What the dap remembers: twelve suites, one room, and the long quiet of mulberry wood
For forty years Turdi Akhun sat with the same frame-drum and refused to write the muqam down. The recordings we have now are the argument he lost — and the gift he meant to leave.
The first time I heard a full chong nagma performed end to end, it was past midnight in a courtyard off Ostengboyi Street, and the dap player — an old man named Memet, born the year the last imperial census reached Kashgar — had been playing for nearly two hours without lifting his eyes. The rawap and the ghijek had long since dropped out. He was alone with the frame and the room, and the room, somehow, was answering.
A score the room had to learn
The Twelve Muqam is not, properly speaking, twelve pieces. Each muqam is a suite of three movements — the slow chong nagma, the danced dastan, the breathless meshrep — and each suite, performed without cuts, runs close to two hours. There is no canonical score. For most of the twentieth century there was barely a notation. What survived survived in mouths and in hands and, above all, in the tension of a single goatskin head pulled taut across mulberry wood.
“The drum is not an instrument. It is a thirteenth voice that the other twelve have agreed to follow.”