The professional musical art of Bashkortostan was forming in the first half of the 20 century. The opening of the Bashkir studio of the Moscow State Conservatory in 1932 was the historic event that marked the beginning of professional musical education. Its graduates of the 40-50s were the first generation of Bashkir professional composers. Before the October revolution, Bashkirs had mainly verbal musically poetic creation.

The opening  of the Bashkir Philharmonic Society and Bashkir Theater of Opera and Ballet (1938) was marked by the beginning of "new era" in the national culture. The group of Russian composers was sent to Bashkiriya in 30es for creation of national repertoire and they wrote compositions of opera and ballet genre, using folk tales, legends, epic stories, folk-lore musical themes; operas: "Mergen" (1940) and "Ashkadar" (1944) by A. Eykhenvald, "Karlugas" ("Swallow"), 1941, A. Chemberdzhi, and ballets: "Crane song" (1944) by L. Stepanov and "Mountain true story" (1951) by A. Klyucharev.

The sphere of creation of the first generation composers became theatrical performances in traditions of folk-lore synthetic actions: folk comedies, plays of the first national dramatists (S. Miftakhov, G. Akhmetshin, M.Gafuri, B.Bikbay and etc). The result of such intensive development of musical culture of prewar years was the organization of the Bashkir Union of Composers (1940), its first chairman was M. Valeyev.

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