Visiting Musician Offers Taste of Tajikistan

With its countless a cappella groups, several orchestras, and a handful of student bands, Harvard’s music scene certainly possesses a degree of diversity. New heights of eclecticism, however, may have been reached this semester with the Department of Music’s artist-in-residence and Central Asian multi-instrumentalist Sirojiddin Juraev. In a performance on April 2 at CGIS, Juraev invited the Harvard community to join in a brief tour through the Tajikistani musical tradition.

Juraev is widely lauded as Central Asia’s foremost dutar player. The dutar, whose name comes from the Farsi for “two strings,” is a long-necked lute that is native to Juraev’s home in northern Tajikistan. The dutar, along with its many variants, can be found across central Asia and Iran, though its exact dimensions, design, and associated styles of play vary significantly. Juraev, whose father and grandfather were both dutar players, began his training at the age of 10. Over the next decade, Juraev mastered the dutar, along with several other traditional string instruments, including the tambour. He currently teaches at Tajikistan’s National Conservatory and performs in the ensemble Shashmoqom.

Juraev’s performance, preceded by a brief introduction to the Tajikistani musical tradition by the Harvard Professor of Music Richard Wolf, opened with a lively and rhythmically complex piece. Though he was limited to a mere two strings, Juraev’s involved strumming and picking technique allowed for a sustained and edgy chordal hum as he delicately toured up and down the thin fretboard. His rapid plucking of quarter tones, musical pitches halfway in between standard Western notes, lent the piece a finely riveted texture. Playing both original compositions and Sufi-inspired works, Juraev sampled a variety of instruments and exhibited a wide range of musical flavors. Subdued and woeful riffs ambled throughout his performance, punctuated by outbursts of exuberant strumming and swift fingerpicking.

For some in the audience, Juraev’s playing elicited intense emotional and nostalgic responses. Jana Owen, a Cambridge resident who lived in Afghanistan for several years, said of her listening experience, “When [Juraev] was playing I could see the extraordinary steppes of Central Asia that are on the border to Tajikistan…. There are endless spaces, no barbed wire, nothing, just sky, and this earth. I don’t know, it brought me back to something.” Li Zeng, a current Ph.D. student in the Department of Astronomy who traveled throughout Central Asia and absorbed its music while growing up, described his interaction with Juraev’s music much as Owen did—with reference to nature. “The music’s notes…are like the flowing water of the mountains in Central Asia, as you can imagine. It can bring you through this time tunnel, a tunnel through space and time,” he said. “You can immerse yourself in that environment, you can feel the culture and also the information and the energy contained in the playing.”

Although shy to speak himself, at one point during the demonstration Juraev similarly interpreted the underpinnings and inspiration for his music. Through Richard Wolf’s translation, Juraev said, “[I get my] inspiration through nature…its impression on my mood and condition. The spirit of nature.” Juraev is a true example of cultural particularity, one with a romantic eye for illuminating and reflecting a rich world of sensory and social experience far from the one with which we commonly interact.