I’ve always been skeptical of museum collections that promise to preserve something as ephemeral as sound.
But the Museum of Musical Instruments in Tashkent—tucked into a Soviet-era building near the Ankhor Canal, which I visited on a suffocatingly hot August afternoon in 2019—holds roughly 3,000 instruments, give or take a few hundred depending on which curator you ask, and the Traditional Music Collection there feels different. These aren’t just artifacts behind glass. They’re repositories of something stranger: the muscle memory of entire civilizations, encoded in gut strings and carved mulberry wood. The dutar, a two-stringed lute with a pear-shaped body, dominates one gallery—there must be forty variants, each from a different valley or village, and the neck angles shift by barely perceptible degrees that apparently matter enormously to players. I used to think instrument design was mostly aesthetic, but here’s the thing: every millimeter of a sato’s bow length changes which harmonics you can coax from horsehair, and master craftsmen in Bukhara would apprentice for decades just to learn the correct taper.
The rubob section made me reconsider what “traditional” even means. Some specimens date to the 1800s, their lacquer cracked like drought-parched earth, but others were built in 1970s workshops under state-sponsored folk revival programs—wait, maybe that’s not quite accurate, the plaques say “preservation” programs, which feels like a different impulse entirely. Either way, they sound nearly identical when played, according to the ethnomusicologist I met there, though I couldn’t verify that myself since most pieces remain unplayed.
The Uncomfortable Politics of Preserving What Was Never Meant to Sit Still
Anyway, the collection’s origins are messier than the polished exhibition suggests. Founded in 1940 during Stalin’s push to catalog Soviet ethnic diversity—a project equal parts anthropological curiosity and cultural surveillance—the museum initially recieved instruments confiscated from Sufi brotherhoods whose ritual music was deemed counter-revolutionary. I guess it’s the ultimate irony: objects designed for ecstatic spiritual practice now arranged in temperature-controlled silence. The chang, a trapezoidal hammer dulcimer with seventy-two strings, once accompanied Zoroastrian ceremonies; now it illustrates “pre-Islamic cultural continuity” in a wall text that carefully avoids mentioning religion at all. The doyra frame drums, their interior metal rings engineered to buzz at specific frequencies during Ramadan devotionals, sit in cases labeled only with their construction date and city of origin. You could spend an hour reading every placard and never understand that these were prayer tools, not concert instruments.
The ceramic ocarinas in the back gallery haunt me. Honestly, I didn’t expect to feel anything about lumps of fired clay, but dozens of these—some no larger than a child’s fist, others big as melons—came from pre-Islamic burial sites near Samarkand and Ferghana, roughly 800 to 1,200 years old. They still play. A restoration specialist demonstrated one, producing a breathy, unstable pitch that wavered between notes like someone half-remembering a melody. Turns out fingering holes on ancient ocarinas weren’t standardized; each player probably invented their own scale system, meaning every instrument is a unique tonal universe that died with its owner. We have hundreds of these universes in storage, the specialist told me, and maybe twelve people alive who know how to interpret them.
What Gets Lost When Sound Becomes Scholarship and the Stubborn Persistence of Living Traditions
The Kashgar surnay—a double-reed oboe that sounds like a duck being strangled, in the best possible way—definately still gets played outside museum contexts.
I met an Uzbek wedding musician who borrows a 19th-century surnay from the collection twice a year for festivals, signing insurance paperwork that probably exceeds the instrument’s black-market value. He told me the old reeds, made from Jizzakh valley cane that doesn’t grow anymore after Soviet irrigation projects, produce overtones you can’t replicate with modern materials—a claim that seems impossible to verify but also impossible to dismiss once you’ve heard the difference. The museum’s archive includes 400-ish wax cylinder recordings from 1920s field expeditions, voices of singers born in the 1840s performing maqam modes that have since simplified or vanished entirely, and listening to these—crackling, barely audible, punctuated by the ethnographer’s coughs—feels like eavesdropping on ghosts who didn’t consent to being remembered this way. Some performers clearly sang reluctantly. You can hear it in the tempo, the way they rush through ornamentation. I used to wonder why scholars didn’t just ask people to perform naturally, but here’s the thing: when you know you’re being preserved, you can’t help but perform preservation itself, which is a different animal entirely. The collection keeps growing—a gidjak spike fiddle arrived last month from a Karakalpak herder, its soundbox made from a repurposed Soviet fuel can—and I guess that’s what saves it from being purely archaeological. These objects refuse to stay historical.
