“In 2004, I found myself in the south of Kazakhstan on a field recording trip: an ethnographic study of the traditional form of throat singing called zhirau”
“The local name for the artists who perform this kind of music is bakshi. The same word is used throughout Central Asia for those possessed of second sight or an ability to intuit the future, or those leading or pointing the way”
“The musical instrument accompanying the bakshi—in both senses of the word: the reciters of ancient legends and the healers voyaging across time and space—is the kobyz, a stringed instrument played with a bow, ubiquitous among the people of the Eurasian steppe”
“By sheer chance I found myself at a burial site on the northern bank of the Syrdarya”
“A local elder who happened to be nearby told me its story, the myth of Qorqyt (whose name means “terror” or “terrifying” in the Turkic language), the inventor of the kobyz, through which he learned the secret of immortality”
“Qorqyt is said to be the first bakshi. After long and fruitless wanderings in search of immortality, as soon as he struck the first note on the kobyz, he was freed from the grip of the earth”
“Overcoming the gravitational pull, Qorqyt hung in the air above the waters of the Syrdarya. In the myth, immortality is equated with the uninterrupted sound of the kobyz”
“There was added poignancy to the story because we were only 50 kilometers from Baikonur and its suburb Toretam, the site of man’s first launch into space some decades earlier, driven, perhaps, by the same impulse for immortality”
“Had the steppe any premonition of man’s wanderings beyond the bounds of the earth? Does it possess a memory of our eternal quest to conquer death?”
“Like all the traditional instruments of Central Asia, the kobyz was suppressed in the 1930s. Its sound box, thought to be a portal into a parallel dimension, was covered with a wooden lid to keep locals from using it for its original purpose, thus turning it into a means of common entertainment. Horsehair strings were replaced with wire”
“A composition for the kobyz is called a kuy. There are eleven known kuy attributed to Qorqyt. Each melody tells a story encoded in musical images: typically, these describe the animals that accompanied Qorqyt on his quest for immortality and sacrificed their lives in the name of man’s struggle against death”
“The end is still plainly manifest everywhere: the dead and lifeless earth, scattered bones of deer after a mass die-off, the bed of a dried-up sea, nuclear scars on the surface of the earth, mounds of scorched rocks around Baikonur, a decimated forest, concrete walls around the town of Baikonur that wall off the endless expanse of the steppe, objects from the local space museum, frozen time”
“The quest for immortality seems to contain man’s radical individualistic challenge to the law (the cosmos), and the measure of this challenge is human life”
“Some 500 meters from Qorqyt’s burial site is the resting place of Aksak Kyz, a lame girl (in Turkic mythology, lameness marks a traveler who has traversed all worlds), for whose sake Qorqyt was bitten by a snake and died”