The Ykhlas Museum of Folk Musical Instruments can be found in downtown Almaty, right next to Panfilov park. It’s a small museum, entirely contained within an old and beautiful pre-soviet wooden building right in the heart of the city. For the price of 500 tenge, roughly one dollar, you can enter the museum.
The museum is jam packed with instruments, traditional Dutars, Kobyz, and mouth harps. Each section is carefully lain out, ensuring that the originality, craftsmanship, and unique features of each instrument is clearly on display. One entire section is dedicated to two string Dombras, containing many from the past two centuries, and going so far as to include who their masters were. Every instrument is labeled in Qazaq, Russian, and English, giving you basic information on the instrument as you wander around.
If you’re looking for more detailed information on the instruments, their history, and how they relate to each other, you’ll have to take the tour, which does cost a bit more. Consequently, we decided to do the tour of museum, hoping to learn more about the instruments and their history. The tour lasted about 40 minutes and we went through most if not all of the museum. However, due to the scope and breadth of instruments that the museum covers, at times there wasn’t a ton of detail covered. Some sections of the museum received detailed explanations and histories on the tour, while other parts felt like the guide was just reading off of the plaques in front of the instruments.
The guide didn’t seem particularly interested in giving us the tour either, it definitely felt like he’d rather be back at his desk scrolling through Instagram. That did bleed through at times, and sometimes I drifted to the side and just looked at the huge variety of instruments that they had. Some personal favorites were the stringed instrument that was shaped like a bow, and a bag-pipe adjacent instrument with a horse-head carved into it.
After the tour, we spent a while wandering around. The breadth of the collection of instruments they had is really impressive, having incredible variation within instruments that I would never have thought twice about how they could be constructed differently. I’d never seen a mouth harp in person before I went, and now I’ve seen dozens.
Unlike a lot of museums of western music, there is a wide variety of how the instruments were made. It’s not a place filled with the equivalent of a Stradivarius, instead you get a mix of quality. Some are thrown together by various objects around them that are clearly not purpose made, while others were constructed by masters of their craft and look absolutely stunning. You can really get an idea of what people were playing, not just the highest quality instruments.
This does have a limit – most of the instruments are relatively recent ones. Of course, the museum has old artifacts and displays them, but the vast majority of instruments are not old. While you can learn about the history of the instruments from the tour itself, you will not learn about the history of any of the instruments just from walking around the museum. However, the collection does a good job of displaying what the musical landscape has been like in the past 200 years, allowing us to examine about every Central Asian instrument we would want to know about.
Even though the museum has the largest selection of Central Asian instruments, it has plenty from other regions of the world as well. Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, and even some African instruments can be found in the museum. However, this is not the place to come to learn about those musical traditions, nor the history of those instruments.
The Museum’s Collection of Russian Instruments
While we were not allowed to play any of the instruments (for obvious reasons), there was a screen that allowed you to delve through the instruments on display at the museum and listen to samples of how each instrument sounds. The display was a bit clunky and unresponsive at times, but ultimately, we got to listen to a few instruments. As much as a museum is a visual display, I would’ve hoped for more of an audio component, as music is ultimately not a visual art, but an auditory one.
If you’re coming from the perspective of an English speaker who does not speak any Qazaq or Russian, there are a few things that may dissuade you from wanting to visit this museum. First, we inquired about what languages they provide tours in, and it’s only Russian and Qazaq. Second, although many of the English-language signs were quite helpful and accurate, there were occasionally typos and mistakes which made it hard to understand what was going on, including entirely mistranslating the type of instrument on display (e.g. the mouth harp was called something else that made no sense).
This museum is cheap, and very unique in its collection, making it a memorable experience. For anyone looking to see instruments that have been important in Central Asia, this is a perfect place to look around. And for those who are just looking to see something new, this museum will certainly have an instrument you’ve never seen before.
