Ancient voices of the steppes

The music of Central Asia is hardly known here, yet next month English National Opera opens its doors to the region's musicians. Michael Church goes in search of a different classical tradition

On a windswept plain, bounded by snowy peaks, rises a row of red-rock hills. "Like a resting camel", the locals say, but the hills' official name - Mazar Kochkor-Ata - reflects their real significance. A mazar is a Muslim shrine where you commune with the saints, but here in animist Kyrgyzstan, shrines are accidents of nature - a spring, a strange clump of trees, an unusual rock-formation. After purifying my soul by circumambulating the hills, and placing my wishing-stone on the highest, I eavesdrop on a recitation of the tale that for a thousand years has expressed the spirit of this spot.

On a windswept plain, bounded by snowy peaks, rises a row of red-rock hills. "Like a resting camel", the locals say, but the hills' official name - Mazar Kochkor-Ata - reflects their real significance. A mazar is a Muslim shrine where you commune with the saints, but here in animist Kyrgyzstan, shrines are accidents of nature - a spring, a strange clump of trees, an unusual rock-formation. After purifying my soul by circumambulating the hills, and placing my wishing-stone on the highest, I eavesdrop on a recitation of the tale that for a thousand years has expressed the spirit of this spot.

The kneeling bard, in his embroidered cap, has a face as though carved in oak. He muses intently, takes deep breaths, rolls his eyes till only the whites are visible, fixes us with a manic glare, and launches into song: unpitched at first - groans, shrieks, and hisses - it turns into an ecstatic chant that is embellished with warlike gestures. The Manas epic is Kyrgysztan's answer to the Iliad - though 20 times longer in its entirety - and Rysbek Jumabaev is what's known as a manaschi, a master of this art. The work is the national creation-myth, and it's studded with heroic deeds: as it sweeps on, Jumabaev's trance gets wilder, until he finally comes back down and reluctantly rejoins reality.

How did Jumabaev become a manaschi? A long story, he says, which began with a celebrated manaschi coming to his house when he was four: "I was frightened of him, so he took me on his knee and blessed me". When Jumabaev was eight, the manaschi started appearing to him in dreams, and after the seventh of these he realised he was destined to join him. "But I fought it. I tried working as a carpenter and farm-worker, but I became so depressed it made me ill - my family thought I would die. To save my life I was told to visit a mazar, slaughter a sheep, spend the night there, and recite the Manas." And the rest, he beams, is history: "I'm grateful that you've come to see me here. But I'm not surprised, because I saw my success in a dream: I knew I would be coming to perform in London."

Which is what he will be doing at the Coliseum on 1 October, together with 40 other musical stars from Central Asia. But why is English National Opera hosting this "world music" event - and why, indeed, is this article appearing on a classical page? If the first question is quickly answered - ENO is opening its doors to great voices from other cultures - the second requires us to redefine "classical", and to accept that there are other traditions just as venerable and sophisticated as our own. Some of those to be heard at the Coliseum will need no advocacy: the Azeri praise-singer Alem Qasimov's art is celebrated worldwide, and Persian classical music - still proudly called that by its present-day Iranian exponents - is self-evidently the product of a musical aristocracy. But other styles - such as the shash maqam from Tajikistan - may strike Western ears as uncomfortably strange: their prime advocate is the world's top authority on Central Asian music, the ethnomusicologist Ted Levin, who has masterminded this event.

Levin thinks it's perfectly appropriate that these singers should be appearing in an opera house. "Each style has a long lineage and its own music theory, and they all cultivate technical virtuosity," he says. " Shash maqam is not folk music: its roots go back to the medieval courts of Bukhara and Samarkand, where it was seen as part of the science of music, which was linked through poetry to metaphysics." He compares it to what Europeans call a song cycle: a huge suite of six groups of pieces, within each of which there are 20 or 30 separate songs, each with a poetic text, to be accompanied by an instrumental ensemble.

The shash maqam maestro Abduvali Abdurashidov is, in effect, court musician to the current president of Tajikistan, but when I encounter him in a leafy courtyard in the capital, Dushanbe, he's watching three of his students with a gimlet eye. Their music is grave and austere, their voices and instruments speak from a different world. But this little academy is also the research team for a project to which he has dedicated his life: reviving and recording the entire shash maqam canon, an oral tradition that the Soviets downgraded to the status of folk music, and whose greatest masters have passed away. "When I was a student," he recalls, "people thought I was weird, transcribing old texts rather than making money playing at weddings. But now they respect me."

Abdurashidov has certainly been helped by the fact that Unesco has accorded shash maqam world-heritage status, but he's also supported by the Aga Khan, whose Central Asian "music initiative" funds both this academy and many others in the region. The Soviets may have done their best to obliterate national identity in the Stans, but they did encourage traditional musicians to meet and exchange ideas: in the post-1990 vacuum, those musicians found themselves cut off from both funding and fellowship, and the Aga Khan has moved to fill the gap, in the belief that music can help make these shattered nations whole again.

In another Dushanbe courtyard I find musicians with an even bigger debt to the shadowy but locally omnipotent figure of the Aga Khan, who almost single-handedly ended Tajikistan's recent civil war. Saheba Dovlatshayeva and her consort are Ismailis from mountainous Badakshan, overlooking Afghanistan, and they have been saved from starvation because the Aga Khan - as spiritual leader of the Ismaili sect - came to their rescue with bread and money. Saheba delivers Sufi devotional songs with a coiled intensity. "These songs are the tears in our blood," she tells me humbly when she has finished. This superb singer-dancer will also be starring at the Coliseum in October.

The pupils of another Aga Khan academy perform in a yurt in the mountains where Kyrgyzstan shades into China: this is nomad horse-country, and the music these boys extract from their three-string lutes sounds just like the drumming of hooves. In true Central Asian style, they live with their master, but a musician who has dropped in turns out to be an exponent on that mysterious instrument, the horse-hair fiddle. Bakyt Chyrtyrbaev has the manner of a mystic, and speaks of his music with sacred awe. He began as a violin student, but happened to see one of these instruments - traditionally used by village shamans to cast spells - in the conservatoire's museum. He worked out how it was played, but it was 10 years before the technique clicked: "When I play it now, I forget reality, and I enter the world of the shamans. All the best art comes out of shamanism". Steaming cups of tea are passed round, and he and his 17-year-old daughter take it in turns to transport us as hail drums down on the yurt's felt roof.

While some of these musicians are reclaiming their past, others are drawing on it to forge something new - in the case of Nurlanbek Nyshanov with great success. This Kyrgyz multi-instrumentalist has no interest in Western electronics, but what he and his fellow-musicians in the Tengir-Too ensemble do is contemporary in the best sense of the word. Like those Irish folk revivalists The Chieftains and The Bothy Band, Tengir-Too adapt old instruments - such as the wooden jew's-harp - to create beguiling new sounds reflecting the nomad life which Nyshanov still pursues. "When I'm stressed or worried," he says, "I just get on my horse and ride into the mountains, and I soon feel fine again."

But the most pressing question for all these musicians remains how to earn a living. Their needs are not huge - Jumabaev is simply saving to buy a dairy cow - and their main source of income comes from weddings. Ted Levin, as the implementer of the Aga Khan's music policy, has set up a system whereby teachers and pupils in these academies receive stipends. And - much more importantly - he's created a publishing arm with the Smithsonian Folkways label so they can receive royalties and not get ripped off by Western producers as they have till now. It was Levin who discovered the Tuvan throat-singers Huun-Huur-Tuu and introduced them to the West: Central Asia's musicians couldn't wish for a more streetwise protector. Levin is also immortalising their music on a 20-CD series to be released next year.

The other big question concerns the future lying in store for Central Asia's traditional music. Levin's immediate aim is to shore it up against the relentless encroachment of Western pop, with its ubiquitous marketing. But is there, for example, any possible further development for the shash maqam? "Probably not," he replies, "because its evolution is complete. But it's not dead; it's full of life. And its future life may lie abroad." Thanks to the Bukharan Jews who were its prime exponents, the shash maqam has already put down roots in Tel Aviv and Queens, New York: Levin admits that parachuting music into unfamiliar terrain is a hit-and-miss venture, but he thinks the materialist West is now fertile ground for Central Asia's spirituality. Meanwhile, it's going to galvanise the Coliseum, where these 40 musicians will premiere their first world tour.

'Voices of Central Asia', at the Coliseum, London WC2 (020-7632 8300) on 1 October at 8pm, is presented by ENO and O2 in association with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture