Uygur Music And Performing Arts Life And Identity

For the recent years,there are more and more Uyghur musicians choose to live in Beijing.Curling hair, European appearance, hoarse voice,all these characters made Uyghur musicians look like a typical artist. And their different music style makes them to be a special group in Beijing musical field. In the past, all Uyghur musician only play their traditional music, but now the Uyghur musician who lived in Beijing combine the element of traditional Uyghur music with rock, jazz, electron, flamenco and start a new musical space.However all these change make their music becoming multiplicity, but the root of music won't change, and the identity of Uyghur is also an unchangeable fact, so I think there is a link between their music and identity.With the development of urban anthropology, the study of minority people who lived in the city is becoming popular. But rarely pay attention to the minority musicians who live and work in the big city. In some way, they actually are the inheritors of the traditional music and also a minority people who have an obvious character and live in the place with many different cultures.Music is the way for living and showing their identity. Bar, restaurant, festival and wedding, you can find Uyghur musician in all these place, and play different style in different places.Through their show, the identity may have small changes.Most of ethnic studies in anthropology are start from ethnicity, language or religion, to the Uyghur musicians who live in Beijing, music is the center of life.This is also the reason why we discuss their musical life and identity through the music.Music and the element of their musical life consist the most important part in my research.There are four part of this paper. The first part is the background of Uyghur musicians who live in Beijing and why they choose Beijing to be their dream place.Some of them are coming from a musical family, and some of them learned music by themselves,but the different background didn't make any difference for their dream.As the capital and the culture center of China, Beijing has its own attraction for theses musicians.The second part is about their work. The working environment is very important to musicians,the stage is their life.The music style is one of the reason that how they can find their own position in Beijing.And the audience,also is the customer of their working place, they are the motive to the musicians.The choice of the audience also infects their own identity. The third part is about the ordinary life of musicians,their performance in the daily life.They live in Beijing but they still keep their own culture and habitude,and their music is the best way to show that.The last part is theory summarize, it shows that the performance and identity of Uyghur musicians who lived in Beijing is related with music in theory way.