Portrait
Music entered Kenzhebek Kumysbekov’s life at home, before school and before a profession. His father played the dombra; his mother sang. After his father’s early death, Ilyas Aubakirov became his mentor — a singer and connoisseur of songs and kui, the Kazakh instrumental pieces traditionally played on the dombra. The boy learned much from him. In an archival interview, Kumysbekov recalled his last conversation with his father: his father asked him to play a kui and died after hearing him. The son understood that request as a hope that he would remain a man of music. His earliest education thus joined the memory of performance to an understanding of what music could mean.
At first Kumysbekov dreamed of becoming a singer. In 1947 he won the All-Kazakhstan Olympiad of Folk Talents in Alma-Ata; the composers Akhmet Zhubanov and Latif Khamidi, who sat on the jury, advised him to study music. After military service he entered the conservatory’s vocal department, but a lung illness closed the path to a singing career. His path in music did not end: Kumysbekov moved to the dombra class and studied with Rustembek Omarov and Kubysh Mukhitov. The setback changed his instrument, but not his choice of life.
During the 1950s Kumysbekov played dombra in the Kurmangazy Orchestra of Kazakh Folk Instruments. The ensemble was named after the nineteenth-century dombra player and composer whose kui became a foundation of Kazakh instrumental music. Here Kumysbekov arranged Russian and international music and helped his fellow players. He came to know a large ensemble from within: how one instrument’s sound could alter the whole, and how a familiar melody became the shared work of many musicians. A score is the written form in which every orchestral voice can be seen at once: the composer decides which instrument carries the melody, which answers it, and how separate timbres combine into a single sound.
The next turn began with his first art song, set to words by Abai. After hearing it, the composer Mukan Tulebayev advised Kumysbekov to study composition. At the conservatory, the composition teacher Yevgeny Brusilovsky became his mentor. Kumysbekov graduated from the composition faculty in 1965. By then he carried with him the songs of home, the dombra and the orchestra. Now that experience had acquired the language of the score — the means not only to play music himself, but to entrust an idea to an entire ensemble.
After graduation he became a music editor at the Kazakh State Philharmonic, the republic’s leading concert organisation. He later served as senior editor of the repertoire board at the Ministry of Culture of the Kazakh SSR. These posts were not desk-bound appendages to composition: an editor selects scores for programmes and helps determine what an audience will hear. Kumysbekov was writing his own works while also taking part in the movement of the republic’s repertoire as a whole.
His music grew from tradition, but it was never simply a matter of moving a ready-made melody into an orchestra. The dombra player Karshyga Akhmediyarov recalled a dispute about musical notation in which Kumysbekov suggested that its opponents go out into the steppe and pitch a yurt. The composer Tolegen Mukhamedzhanov preserved another conversation: Kumysbekov and the composer Sydyk Mukhamedzhanov reproached younger authors because their songs lacked a Kazakh spirit. Together, the two remarks set a measure: tradition must take on new form without losing its character.
That measure can be heard in the different lives of his compositions. Poem, written for cello and piano in 1960, later sounded in versions for qobyz, the Kazakh bowed instrument, oboe and other instruments. In Farabi Sazy, a dombra kui expanded into an orchestral poem. Dala Syry entered the repertoire of large folk instrument orchestras. Bishi Qaiyn — The Dancing Birches — travelled from a record to a staged dance and a digital recording. And when the gravely ill composer handed the score of Amanat to the conductor Aitkali Zhaimov, he gave it as a charge: perform this music and pass it on.
From 1972 Kumysbekov taught orchestral conducting in the folk instruments department of the Alma-Ata Conservatory. His students later studied instrumentation — the capabilities of different instruments — and orchestration, the art of distributing music among them. They remembered more than subjects. Zhalgasbek Begendik spoke of the demand to understand a work’s essence and character; Lyudmila Shaldinova remembered an imaginative freedom that the teacher guided rather than suppressed. Knowledge of the orchestra passed from scores to people.
His official distinctions mark the public scale of this work: People’s Artist of the Kazakh SSR, Honoured Art Worker of the Kazakh SSR, State Prize laureate and professor. Yet beside them remained his first craft — that of the dombra player. Performer, composer, editor and teacher met in one person: a man who could hear tradition, build a new sound, bring music before an audience and teach others to continue the work.
The final turn in this story came after his death. In 1997, preparations were under way in Kumysbekov’s homeland for a concert celebrating his seventieth birthday. After the composer died, the celebration had to become an evening of remembrance. Instead of the large Palace of Culture, the organisers chose the music school where more than ninety children studied. People spoke about Kumysbekov in the hall, while students and teachers played his works. A living composer’s jubilee became his memorial — and the music passed at once into the hands of the next generation.
At a glance
- Years: 1927–1997.
- Place: the village of Kumkol, Korgalzhyn District, Akmola Region; died in Almaty.
- Professions: composer, dombra player, music editor, teacher and professor.
- Work: dombra player with the Kurmangazy Orchestra in the 1950s; after graduation, music editor at the Philharmonic and senior editor of the Ministry of Culture’s repertoire board; from 1972, teacher at the conservatory.
- Titles and awards: People’s Artist of the Kazakh SSR, Honoured Art Worker of the Kazakh SSR, State Prize laureate and professor.
- Key works: Poem (1960), Dala Syry, Farabi Sazy, Amanat and Bishi Qaiyn.
Voices of his time
“His contribution to the country’s musical art is substantial and significant, particularly to the development of folk music.”
— Marat Iskendirov, “In Memory of the Maestro,” Kyzylorda News, 2022.
