Shashmaqam

Shashmaqam (Tajik Shashmaqom, Uzbek Shashmaqom) means ‘six maqams’. It is the classical music of Transoxiana, the land between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, and it took the form in which it is known today in the city of Bukhara, at the court of its rulers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each of its six maqams is a large cycle of songs and instrumental pieces, which a complete performance might take hours to play. The six are Buzruk, Rost, Navo, Dugoh, Segoh and Iroq.

Each maqam has two parts. The mushkilot, ‘difficulties’, is a sequence of instrumental pieces. The nasr is a sequence of vocal pieces, built in groups that rise to a climax called the awj, the highest point of the melody, before returning. The songs set poetry, much of it classical Persian, Hafez, Jami and Bidel among the poets, and much of it in Uzbek, including the verse of Ali-Shir Nava’i. Many performers sing in both languages. The rhythms are carried by the doira, a frame drum, with the long-necked tanbur, the dutor, the sato and the ghijak fiddle in the ensemble.

Bukhara and its musicians

Bukhara was a city of many communities, and its classical music was shaped by all of them. Tajik and Uzbek musicians performed it, and Bukharan Jewish musicians played a prominent part as performers and teachers, especially in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many Bukharan Jewish families later emigrated, to Israel and to New York among other places, and took the repertoire with them. In New York and Tel Aviv, Bukharan Jewish ensembles still perform maqom pieces at community celebrations.

In the Soviet period the Shashmaqam was notated and published, a step that changed how it was transmitted. The composer and ethnographer Viktor Uspensky wrote down a version from the Bukharan master Ota Jalol in the 1920s, and later editions were prepared in both the Tajik and Uzbek Soviet republics. After independence in 1991 both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan embraced the Shashmaqam as part of their national heritage. Uzbekistan also cultivates other maqom traditions, such as those of Khorezm and the Ferghana valley.

Shared heritage

In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed the Shashmaqom music of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, and in 2008 it was incorporated into the Representative List in the names of both countries. The joint inscription is a recognition that the music belongs to two nations, each of which defines it, teaches it and names it in its own language. For readers of Persian poetry it is a reminder that Hafez and Jami have been sung in Bukhara for centuries, in a classical style of its own, quite different from the radif of Iran.