My understanding of the concept of tradition is that it is not static, but rather living and always evolving. I wonder, how much the environment, the rhythm of life, the customs, the food, and the people influence the evolution of tradition? What is the impact on the concepts of identity and authenticity?
In this project, I will use the method of autoethnography to discuss these questions by telling my own story. This story is woven together with the music I created for my 3rd year bachelor concert. Autoethnography is described by Joan Didion as ‘stories of/about the self told through the lens of culture. Autoethnographic stories are artistic and analytic demonstrations of how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and cultural experience.’[1]
I am an Uyghur who was born in Xinjiang and grew up in Beijing. I now live in Helsinki, Finland. These huge changes of environment have constantly affected my musical identity as a musician. In spring 2019, I began the preparation of my bachelor project and concert at Sibelius Academy. The goal of the project was to introduce my culture and traditions, while at the same time search for my identity within the culture. The band for my concert was made up of musicians from Aruba, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain and Finland. The instrumentation was not connected to Uyghur tradition. With this in mind, my main interest was to investigate the questions:
How can I present my Uyghur culture and myself in a completely new musical and cultural environment?
How can I use this process to renew and reinvent myself and my culture?
For me, the idea of authenticity means to represent oneself as who you truly are. We can think of our own personal identity as being authentic, which is something that we build and create over time. This identity may continue to change, because it is certainly not static.[2]
At the same time, there is a push for many of us as individuals and as members of groups to perform our identities in ways that are expected of us by society.
In this project, the identity that I presented in my concert is not necessarily my ‘true’ or only identity. It is rather the identity I have crafted at this time, which I choose to represent myself to my audiences.
When we perform, there must be a reason why we are playing that particular piece of music and an idea behind what we are trying to communicate to the audience through our music. One of the amazing things about music and the arts is that we are able to transfer information and communicate so many different forms of emotions in a safe way. Art is food for the soul. It can serve the role of a silent reminder of a topic that is bothering the society, a topic that needs to be addressed and if given the chance, it can be an awaking call.
For my concert, I came up with the idea of taking inspiration from a film. The film depicted the story of an old pioneer man and his grandchildren living in the Tarim river area, next to the Taklimakan desert, located in Southwest Xinjiang in Northwest China [3] This desert is one of the biggest in the world, only slightly smaller than the size of Germany. The man's family hometown was very small and life was incredibly peaceful. However, this all changed when a group of Chinese officials and Swedish explorers arrived, searching for cultural relics in the middle of the desert. They forced the old man to guide them into the desert because he was the only person who was most familiar with the desert terrain. Eventually, they found the artifacts, but the old man died of thirst in the process.
In recent years, hundreds of mummies have been excavated from the Taklimakan Desert. The oldest mummies were found to be from the period between 2000 BC. to the year zero. When I watched the film again, I kept thinking about the old man’s grandchildren, imagining his mother singing a lullaby when he was born. This image was the inspiration for me to write my own story about the boy, which became the entire framework for my concert.
