The concubine Amanni Shahan of the Yerqiang kingdom (1526-1560) is credited with collecting and thereby preserving the Twelve Muqam, while reshaping its style to draw more from the indigenous traditions of the Tian Shan mountains and purging it of the Perso-Arabic.
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The most fully developed at this point is the Western Tarim region's 12 muqams, which are now a large canon of music and songs recorded from the traditional performers Turdi Akhun and Omar Akhun among others in the 1950s and edited into a more systematic system.
The festival has featured Oriental musicians such as Indian flautist Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, sitarists Pandit Ravi Shankar and Anoushka Shankar, the Japanese giant drum ensemble "Kodô", the Tuvinian guttural singers "Huun-Huur-Tu", Tibetan Buddhists monks of Gyuto and Gyume monasteries, the Turkish percussionist Burhan Öçal, the Armenian dudukist Jivan Gasparyan, and the Azeri muqam singer Alim Qasimov.