Music of Yakutia: Research Guide

The Sakha (Yakut) reside in the Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation, a circumpolar region, half of which lies above the Arctic Circle and is the largest sub-national entity in the world.  These resources require a Harvard login but are common to libraries with music collections.

Olonkho is a vast corpus of song and poetic recitative that encompasses spiritual beliefs ritual practices, philosophy, and historical memory at the root of Yakut cultural identity. The majority of the Alekseyev collection recordings were created in a fieldwork setting, but some were made during concerts, and at festival events of Ukrainian people in Kiev, and of Crimean Tatars in Simferopol. Included are various types of rites, such as shamanistic ceremonies of purification and epic songs that precede hunting or fishing. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Soviet policy suppressed publications about the rituals of indigenous cultures. For that reason, the recordings within this collection are particularly valuable.  Read more on our library blog about the voices of indigenous Siberia and musical culture of Yakutia.

Speaker topics at the symposium:  Vasily V. Illarionov of North-Eastern Federal University (Sakha Republic), will discuss performance tradition of the Yakut heroic epos (epic poetry), olonkho and it's transformation in modern contexts.  Sergei Y. Vasilev, also of North-Eastern Federal University will give a talk entitled "The future of olonkho and modern technological capabilities for its documentation, study and propagation."  Robin P. Harris of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics, in Dallas, TX, will address "Transmission and innovation: Keys to a sustainable future for the Siberian epos olonkho".

Dr. Robin Harris lived for a decade in the Russian North, where she began to study the music of the Sakha, a Siberian minority group whose epic narrative song genre olonkho became the focus of her PhD dissertation from the University of Georgia Athens (2012). She is active in the Applied Ethnomusicology sections of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) and coordinates an MA program in World Arts at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL) in Dallas, Texas.

She recently completed her doctoral studies and her dissertation entitled, Sitting “Under the Mouth”: Decline and Revitalization in the Sakha Epic Tradition Olonkho. Her curriculum vitae lists her many presentations, publications and honors:

Dr. Vasiliy Vasilievich Illarionov is the Chair of the Department of Folklore and Cultures at the Institute of Languages and Cultures of the Peoples of the Northeast of Russia, Northeastern Federal University. He is an expert on epics and folklore, with broad research interests, which besides olonkho, include studying and organizing the Sakha annual summer festival (Yhyakh) and the Sakha round dance (Ohuokhai). During the 1970s, he began to work with olonkhosuts, transcribing their olonkhos, eventually publishing 20 full texts of olonkho with commentary.  He has also published many other works on topics related to folklore.

Sergei Yefimovich Vasilev is the Deputy Director of the Scientific Research Institute “Olonkho” of the Northeastern Federal University. A specialist in the radio-physics department, for more than a decade, he has been involved in the technical side of the preservation of olonkho. He created an internet informational system for the study and preservation of olonkho, an internet portal “Olonkho” (www.olonkho.info), and a television channel dedicated to olonkho and other folklore genres. When olonkho was named by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, he was responsible for the technical and media aspects of documenting olonkho for that application.