Wild Music by Maria Sonevytsky

Author:Maria Sonevytsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

INVENTING “EASTERN MUSIC”

In the summer of 2015, I returned to Simferopol for a brief research visit, and met the founder of Radio Meydan through the kind of serendipity that ethnographic research occasionally affords: a musician whom I interviewed early in the day invited me to a posh new restaurant on the outskirts of the city, owned, coincidentally, by the same businessman who had founded Radio Meydan. Due to a taxi dispatch mix-up that left my party waiting on the curb, the musicians, who had just finished playing and stepped outside to smoke, invited us back inside for late-night sweets and coffee. The owner, seeing that we were friends of the musicians, joined us at the table, and I seized the opportunity to inquire how the radio came to be. What follows is the story he told me on that evening.

In the 1990s, shortly after returning from exile in Central Asia, the businessman was driving around Simferopol with his elderly father when their car’s CD player stopped working. His father asked him to turn on the radio. All of the radio programming—music and news—was in Russian. His father, a man who had spent nearly all of his life longing to return to his childhood homeland, said that he wished to one day turn on the radio and hear Crimean Tatar music, but lamented, “I probably won’t live to see that day.” When AtlantSV, a telecompany, became available for purchase, the son asked the seller whether the company could broadcast in Crimean Tatar if it came under his ownership. The seller told him he could broadcast “in Chinese if [he] wanted to,” so the businessman invested his resources and purchased it. It took two years to clear various bureaucratic hurdles. When the radio finally went live on February 5, 2005, it opened with a broadcast of the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian national anthems, and then an address from Mustafa Jemilev, the Crimean Tatar human rights crusader and political leader (personal communication, June 14, 2015).

This story demonstrates, or at least personalizes, how the liminal sovereignty of Crimean Tatars spanned across different generations of Crimean Tatars and instructed them toward a particular politics around music and media. For Crimean Tatars reared under the Soviet regime of discursive cleansing, where the very notion of “Crimean Tatar music” was banned, the idea of making Crimean Tatar music public and audible was a poignant statement of resilience. To repatriates, even those born in exile, restoring their Indigenous claim on the peninsula was an obligation, one strategically pursued through the acquisition of media holdings and also through supra-state mechanisms of global governance. These liminal affiliations encompass complex positions: they appeal to past and present sovereignties, to post-Soviet nation-states as well as to bodies of global governance; and, in the realm of music, to discourses of tradition and “folk music” and to the globally commercialized and cosmopolitan realm of hip-hop. To Crimean Tatar repatriates, the insertion of Radio Meydan’s “Eastern music” into the mediasphere of Crimea was a powerful

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