Lecture | Negotiating ‘Free Meter’ in Kazakh Folk Song

After Kazakhstan’s forced integration into the USSR in 1920, the Soviet state sponsored publications of folk music to celebrate the so-called “the friendship of the peoples.” The Russian-born ethnographer Aleksander Zatayevich (1869–1936) was the first to extensively collect and publish Kazakh songs. Among challenges in transcription Zatayevich mentioned that “the majority of songs allowed great liberty to free meter.” He further ascribed “irregularity,” “non-squaredeness,” and “variability” of meter to biological inferiority.

This lecture examines approaches to meter in Kazakh vocal and instrumental folk music to show that negotiation of free meter was far more than a neutral artistic or scholarly endeavor. By tracing the afterlives of Zatayevich’s transcriptions, I argue that references to Kazakh free meter by Russocentric musicians, including Boris Erzakovich and Nikolai Tiftikidi, illuminate the glaring presence of racialization in the USSR. I place the discourse on free meter alongside nineteenth-century Russian anthropological writings that highlighted Kazakh people’s presumed backwardness and inferiority. As an alternative to evolutionistic approaches to free meter, I turn to Kazakh theorists—such as Asiia Baigaskina and Il’ias Kozhabekov—who link metro-rhythmic foundations of Kazakh music to the structure of language and prosody. Ultimately, I show that the Soviet state’s utopian claims about communism’s defeat of racism and colonialism was nothing but propaganda that aimed to conceal the polarized socio-cultural reality within the multiethnic Soviet empire.

Speaker Knar Abrahamyan is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Race at the Department of Music.