Performance of the Kazakh ethno-folk ensemble 'Kulansaz' generates a lot of interest among the ethnomusicologists at UCLA

"You really can't get an idea of how a music is made unless you've seen it made, as well as heard it and I think having them live on stage in a really nice acoustic environment is going to make a huge difference," Seeger told Silk Road Newsline in an interview.

Seeger is also a former director of Smithsonian Folkways, a recording label of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. dedicated to supporting cultural diversity around the world through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound. Research into how traditional musical instruments were evolved is of particular interest to musicologists and those who are trying to preserve the world music heritage, Silk Road Newsline reports.

"The instruments that are located on points on what we call the Silk Road have been moving along that road for hundreds of years and so some of them are arriving in Kazakhstan now and some of them are arriving from parts of Central Asia and have been arriving in parts of Europe for hundreds of years. So, what we call European instruments aren't necessarily European. They are often from somewhere else," the professor of ethnomusicology said.

The term ethnomusicology was coined by the Dutch musician Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) who pioneered research in this field and who described ethnomusicology as "the study of social and cultural aspects of music and dance in local and global contexts."

Currently, the Department of Ethnomusicology of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA is the first and only independent ethnomusicology department in the U.S.

The department houses the third largest ethnomusicology archive in the U.S. with over 100,000 recordings and documents.  The archive is preserving original recordings and digitizing all music. UCLA Ethnomusicology also has a collection of more than 350 unique musical instruments from different parts of the world, including several traditional string and wind instruments from Central Asia.

What makes the UCLA ethnomusicology program unique in the world is the requirement that students learn to play the music they study, including learning how to play traditional musical instruments form Central Asia and other parts of the world.

"In the years I've been working as an ethnomusicologist, I find that when people become excited about a music, first they want to hear more of it, and there is more to be heard, of course, on CDs.  But then often they want to go beyond that and learn how to play the instruments," Seeger said.  "They'd like to travel there perhaps and see them being played again, not on one of our stages but on wherever the stages they are played on in the countries they are performed in. I'm sure that some of the students who hear the music at this concert will be inspired and show up in Kazakhstan."

From the moment the performance of Kazakh folk virtuosos was announced, it has been eagerly awaited by the professionals and the students at the Ethnomusicology Department and by all other lovers of the traditional oriental music in L.A.

"I think it can inspire young students to think about new ways of making sounds and new kinds of virtuosity," Seeger said. "I think it can reassure us old faculty members that there is some really great music that we haven't had the chance to hear in-person yet."

'Kulansaz' is currently on a three-city concert tour in the U.S. The ensemble performs in Los Angeles after two very successful shows in New York and Washington.

Founded in 1979 by the great Kazakh composer Aset Beyseuov, and relaunched in 2010 under the artistic direction of Yerzhan Kosbarmakov and musical direction of Marat Zhalbirov, "Kulansaz" is made up of students graduates of the Kurmangazy National Conservatory and the Zhurgenov National Academy of Arts in Kazakhstan.

The repertoire of the Ensemble includes folkloric music pieces, the folk songs of professional folk-composers, as well as contemporary compositions and dances. Members of the ensemble play a variety of string, wind, and percussion instruments, including dombyra, sherter, bass dombyra, zhetygen, adyrna, shinkildek, kobyz, kylkobyz, narkobyz and sazgen (all string), saz syrnai, uildek, sybyzgy and syrnai (wind) as well as dauylpaz, dabyl, asatayak and tokyldak konyrau (percussion).

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