Doctoral Colloquium (Music): Adalyat Issiyeva
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Doctoral Colloquium: Adalyat Issiyeva
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According to the first - and only - Russian Imperial census of 1897, less than half of the Empire’s population spoke Russian as their native language. What was the place of ethnic minorities’ cultures within the ever-growing Russian Empire and later within the tightly controlled Soviet Union? This talk focuses on musical representations of Taranchi (or modern Uighur) people in late-Imperial Russia and explores how their identity was negotiated, absorbed, assimilated, and/or (mis)represented by the dominant culture. I also discuss the life and music of the first Soviet Uighur composer Kuddus Kuzhamiarov (1918–1994) in the context of the Soviet Union’s controversial minority relations, which regularly involved the extensive manipulation of music for political ends.
Adalyat Issiyeva holds a Bachelor of Music from Almaty State Conservatoire and completed master’s and doctoral work at McGill University. Shifting from an ethnomusicological focus (“Philosophical and Religious Aspects of Uighur Muqam”) to western European early music, her master’s research, “Ostinato Motets by Josquin des Prez,” investigated number symbolism and compositional techniques in renaissance music. She completed her doctoral dissertation titled “Russian Orientalism: From Ethnography to Art-Song in Russian Nineteenth-Century Music.” She has published articles in several journals (Revue du Centre Européen d’Etudes Slaves, Sacre Celebration: Revisiting, Reflecting, Revisioning, and Revue musicale OICRM ), as well as in a collection of articles (Rimsky-Korsakov and His World). Her book Representing Russia’s Orient, published by Oxford University Press, explores the political implications of nineteenth-century Russian art songs with oriental subjects, both within and outside the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism.
Her research interests include Russian music, Orientalism, nationalism and identity formation, (music) ethnography, Central Asian music and culture, and the politics of representation. In addition to her academic life, she has participated in a number of folk festivals, representing Uighur traditional dance and songs at the Smithsonian Silk Road Festival, among others.
