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The present article falls within the burgeoning area of medical ethnomusicology, which has emerged over the last several years as a bona fide specialty within the realm of ethnomusicological studies. The field has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers, scholars, and practitioners across diverse disciplines in biomedicine, the social and health sciences, physics, ICAM (integrative, complementary, and alternative medicine), medical anthropology, religious studies, and of course, music and the humanities.1 Additionally, this article emerges from a long-term research program within the understudied region of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, where certain genres of music, prayer, and related practices that are central expressions of cultural identity and religious belief function in individual and complementary ways to promote health or facilitate healing. Among the multiple applications of specialized music that fall under the broad, local categories of musiqiye shafâi (healing music) or musiqiye darmani (music medicine, remedy, healing) is the role of music to assuage one's pain or even cure a person afflicted with the ills of stress or depression. A vast body of research across disciplines in the humanities, social, and health sciences shows that stress and depression are pervasive throughout the world, pose major health risks, and can cause the development of numerous conditions and diseases.2 After more than a generation of Soviet control and oppression, a subsequent devastating civil war, and a decade of slow struggle to begin the process of rebuilding, Tajikistan is no exception to the ills of psychological distress and depression. One of the most important musical responses to stress and depression in Badakhshan is the performance of falak.
Initial Thoughts on Falak
Broadly, falak (lit. "heaven," "universe," "fortune") is a musical-poetic genre of lament that is intimately linked to local religious beliefs and the related genre of maddâh (lit. "praise"), which is the foremost religious music among the Isma'ilis of Badakhshan.3 It should be mentioned at the outset of this article that there are many types offalak, which are performed in a host of different contexts and serve many different functions in Badakhshani culture, only one of which is to promote health and facilitate healing by modulating stress and depression. For instance, as a remnant of the politically constructed folkloric ensembles that were used as propaganda during the Soviet era, today, falak...