Music of Central Asia Vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved

Musicians of The Academy of Maqâm (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 14, 2006)
• Original Release Date: 2006
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Smithsonian Folkways
• ASIN: B000EBFWPI
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,605 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #2 in Music > World Music > Europe > Eastern Europe > Uzbekistan

Editorial Reviews

Amid the mosques and minarets of Samarkand and Bukhara, generations of vocalists set the mystical, Sufi-inspired verse of Hafiz and other classical poets to lyrical melodies, creating a spiritual art music of great refinement and sublime beauty called Shashmaqâm, confirming its important place among the great art music traditions of Euasia. 18 tracks, 70 minutes, 44-page booklet, photos, and bilingual lyrics; DVD contains series introduction, 24-minute film, interactive glossary, and map.

Music of Central Asia is a co-production of the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia, a program of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The aim of the series is to present leading exponents of Central Asia's rich and diverse musical heritage to listeners outside the region.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning and Comprehensive!!!, March 15, 2006

By 

Soto (Tokyo) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Music of Central Asia Vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved (Audio CD)

If you are already familiar with Central Asian music, you will fall in love with this! If you are not familiar, this is maybe the best place to start-you will also fall in love with this!

I have several hundred recordings from this region, and this 3 part series instantly ranks in the top 5.

Not only the music in the CD, but the bonus DVD goes a long way to fill in a much needed gap in documenting the beauty of the world`s traditional music that will gradually slip away in this artificial world we now find ourselves living in.

Be sure to get the other 2 in the series also. Homayun Sakhi`s rubab playing is utterly stunning (Vol.3)!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lovely modal melodies and classical Persian poetry presented with a huge amount of background for Westerners, August 4, 2008

By 

Christopher Culver - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Music of Central Asia Vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved (Audio CD)

This may be the most important series of world music CDs ever. The Music of Central Asia initiative was set up by the Aga Khan and the Smithsonian Insitution to document the surviving folk music traditions of that rich part of the world, and to present it to the global community with enough background to get the most out of it. Each volume in the series comes with a substantial booklet, as well as a DVD with a short documentary film.

Volume 2 of the series features music by the Academy of Maqam, a Dushanbe-based ensemble dedicated to the classical tradition of Uzbeks and Tajiks. This tradition, called shashmaqam, consists of six types of suites where great Persian poetry is combined with powerful modal melodies. The instruments we hear here are the dutar, a two-string long-necked fretted lute; the sato, a long-necked bowed lute; the tanbur, a long-necked plucked lute with one string and a number of sympathetic strings; and the doira, a frame drum with jingles. Five vocalists, two men and three women, sing verse from the Persian mystical love poet Hafiz and folk song.

The suite we hear on this disc is called Maqam-i rast, and its construction is immensely elegant. A brief solo on the sato serves to tune the singers. We then enter into "Sarakhbor-i Rast", a Hafiz setting, where successive couplets are sung in a continuously developing melody builds toward a climax on the second to last couplet, and then returns down to the start point on the last. There then follow several short songs called taronas, typically folk song, which serve as moments of relaxation between the spiritual ectasy of the classical poems, and as melodic and rhythmic transitions. Another type of transitional movement is the suporish, which serves to quickly move between one meter and another. I especially like how, in the very last movement of the suite, the climax couplet from the first poem returns, and will be unmistakable even if you don't speak a word of Persian.

The booklet contains a presentation of the musical instruments, a description of each movement of the suite, and a general introduction to maqam. Students of Persian will be happy to find the text of the songs given in both transliterated Persian and English translated. The documentary on the DVD is concerned mainly with the efforts of Abduvali Abdurashidov, the founder of the Academy, to transmit shashmaqam to the next generation. We hear his thoughts of what shashmaqam means to him personally, and see bits of suites other than the Maqam-i rast presented on the CD.

If you are interested in indigenous musical traditions, the Persian language, Central Asian culture or are just a simple music fan on the lookout for something cool, I cannot recommend this disc and the whole Music of Central Asia series enough.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Misleading Title yet excellent classic works, March 2, 2007

By 

Turkistan (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Music of Central Asia Vol. 2: Invisible Face of the Beloved (Audio CD)

The title of the CD is misleading, The Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks. I bought the CD to hear shashmaqam with Uzbek poetic texts/ songs. Yet not even one text/song was Uzbek. As the booklet in the CD states, many of the songs sung are from the poetic texts of Hafiz. I was quite surprised that such a work produced with names like the Smithsonian and the Aga Khan Trust and not one Uzbek song. If one goes to Uzbekistan today, there are incredible classical shashmaqam performers from the historic cities of Samarkand and Bukhara to the heartland of Uzbek traditions, the Ferghana Valley. Overall, the other works are great and I applaud the effort and good work.