The First Monographic Study of Traditional Yakut Music by the Founder of the National School of Composition M. N. Zhirkov

Systematic research on the traditional music of the Yakuts, a Turkic-speaking people of northeastern Russia, began in the 1930s. The first Yakut composer, M.N. Zhirkov, who laid the foundations of the national school of composition, undertook the earliest monographic study of Yakut traditional music between 1947 and 1951. This work was published only posthumously, in 1981, under the editorship of G.G. Alekseeva. In 2022, the present author released the complete edition of Zhirkov’s study Yakut Folk Music, including all appendices, transcriptions, drawings, and illustrations. The article examines the content of this first monographic research on Yakut music in the history of musicology, focusing on Zhirkov’s observations on the genres of Yakut folk music, the traditional vocal styles dieeretii and degeren, Yakut national instruments, and the scholarly problems he identified, many of which remain relevant today.