In Kazan, the publishing house “Ak Bure” has printed the book “Harmonics” in the traditional culture of the Kazan Tatars”. Its author is an American scientist and musician who graduated from the Conservatory in Cincinnati, Ohio, majoring in violin and viola. From 1997 to 2010, Paul Walter lived in the Republic of Tatarstan, where he completed a full postgraduate course at the Kazan State Conservatory, and then wrote and defended his dissertation on the topic of the Tatar garmon. To do this, he mastered playing 7 types of folk harmonics, learned the Tatar language and made expeditions to the Arsky, Atninsky, Baltasinsky and Vysokogorsky regions of Tatarstan, created a new system of musical notation, developed an original method of teaching to play the harmonics.
The monograph, intended for musicologists, folklorists and ethnographers, as well as for everyone who is interested in Tatar folk music, shows the history of the harmonics, the role of the harmonics in the Tatar traditional culture of the 19th – early 21st centuries, examines the features of each of the seven types of harmonics (Tula, Vyatka, Saratov, “terapashka” (kechkenә), piano, chrome, Tatar), techniques of playing the garmon and methods of their musical fixation. Traveling to the districts, the author recorded more than 600 samples of traditional garmon performance, musical transcriptions of thirty-three of them are included in the book. The value of these recordings is that they are provided with QR links to the You Tube web service, giving you the opportunity to see video recordings of the performances of Tatar harmonics and get acquainted with the original sound of the notated samples.
The appendix to the book contains a list of accordions recorded in settlements of northwestern Tatarstan, their appearance and settings, as well as photographic material of harmonics from Vysokogorsky, Arsky, Atninsky, Baltasinsky districts.
Kuivinen’s work became the first serious work in the United States on the ethnomusic of Tatarstan, which will undoubtedly serve to popularize the Tatar culture. At the same time, the work of Paul Walter Kuivinen, revealing a whole layer of the musical culture of the Tatar people, is invaluable for our republic and will serve as an example for the continuation of scientific research in this direction.
