Becky just finished a two-week project prepping her class for a field trip to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall to see Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Project. The field trip took place today, and it was a resounding success. The kids were rapt and on their best concert-hall behavior, and Becky is inordinately proud of them, and yet there is turmoil in our home as a result of our resulting discussion of Central Asian musical traditions, for it has brought once again to the forefront of my mind a recurring question, to wit:
Should I take lessons in Tuvan throat singing?
Now those of you who are familiar with Tuvan throat singing have almost certainly answered my question rather easily to yourselves, by saying “no.” But not everyone knows what Tuvan throat singing sounds like, despite a recent upswing in the genre’s American popularity over the last decade or so. A full five percent of Americans can probably identify throat singing when they hear it. But one hundred percent minus five percent equals a whole lot of people not yet familiar with the genre, and so to describe my dilemma properly, I need to provide an example or two of the music.
Here’s a good one, devoid of rock stars. The gentleman on the right playing the chanzy is singing in the sygyt style, with its characteristic high-pitched whistle, while the attractive person of indeterminate gender on the left unleashes an impressive kargyraa.
The idea behind Tuvan throat singing, you see, is to take advantage of voice overtones provided by the structure of the lungs, larynx and palate. It’s not by any means a style limited to Tuva (or Tyva, as it is now officially spelled) (except that actually it’s officially spelled “Тыва,” being that they use the Cyrillic alphabet there). Most of the Turkic-Mongol-influenced people of Central Asia have one form or another of throat singing, such as (of course) Mongolia, or, as in the case of this talented fella, the Altai Republic, where the style of singing is called Каи (kai):
Of course there are titans of the genre, one such band, Huun Huur Tu, being the pioneers in bringing the music to the Western world:
And no discussion of the school would be possible without Kongar-ol Ondar, Tyva’s rock star. Here he is with the late San Franciscan blues legend Paul Pena, in the extended footage from the Genghis Blues DVD. (The documentary follows Pena to Tyva some years after he teaches himself to sing kargyraa by listening to it on his shortwave radio, and it’s an excellent movie with lots of exposition of Tyvan culture, and Ondar has quite a compelling personality, and, well, just go rent it already.)
One thing that’s troubled me over the years, though, is that Tyvan women have been somewhere between officially discouraged and forbidden to learn throat singing. (Odds are, that androgynous person in the first video up top of this post is male for just that reason.) But there are women throatsinging pioneers now, in the person of Tyva Kyzy, who just finished up their 2007 Winter US tour. Here’s Tyva Kyzy’s artistic director Chouduraa Tumat and bandmate Aylang-Maa Damyrang demonstrating the various styles of throat singing (part two is here.)
I’ve got to pick up their CD.
So now, assuming that finding local community colleges with Tyvan throat singing classes is as easy as I think it will be, my question is which instrument I should learn to play along with it. Should I go with the chanzy, that kidney-shaped three-string lute that, played properly, sounds like a horse in full flight, or a doshpuluur, which is trapezoidal and fretless? Or should I take Becky’s advice and go for the morin khuur? Of course, with that last people might mistake me for this guy.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Music
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