Maqām Beyond Nation

“Chegra Bilmas Maqom”A collaboration on Central Asian Maqām across Borders

https://www.maqamproject.uk/maqom-collaboration-concert-oct2025

Dotar Ensemble

Visit to the Uzbek National Institute of Musical Arts Named After Yunus Rajabi, Tashkent, March 2025.

In March 2025, Rachel Harris and Mukaddas Mijit visited the Yunus Rajabi Institute in Tashkent and were treated to a tour of the Institute’s departments as well as some outstanding performances by current students and teachers.

Clip: Students of Malika Khanum perform an ensemble dotar piece (excerpt)

Established in 2020, the primary purpose of the Yunus Rajabi Institute is to sustain and develop maqom-based performance and creativity. It holds departments for instrumental and vocal maqom performance, composition, dotar ensemble, and a daston department specialising in Qaraqalpaq and Qashqadaryo traditions. Courses include solo and ensemble performance, and students specialise in a wide range of instruments including dotar, sato, tanbur, doira and chang, as well as oud, qanun, Kashgar rubab, nay and qoshnay.

Dotar Ensemble Visit to the Uzbek National Institute of Musical Arts Named After Yunus Rajabi, Tashkent, March 2025.In March 2025, Rachel Harris and Mukaddas Mijit visited ...

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Maqām Beyond Nation Maqām Beyond Nation explores a field of music-making that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia; a set of historically fluid and inter-connected creative practices which were transformed under 20th century nationalisms into fixed repertoires. The project seeks to understand the major changes ...

𝐕𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐅𝐚𝐫𝐠’𝐨𝐧𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐪𝐨𝐦 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐠’𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐪𝐨𝐦 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐞
In April 2025, Rachel Harris and Aziz Isa Elkun were generously hosted by the Maqom School led by Ulug’bek Mamadjanov, and the Maqom Theatre led by Fazil Ismailov. Both are recently established, on the foundation of existing music institutions, but with a new focus on maqom.

The Maqom School holds several hundred students of school age, and several dozen talented teachers who are mainly local to the Fergana Valley but trained in the Tashkent conservatory. They teach a range of instrumental and vocal genres, but the emphasis is on maqom, both local and national styles.

The qanun seems to have arrived in Uzbekistan as recently as the 1980s, and it has now become central to professional maqom performance. Played here by Jevher, another teacher in the school, it accompanies this gorgeous arrangement of a piece from the Fergana-Tashkent Maqom tradition with delicate flourishes.

This is not the only instrument from other parts of the maqam world to have become rooted in Uzbekistan in recent decades; the oud is also common in the professional ensembles, and the tar has almost replaced the tanbur as the instrument of choice for amateur singers in the Fargana Valley.

The Kashgar rubab is another mid-twentieth century borrowing now firmly established in Uzbekistan’s ensembles. Some Uyghur songs have also found their way into the professional repertoire in Fargana. One of the school ensembles performed a piece for us called Uyghurche: an arrangement of the popular Uyghur folk song, Rozilem.

Read the full article:

https://www.maqamproject.uk/visit-to-the-fargona-maqom-school-and-the-margilan-maqom-theatre/

Wind of Saba: A Creative Collaboration
Performance, Wind of Saba, August 13, 2024.

Ozan Baysal has performed bağlama, including regional folk and Alevi traditions, since a young age. He studied institutional approaches to Turkish makam alongside jazz and classical music, and completed a PhD on bağlama şelpe (tapping) techniques at the Istanbul Technical University, MIAM. He was a visiting scholar at SOAS between 2021 and 2023.

Shohret Nur was born into a musical family in Kashgar and trained in the Xinjiang Arts Institute before moving to Istanbul to study ethnomusicology. He learned Uyghur Muqam at the Institute, and is now researching the Twelve Muqam repertoire at SOAS.

This collaboration developed out of their participation in the SOAS-based Miras Silk Road Collective. In the video, Ozan and Shohret discuss their approach to the composition, and their sources of inspiration, which range widely across different maqām-based traditions, approaches to modal improvisation, instrumental techniques, and recording technologies.

Videos “Wind of Saba: A Creative Collaboration” Part One and Two: Excerpts from a joint interview with Rachel Harris, recorded on August 13, 2024.

https://www.maqamproject.uk/wind-of-saba-a-creative-collaboration/

On 14 January 2025, SOAS Department of Music hosted Honoured Artist of Uzbekistan, Ilyos Arabov, to discuss and demonstrate his art. An outstanding singer, instrumentalist, and maqām master from Uzbekistan, Arabov has performed internationally and won prestigious prizes at festivals worldwide. He is recognised as one of the leading performers of Central Asian Shashmaqom and heads the instrumental performance department at the Yunus Rajabi Institute in Tashkent.

In a wide-ranging discussion in both Uzbek and Farsi language, Arabov spoke on the transmission of maqom performance practice in Uzbekistan, and questions of intonation, mode, and rhythmic cycles in the Shashmaqom tradition.

https://www.maqamproject.uk/masterclass-with-ilyos-arabov/

Maqām Beyond Nation Project

Maqām Beyond Nation explores a field of music-making that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia; a set of historically fluid and inter-connected creative practices which were transformed under 20th century nationalisms into fixed repertoires. The project seeks to understand the major changes which are now weakening these nationalist models. We attend to the musical materials and their potential for new creativity, and to the social: how a focus on expressive culture can further our understanding of the aesthetics of religious revival and cultural responses to the experience of forced migration. Our case studies are fault lines across the maqām world – among them the former Soviet-Chinese border, and the border between Iran and Azerbaijan – key spaces where shared traditions of music-making were split apart by the formation of new nation states. To understand these spaces, we draw on archival, analytical and ethnographic research, as well as practice- based creative collaboration. Our findings will be shared through an exciting programme of workshops and conferences, publications and films, collaborative performances and compositions.

https://www.maqamproject.uk/maqam-beyond-nation

Maqām Beyond Nation – Maqam Beyond Nation Maqām Beyond Nation explores a field of music-making that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia; a set of historically fluid and inter-connected creative practices which were transformed under 20th century nationalisms into fixed repertoires. The project seeks to understand the major change.....

Maqām Beyond Nation explores a field of music-making that stretches from North Africa to Central Asia; a set of historically fluid and inter-connected creative practices which were transformed under 20th century nationalisms into fixed repertoires. The project seeks to understand the major changes which are now weakening these nationalist models. We attend to the musical materials and their potential for new creativity, and to the social: how a focus on expressive culture can further our understanding of the aesthetics of religious revival and cultural responses to the experience of forced migration. Our case studies are fault lines across the maqām world – among them the former Soviet-Chinese border, and the border between Iran and Azerbaijan – key spaces where shared traditions of music-making were split apart by the formation of new nation states. To understand these spaces, we draw on archival, analytical and ethnographic research, as well as practice- based creative collaboration. Our findings will be shared through an exciting programme of workshops and conferences, publications and films, collaborative performances and compositions.