The archive

Three separate collections sit behind this site, and it is worth knowing which is which.

The museum’s holdings. Manuscripts, scores, correspondence, records and instruments, in Dushanbe. Physical, consulted in person, by arrangement. See Visit.

The recovered website. The Foundation published in English on the web from 2001 and the site went down in the 2020s. Its pages, its ten photographs and its twenty-eight audio clips were pulled back out of the Internet Archive and are the basis of much of what you are reading. Where a page here quotes the Foundation, that is where the words come from.

The family archive. Documents photographed by the family, catalogued and published separately, behind a passphrase. It is not open to the public and is not indexed by search engines. Researchers with a reason should write to the Foundation.

What is not here is as worth recording as what is. No complete run of Fonus has been found. The full scores of most of the works are unpublished. There are ten photographs of a man who lived seventy years. If you hold anything — a programme, a tape, a letter, a print — it is likely to be the only copy.