Tajik Music with Sirojiddin Juraev - Tradition and Innovation on the Silk Road
ProgrammeAbout the PerformersTicketingFeature Article
Located in the Central Asia, the geographical crossroad of East and West, Tajikistan inherits a rich, colourful urban cultural tradition from ancient Persia, the medieval Islamic courts, and the confluence of neighbouring cultures. The Grammy-nominated Tajik music virtuoso Sirojiddin Juraev will take us on a journey of this fascinating musical tradition.
The first half of the recital will mainly feature Juraev performing solo on the dutar, tanbur and sato, introducing their distinct sonorities and demonstrating their versatility to the audience with his technical prowess. In the second half, together with fellow musicians Shavkatjon Okilov and Bekhruz Naimzoda, he will present the jewels from the Tajik classical music heritage, as well as his own compositions, inspired as much by this tradition as by his wide-ranging collaboration with musicians worldwide. They will also be joined by local musicians Eugene Leung and Jessie Law with two of Sirojiddin’s original compositions.
The performance will run for about 1 hour 30 minutes including a 15-minute intermission.
Members of the audience are strongly advised to arrive punctually. Latecomers and those who leave their seats during the performance will only be admitted and allowed to return to their seats respectively during the intermission or at a suitable break. The presenter reserves the right to refuse admission of latecomers, or determine the time and manner of admission of latecomers.
The programme does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.
The presenter reserves the right to change the programme and substitute artists.
Meet-the-artist Session
With meet-the-artist session after performance. Members of the audience are welcome to join.
Sirojiddin Juraev (Dutar / Tanbur / Sato)
Sirojiddin Juraev is a master musician from Tajikistan, specialising in the traditional courtly classical music of Central Asia, shared between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Born in the Spitament district of the Sughd region of Tajikistan in 1975, he started playing the two-string strummed lute dutar from a young age. Upon graduation from the Khujand State University, he was invited by the President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon to study at the prestigious Academy of Maqom in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe. There he studied the theory of the traditional classical music maqom under the renowned musicologist Abduvali Abdurashidov, and mastered the plucked lute tanbur and the bowed lute sato. As a member of the ensemble of the Academy of Maqom, he recorded the album “Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks”, released by Smithsonian Folkways in 2006, which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music Album.
Juraev has since taken on a busy career as a performer and educator. In Tajikistan, he was appointed Music Director of the State Ensemble of Shashmaqom in 2020. He is also a teacher at the Tajik National Conservatory, where he has taught a whole generation of award-winning students who have in turn become professionals. Internationally, he has performed in Mainland, Belgium, France, Greece, India, Italy, Korea, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, UK, US and in all the Central Asian republics, in some of the world’s most prestigious venues such as the Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall in London and the Calouste Gulbekian Museum in Lisbon, and working with world-renown musicians such as the Kronos Quartet and the pipa player Wu Man. He was also a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University, and has also conducted masterclasses in institutions such as SOAS (UK), Stanford University (US) and Tsukuba University (Japan). He is active as a composer and arranger, and has created a body of new virtuoso works for dutar, tanbur, and sato, infusing contemporary sensibilities as well as his experience of collaborating with other traditional musicians worldwide into his tradition-based compositions.
Shavkatjon Okilov (Ghijak)
Shavkatjon Okilov was born in the Spitament district of the Sughd region of Tajikistan. He graduated from the Khujand Academy of Music in 2000 and started teaching the spike fiddle ghijak there. He subsequently studied at the Tajik National Conservatory and became a teacher there too. He is currently a musician at the Fazliddin Sakhobov State Ensemble, Tajikistan’s main ensemble for the performance of the shashmaqom canonic repertoire and related classical pieces.
Bekhruz Naimzoda (Voice / Tanbur / Doira)
Bekhruz Naimzoda was born in Istaravshan of the Sughd region in Tajikistan. He graduated from the Tajik National Conservatory in 2014 as a singer-musician. Since 2022, he works at the State Shashmaqom Ensemble under the Committee for Television and Radio. He was a Grand Prix winner at the music festivals “Andaleb-2009” and “Ganchkhoi Hunar - 2017”, and had participated in music festivals in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In 2023, he was awarded the “Khizmati Shoista” medal by the government of the Republic of Tajikistan.
Eugene Leung (Dutar)
Eugene Leung graduated from the University of Cambridge and holds a Master of Music degree in Ethnomusicology from Goldsmiths, University of London. After that, he has visited Uzbekistan and Tajikistan many times to learn the two-stringed lute dutar with renowned local players. He has been an active figure on the Hong Kong music scene promoting the traditional music of Central and West Asia, and has taken part in many performances and exhibitions as curator and music director. He is the co-founder of the ensemble, The Nur Collective, in a bid to promote and explore musical traditions and cultures across Eurasia and North Africa.
Jessie Law (Guzheng)
Jessie Law is a guzheng performer graduated in the Degree of Master of Music with Distinction at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2022. She was under the tutelage of Prof. Xu Lingzi, and also being instructed by Prof. Luo Jing from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Rao Shuxing from Xinghai Conversatory of Music in Guangzhou for Lingnan zheng art. She has been playing Iranian and Turkish music with the kanun and actively promoting Middle Eastern and Central Asian music in Hong Kong. She was invited to perform at RTHK, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, Hong Kong Maritime Museum, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and City University of Hong Kong.
Information provided by the artists
Tajik Music with Sirojiddin Juraev - Tradition and Innovation on the Silk Road
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Sustaining Culture on the Silk Road: Sirojiddin Juraev’s Tajik Music
Eugene Leung
Among the countries on the Silk Road, Tajikistan may easily escape our attention: it has the smallest area among the five ex-Soviet Central Asian republics, and is the only Persian-speaking nation among them, the others (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) being Turkic-speaking. The region where Tajikistan lies boasts of a long history, known as Sogdiana, an area that once came under the dominion of Alexander the Great in 327 BC and had also been vassal state of the Tang Dynasty in 651-751AD. Before Sovietization in the early twentieth century, the region was ruled under various Islamic Empires and Khanates, as it had been since the Muslim conquest in the early eighth century. Traditionally, the Islam practiced in the region has been marked by strong influence of Persian culture and by Sufism, a spiritual practice within Islam. Today, Tajikistan is known for its diverse culture - a courtly, urban culture in the north (shared with neighbouring Uzbekistan), a pastoral-rural culture in the centre and south, and a highland culture in the Pamir mountains in the east.
Sirojiddin Juraev, perhaps the best known Tajik musician on the international stage today, hails from northern Tajikistan. Born to a family of musicians in 1975, his instrument of choice is the dutar, a humble, low-voiced two-string strummed lute that is perceived as a household instrument mainly fit for accompanying folk songs and dance. Only in the hands of a few exceptional masters is this instrument transformed into a vehicle of virtuosity, and Juraev is one of the brightest examples in this generation.
His talent was such that he was personally invited by the president of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon in 2004 to move to the capital Dushanbe to pursue further studies. There he would study the shashmaqom, a repertoire of sophisticated instrumental pieces and songs whose development reached an apex in the Central Asian royal courts in cities such as Bukhara and Samarqand in late nineteenth century and is considered the most emblematic music of urban Central Asia, being one of the first art forms proclaimed by the UNESCO as a “Masterpiece of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” in 2003.
Related to the musical theoretical tradition of the Islamic Empires since medieval times and set to words by great Sufi poets such as Hafez (1325-1390) and Nava’i (1441-1501), this intricate, elite art form was severely repressed during the early years of Soviet rules, and much of its original theory was lost. Juraev studied with the music theorist Abduvali Abdurashidov, mastering his reconstruction of the shashmaqom theory as well as the most important instruments for this repertoire, the plucked lute tanbur and the bowed lute sato, and recorded the entire repertoire, lasting close to thirty hours. One of the recordings, Invisible Face of the Beloved: Classical Music of the Tajiks and Uzbeks, was published in the United States by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and received a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music Album in 2007. Since 2020, he has been the director of the State Ensemble of Shashmaqom. He is indisputably a master musician of the traditional repertoire.
Do these credentials make Juraev a typical defender of tradition, out to safeguard a near-extinct tradition by sticking religiously to traditional aesthetics? Quite the contrary, Juraev’s renown on the international stage is marked by innovative approach to traditional repertoire, by his own creative spirit, as well as his openness to cross-cultural collaborations. His performance of traditional repertoire is informed by his research into little-known recordings of old masters, bringing a fresh interpretation to well-established classics.
He has been active as a composer and arranger since the beginning of his career, and his compositions are characterised by four approaches. Firstly, he often takes traditional pieces and recast them in different rhythms or musical forms, bringing just enough surprise to a largely recognisable melodic framework. This is a typical compositional procedure in the shared Tajik-Uzbek musical tradition that celebrates its own conservatism – like how all human faces have the same essential features but are nonetheless infinitely varied, as opined the late Uzbek dutar master Abdurahim Hamidov.
The second feature is the use of “Tajik” flavours, inspired by musical traditions in the rural south and the mountains Pamir. In this, Juraev continues a Tajik compositional tradition marked by old masters such as Muhammadjon Muminov (1901-1976) and Mirzoqurbon Soliev (1912-1996), who have made their mark in this musical traditional mainly populated by Uzbek composers in the twentieth century.
A third aspect sees him taking techniques specific to the dutar as a starting point, exploring new possibilities they offer. As an instrument with only two strings, the dutar is mainly played by strumming fingers on the right hand across both strings at the same time. While this may sound rather simplistic, Juraev conjures up a wide palette of colour through novel finger combinations and rhythmic patterns, which, together with subtle ornamenting of pitches on the left hand, draws out a quasi-orchestral sound out of this humble instrument. The intricate rhythmicity of his compositions has gained him many international fans who find in this music echoes of western rock music.
The final aspect that characterises his compositions is his spirit of openness. His extensive international experience allowed him not just to perform and promote Tajik music abroad (including residencies at Harvard University no less), but also to collaborate with musicians from around the world. Through his association with the Aga Khan Music Programme, Juraev has collaborated with a wide range of musicians from both the West and the East, including the renowned Kronos Quartet from the United States, as well as Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, the Italian frame drum master Andrea Piccioni and the Syrian saxophonist Basel Rajoub among others. These collaborations have marked his compositions through their openness to instruments of different traditions, through the judicious use of musical systems from other traditions (including but not limited to Western harmony), and overall, through creating an ambience that is tradition-based but contemporary and inclusive in its sensibilities.
In his upcoming debut concert in Hong Kong, Juraev will be showcasing his art through both his own compositions as well as highlights from the tradition. The first half will mainly feature Juraev performing solo on the dutar, tanbur and sato, introducing their distinct sonorities and demonstrating their versatility to the audience with his technical prowess. In the second half, he will be joined by his fellow Tajik musicians Shavkatjon Okilov on the spike fiddle ghijak as well as by Bekhruz Naimzoda on voice, tanbur and the frame drum doira to present selections from the prestigious shashmaqom repertoire as well as other related art songs in a small traditional ensemble setting. The Tajik musicians will also be joined by local musicians Eugene Leung (dutar) and Jessie Law (guzheng) with two of Juraev’s original compositions.
In a world where the traditions are challenged by stagnant conservatism on the one hand and wholesale commercialisation and westernisation on the other hand, Sirojiddin Juraev’s music may point us to another way of sustaining a tradition – one that is firmly rooted in local, traditional aesthetics, but is also open to influences from around the globe, and is grounded in the transcultural experience of musicality. This is music from the heart of the actual and metaphorical heart of the Silk Road: one that emerges from the interaction among cultures with long, rich histories, yet still receptive to new influences, with a sense of beauty that gives it a transnational appeal.
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