The other two, Muhutaerjiang
Turdi, a 34-year-old man, and Aimannisha Guli, a 22-year-old woman, were sentenced to 10 years and seven years in jail, respectively, for threatening a taxi driver with a syringe on Aug.
In a second case heard in the same court, Muhutaerjiang
Turdi, a 34-year-old man, and Aimannisha Guli, a woman aged 22, were sentenced to 10 and seven years in prison respectively.
In mid-July 1951, the 70-year-old legendary Uyghur master musician Turdi Akhun arrived, for the first time, in Dihua--better known today as Urumchi--the provincial capital of the newly established Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on the northwestern fringe of China, some 1,800 kilometers away from his hometown Yengisa.
The initial encounter in 1951 between Turdi Akhun and Chinese musicologists, in some sense, inaugurated decades of modern Chinese scholarship on minority music, and the often vexing minority politics involved.
Turdi Akhun's initial visit to Urumchi brought about not only hours of muqam music, recorded on magnetic wire, but also unprecedented attention by the Chinese state to the classical tradition of an otherwise "uncivilized and barbaric" ethnic minority.
Turdi Akhun has since then become synonymous with the Uyghur muqam tradition.
What Turdi Akhun did not realize, perhaps, was that the conclusion of the decade-long music collection project turned out to be only the beginning of half a century of musical and musicological encounter between modern China and its minority citizens.
Existing recordings of Turdi Akhun from the 1950s, however, reveal a rather different soundscape.
For instance, he explained, in the original Turdi Akhun recording of Iraq Muqam, one of the twelve muqam suites, only eight sections/pieces were identified, leaving, theoretically, at least two-thirds of the suite lacking.
