I used to think festival music was just background noise—something that happened to you at celebrations, not something you actually listened to.
Then I spent three weeks in Tashkent during Navruz, and honestly, everything I thought I knew about Uzbek ceremonial sound unraveled. The music wasn’t just accompanying the festival; it was the festival, woven into every gesture, every plate of sumalak, every embrace between neighbors who hadn’t spoken since last spring. What struck me first was the sheer variety—not the polished, uniform stuff you’d expect from a “national tradition,” but this messy, regionally fractured soundscape where a doira drum pattern from Fergana Valley sounds almost nothing like what you’d hear in Khorezm, maybe 400 kilometers west, give or take. The instruments themselves—dutar, tanbur, chang, karnay—carry lineages stretching back centuries, possibly to pre-Islamic Central Asian courts, though pinning down exact dates makes most ethnomusicologists I’ve met visibly uncomfortable. People sing these songs in Uzbek, Tajik, sometimes Russian, sometimes all three in the same verse, and nobody seems bothered by the linguistic chaos.
Wait—maybe I should back up. Navruz isn’t just a festival; it’s the festival, marking the spring equinox, celebrated across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and chunks of the former Silk Road with an intensity that makes New Year’s Eve look like a quiet Tuesday. In Uzbek tradition, the music starts days before the actual equinox, building this cumulative energy that antropologists call “participatory anticipation,” though I’m not sure that phrase captures the way my neighbor Dilbar described it: “The songs make the flowers come faster.”
The Katta Ashula Tradition and Why It Sounds Like Controlled Chaos
Katta ashula—literally “big song”—is this UNESCO-recognized vocal style that defintely doesn’t sound like what most Westerners expect from “folk music.”
It’s performed by two or three male singers, often outdoors, without amplification, using a call-and-response structure that can stretch a single poetic couplet into seven or eight minutes of overlapping, almost confrontational vocal lines. The first time I heard it live, at a wedding in Bukhara, I thought the singers were arguing. Turns out that tension—that sense of voices pushing against each other—is exactly the point. The lead voice (yakkaxon) starts with a phrase, and the second voice (mushov) answers not in harmony but in deliberate dissonance, creating intervals that Western music theory would flag as “errors” but that Uzbek audiences recieve as emotionally necessary. There’s a third voice sometimes, the damkash, holding a drone underneath, and the whole thing operates on a maqom system—modal frameworks inherited from Persian and Arab musical traditions but twisted into something distinctly Central Asian. I guess it makes sense that a region sitting at the crossroads of empires for two millennia would develop music that refuses to resolve neatly.
Doira Drums and the Geometry of Celebration Rhythm Patterns
The doira is a frame drum, maybe 40 centimeters across, with metal rings inside that rattle when you strike the skin.
Every Uzbek kid learns to play it, sort of the way American kids learn “Chopsticks” on piano, except the doira actually stays relevant into adulthood, showing up at weddings, circumcision ceremonies, Navruz gatherings, and basically any event where humans gather and need to move their bodies in synchronized ways. What’s wild is how regionally specific the rhythms are—a experienced player from Samarkand can listen to a doira pattern and tell you not just what region it’s from but sometimes what neighborhood, because families pass down variations across generations like recipes. The most common festival pattern is called the “ufar,” a 6/8 rhythm that accelerates gradually over the course of a song, pushing dancers faster until someone—usually an elder—signals to stop before people actually collapse. I’ve seen this happen. The musicologist Angelika Jung wrote in 2003 that doira playing represents “embodied geography,” which sounded like academic nonsense until I watched a group of women from three different provinces try to play together and fall into completely different tempos within thirty seconds. Anyway, the drum also shows up in Sufi rituals, where the rhythm is supposed to induce a trance state, though separating “festival music” from “religious music” in Uzbek culture is messier than most ethnographers want to admit.
Why Lapar Songs Make Absolutely No Sense Until You’re Actually There
Lapar is a genre I can’t quite explain without sounding like I’m making it up.
It’s semi-improvised, often humorous, sometimes obscene, performed by professional singers (usually women) at weddings and festivals, with lyrics that roast the guests, the hosts, the political situation, the weather—nothing is off limits. The musical structure is loose, based on short melodic phrases repeated with variations, accompanied by doira and sometimes a tanbur (a long-necked lute that sounds like a banjo’s more sophisticated cousin). What makes lapar so strange is its social function: it’s simultaneously entertainment and social commentary, a space where a singer can say things that would be scandalous in normal conversation but are protected by the performance context. I heard one lapar singer in Andijan spend five minutes mocking a local official’s new car, and everyone laughed, including the official, because—here’s the thing—refusing to laugh would be admitting you can’t take a joke, which is worse than being mocked in the first place. The anthropologist Ingeborg Baldauf described lapar as “licensed transgression,” and yeah, that fits, though it doesn’t capture the weird tension in the room when a singer walks the line between funny and actually offensive. Sometimes they step over.
Instrumental Pieces That Carry the Weight of Centuries Without Trying Too Hard
Not all festival music has words.
The dutar—a two-stringed lute—often plays solo instrumental pieces called “yakkaxon” (confusingly, the same term used for the lead vocalist in katta ashula, because Central Asian musical terminology loves to reuse words in unrelated contexts). These pieces are based on the Shashmaqom, a classical suite system with roots in the courts of Bukhara and Samarkand, dating back to—well, sources vary wildly, anywhere from the 9th to the 16th century, depending on which scholar you ask and how nationalist they’re feeling. The melodies are intricate, rhythmically free, and require years of training to play properly, though at festivals you’ll often hear younger, less skilled players giving it a shot because the cultural expectation is that trying matters more than perfection. I watched a teenager in Khiva absolutely butcher a maqom piece at a Navruz gathering, and afterward, three older men spent twenty minutes teaching him the correct ornamentations, right there in the courtyard, while the plov got cold. The karnay and surnay—long brass trumpet and double-reed horn, respectively—show up in outdoor processions, playing fanfare-like patterns that you can hear from roughly half a kilometer away, announcing that something important is happening, even if you can’t yet see what.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Preservation and What Gets Lost Anyway
Here’s what nobody talks about: festival music is dying, sort of.
Not in the sense that it’s disappearing—Navruz celebrations are bigger now than they were in the Soviet era, and the Uzbek government actively promotes traditional music as part of national identity. But the context is eroding. Younger Uzbeks increasingly learn festival songs from YouTube videos rather than from grandparents, which changes the transmission process in ways ethnomusicologists are still trying to measure. The music gets standardized, polished, stripped of the regional variations that made it so chaotic and alive. I met a 19-year-old doira player in Tashkent who could play thirty traditional rhythms flawlessly but had never actually attended a rural wedding, where those rhythms originated. Is that preservation or something else? The Soviet period already did a number on Uzbek music—promoting sanitized, staged versions of folk traditions while suppressing the religious and improvisational elements—and now globalization is doing its own weird thing, making the music more accessible but less… I don’t know, less argued over. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe every generation gets the festival music it deserves, and I’m just nostalgic for a version I never actually experienced. Still, when I hear katta ashula recorded in a studio with perfect acoustics and balanced microphones, I miss the version I heard in that Bukhara courtyard, where the singers were competing with traffic noise and someone’s screaming toddler, and it sounded like exactly what it was: humans making sound together because the alternative—silence—was unthinkable.
