![]() ![]() Though most of the world knows little of Kyrgyz instruments, the twang of the temir komuz, or Jew's harp, is widely familiar. "I want the world to know these musicians, to know this music-Kyrgyz music," he says. ![]() Today, the school trains hundreds of students-but what really makes Begaliyev, its rector, proud is that nearly half his students play both classical and traditional Kyrgyz music. Twenty of Begaliyev's unemployed musical contemporaries eagerly joined in nurturing it. ![]() Soviet art subsidies were a thing of the past, and Kyrgyz government funds were severely limited, yet Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev's donation of more than $200,000 paid for the renovation of an old state-owned building, and the newborn Kyrgyz Conservatory had its cradle. ![]() "Good musicians were unemployed: There were no good orchestras, no good theaters." Without any idea about what he would do next, or of how he would earn a living, he felt drawn back to the newly independent Kyrgyz Republic. "Too many friends in Moscow had no work," he recalls. Inspired by 19th-century Russian painter Karl Brullov's "Last Day of Pompeii," the Begaliyev symphony gave voice and expression to the tragic fate of humans entangled in natural and social collapses.Ī string of awards and a UNESCO grant opened doors throughout Europe, yet the composer was caught up in social collapse himself: the collapse of the Soviet Union. More significantly, he had become the school's leading composer by the time he graduated.ĭuring graduate studies at Moscow's Tchaikovsky State Conservatory, Begaliyev's "Symphonic Poem" took the grand prize in the 1983 All-Union Competition of Pianists. At Bishkek's Institute of Arts, he became proficient on several woodwinds, beginning with the bassoon, as well as on "this box," the piano. "Even before leaving for Bishkek, even as I first read in the newspaper that the composer faculty was open, I wanted to study composition," Begaliyev explains. "They asked me, 'Have you played this instrument?' and I said, 'This box? I am seeing it for the first time.'"ĭespite this lack of instrumental competence, the instructors were impressed when Begaliyev demonstrated his sophisticated compositional skill-all the more because his work had been done "only" on a three-stringed komuz. "During examinations they showed me a piano," he recounts. Soviet conservatories at that time stressed only European classical music, which Begaliyev had never heard. At age 15, he traveled alone to the Kyrgyz capital to audition. It was a newspaper ad that alerted the young man that a music school in Bishkek was enrolling students. Its music entertained his first audience: the flock of sheep he tended throughout boyhood. Barely three years old when he was handed his first komuz, he made the instrument his constant companion. When Begaliyev smiles, it all sounds simple, and he certainly seems to have absorbed music just that easily. "I was raised among musicians," recalls the man who is now Kyrgyzstan's leading classical composer. Muratbek Begaliyev grew up tending sheep in the village of Jumga. Melodies played on this long-necked, three-stringed, pear-bodied instrument may not be as old as the country's vast Tien Shan Mountains, but they are as familiar to rural Kyrgyz as the sheep they tend and the horses for which they are famous. Across Lake Son-Kul, strains of the komuz, one of Kyrgyzstan's national instruments, echo through the highlands. ![]()
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