Archive · 2018 · From the print edition of Monday 4 June 2018, Vol. 26, No. 7,897
CultureFoundation brings young musicians to Nurzhan's boiler rooms
The Nurzhan Contemporary Arts Foundation’s summer school is putting scholarship students into the old industrial spaces where Mor-Wave began.
NURZHAN — Thirty young musicians, most of them from Nurzhan and Talas, began a month-long summer school yesterday in a former district-heating boiler room and a disused workshop in Dastgoh, under a scholarship program run by the Nurzhan Contemporary Arts Foundation.
The foundation, set up in 2010 by Asel Bekzatova, a daughter of the NurGaz president Kamran Bekzatov, gives scholarships to young musicians and organizes concerts in Nurzhan, including performances of electronic and experimental music in former industrial buildings. It is funded by the Bekzatov family and by NurGaz.
The choice of rooms is deliberate. In the late 1990s Nurzhan’s boiler rooms and idle workshops were rehearsal spaces for the musicians who created Mor-Wave, among them the duo tüntolk, who formed in a Dastgoh boiler room in 1997. “Students come here expecting a conservatory,” Bekzatova said. “We give them a room with pipes in it and old synthesizers, and they write music no conservatory would teach.”
Daria Koval, 19, who plays the kyl-kyak and studies at the Polytechnic, said the program was the first time she had been paid to make music. The school ends with a public concert in the boiler room on 30 June.