Study Day

Organised by Giovanni De Zorzi and Razia Sultanova, this Study Day has been made possible thanks to collaboration between the Giorgio Cini Foundation’s Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies, the G. Mazzariol Department of History of the Arts and Conservation of Artistic Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, and the Cambridge University Faculty of Music. A morning seminar will explore the main two currents in Central Asia in which spirituality and the use of music, thanks to its power to en-chant, have interacted since their remote origins. In an approach based on interdisciplinary comparative analysis, the speakers will use their respective instruments to focus on a “phenomenon” combining music and spirituality that they have come across in their research. An important element will thus be the various contexts that the speakers will describe with the help of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, Orientalists, linguists, historians of literature from the areas concerned and musicians. By referring to “other instruments” (musical instruments and choirs), some experts will also deal with the issues examined during the seminar together with Marâghî and Navrous, two music groups with which they have collaborated for many years, by holding a concert during the afternoon. The “musical criterion” adopted by the organisers seemed to be an effective way of mapping out diversity and establishing affinities in the truly vast Central Asian region in which many very different peoples live: Turkmens, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Kyrghisians, Uyghurs together with Russians, who have been living in the area for centuries, and new immigrants. These peoples inhabit a geographical region which, from West to East, stretches from the Caspian Sea to the Tian Shan mountain range and the Gobi Desert, while from North to South, it goes from the Siberia steppe to the mountain chains of Tibet.