The Khakas people, living in Khakassia, South Siberia, have a wide range of musics and music-related performances, from "traditional" forms to so-called classical music. The present musical soundscape was influenced by several historical processes: the increasing immigration of mainly Russians, the Russian Orthodox mission, Soviet cultural politics, glasnost, and, most recently, ethnicity-based cultural revival. Especially Soviet cultural policy fundamentally changed the existing soundscape, transforming it into folklore.

Since glasnost in the 1980s, and more intensively since 1992, Khakas musicians have been searching for more "authentic" musical forms, thus re-inventing their music traditions. In this article I first present a reconstruction of an older soundscape and some of its underlying principles, in order to make today's staged musics comprehensible. Second, I give a sketch of this present musical soundscape, to which I add some remarks on present revitalisation processes in Khakas music.