David Dalle
Thursday February 24th, 2022 with David Dalle
The vanishing Uyghur music from Xinjiang; music from Cuba, Angola, Brazil, Mocambique and more.

The Uyghurs in Northwest China have been present in Xinjiang for almost 1600 years, constituting an independent people with cultural and commercial ties stretching across central Asia to Iran. Their music reflects this rich heritage with its ties to the great traditions based on Maqam, which range from Morocco through North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and through Central Asia ending in Xianjang. This cultural exchange was never just one-way but represented bilateral movement at its best. The Uyghurs, like most peoples in Asia, became members of different polities over the centuries. They were not part of China until 1884 lasting until the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1911. They again came under control of China after 1949, much like Tibet. Like Tibetans, they have been persecuted and oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party in its obsession with all Chinese populace being uniform, and uniformly Han Chinese. The Chinese Communist Party's embrace of Han Chinese superiority would be the envy of the most extreme white supremacists in North America. In the past decade, China has greatly escalated its persecution of Uyghurs and it resembles the cultural genocide of Canada's First Nations and Inuit through Residential schools, but on a much larger scale, and with 21st century technology. China is committing cultural genocide against Uyghurs in hopes they disappear and eventually become indistinguishable from the majority Han Chinese. This is just another tragic chapter in Communist China's long war against its own people... For the first hour we will hear Uyghur music from Xinjiang as well as from the diaspora in neighbouring Uzbekistan, where several hundred thousand Uyghurs have settled since the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1970's. We will hear several suites based on the Uyghur Muqam as well as folk and one rare example of Uyghur Sufi music recorded in Xinjiang in 1988. I wanted to program this show during the recent Olympics in Beijing, but for personal reasons--someone close to me was working at the Olympics--I waited until she was back in Canada.