Mugam: A Homeland on Strings
3 min readAt any corner of Xinjiang, where there is muqam, there are songs, where there is village, there is mugam and where there are human beings there are songs of joy or sadness People in Xinjiang perform muqam to welcome those who come into this world and see those off when they leave this world. Young people get married with the accompaniment of mugam, people forget about their sorrows when hearing mugam. Muqam accompanies the Uygur people from their birth to the last moment of their life. the famous Uygur poet Tieyifujiang once wrote a poem for mugam, which has enjoyed continued popularity among the Uygur.
The Uygur Muqam is like a lullaby
Which accompanies the birth of the Uygur people
A wedding would be boring without muqam
Mashrap would be dull without mugam
hen old man and women heard mugam
They would feel energetic again
hen the dying heard muqam, Their soul will rest in peace and turn into an immortal I feel lucky that i have spent my whole life with the accompaniment of muqam My friend when die.
Please don’t cry for me
Just see me off with muqam
In the Twelve Muqam is dawn, wine, girls, deer, fire, sword, night, moths, windows, ruins, air, grain of wheat, the wilderness, flowers, elves, graves, rivers, gravel, tears, clouds and raindrops. In the area around Southern and northern Mt. Tianshan, people can often hear beautiful mugam music. In major festivals, muqam will be performed with various kinds of national instruments with hundreds of people singing and dancing. In golden autumn, people sing mugam music to celebrate a good year’s harvest and express their joy.
Twelve Muqam in Kashgar
The twelve Muqam is the culmination of the Uygur classic music. It is the groaning.sobbing, resistance and compromise of the people on this land when faced with Gobi and sea. It is also the lingering of soul on this world when the body disappeared It is the magic lamp, lighting up the national soul a poet of Xinjiang once said that the twelve mugam could compete with time and race against the sun and the moon. this is a high peak of passion a pyramid of music and abanquet of songs, poems, music and dances On the table are placed 320 pieces of music with 4, 492 lines sung by 44 poets which will take 24 whole hours to finish. In the Twelve Mugam is the secret path of time, praise of nature, sadness and rapture caused by love, running and calling in the wilderness, the whimper of ghosts from the tomb, the solemnity of religion, the asceticism and mystery of Sufism. It is a great integration between the elegant court style and the wild folk characteristics.
Twelve Mugam in Kashgar
The Xinjiang Uygur Muqam is a generic term for various muqam in the areas inhabited by the Uygurs. It is a massive comprehensive artistic form featuring songs, dances and music. In modern Uygur, muqam mainly means massive divertimento, rules, standards, tunes, music and random sequence. Muqam is composed of three parts: gong negme, dastan and mashrap. The musical structure of muqam was gradually improved in the 17th century, forming a music divertimento which included yan(songs), qu(music) and luan.
