Azerbaijan is a part of the Caucasus where women have achieved remarkable success in the performing arts including singing, dancing, and playing instruments. This tradition goes back to antiquity and particularly flourished in the twentieth century. Two factors facilitated this process: the ideas of women's emancipation, important for Communist ideology, since from 1920 to 1991 Azerbaijan was a part of the Soviet Union, and the tremendous efforts of Uzeyir Hajibeyov (1885–1948), the Azerbaijani …