1. Uyghur Musicians
Shih-Yin Wang
In what follows I take my conversations with two Uyghur musicians living in Holland,
Gulendem and Kamil Abbas, as a point of departure, and try to expand on some of the
issues that their particular life stories and points of view raise in regard to the musical
tradition they now represent abroad. In the same vein as Rice’s account of the
Varimezovs, although at a much more modest level, an understanding of their
interaction “with the world into which they were thrown”, and the way this has shaped
(and continues to shape) their music, can give us a better understanding of “how music,
history, and social, economic, and ideological forces unite in everyday experience”
(after Rice 1994:8). I start with their entry into the tradition, and considerations about
the change in the status of musicians in Xinjiang. Their work in state-sponsored troupes
leads to the issue of politics and music, aspects that have been closely linked in China
during the last 50 years. Thirdly, their exile and work abroad bears on the issue of
outside exposure and authenticity.
Becoming a Uyghur Musician
The way Gulendem and Kamil became musicians is atypical in more than one respect,
as compared to how this would happen traditionally, and taking into account their
backgrounds. In both cases the exceptionality is linked to the upheavals brought about
by the Cultural Revolution, and precisely this makes them early representatives of the
kind of change in status that has got under way not only in Xinjiang, but also in other
parts of China.

2. Traditionally, music making has been so widespread that learning would take
place at home—a reasonable explanation for the stereotypical statement about Uyghur
people’s “excellence at singing and dancing”. Apart from amateurs performing at social
gatherings, an exclusively male semi-professional caste of ‘folk artist’ existed that
usually undertook another job; Mackerras (1985a: 48) points out how the most famous
of them, Turdi Axun, was always on the move and earnt a modest living.
Apprenticeship with a master was usually a family matter, and he would take under his
guidance only his own sons or nephews (Trebinjac 2000: 174).
Gulendem, although born in southern Xinjiang, moved at a very early age to
Beijing with her parents, Uyghur cadres of the Communist Party. She remembers
listening to traditional Uyghur music at home from recordings, both LPs and, later,
home-made by her father with a tape recorder bought for recording. He would seize on
the opportunity provided by visits to the capital by performing artists, and also arrange
for private lessons for Gulendem on these occasions. At school, she had been selected to
take part in a propaganda group because of her beautiful voice, and there she later took
to the repertory, in Mandarin Chinese, that became the hallmark of the Cultural
Revolution era –the Eight Model Works. Starting in 1971, since she happened to attend
a ‘Model High School’ and be the only representative of the Uyghur minority, she
performed for foreign and illustrious guests. This provided opportunities to sing her
own repertoire of folksongs. Encouraged and supported by the administrative staff, she
soon joined the Oriental Ensemble and went on to perform on a semi-professional basis.
At that time, she was trained in singing by a teacher who forced on her western style
‘bel canto’ techniques —completely opposite to the ‘natural’ singing of famous people
like Pasha Isha. As she found it difficult to adjust to these restrictions, she searched on
her own for a less constrained style. Some years later she met another teacher at
Beijing’s Conservatory who, having trained singers from Xinjiang before, led
Gulendem to find her ‘true’ natural voice and add technique only as a supplement.
A clearer answer to the question of how Gulendem was not only allowed, but
even encouraged, to embark on a professional musical career, emerges from Kamil’s
own account. His background may also be considered as middle class, his father being a
publisher. When the Cultural Revolution was at its peak, schools were closed and he
persuaded his father to let him learn dutar, rawap and violin, but from a teacher as
neither of Kamil’s parents had a strong musical background. This explains why his

3. father tried to learn at the same time. The reason he now offers for his parents’ support
is that, with society upside down at the time, professional music supported by the state
looked like a safe haven in the face of things to come. Kamil, however, was too fond of
the violin and Western music, and that led him to a re-education farm of the kind
operating at the time for intellectuals. Still, he was allowed to take his violin there and
learn in his spare time, and he later applied for a post at a newly created troupe with
western and Uyghur instrumental sections. He was unjustly charged with “smelling of
onion”—playing the strings in the Uyghur sliding way—by the leader, from the western
section, a Han domain, but the all too evident racial slur backfired, and Kamil worked
with the troupe for eight years.
The passage of Kamil and Gulendem from “outside the tradition” to living in it,
on the one hand reminds us of the experiential option argued for by Rice (1997), an
option that blurs the clear-cut distinction between outsiders and insiders, particularly in
the case of Gulendem’s search for “her own voice” through a neo-traditional listening-
and-repeating method. On the other hand, it makes an interesting contrast to the
ambiguities of professionalization of musical life that has taken place in Xinjiang,
defying the clear borderline that seems to separate professionals and amateurs elsewhere
in current Chinese music.
For musicians under 40 years of age, schools in Xinjiang have offered the
possibility of pursuing a career, at the end of secondary school and for four years, that
leads a man (or a woman, as women are no longer excluded from public performance),
to enrol in one of the song and dance troupes sponsored by the government at various
levels; or s/he can try to gain admission to the selective Arts School in the provincial
capital and there receive further training. Sabine Trebinjac (2000: 176) states that, at
present, the young generation receives both a traditional training at home, in the old
ways and of the old repertoire, and a formal training at school that teaches what she
calls the ‘traditionalized’ repertory through a western pedagogical approach. Trebinjac
contends (and Harris 2002: 268 confirms) that, although at face value this shift in
educational methodology would seem to pose a risk to the tradition, much as foreign
observers see it, the truth is that young musicians are most skillful at following a dual
life and dual language: outside the workplace, they play the pieces in the way they have
learnt them at home, betrayed only by the occasional display of technical prowess, yet
the same musician, in an official context, will keep that knowledge hidden and act as the

4. mouthpiece for the ‘traditionalized’ music s/he has been taught at school. As Kamil put
it, it is “two different worlds”.
In the troupes
During her professional career in China, Gulendem has worked in three different song-
and-dance troupes, all of them based in Beijing, and so has performed Uyghur songs
and dances to an audience composed mainly of Han Chinese. Ethnic minority music has
been actively promoted by the state in this way, as a statement about the multi-cultural
nation being built on a happy coming together of China’s nationalities. The stage
becomes a harmless showground where Han dominance can be downplayed, and
momentary prominence be granted to those same groups whose self-determination is
denied in other fronts.
Accusations of cultural appropriation surfaced more audibly not long ago, in
relation to the CD Sister Drum, but as Janet Upton (2002:108) points out, “ever since
the 1930s, Chinese musicians have been utilizing Tibetan themes, including Tibetan
folk tunes, as they seek to construct a new national music that embraces all of the
modern nation-state’s ethnic diversity”. In a sense, this can be seen as an early, and very
wicked, tack on the “increasingly important part played by indigenous peoples in
constructions of national identities” (Castles 1998:17).
Trebinjac (2000) has studied in detail, in relation to a musical tradition so
different from the Han as the Uyghur, the process of rewriting through which “new
national music” is born. A large-scale bureaucratic machine is in charge of
manufacturing a truly national musical heritage, not least through ethnomusicological
collection. The result is an encyclopaedic Anthology, ordered by province and genre,
that is still in the process of publication, and that so far has made available around 10%
of the data gathered. Musical research and compilation is aimed, in the minds of those
ultimately in charge, at the practical purpose of modernizing folksong, and leaves out a
good deal of material for a variety of reasons—from self-censorship to inadequate
equipment. The final product, respecting regional musical specificities that don’t push
too far Han tolerance towards the exotic, are handed over to song-and-dance troupes for
dissemination. And in this way the musics of China’s 56 national minorities is tirelessly
broadcasted by radio stations all around the country, all ending up sounding strangely

5. similar to one another. Yet this “mannerist” style (in the sense of Katz 1970), or
“clumsy hybrid”, as Gulendem put it, is not limited to national minorities’ music. In
reference to Shanghai’s Jiangnan sizhu amateur specialists criticizing professional
performers’ and composers’ attempts to play or write in the style of their music without
having developed a sense of how to apply its special characteristics, Witzleben
(1995:132) elaborates on the situation in conservatories: students are taught annotated
or arranged versions of a few pieces in each important style, and in these “the liberal
application of a few characteristic ornaments is assumed to be sufficient to bring out the
correct regional ‘flavor.’” But this leads to the other side of the coin.
Kamil’s work unit was of a different kind: the Uyghur Opera Troupe, based in
Urumchi, is one among a number of local equivalents to the national, multi-ethnic
troupes, whose task is to introduce musical developments at the local level. Their
composition, as natives to the region, results in a greater adhesion to the tradition. On
the other hand, novelties and modernity are not rejected, as long as, given ethnic
animosity, not too many Han elements are introduced (Trebinjac 2000: 143-4).
Trebinjac (2000: 172) gives a tentative figure of 100 groups, from regional to provincial
to local, that exist, and includes a description of one such performance. Kamil’s troupe
can be seen to stand towards the “refined” end of a continuum, as its work was based on
adaptations of opera scripts combining western and classical Uyghur music. In fact,
their first production was a version of one of the Eight Model Operas, The Red Lantern
Tale, and this won enthusiastic applause from Madame Mao, Jiang Qing. It took them to
Beijing for performances and the shooting of a film based on it. After the Cultural
Revolution was over, Gherip and Sanam, their first production truly based on a Uyghur
epic, and drawing much more on classical music from the muqam tradition, also met
with great acclaim.
The ways that western, equated with scientific, treatment of traditional musics,
with a long tradition of official sanction in China, has affected and changed tradition, is
still a topic of debate. Trebinjac points out that in China the making of a national music
rests on a concept that she calls “state traditionalism”: the creation of a national tradition
by treating scientifically a vulgar folklore, whose possibilities are thus “revealed”. The
need for such a treatment indirectly legitimates national authority, as it is this that
provides the means necessary to the end and raises the category of the music. In the case
of the classical muqam tradition, there has not been any attempt at writing new material;

6. but through the tasks of “ordering” (or ‘fixing’ or ‘canonising’), preservation and
publicizing, the state assumes an essential role as it takes care of it subjects’ cultural
assets (Trebinjac 2000: 323-39). Certainly, this role may be challenged, as Trebinjac
notes with regard to the Uyghur musicians she spoke to: they were ready to criticize the
work of Han musicians on the grounds that they were Han, thus unable to truly
understand their music. But on the other hand, they did not question the concept of
rewriting as such: a music played by peasants, and thus “primitive”, does indeed need
the intervention by intellectuals to attain true artistic expression. The songs she found in
the local Kashgar anthology, compiled by Uyghur musicians, have been “corrected”,
suppressing non-chromatic notes and intervals other than the tone and semi-tone, and
also suppressing sexual expressions, as if to prove that Kashgarians are a civilized
people (2000: 337). And the recordings of Uyghur amateur musicians produced by
Trebinjac, when played back in China, met with disbelief, as to the existence of an
interested audience in France, a civilized country, or were simply just disapproved of
because of their roughness.
Rees (1998:152) describes a related episode with regard to Naxi classical music,
“improved” by a composer of the local song-and-dance troupe; again, the elderly
amateurs felt it was lacking in flavor. Rees summarized the opposite views on
traditional music, of the kind sponsored by Chinese conservatories, held by Chinese
professional musicians and Western audiences, and discussed in Asian Music in 1981.
The right to change is defended by the former, and a justification made on the basis of
historical borrowing of foreign elements. Witzleben (1995:135-39), in discussing the
indirect influence that Western music has had on Jiangnan sizhu, through its impact on
the Chinese professional music world, concedes that recent trends are based on
principles that have existed in Chinese culture for centuries. However, he still finds the
foreignness of their application “disturbingly obvious to people who value traditions
that are indigenous to China or whose foreign origins have been obscured by centuries
of Sinicization” (1995: 21). And Jones (1995:140), who thinks that the Asian Music
debate needs to be continued because at the time few “of us laowai had heard the folk
music of the majority of China’s peasant population”, and thus “the conservatory style
got off lightly”, addresses the problem from the insider/outsider dichotomy: the change
should not be forced by outsiders, nor should folk musicians be misled to believe that
their music is “less scientific”.

7. New contexts
Kamil and Gulendem left China in 1988, first on a visit to Turkey. Then, in 1989, after
an incident there that the increasingly tense political situation in China may have made
undesirable, they took advantage of the opportunity to go to Holland to perform and
eventually settled there. The incident revolved around music and identity; in fact,
according to Harris (2000: 18-9), the “Uyghur music industry is actively contributing to
the solidification of a pan-Uyghur identity...and nationalism is clearly a driving force
among many recording musicians...highly politicized statements being made through
popular song and disseminated on cassette”. Kamil contends that even performance of
the muqam is nowadays discouraged by government on the grounds that it contributes to
Uyghur self-assertion.
Exile has reinforced in Kamil and Gulendem their Uyghurness, restricted during
their long-term residence in Beijing—Kamil also moved to Beijing after marriage, in
1981, and had to work mainly as a translator. Thus, the name of their ensemble
remembers the protest incident in 1997 that ended with brutal repression by the
government. And their identity as Chinese has naturally dropped in the course of
adjusting to a new living situation, since it has proved enough of an effort to raise their
children as Uyghur as well as Dutch. The change in context has also affected their
music, which as Stokes (1994: 97) points out is not “simply a ‘thing’ slotted into a static
social and cultural matrix existing outside and beyond the performance”. So, as he asks
(1994: 105): “What happens when the musical expectations of the host society
problematise for the visitors some hitherto ‘invisible’ aspect of the visitors’ musical
habitus?” Kamil has renounced playing Uyghur music with a violin, despite its long-
standing popularity among the Uyghur themselves back in Xinjiang, and his firm belief
that it is playing style that makes music properly Uyghur, rather than the different
sonority of the ghijak. For her part, Gulendem says people have approached her,
praising the more unrefined delivery that singers coming from other parts of Central
Asia employ; this has prompted her to look for a compromise with the similarly
“powerful” style, if somewhat lacking in technique, of classical Uyghur singers.
Rees (1998) describes the paradoxical effects that the quest of the “existential”
tourist for authenticity is having on Naxi classical music, where moderate musical

8. innovation as practised by internally-oriented groups is, in a sense, more “authentic”
than the self-conscious traditionalism performed by the externally-oriented group. She
indicates some negative effects of that traditionalism on the repertory and style. On the
other hand, Jones (1995: 141) comments on the acclaim received by a group of Daoist
folk musicians performing in England, in stark contrast to the little respect they enjoy at
home: “They were relieved and amazed that their music was ‘all right’, not too long,
primitive, or out of tune, and all the rest of the insecurities which official culture has
given them.” Trebinjac (2000: 382) concludes her account of the encroachment on
traditional music by official “state traditionalism” asserting that, after one century, it is
still well and alive. But not in Holland.
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