Kerstin Klenke - The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era

The Sound State of Uzbekistan: Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era is a pioneering study of the intersection between popular music and state politics in Central Asia. Based on 20 months of fieldwork and archival research in Tashkent, this book explores a remarkable era in Uzbekistans politics (20012016), when the Uzbek government promoted a rather unlikely candidate to the prominent position of state sound: estrada, a genre of popular music and a musical relic of socialism. The political importance it attached to estrada was matched by the establishment of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus for state oversight.

The Sound State of Uzbekistan shows the continuing legacy of Soviet concepts to frame the nexus between music, artists and the state, and explains the extraordinary potency ascribed to estrada. At the same time, it challenges classical readings of transition and also questions common binary models for researching culture in totalitarian or authoritarian states. Proposing to approach lives in music under authoritarianism as a form of normality instead, the author promotes a post-Cold War paradigm in music studies.

Kerstin Klenke is an ethnomusicologist and head of the Phonogram Archive at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

Series Editors:

Rachel Harris, SOAS, University of London, UK

Rowan Pease, SOAS, University of London, UK

Board members:

Angela Impey (SOAS, University of London)

Noriko Manabe (Temple University)

Suzel Reily (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)

Martin Stokes (Kings College London)

Richard Widdess (SOAS, University of London)

SOAS Musicology Series is today one of the worlds leading series in the discipline of ethnomusicology. Our core mission is to produce high-quality, ethnographically rich studies of music-making in the worlds diverse musical cultures. We publish monographs and edited volumes that explore musical repertories and performance practice, critical issues in ethnomusicology, sound studies, historical and analytical approaches to music across the globe. We recognize the value of applied, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, and our authors draw on current approaches in musicology and anthropology, psychology, media and gender studies. We welcome monographs that investigate global contemporary, classical and popular musics, the effects of digital mediation and transnational flows.

Becoming a Garamut Player in Baluan, Papua New Guinea

Musical Analysis as a Pathway to Learning

Tony Lewis

Music Theory in the Safavid Era

Owen Wright

Arnold Bake

A Life with South Asian Music

Bob van der Linden

The Sound State of Uzbekistan

Popular Music and Politics in the Karimov Era

Kerstin Klenke

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/music/series/SOASMS

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Kerstin Klenke

The right of Kerstin Klenke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. The purchase of this copyright material confers the right on the purchasing institution to photocopy or download pages which bear the eResources icon and a copyright line at the bottom of the page. No other parts of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Klenke, Kerstin, author.

Title: The sound state of Uzbekistan : popular music and politics in the Karimov era / Kerstin Klenke.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: SOAS musicology series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001408| ISBN 9781138486140 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351046435 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Popular musicPolitical aspectsUzbekistan. | Music and stateUzbekistan.

Classification: LCC ML3917.U93 K54 2019 | DDC 781.6309587dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001408

ISBN: 978-1-138-48614-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-04643-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by codeMantra

Accepted in fulfilment of the requirements for the doctoral degree, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media, 2015

Visit the eResources: www.routledge.com/9781138486140

To the memory of
Rdiger Schumacher (19532007)
and
Irene Hilgers (19752008)

Figures

Tables

This book could not have been written without the generous support of various institutions and individuals, and it is to them that I want to extend my deepest gratitude here. My first exploratory trip to Uzbekistan in 2001 was financed by my father, Werner Klenke, who saw both his daughters set off for fieldwork in different parts of Asia at about the same time. The Volkswagen Foundation awarded me an individual project grant as part of their Between Europe and the Orient A Focus on Research and Higher Education in/on Central Asia and the Caucasus programme for 20032006. I am grateful to Wolfgang Levermann, the programme coordinator, for allowing me maximum flexibility in scheduling trips between Germany and Uzbekistan. Fieldwork stays in 2008 and 2016 were funded by the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and the Center for World Music at the University of Hildesheim Foundation respectively.

This financial and logistic support would not have amounted to anything without the willingness of institutions in Uzbekistan to support me and my research. In Tashkent, my fieldsite, this included first and foremost the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan, the Institute for Art Studies, the Ministry of Culture, the Estrada Association Ozbeknavo, the Central State Archive, the Institut Franais dtudes sur lAsie Centrale (IFEAC), National TV and Radio, various independent radio and TV stations and recording studios. I am grateful to all of them for granting me access to their staff and their resources.

My deepest gratitude, however, I owe to the numerous people, particularly in Tashkent, but also in Samarqand and among the Uzbek diaspora, who generously shared their time, their knowledge, their music, their contacts, their thoughts and their life with me some for shorter spans of time, some for already more than 15 years. I would very much like to honour them all by listing their names here. Many interlocutors, acquaintances and friends, however, whose opinions and statements have found their way into this book, have wished to remain anonymous. Some who did not express a desire for anonymity earlier may have since changed their minds or may yet do so in the near future. Because of this, I have decided not to put their names in print. I will instead find other ways to demonstrate my gratitude. Until then a heartfelt