Erke sylkym

About this piece

Erke Sylkym is a comparatively recent work by the kuishi Abdimomyn Zheldibaev. The composer told the story behind it himself, in an interview with the newspaper Turkistan.

The kui has a real heroine. As a young man the composer chose her among the girls of his village, but fate did not bring them together. At their last meeting he told her that no one would ever be able to extinguish his love for her.

Words, he said, could not carry the feeling: comparing her to the full moon or to an opened flower still fell short. In the end he understood that it could only be said through a kui — and finding the melody itself took him twenty years.

The composer regards the piece as a composite portrait rather than one woman: it gathers the bearing, the manner and the gentle playfulness of Kazakh women in general.