The Future of the Uyghur Musical Past: Reconstructing Uyghur Muqam in Chinese Central Asia

The most famous Uyghur traditional music today is the Twelve Muqam, a set of musical suites for vocals, dance, and instruments from the far northwest of China. Over the last fifty years, State-sponsored research, performance, and reconstruction projects have recreated muqam as a canonized minority musical tradition, often used by the State to musically exhibit its joyful and subservient minorities, and in the process, downplaying the pronounced contemporary ethnic conflicts between the Uyghur and Han Chinese. Drawing on recent ethnographic research, this essay looks at how contemporary sociopolitical issues are implicated in the narration of music history and the muqam revival project. I am concerned with the multifaceted representations of Uyghur muqam, and shall examine the local, national, and transnational dimensions of cultural representation as traditional music encounter modernity. In particular, I investigate how the State-sponsored revival project brings about a canonized muqam tradition, which is in turn used to symbolize the modern notion of a pan-Uyghur identity and ethnic nationalism. I suggest that, far from simply being vehicles for State oppression or nationalistic opposition, traditional music works towards a redefinition of modern Uyghur identities and attain new meanings in the process. Muqam gives the Uyghur a renewed way of understanding themselves and their relations with the past, exploring unprecedented horizons for asserting political and cultural identity.