The Eldarova Archive Project: Opening New Sources in Azerbaijani Musicology

This paper discusses the life and work of Azerbaijani ethnomusicologist Emina Eldarova [Əmin ə Əldarova] in the context of a new project to open her previously unexamined professional archives. Mentored by composer Uzeyir Hajibeyli in the 1930s, Eldarova was Soviet Azerbaijan’s first ashiq musicologist and spent her career researching the bardic ashiq [aşıq] genre. Starting from her student days, she conducted decades of fieldwork with the last generation of ashiqs trained by 19th-century masters. She led the active life of a public scholar, contributing general interest articles, radio, and television appearances, along with her academic articles and presentations. Her 1984 book, The Art of the Azerbaijani Ashiq [Исскуство азербайджанского ашугов] is considered the foundational work on the genre. Eldarova passed away in 2008, leaving a professional archive of field notebooks, photographs, correspondence, recordings, and col- lections of published and unpublished writings. In 2024, Anna Oldfield and Kamila Dadash-zadeh began a Collaborative Heritage Preservation Project, the Eldarova Archives. This project is to catalog and preserve archive materials with the goal of bringing Eldarova’s scholarship into global conversations in fields such as Ethnomusicology, Folklore, Oral Narrative Studies, Caucasus Studies, and Post/Soviet Nationalities Studies. This paper is based on the presentation “Exploring the Archives: Emina Eldarova’s Contribution to Azerbaijani Ashiq Studies” given by Kamila Dadash-zadeh and Anna Oldfield at the Joint Symposium of the International Council of Music and Dance Study Groups for Global History and Music and Music and Dance of the Turkic World held in Baku in 2024. Drawing from personal inter- views and archives as well as research, this paper will overview Eldarova’s life and work while giving a preview of archive highlights.