Qyzğaldaqtar (Tulips) - Ongoing project, 2026
(the work I am proposing to develop in the lab)
Qyl-qobyz, voice, and spatial electronics.
Prototype, 2026
Composition, performance, and production: Akmaral Mergen
When the tulips fade to yellow and the steppe falls silent…
When the grey sky bends low, soundless, drifting over the earth…
The wind that never rests on this steppe is forlorn, like me.
My grief will thaw tomorrow, at first light…
Қызғалдақтар сарғайып дала жым-жырт болса…
Сұр аспан үнсіз төніп, жер бетінде қалқыса…
Тынымсыз жел бұл далада мен сияқты мүсәпір.
Қайғы менің жібітіліп етер, ертеңгі азанда…
A. Mergen (2008)
MATERIAL. The piece grows from these four lines. Wind is the element of the steppe, and it is no accident that it lives in the timbre of Kazakh instruments: they are ascetic and open-bodied, letting friction and breath through. Take the qyl-qobyz, a two-stringed fiddle, horsehair bowed with horsehair, or the sybyzgy, a rim-blown flute with no fipple or mouthpiece, the tone formed by the lips against the open edge. Sound comes out of them unwillingly, and it comes out with air in it. Only the qyl-qobyz is used in this piece, and so far nothing in it is a field recording. The wind, and everything that lives around it in the steppe, is drawn from the instrument, through extended techniques, granular and spectral processing, time-stretching.
FRAMEWORK. The frame is Korkyt, ancestor figure of the Turkic world and, in the legend, its first musician, who rode to the four directions to escape death and found it waiting in each of them. He made the first qyl-qobyz to ward it off: as long as he played, death could not approach. After years of work on projects about damaged land, I read those four directions as today's ecological disasters, the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site among them. Qyzğaldaqtar are the steppe's wild tulips. For most of the year the steppe gives little to look at; then it flowers for a few days. Nothing here lasts longer than that.
STRUCTURE. The practice of these instruments is improvisatory. A saryn, a melodic formula passed by ear from teacher to student, generation after generation, keeps a recognisable outline while everything around it is improvised. Mine was passed from me in 2008 to me in 2026: it is the melody of these four lines. That is what the centre holds — a bare voice singing them. The ring around is composed.
ARRAY. Sixteen channels is the ideal: a multiple of four, so the four directions stay marked, each channel carrying its own playing or processing technique. The speakers are meant to stand around the room, four of them on its axes, the audience inside and, in the performed edition, the performer at the centre. Whether the ring thins as the piece goes — from sixteen sources to four, and at the end to one — is still being worked out. For smaller rooms it comes down to eight or four channels, as long as the multiple of four holds.
FORMAT. What I am working out now is where the qyl-qobyz stops being recognisable as itself, and whether a live centre can hold its ground inside a diffused ring. Whether the piece belongs in a room as an installation or on a stage as a performance, I do not know yet either.