Project: Digital Archive of Kazakh Academic Music
The Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan together with Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory and Kurmangazy Orchestra of Kazakh Folk Instruments initiated the Project: Archive of Kazakh Academic Music which is to be implemented by 2025. Academic music of Kazakhstan is the most important part of the national cultural heritage of the country, the nation's spirituality foundation, an indicator of the level of cultural development of Kazakhstani society. The academic music formed in the 20-30s of the XX century and actively developing now, includes a wide range of musical genres, dozens of names of professional composers and hundreds of samples of musical works that all Kazakhstanis can and should be proud of.
The social status of professional composers in Kazakhstan during the Soviet times was very high, the music publishing, concert performance institutions worked well through a developed network of concert and philharmonic societies, academic music was regularly recorded on gramophone records and popularized on republican television and radio channels. Currently, in the conditions of mass culture dominance classical music and its creators obviously are not that popular. This is due to the complex national statehood formation processes, economic and ideological difficulties faced by our Republic. Systematization of information about Kazakhstani composers and their works, their cataloging, digitization, rewriting on modern media and opening access to them for the general public is a critical area in the country's cultural policy.
It became possible now to centralize the most extensive collections of manuscripts and publications (the library collection of Kurmangazy Kazakh National Conservatory and the Union of Composers of the Republic of Kazakhstan). The existing storage units are being revised. An expert assessment of the state of manuscripts, the selection of the most significant ones for digitization and reprinting will be done shortly. It is planned to create a digital fund of wide access by 2025, electronic copies of manuscripts, digitized sheet music and audio recordings of the most significant works for the history of Kazakh music will be presented soon.
Such a resource will greatly facilitate the compilation of a national repertoire for soloists and creative groups. As a result, Kazakhstan will be represented on world stages not by individual, albeit bright though works repeating from concert to concert, but by a whole layer of culture demonstrating the inclusion of Kazakh music in world cultural processes.