The Value of Missing Tunes: Scholarship on Uyghur Minority Music in Northwest China

Modern Chinese scholarship on minority music often involves vexing minority politics coupled with attempts to "collect and rescue" that have been implicated in China's quasi-colonial encounter with its minority citizens. Chinese music scholarship on the claßical traditions of the Uyghur, a group of Turkic-speaking Muslims residing in the northwest of the People's Republic of China, demonstrates how the production of musical knowledge has become inextricably linked with problems of power relations and politics of the region. For example, large-scale, state-sponsored research into the Uyghur claßical tradition of Twelve Muqam (multi-sectional vocal, instrumental, and danced suites) has effectively standardized and fixed its repertory, performing style and pedagogical practices. One effect of such efforts to "reconstruct" or "revive" the Twelve Muqam has been to provide evidence for a historical relationship with minority traditions and that of court music from the ancient Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) as well to identify useful musical materials for use by contemporary composers. Often imbued with the discourse of cultural progreß and development, this scholarship not only contributes to the modernization of minority musical traditions, but also embodies the modern reformist values of the Chinese state as it homogenizes its domestic racial and ethnic others.  [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]