Concussion Indiophones: Beer Bottles-(1979 Film The Warriors)

Concussion idiophones: sub-group of idiophones that consists of two or more similar non-flexible objects that are struck together to make sound.

I remember seeing this in a theater back in the day, and no one watching knew what that sound was when it began. Everyone tripped out seeing the beer bottles both in terms of surprise at the sound source and admiration for the inventiveness. Combined with the increasingly twisted call of "Warriors....come out to play-hay" was a perfect blend of over-the-top menacing insanity (especially after watching the protagonists running for their lives for over an hour) and cleverness.

David Fanshawe (1942-2010)

The Washington Post was one of many outlets that ran an obituary of composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe.

David Fanshawe, 68, dies; ethnomusicologist who composed 'African Sanctus'

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; B06

David Fanshawe, 68, a British musician and explorer best known for composing "African Sanctus," a controversial interpretation of the Latin Mass set against a backdrop of tribal music he recorded on a three-year journey up the Nile River, died July 5 at a hospital in Swindon, England. He had complications from a stroke.

Beginning in the 1960s, long before the craze for world music took hold in the Western world, Mr. Fanshawe traveled thousands of miles in Africa and the South Pacific -- largely on foot, but also by camel, canoe, barge and sailboat -- to record traditional songs and sounds of the world's indigenous peoples.

He weaved those recordings with live performances by singers and instrumentalists to create original compositions that were performed at venues including Washington's Kennedy Center.

The most famous of his compositions was "African Sanctus," an hour-long choral Mass in 13 movements first performed as "African Revelations" in 1972. The piece pairs the Lord's Prayer with war drums from eastern Sudan and couples a traditional dance from Uganda with Sanctus, a hymn from Christian liturgy.

Mr. Fanshawe estimated that "African Sanctus" was performed more than 1,000 times but acknowledged that the work's interpretation of the Lord's Prayer had a polarizing effect on critics.

"Mr. Fanshawe's idea of fusing the ominous sound of Sudanese war drums with the choir's gentle prayer for peace was a masterful touch," music critic Robert Sherman wrote in the New York Times in 1982. "It was a thrilling experience."

However, music reviewer Richard Carter wrote in The Washington Post that the combination of traditional and classical music "simply does not add up to anything more than a work of banal, dreary, jejune, prosaic vapidity."

The composer's efforts raised ethical questions from those who questioned whether his recordings were an aural sort of imperialism that exploited indigenous musicians.

"It's an extraordinary collection of music and images," said Carol A. Muller, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania. But "there is an edge to everything he did," she said. "There is a level of complete arrogance, a kind of colonial mind-set, that you can go to Africa and make these recordings and use them at your own will."

He brushed off such criticism, saying that his recordings help the world remember songs that otherwise would be forgotten.

"I've tried to make recordings in remote places that preserve the music honestly. I've paid the musicians what I can," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000. "All I can say is that if I hadn't recorded this music, or taken these photographs, nobody else would have."

David Fanshawe was born in a seaside town in Devon, England, during an air raid on April 9, 1942. "My father was born in India, four generations of my family were born in India, all the stories I heard were from India and I was born in bloody Devon," he once said.

His family's history kindled in him a desire to explore the world -- and he did it through music. After working for several years as an apprentice sound engineer in the British film industry, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.

He said his inspiration for melding the world's musical traditions came from an epiphany he had while hitchhiking around the Middle East in the late 1960s. As he listened to a Latin Mass in a church in Old Jerusalem, he heard from outside the sound of imams calling the Muslim faithful to prayer.

"I heard that cacophony, and I heard that as harmony -- harmony between East and West, harmony between Christian and Muslim, harmony between Christ and Muhammad," Mr. Fanshawe told a Vermont newspaper in 2008. "I heard in my head the duality of both religions singing to the glory of one God."

In 1969, Mr. Fanshawe set out from Cairo on a journey that traced the shape of a cross: south on the Nile to Lake Victoria, then west to the mountains of Sudan and east to the Red Sea. Armed only with a simple rucksack, a tape recorder and a few British pounds, Mr. Fanshawe endured the sort of exotic travails that later made him the subject of BBC documentaries.

Read the full story HERE.

Fanshawe's website is HERE.

From the Kol Israel Orchestra to a Pygmy Choir: The Musical Life of Simha Arom

A nice story on ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, with audio as well. Check it out here at Forward.

Interview with UCLA Ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger

Great interview with ethnomusicologist Tony Seeger, at Artistshousemusic. many clips, check them out HERE.

Interview with Ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice

A nice interview about a wide variety of subjects with UCLA ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice. See the menu of interview clips HERE.

Ethnomusiologist Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy: 1927-2009

UCLA press release

I would add that he was, truly, a gentleman and a scholar, a gentle soul and generous and patient teacher.

Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy: 1927-2009

Published: June 24, 2009

Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, an ethnomusicologist with an international reputation as a researcher, teacher, administrator, and an emeritus faculty member of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, died peacefully of lung cancer on Saturday, June 20 at his home in Van Nuys, California.

Jairazbhoy joined the UCLA Department of Music as a full professor in 1975 and in 1988 became the founding chair of the new Department of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology at UCLA.

Professor Jairazbhoy’s comprehensive knowledge of India’s folk, classical, and popular music traditions was unrivalled among those in the field of ethnomusicology, which combines the study of music with the ethnographic techniques and theories of anthropology. In addition, his promotion of audio-visual documentation and use of technology to disseminate performing arts traditions, his leadership in advancing the methodological debates of his field, and his pioneering efforts to create institutions which advance the study of “world music” traditions, made a place for him among those whose goal is no less than global human understanding.

Born in England of Indian parents, Jairazbhoy became interested in music as a child watching his mother play the sitar at home. He attended high school in India and England and received and B.A. in Geography from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in 1971 in Indian Music from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Publications to his credit include The Rags of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution and Hi-Tech Shiva and Other Apocryphal Stories: An Academic Allegory. He has also produced numerous audio and video documents, which include A Musical Journey through India, 1963-1964 and, in collaboration with his wife, Dr. Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Bake Restudy in India: 1938-1984, which received an award from the Society for Visual Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and Retooling a Tradition: A Rajasthani Puppet Takes Umbrage at his Stringholders, a fictive documentary. He also taught numerous courses in ethnomusicology at UCLA, including field and laboratory methods, transcription and organology, as well as courses on the folk and classical music of India. He served as director of Indian music performance in the department until his retirement in 1994.

One of Jairazbhoy’s major contributions is in the use of audio-visual materials. The work of scholars such as Jairazbhoy, whose research is based primarily on fieldwork in remote locales of poorer nations, demands a high level of proficiency in the technical facets of photography, sound recording, and video recording. (When a musical tradition has not previously been documented, the scholar must of course do all his or her own AV documentation before [s]he can begin to analyze the music or investigate its history and social background.) Jairazbhoy always had a strong technical bent, and by the 1980s he expanded his publications from the purely text-based to videos and films he edited and produced from his own field footage. In 1994, he and his wife established their own registered non-profit-making publishing company, Apsara Media for Intercultural Education (motto: "Bringing Ethnographic Content to the Classroom"), which is extremely active in publishing AV materials and books on the performing and other arts of South and Southeast Asia (many based on their own work, but including some that are collaborations with or authored by other parties).

Jairazbhoy’s work was revered throughout his life as pioneering because of his ability to think “outside-the-box.” For example, still today in Indian music circles, many people consider Indian classical music to be the only form of South Asian music worth studying. Jairazbhoy began his career in the 1950s playing, presenting, and writing on just that classical tradition. Nevertheless, almost from the outset, he developed a passionate interest in the undocumented but wonderfully diverse folk music traditions of India and Pakistan, and spent the last half-century bringing them to light. In many cases, the only reason we have any documentation of entire genres and their social and historical importance is because of Jairazbhoy's work.

In a related vein, when in the early 1970s the North American field of ethnomusicology was almost entirely focused on classical and folk musics of the world, he courted controversy by reading a paper at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting on Bollywood film music ("How Indian is Indian Film Music?" [1973]), and advocating for popular music to be taken seriously as a hugely influential musical form (a view that is now mainstream). The same pioneering spirit led him to experiment in the 1970s and early 1980s with video field recording and computer applications for data organization and retrieval, to institute the first phase of an ongoing "restudy" of Indian musical genres recorded in the 1930s by Dutch researcher Arnold Bake (in fact, the first restudy ever undertaken in the field of ethnomusicology), and to collaborate with colleagues from other fields in work on acoustics and music perception.

This "can do" spirit also resulted in numerous leadership roles: Jairazbhoy spearheaded the formation in the mid 1980s of India's renowned Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology in New Delhi, which is now considered a worldwide model; in 1975 he became the first non-white President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the premier professional association in North America; in 1988 he was the founding chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA (now arguably the leading program in ethnomusicology in the English-speaking world); he consulted and presented for three Smithsonian Institution festivals; and he served as a member for eleven years of the Board of Directors of the UNESCO-affiliated International Council for Traditional Music (the most high-profile international organization in our field). The ideas and innovations he implemented in these roles still affect these institutions and their missions today.

Since his official retirement in 1994, Jairazbhoy’s career has remained vibrantly active. His most recent book came out in January 2008; he recently had an article published by Ethnomusicology, the flagship journal in the field; he edited and produced two published DVDs based on his field research in 2007; and awards and speaking invitations continued to flow in both domestically and internationally.

Since 1994, Jairazbhoy has spent four months nearly every year during the winter in India continuing his field research; despite his age, and despite difficult physical conditions in the countryside and small towns. An enormous flow of published works resulted from these trips and other research: his 2008 book on puppetry in Rajasthan; seven videos and DVDs as well as an audio CD, some produced in collaboration with his ethnomusicologist/filmmaker wife Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, that document folk music traditions of India, Pakistan, and Hmong Americans; two refereed journal articles; four book chapters; five conference papers; and several other smaller items. This period has also seen publication of the substantially revised second edition of his 1971 book The Rags of North Indian Music, now considered a classic in scholarship on Indian classical music. He and Catlin-Jairazbhoy recently completed a new DVD project based on recent fieldtrips to restudy South Indian musical traditions first recorded in the 1930s by Dutch scholar Arnold Bake. The DVD, Music for a Goddess, was screened in March at the National Centre for performing Arts, Mumbai.

Jairazbhoy was a role model for humanly concerned scholarship: until the end of his life, he continued to support the New Delhi Archive he established, depositing copies of all his materials there to benefit the originating communities and Indian scholars; he spoke constantly at Indian institutions; and following the disastrous Gujarat earthquake of 2001, he and Catlin-Jairazbhoy lobbied and raised funds for destitute musicians of the region, helping them get smashed instruments reconstructed, and ultimately assisting them in obtaining invitations to perform at both domestic and international venues, which helped their families both economically and in terms of social status. They were also engaged in a similar effort to help sacred musicians dedicated to the Goddess Renuka/Yellamma improve their own and their children's prospects while retaining musical traditions they wish to continue (despite local government determination to destroy everything associated with their lifestyle). These activities are in fact an extension of Jairazbhoy's decades-long custom of using his own personal funds to provide financial and counseling support to less well-off artists in India, in particular musicians and puppeteers from Rajasthan, and Sidis (African-Indians) from Gujarat.

Jairazbhoy's achievements have been richly rewarded with both domestic and international recognition. His professional society in North America, the Society for Ethnomusicology, has given him both of its highest awards: in 1995 he accepted the prestigious invitation to give the Charles Seeger Memorial Lecture (the keynote address) at the Society's annual meeting; and in 2005 the Board of the Society named him an "honorary life member," an honor reserved for the most distinguished senior figures in the field. In India, Jairazbhoy was honored in 2005 with the Music Forum Award (Mumbai) for "Contribution to the Cause of Indian Music by Overseas Resident Personality." He has also achieved the rare distinction of an entry on his life and work in the world's primary English-language music encyclopedia, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980 and 2001 editions). In 2009 an oral history of his life and work was completed and submitted to the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research. In 2008 he received the UCLA Dickson Emeritus Award in recognition of his numerous ongoing contributions to UCLA, to many musicians and institutions in India, and to the wider world of scholarship.

Jairazbhoy donated his body to the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine Donated Body Program for teaching and research.

He is survived by his wife, Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, daughters Nishat Jairazbhoy (Spacek), Angela (Jairazbhoy) Schurer, Judy (Jairazbhoy) Lewicki, son Paul Jairazbhoy, and godson Abdul Hamid Sidi.

35,000-year-old Flute Discovered in Germany

Yahoo/AP



Professor Nicholas Conard of the University in Tuebingen shows a flute during a press conference in Tuebingen, southern Germany, on Wednesday, June 24, 2009. The thin bird-bone flute carved some 35,000 years ago and unearthed in a German cave is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archeologists say, and offers the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture. A team led by Conard assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany. (AP Photo/Daniel Maurer)


NYT
June 25, 2009
Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.

Music and sculpture — expressions of artistic creativity, it seems — were emerging in tandem among some of the first modern humans when they began spreading through Europe or soon thereafter.

Archaeologists Wednesday reported the discovery last fall of a bone flute and two fragments of ivory flutes that they said represented the earliest known flowering of music-making in Stone Age culture. They said the bone flute with five finger holes, found at Hohle Fels Cave in the hills west of Ulm, was “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves” in a region where pieces of other flutes have been turning up in recent years.

A three-hole flute carved from mammoth ivory was uncovered a few years ago at another cave, as well as two flutes made from the wing bones of a mute swan. In the same cave, archaeologists also found beautiful carvings of animals.

But until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and were not dated precisely enough to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music. The earliest solid evidence of musical instruments previously came from France and Austria, but dated much more recently than 30,000 years ago.

In an article published online by the journal Nature, Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tübingen, in Germany, and colleagues wrote, “These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”

Although radiocarbon dates earlier than 30,000 years ago can be imprecise, samples from the bones and associated material were tested independently by two laboratories, in England and Germany, using different methods. Scientists said the data agreed on ages of at least 35,000 years.

Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial settlement of the region.”

Dr. Conard’s team said an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals had been found in the sediments with the flutes. Many people appeared to have lived and worked there soon after their arrival in Europe, assumed to be around 40,000 years ago and 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct.

The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no firm evidence of having been musical.

The most significant of the new artifacts, the archaeologists said, was a flute made from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture; griffon skeletons are often found in these caves. The preserved portion is about 8.5 inches long and includes the end of the instrument into which the musician blew. The maker carved two deep, V-shaped notches there, and four fine lines near the finger holes. The other end appears to have been broken off; judging by the typical length of these bird bones, two or three inches are missing.

Dr. Conard’s discovery in 2004 of the seven-inch three-hole ivory flute at the Geissenklösterle cave, also near Ulm, inspired him to widen his search of caves, saying at the time that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”

Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. “The tones are quite harmonic,” he said.

A replica has yet to be made of the recent discovery, but the archaeologists said they expected the five-hole flute with its larger diameter to “provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities.”

This week, Dr. Conard began a new season of exploration at Hohle Fels Cave. “We’ll see how it goes,” he said by e-mail. “I never have expectations. One never finds what one is looking for, but one normally finds something interesting.”

Archaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.

It so happens that the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old, noted Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tübingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. That discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.

Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”

Music-Play Project Fosters ‘Response-ability’ in Children with Autism

FSU Newswise
Released: Tue 02-Sep-2008, 12:40 ET
Music-Play Project Fosters ‘Response-ability’ in Children with Autism

Newswise — In a room dubbed the E-WoMP (exploratory world-music playground) that serves as the centerpiece of the Music-Play Project housed at Florida State University’s College of Music, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are making impressive gains in creativity, emotional regulation and social participation.

FSU ethnomusicologist Michael B. Bakan likes to call such gains “response-ability.” He’s the director of the innovative medical ethnomusicology program, which uses an array of unusual musical instruments from around the world for improvisational music-play activities that help create a unique therapeutic environment.

“Our program emphasizes ability and personhood over disability and ‘treatment’ and accepts that there are different ways of interacting, just as there are different ways of making music in different cultures,” said Bakan, an associate professor in the College of Music. “The Music-Play Project fosters the growth of response-ability, and in turn, happiness, because it gives children the chance to contribute to the co-creation of culture who too often are characterized as being incapable of doing so.”

Bakan and FSU colleague Benjamin Koen, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology, developed, launched and now oversee the interdisciplinary project in collaboration with researchers at the university’s Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and College of Medicine.

The Music-Play Project welcomes children three at a time to the E-WoMP, where they can choose from among safety-modified world-music options such as Balinese gamelan instruments, a West Javanese angklung (tuned bamboo-tubes rattle), and a West African gyil (xylophone), among many others. Less exotic choices might include homemade shakers, small cymbals and slide-whistles. Soft, colorful rubber swimming-pool dive sticks are used as mallets. Bakan describes all the instruments as “high yield for low input” because they yield satisfying sounds with minimal effort and require little or no technical competence.

Children can freely explore the creative and social possibilities in the E-WoMP on their own terms or with one another, the parent accompanying them, or Bakan and Koen, who as expert improvisers trained in diverse world music traditions, serve as music-play facilitators.

“By supporting a child’s expression and creativity, following instead of leading, responding rather than directing, and integrating instead of teaching, our approach helps children on the autism spectrum in ways that more directive, skills development-based interventions, music-related or otherwise, may not,” Bakan said.

Participants in the Music-Play Project are first evaluated and then referred to the program by the FSU Center for Autism and Related Disabilities. To date, there have been three, six-week programs of weekly, hour-long sessions, which Bakan and colleagues aim to further develop and eventually expand.

For a comprehensive overview of the Music-Play Project there’s “Following Frank: Response-Ability and the Co-Creation of Culture in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum,” a paper that is published in the current (Spring/Summer 2008) edition of the prestigious scholarly journal Ethnomusicology. Bakan was the lead author.

“Following Frank” also describes a 2006 study of the Music-Play Project that focused on a memorable six-year-old participant called “Frank” (not his real name), whose autism-related challenges were profound and pervasive compared to those of most of his music-play peers. Even so, Bakan observed remarkable, positive changes in the child’s response-ability during E-WoMP sessions that also were evident in his social interactions at home.

“The medium of free music-play can help children with ASD to gain confidence and self-esteem, and we are seeing this bear fruit not just in the E-WoMP but also at home, at school and in peer relationships,” Bakan said. “Both in what it achieves and what it reveals about what is already there, the Music-Play Project at FSU is providing a lens through which others can view these children as creative and social makers of culture.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that one in 150 U.S. children is affected by ASD, which encompasses a wide range of developmental challenges of varying degrees in verbal and non-verbal communication and social interaction.

With Bakan as lead author, co-authors of “Following Frank: Response-Ability and the Co-Creation of Culture in a Medical Ethnomusicology Program for Children on the Autism Spectrum” are Koen, FSU College of Music; Fred Kobylarz, M.D., former associate professor of geriatrics, FSU College of Medicine, now at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Lindee Morgan, director, Center for Autism and Related Disabilities, FSU; Rachel Goff (FSU, B.S. 2007), graduate student, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Sally Kahn (FSU, B.S. ’07), graduate student, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Vanderbilt University; Megan Bakan, research associate, Dyslexia Research Registry, FSU.

The Whistle of Death: Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds

AP

Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds
Noisemakers made of natural materials were integral part of life
By Julie Watson
The Associated Press
updated 9:18 a.m. PT, Sun., June. 29, 2008

MEXICO CITY - Scientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.

But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.

If death had a sound, this was it.

Roberto Velazquez believes the Aztecs played this mournful wail from the so-called Whistles of Death before they were sacrificed to the gods.

The 66-year-old mechanical engineer has devoted his career to recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, producing hundreds of replicas of whistles, flutes and wind instruments unearthed in Mexico’s ruins.

For years, many archaeologists who uncovered ancient noisemakers dismissed them as toys. Museums relegated them to warehouses. But while most studies and exhibits of ancient cultures focus on how they looked, Velazquez said the noisemakers provide a rare glimpse into how they sounded.

“We’ve been looking at our ancient culture as if they were deaf and mute,” he said. “But I think all of this is tied closely to what they did, how they thought.”

Velazquez is part of a growing field of study that includes archaeologists, musicians and historians. Medical doctors are interested too, believing the Aztecs may have used sound to treat illnesses.

Noisemakers made of clay, turkey feathers, sugar cane, frog skins and other natural materials were an integral part of pre-Columbian life, found at nearly every Mayan site.

The Aztecs sounded the low, foghorn hum of conch shells at the start of ceremonies and possibly during wars to communicate strategies. Hunters likely used animal-shaped ocarinas to produce throaty grunts that lured deer.

The modern-day archaeologists who came up with the term Whistles of Death believe they were meant to help the deceased journey into the underworld, while tribes are said to have emitted terrifying sounds to fend off enemies, much like high-tech crowd-control devices available today.

Experts also believe pre-Columbian tribes used some of the instruments to send the human brain into a dream state and treat certain illnesses. The ancient whistles could guide research into how rhythmic sounds alter heart rates and states of consciousness.

Among Velazquez’s replicas are those that emit a strange cacophony so strong that their frequency nears the maximum range of human hearing.

Chronicles by Spanish priests from the 1500s described the Aztec and Mayan sounds as sad and doleful, although these may have been only what was played in their presence.

“My experience is that at least some pre-Hispanic sounds are more destructive than positive, others are highly trance-evocative,” said Arnd Adje Both, an expert in pre-Hispanic music archaeology who was the first to blow the Whistles of Death found in the Aztec skeleton’s hands. “Surely, sounds were used in all kind of cults, such as sacrificial ones, but also in healing ceremonies.”

Sounds still play an important role in Mexican society. A cow bell announces the arrival of the garbage truck outside Mexico City homes. A trilling, tuneless flute heralds the knife sharpener’s arrival. A whistle emitting cat meows says the lottery ticket seller is here.

But pre-Columbian instruments often end up in a warehouse, Velazquez said, “and I’m talking about museums around the world doing this, not just here.”

That’s changing, said Tomas Barrientos, director of the archaeology department at Del Valle University of Guatemala.

“Ten years ago, nothing was known about this,” he said. “But with the opening up of museum collections and people’s private collections, it’s an area of research that is growing in importance.”

Velazquez meticulously researches each noisemaker before replicating it. He travels across Mexico to examine newly unearthed wind instruments, some dating back to 400 B.C. and shaped like animals or deities. He studies reliefs and scans 500-year-old Spanish chronicles.

But making replicas is only part of the work. Then he has to figure out how to play them. He’ll blow into some holes and plug others, or press the instrument to his lips and flutter his tongue. Sometimes he puts the noisemaker inside his mouth and blows, fluctuating the air from his lungs.

He experimented with one frog-shaped whistle for a year before discovering its inner croak.

Renowned archaeologist Paul Healy, who made an important discovery of Mayan instruments in Belize in the 1980s, said many of the originals still work.

“A couple of these instruments we found were broken, which was great because we could actually see the construction of them, the actual technology of building a sound chamber out of paper-thin clay,” he said.

Still, their exact sounds will likely remain a mystery.

“When you blow into them, you still can get notes from them, so you could figure out what the range was,” Healy said. “But what we don’t have is sheet music to give us a more accurate picture of what it sounded like.”

Recordings added to the National Recording Registry 2007

See and hear clips HERE at the National Recording Registry, Library of Congress. The list:

The National Recording Registry 2007

Montage of Recordings named to the 2007 National Recording Registry. (6:52).

NOTE:

* This is a national list and many of the items listed are housed in collections across the country. The Library of Congress does not currently hold copies of all the recordings listed.
* Images on this page are from the Library's collections except where otherwise noted. The Library does not grant or deny permission for their use by others. Users of this material must make an independent legal determination whether they need to obtain permission directly from the rights holders.

Recordings are listed in chronological order:

1. The First Trans-Atlantic Broadcast (March 14, 1925)

2. "Allons a Lafayette," Joseph Falcon (1928)

3. "Casta Diva," from Bellini's Norma. Rosa Ponselle; accompanied by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Giulio Setti. (Recorded December 31, 1928, and January 30, 1929.)

4. "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," Thomas A. Dorsey (1934)

5. "Sweet Lorraine," by Art Tatum (1940)

6. Fibber's Closet Opens for the First Time, Fibber McGee and Molly radio program (March 4, 1940)

7. Wings Over Jordan radio broadcast (May 10, 1942)

8. Fiorello LaGuardia reading the comics (1945 )

9. "Call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday is Just As Bad," T-Bone Walker (1947)

10. Harry S. Truman Speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention (July 15th, 1948)

11. "The Jazz Scene," various artists (1949)

12. "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," Kitty Wells (Recorded May 30, 1952)

13. "My Fair Lady," original cast recording (1956)

14. Navajo Shootingway Ceremony Field Recordings representing the David McAllester Collection (Recorded by David McAllester 1957-1958)

15. "‘Freight Train,' and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes," Elizabeth Cotten (1959)

16. United States Marine Band (1963)

17. "Oh, Pretty Woman," Roy Orbison (1964)

18. "Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (1965)

19. "You'll Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song," Ella Jenkins (1966)

20. "Music from the Morning of the World," Various Artists, Recorded by David Lewiston (1966)

21. "For the Roses," Joni Mitchell (1972)

22. "Headhunters," Herbie Hancock (1973)

23. Ronald Reagan Radio Broadcasts (1976-1979)

24. "The Sounds of Earth," Disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977)

25. "Thriller," Michael Jackson (1982)

The Mother of All Gold Records: The Voyager Spacecraft Golden Record

The Golden Record included on the Voyager Spacecraft:



The protective record sleeve:


In addition to greetings in 55 languages and snippets of sound from earth life, the following musical examples were included:

Music


Voyager
Golden Record

Scenes From Earth
Greetings From Earth
Music
Spacecraft Lifetime
Sounds Of Earth


Music On Voyager Record

* Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
* Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43
* Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
* Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
* Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning Star" and "Devil Bird," recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26
* Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14
* "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
* New Guinea, men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
* Japan, shakuhachi, "Tsuru No Sugomori" ("Crane's Nest,") performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51
* Bach, "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
* Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
* Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
* Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
* "Melancholy Blues," performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
* Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30
* Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35
* Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
* Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
* Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
* Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
* Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, "The Fairie Round," performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17
* Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12
* Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
* China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37
* India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
* "Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15
* Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37


For more info about the golden record, read Murmurs of Earth and check out these sites: NASA/JPL, and NASA golden record.

Honking Horns Transformed: Ghana's Por Por Music

NPR
[go to NPR for audio and video]

Honking Horns Transformed: Ghana's Por Por Music
All Things Considered, March 26, 2007 - A union of truck and taxi drivers in Ghana's capital, Accra, has turned the mundane honking of horns into music.

Steven Feld, a professor at the University of New Mexico and self-described "anthropologist of sound," has spent three years recording the sound of these horns, known in the West African nation as por por horns after the sound they make.

Antiques from the 1930s and '40s, the honk horns have a rubber squeeze bulb at one end and are either straight or curved. Drivers used to hang them off their side mirrors.

Feld has produced a CD of the music, Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence earlier this month. The CD features the unique combination of drums, singing, bells and squeeze-bulb horns.

The music originated for very practical reasons, Feld tells Melissa Block.

Punctured tires were common on Ghanaian roads in the past. At night, as they pumped air back into their tires, the drivers — fearful of animals that might lurk in the darkness — also banged on tire rims with wrenches and honked their horns "like crazy" to scare any potential predators away.

"And then somebody got the idea to start taking bell rhythms and horn rhythms from different kinds of music in the country, and transposing them onto the horns and the tire rims, and that was the birth of the music," Feld says.

Although por por originated 60 years ago, Feld says it has been largely unknown until recently because it is performed only at the funerals of truck drivers.

"The idea is kind of like a New Orleans jazz funeral: a real rejoice-when-you-die kind of party, where you are sent up by a honking of horns," explains Feld. "The drivers' road to heaven paved with car horns and a whole lot of honking."

A Native American's Last Testament: Opera

A Native American's Last Testament: Opera
By Sasha Khokha
NPR Music

Weekend Edition Saturday, March 29, 2008 - Joseph Mondragon was just 8 years old when a man with an olive-green soldier's coat came to live in his family's basement in Monterey, Calif. The year was 1929.

"Grandma said she knew he was coming," Mondragon said. "She felt it; she had a premonition that he was coming to open the gates for our people and let the Caucasians know the Indian way, the history of our people, which nobody knew for a long time."

The man was John Peabody Harrington, a linguist from the Smithsonian who spent four decades gathering notes on native languages spoken from Alaska to South America. He'd come to record the oral history of Mondragon's dying grandmother, Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. She was a famous herbal healer and the last known fluent speaker of Mutsun, the language of the Amah Mutsun tribe that lived near California's central coast.

Today, her grandson Joseph is 86, and he's sharing his own memories of Ascencion Solorsano with a different sort of translator: an opera singer.

Mezzo-soprano Helene Joseph-Weil is a music professor at Fresno State. She first learned about Ascencion Solorsano 20 years ago, when she saw a picture of her in the San Francisco Chronicle.

"I was so moved by it," Joseph-Weil says. "And there was something about her photo that just mesmerized me, that I suddenly said: 'I have to sing her. How can I sing her?'"

Along with award-winning composer Benjamin Boone, a fellow Fresno State professor, she is working to put Ascencion Solorsano's oral history into a piece called Ascencion. They're calling it an "ethno-historical cantata."

"She trusted Harrington," Joseph-Weil says. "She said in one of our direct quotes to him it's a curious thing that the Americans waited until all those that are dead and finished to find out about the tribes and their language, and they just scribbled down any old thing. But she said, 'Together, you and I are going to make that right.'"

In a scene called "Lamentation," Boone tries to express the horror of Native American genocide through wide leaps in the choral parts — dramatic sounds that are almost discordant.

The work has won the praise of historians and Native American scholars like University of California-Davis professor Martha Macri. She's spearheading an effort to digitize the oral histories Harrington collected. She says that setting these histories to opera is an innovative idea — and one that she thinks Joseph-Weil has handled respectfully.

"It's not someone trying to imitate native culture and pretend," Macri says. "She has really taken her great respect and regard for Ascension and translated it into an art form that is her art form. It can seem quite incongruous, but in fact she's presenting Ascension's life and words to an audience that might not otherwise come across it."

For the song of Ascencion Solorsano's death, Joseph-Weil and Boone made the first recording of the bells at Mission San Juan Bautista in California, and arranged them for a chorus. Ascencion Solorsano was buried at the Mission cemetery, home to some 4,000 Native American graves from different tribes.

Ascencion Solorsano's descendents say they hope the new cantata will help people learn about her tribe. Today, there are some 600 members, and they're still struggling for federal recognition.

Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes

New York Times
December 2, 2007
Music
Adding Notes to a Folklorist’s Tunes
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

NASHVILLE

TWO years ago, the book “Lost Delta Found” criticized the American folklorist Alan Lomax for giving short shrift to the work of three black researchers with whom he made some of his landmark field recordings in the 1940s. Maybe more important, the book argued that our appreciation of the black roots music of the era would have been greatly enriched had the writings of the researchers reached a wider audience. With the release of “Recording Black Culture,” an album consisting largely of newly unearthed acetates made by one of the collectors, John Work III, we now have the music itself to buttress this claim.

Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.

Robert Gordon, who edited “Lost Delta Found” with Bruce Nemerov, cites the hot, driving piano on Mr. Work’s recording of a group of Primitive Baptist women singing a song called “I Am His, He Is Mine” as an example.

“There’s nascent boogie-woogie in that music,” said Mr. Gordon, who has also written a biography of the blues singer Muddy Waters, whom Mr. Work and Mr. Lomax recorded on their trip to Coahoma County, Miss., in 1941. “That piano would have made many loyal churchgoers angry: a harbinger of the response to R&B and rock ’n’ roll.”

The pressing harmonic and rhythmic interplay of the Heavenly Gate Quartet singing “If I Had My Way” offers further evidence of this evolution. The heavy syncopation heard there and in Mr. Work’s recording of the Fairfield Four’s “Walk Around in Dry Bones” presage doo-wop a good decade before vocal groups like the Clovers and the Coasters would establish it as the soundtrack for young black America in the 1950s.

This isn’t to claim Dead Sea Scrolls-like significance for the music on the new CD. Black Americans, though, were making the transition from rural to urban life. Spirituals were being supplanted by music that was more agreeable to black communities in which congregations were buying pianos so they could play the songs of contemporary gospel composers like the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey during worship. Mr. Work was committed to capturing these changes as they were happening rather than after the fact.

Issued by Spring Fed Records, a label based in Woodbury, Tenn., “Recording Black Culture” demonstrates not only Mr. Work’s understanding of the dynamic way vernacular music functioned in black culture but also his omnivorous musical appetite. In addition to dramatic examples of gospel singers anticipating rock ’n’ roll, the selections include rare recordings ranging from black Sacred Harp singing to the virtuoso banjo playing of Nathan Frazier, performing as half of the banjo-and-fiddle duo Frazier & Patterson.

Classically trained at the Institute of Musical Art in New York City (now a part of Juilliard), Mr. Work became a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville; from 1947 to 1966 he was the director of the school’s spirituals chorus, the Jubilee Singers. His son John Work IV recalled that his father, who died in 1967, was also conversant with jazz.

“I remember Duke Ellington coming to the house on at least three occasions,” John Work IV wrote in an e-mail message from New York City. “On one of these, I am sure that I was a slight embarrassment to my father when Maestro Ellington went to the piano and played ‘Sophisticated Lady’ and one other major composition and I could recognize neither.”

Mr. Work’s expansive grasp of black music was reflected in his approach to collecting source material. “Instead of pigeonholing musicians in terms of what he wanted them to play, Work acted as a fly on the wall and recorded what was there at the moment,” said Evan Hatch, the producer with Mr. Nemerov of “Recording Black Culture.” “He accepted what was indicative of the culture, as opposed to only going after what he expected or thought should be there.”

Mr. Work’s method of documenting the music proved a corrective to the sometimes romantic approach of Mr. Lomax, who viewed the spiritual, for example, as the apex of black culture and largely ignored the new sounds emerging from Southern black churches. “Blues had become established,” Mr. Gordon said, “and churchgoers began to ask, ‘Why should the devil get all the good tunes?’”

Mr. Lomax also seemed preoccupied with old work songs at a time when the cotton fields were becoming mechanized. “Workers weren’t just dragging the big sacks behind them in the fields anymore,” Mr. Nemerov explained. “Muddy Waters was a tractor driver.

“But to be fair to the Lomaxes,” he added, referring both to Mr. Lomax and to his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax, “they were interested in preserving music that wasn’t going to be around in 10 years’ time. You can’t fault them for that, but not knowing all the details, modern listeners get a skewed view of what black people liked to sing. Thus you have people listening to this music 20 or 30 years later going, ‘Oh, look, black people love to sing ‘Go Down, Moses,’ when that wasn’t really the case.”

Racial dynamics at the time might have contributed to the Lomaxes’ view of the music. Because of the prevalence of lynchings and Jim Crow laws, many Southern blacks might have been wary of white folklorists from the Northeast. As a black man and a Southerner, Mr. Work would have had a much easier time gaining entree to churches, dances and other social events than would his white counterparts.

“Work clearly would have had a rapport with the church singers, especially with the church hierarchy, being from a religiously based college like Fisk,” said David Evans, the director of the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis. “There was also the reputation of the Jubilee Singers. All of that would have given him a kind of in.”

Unable in some cases to gain such access, the Lomaxes turned to the prisons, where inmates like Lead Belly had no choice but to sing at the warden’s bidding. “Lead Belly of course is an icon of American music, so it’s not to be dismissed,” said Mr. Nemerov. “Nevertheless, the Lomaxes gave America a very peculiar view of black music. Professor Work’s recordings give us a much more balanced view, both in terms of music and social class, of the black culture of the time.”

Why Mr. Work did not publicize the acetates that have been meticulously remastered on “Recording Black Culture” remains unclear. When Mr. Nemerov found the discs in the attic of the Work home near the Fisk campus a few years ago, they appeared to have been played frequently, suggesting that they were dear to Mr. Work.

Some of the recordings that he had made with Mr. Lomax, largely the work songs and spirituals favored by Mr. Lomax, had been deposited in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. The rest of the performances, which have gone unheard by the public for the better part of seven decades, give a more expansive view of the black vernacular music of the time.

“Professor Work had big ears,” Mr. Nemerov said. “The overarching theme here is just how much music there was in the black community before World War II. It just seemed to be everywhere, and in every layer of black culture, not just in the cotton fields and prisons.”

Digital Music Project Races to Save Tibetan Folk Songs

Digital Music Project Races to Save Tibetan Folk Songs
Paul Mooney in Red Cliff Village, China
for National Geographic News
June 29, 2007

In the remote plateaus of Tibet, recording artists have been hard at work laying down tracks of love ballads, drinking tunes, and songs meant to soothe the savage beast.

That's because students at Qinghai Normal University are trying to save Tibetan folk music, which has been vanishing in the face of cultural conflict and globalization.

Led by anthropology professor Gerald Roche, the team is fighting fire with fire, using high-tech devices to capture tunes that are being lost due in part to encroaching modernization.

"The goal is to digitalize the songs we record and return them to our communities," said 20-year-old student Dawa Drolma. "We want to record as many songs as possible."

Dubbed the Tibetan Endangered Music Project (TEMP), the volunteer-run program aims to put all the digital songs they collect online, as a way of archiving the material for future generations.

So far the students have recorded more than 250 songs, including melodies for herding, harvesting, singing babies to sleep, and coaxing yaks into giving more milk.

"It is quite remarkable how much they have been able to accomplish from such a remote place, thanks to the Internet and digital recording technology," said Jonathan C. Kramer, a professor of music at North Carolina State University who has worked with the students.

"It is hard to imagine such a project even 20 years ago."

Fading Melodies

Tibetan music first went on the decline during the Cultural Revolution, a campaign between 1966 and 1976 during which the Chinese government sought to wipe out all "feudal" practices and "make art serve politics."

The biggest threat today, however, is modernization.

"After we got electricity ten years ago, people began buying tape recorders, radios, and TVs, and then they began losing interest in traditional things," Drolma said of her remote village in Gansu province.

Anne-Laure Cromphout, a doctoral student at the Free University of Brussels, is doing research at Qinghai on the relationship between traditional and modern Tibetan music.

She said another problem has been the influx of modern Chinese pop music.

"People hear this music all the time on the radio, on [video CDs], and cassette tapes," she said. "It comes in and basically takes over."

Mechanization has also had an impact, she added.

"Butter-churning songs are disappearing, because there are now electric machines to do this and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm."

In a barren mountain region west of the provincial capital of Xining, TEMP volunteer Drolma sits with two grandmothers in a farmhouse in Red Cliff Village who are repeating the words of an ancient folk song.

The women are bent close as if in prayer, each cupping her left hand over an ear so she can hear her own voice more clearly.

The women are learning an ancient song linked to the hair-changing ceremony, a rare rite that celebrates a girl becoming a woman.

No one knows how long this tradition has existed here, but they do know the songs are fading from memory.

Cairang Ji, 61, is the only person in the village who still knows how to sing the 30-minute song. She is trying to pass the words on to her two neighbors.

Kramer, of North Carolina State, said that the assimilation of native peoples around the world has stripped them of traditional languages, beliefs, customs, and forms of expression.

The result is a marked incidence of alienation, alcoholism, and suicide among younger members of these groups, Kramer said.

These people, "having lost their traditional identity, seem to have lost some of their capacity to function effectively as human beings," he said.

The raw material of the music archive, he said, could be used to train folk singers and teachers to continue traditions.

"Educational curricula can be developed to teach children the songs of their ancestors, and from these songs learn about the ways of life that were once practiced by their parents and grandparents."

Keeping Up the Tempo

But financial hurdles still need to be addressed to keep the project up and running.

"Cultural preservation is not very high on the list of funding priorities in an area where basic human needs still need so much improvement," TEMP leader Roche said.

The recording equipment being used now is secondhand, and during this year's sessions, 6 of the 17 students reported their machines breaking down.

Back in Red Cliff Village, one of the grandmothers, Pumao Ji, is persuaded to take the mike. The shy Tibetan farmer belts out songs with a surprisingly strong voice for 30 minutes.

After she finishes, she puts on the headphones and for the first time hears what her own voice sounds like on tape.

"I like it," she said, smiling. But "I'm not as good as when I was young."

Pumao Ji and Pumao, the other villager who has come to learn the hair-changing song, say they're determined that the music will survive them.

"We'll teach this to the younger generation," Pumao said. "If we don't, the songs will disappear, and I'll feel sad."

Translated Abstract of Study on Tuvan Music

From Tuva-Online
read the original here.

Fundamental Research on Musical Culture of Tuva in the Twentieth Century Ready for Publishing
Dina Oyun
May 2, 2007
Translated by Sean Quirk and Theodore Levin

Famous Tuvan music researcher Valentina Suzukei has finished her multifacetous study of Tuvan music culture in the XXth century. The scientist takes a closer look at the Tuvan musical phenomenon, analyses it in the context of the nomadic world perception, gives a full account of the ritual and labour musical practices, songs, instrumental music, Tuvan traditional instruments, makes a survey of both positive and negative consequences of the attempts to 'adapt' Tuvan music to European standards.

Here are abstracts of the above-mentioned work: Tuva is one of the most striking and original cultural centers of the Altai-Sayan region, remarkable for its diversity of musical forms and genres, and for the melodic richness and distinct national color and timbre of its traditional sound production. Tuva’s rich legacy of instrumental music merits special attention. Beginning in ancient times, the musical culture of the Tuvans has evolved exclusively in the context of a nomadic way of life characterized by specific cultural and economic conditions. The musical tradition of the Tuvans maintained an organic continuity and did not undergo any radical change until the second decade of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century was the first in the entire centuries-long history of the Tuvans to bring about a revolutionary transformation of musical life. This transformation occurred both as a result of the change from a nomadic way of life to a sedentary one, and as a result of the introduction of new musical forms and ideas. This social transformation had both positive and, to a greater degree, negative results. One of the main reasons for the unpremeditated destruction of tradition, which seriously degraded the foundations of Tuvan culture, was an a priori judgment that it was “primitive.” As a consequence, the condescending treatment of the culture as “undeveloped” or, more precisely, “backward” – stuck in a mere primordial state of existence, facilitated the idea that it was necessary to provide aid for its “rehabilitation.” Thus emerged the idea of “professionalizing” folk music, which became widespread from the first days of the foundation of Soviet power in Tuva.

It is imperative to highlight the consequences of misdirected efforts to professionalize traditional music. One consequence was that folk musicians began to evaluate their own music-making through the unfamiliar standards of academic music, and finding themselves wanting, developed a low self-image. The result of this experience was a mutation not only of instruments but of all the aesthetic-normative bases of the traditional sound system upon which the ethnic “sound ideal” had been oriented. Paradoxically, all of these transformations still have a place in the established educational system of culture and arts at all levels: in music schools, colleges, and conservatories, in institutes and in academies of culture. And this is one of the principal problems in modern systems (ethnic, ethno-artistic) of professional music education for the bearers of traditional culture, which today requires a fundamental review.

In the present day, against the backdrop of the events of the 1990s, which brought a major reconstruction of socio-economic and cultural systems in the post-Soviet republics, there is an urgent need for a re-examination of the gains and losses that have occurred in the ethnic cultures of the national republics of the former USSR.

In the post-Perestroika era a process has begun in the various ethnic republics of the former USSR to return to their own historical roots. These processes have not passed over Tuva. The professionalization of Tuvan music in essence was and is an attempt at adaptation, or more precisely, an attempt at remaking traditional music within the parameters of European classical music theory. The process of professionalizing Tuvan music brought with it an attempt to translate musical instruments and instrumental music from the drone-overtone system of tuning to the tempered tuning system. However, Tuvan music first debuted on the world stage in its pure, non-professionalized form in records produced by the Moscow Sound Recording Factory in 1934 at the request of the government of the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR). Since that time, Tuvan music has commanded massive interest as an extraordinary example of creative human fantasy in the realm of sound. Tuva’s particular achievement in the sphere of musical culture, or more broadly, sound culture, is considered a unique contribution to the evolution of human culture.

The nomads’ experience of acoustical immersion in the sounds of their natural environment and the subsequent transformation of this experience into an artistic and creative consciousness gives rise to a unique effect: a considerably broader conception of music and musicality than that imparted by classical European theoretical musical knowledge.

Chapter I: The Musical Culture of Tuva at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, the traditional musical culture of the Tuvans as a specific form that reflected life, domestic work, material and spiritual culture, history and worldview was an original aesthetic phenomenon that presented a complex sound-world corresponding to an ethnic sound-ideal. This traditional musical culture, or what one could call the process of understanding the world in sound, embodied people’s conception of the characteristics of sound, various ways of making it, and the organization and effect of this or that kind of sound on the surrounding world and on individuals.

The Traditional Tuvan Conception of Sound

Understanding the specifics of Tuvan music carries a necessary condition: an ability to comprehend the world, and especially the nature of Tuva, with the eyes and ears of a nomad – an essential skill for perceiving the atmosphere of Tuva, its “aroma,” colors, sounds, and subtle nuances, sometimes barely perceptible in the ephemeral sound world of nature. It should be noted that what the author of this work is calling for is in fact quite far outside the classical research methods of theoretical musicology. Indeed, the concepts and physical variables that are principally developed and manipulated in Tuvan music lend themselves poorly to the conventional approaches of European music theory and musicology.

European music theory arose from a Christian worldview opposed to the traditions of the East. This worldview places man against nature, where man and nature are two opposite forces, contradictory and hostile to one another. “The Christians despised the earth: what is a creature compared to the creator? What are sun, moon, and earth compared to the spirit of man? Earthly life loses purpose for he who believes in God, who believes in eternal heavenly life,” wrote L. Feierbach in The Essence of Christendom. “Christianity separated man from all association with nature and through that fell into extremism, finding even in the remote comparison of man with animal an insult to human dignity.”[i]

The formation of the Tuvans’ traditional complex of sound perception was influenced in the pre-Revolutionary period by early forms of pre-shamanic beliefs (totemism, fetishism, animism), shamanism, and somewhat later syncretized with the genetically related philosophical-religious worldview of Buddhism. It must be emphasized that “the propagation of Lamaism in Tuva was characterized by its interweaving with local shamanic cults.”[ii]

Shamanic mythology is based on the cosmogonic conception of the universe (macrocosmos) as a three-tiered area with upper, middle, and lower worlds. Each world, accordingly, is populated with a pantheon of deities, spirit-lords, and a pandemonium of evil spirits and supernatural forces. The shamanists’ mythological complex of cosmogonic perceptions reflects the nomadic sense of sacred space and nourishes the feeling of an indissoluble connection with nature. This idea of the indivisibility of man and nature developed in the ancient past and exists among other peoples of Central Asia.

The traditional shamanistic conception of microcosmos and macrocosmos is tightly interwoven with a belief in supernatural forces inhabiting the Upper, Middle, and Lower worlds, and presents the main basis for determining a person’s place in objective reality. The awareness of an indissoluble connection with the natural world is a core value of shamanic cults, which sacralized the guiding mechanism of people’s daily lives. This mechanism was also founded in animistic conceptions connected with the deification of nature, and veneration of the living world and the terrible strength of nature.

Under these conditions, it becomes clear why images of nature occupy a central place in the artistic creations of the Tuvans. Singing a materially perceptible picture of the natural environment is not ideal contemplation, as Europeans have often perceived it, but a social manifestation of shamanic ideology rooted in an animistic perception of deified nature.

The Tuvans’ auditory and visual perception of the environment has left a significant imprint on their sound cognition. In instrumental music, it is exactly the three-dimensionality, multiplicity, and spatiality of the flow of sound that imparts such a subtle timbral color to the expressive language of Tuvan folk music, thus allowing reality to be perceived keenly and artistically. Thus a holographic rather than photographic image is created of the native environment that simultaneously incorporates concepts from the realm of spiritual culture as well as metaphysical and social ideas. Thus the traditional music of the Tuvans is influenced by domestic-economic and philosophical-psychological factors, by the forces of nature and climate, philosophy and psychology, economics and social life.

Laic and Ceremonial Folklore

The Tuvans’ auditory perception of their environment has been reflected in their musical culture and significantly influenced the originality of their creative expression in the sound arts. The nomads’ perception of environmental sounds and noises allows them to interpret every reproducible sound, not always by means of a precise pitch, but through timbre.

A good musical ear – a fundamental characteristic of a good musician as well as a good listener – also implies the skill to reproduce or perceive sounds rich in timbre, which impart a special color and meaning to the performance of music. The timbral characteristics of sound are usually correctly and unambiguously deciphered by members of a traditional culture, and in many cases, timbre also serves as an organizing principle for musical form and genre. Nevertheless, many musical instruments of the Tuvans were cast aside as “primitive and dated trappings of the past” for the reason that it was impossible to play classical European music on them, as a consequence retarding the development of national professional art in the period of the foundation of Socialism. Aside from this, ruthless ideological struggle took place under the banner of uprooting the remnants and vestiges of feudalism. This banner was convenient, for what was not understood was briskly swept aside under the pretext of having primitive attributes of the past. National instruments were suppressed on the grounds that they represented counter-revolutionary intentions. Other instruments were reconstructed, modernized, or “improved” with the aim of facilitating the performance of harmonically-organized music.

Viewed through the prism of traditional domestic activity, the nuances and subtleties of Tuvan “sound culture” become clear. The seasonal herding cycle of the nomads, the daily pasturing of cattle, and the self-appointed mission of protecting the grasslands and allowing them to grow anew make for constant communication between man and animal. From their observations of the natural world, Tuvans have assembled a very precise and original sound calendar that plays an important role in the lives of nomads. While the lunar calendar marks the passing of standardized time -- hours, days, years, and so on -- the sound calendar is precisely calibrated to local climatic conditions and helps to maintain herders’ close connection to the natural world. This sound calendar divides the year into four quarters, each connected to a different pasturage, and provides aural cues that inform nomads when it is time to move their herds from one pasturage to the next. All genres of ceremonial folklore are organized according to the sound calendar and linked to a specific pasturage and its corresponding camp.

Vocal Music

Tuvans’ love of music, and especially of song has been repeatedly noted by pre-Revolutionary authors. “The Tuvan satisfies his need for music everywhere he has the opportunity: he sings on the road, in leisure and at work,” wrote the Russian merchant N.F. Vesyelkov at the end of the nineteenth century. “Of all the Turkic tribes, the Soyot [Tuvans] are the most tuneful. In my observation, the Soyot are ninety-five percent singers,” noted A.V. Anokhin, a well-known collector of musical folklore of the Turkic-speaking peoples of Western Siberia. Popular vocal genres include kozhamyktar (quatrains), kyska yrlar (short songs), and uzun yrlar (long songs).

Musical Instruments and Instrumental Music

The traditional musical culture of Tuva is distinguished by its variety of musical instruments, and by the important role of musical instruments in spiritual, expressive, and material culture. Traditional folk terminology includes a systematic array of terms for evaluating musical instruments, instrumental performance, and instrumental music. Both musical instruments and instrumental music express a distinctive sound-ideal that is reflected in the sound-producing potentialities of instruments and in the specific manner of their realization.

The Tuvan instrumentarium includes a large number of musical instruments that are performed in different genres of folklore. There are instruments to accompany lyric songs and heroic epics, instruments that reproduce hunting calls and signals for calling domesticated animals, and instruments in shamanist and Buddhist ceremonial practices.

Instruments Used in Work

In Tuvan “intonational culture” (the musical-semantic domain based on Asaf’ev’s theory of “intonatsia”) instruments played outdoors systematically represent the natural sound world in the sphere of social and psychology activity.[iii] In the majority of cases these instruments can be made quickly, and be made to produce sound through simple physical procedures. The materials used to construct the instrument are also simple: the stalks of farinaceous plants (wild oats, barley, feather-grass), stems of buckwheat or umbellate (angelica, wild parsnip) plants, pieces or branches of trees, bark, leaves, etc. In many cases, making such instruments takes no more than one or two minutes.

Many of these instruments can be made only at a certain time of year. Instruments made from vegetable matter are particularly dependent on the season, for example, the terezin-ediski or kinds of murgu, which are made generally in the fall inasmuch as the stems that are the source material reach the necessary firmness simultaneously with the ripening of cereal grains. Another instrument, a variant of the shoor, made from willow bark, is made only in early spring at the time when the sap begins to run (chuluk uezi), and the bark is easy to remove whole.

One of the distinctive peculiarities of these instruments is their impermanence, right down to single-use, as for example, with instruments made from leaves. In the majority of cases, the materials from which they are made are very fragile, and over time, with the drying of stalks and stems, their sound qualities worsen or are completely lost.

Ceremonial Instruments

Beginning in the eighteenth century, Buddhism gained significance in Tuva as the official religion. Nevertheless, shamanism retained a strong influence. A particular feature of Tuvan Buddhism was its interweaving with the local shamanic cults, and syncretism with shamanic beliefs and practices. The parallel existence of Buddhism and shamanism is reflected in many ceremonies and religious holidays, often conducted with the joint participation of lamas and shamans.

Shamanic instruments

Buddhist musical instruments

Musical Instruments

The Tuvan instrumentarium includes a large number of musical instruments that exist in stable forms and are used primarily in artistic, as opposed to ritual or applied technological, forms of music. Such instruments are used to accompany lyric songs and heroic epics, as well as to perform a highly developed instrumental repertoire that is a testament to the richness of the instrumentarium, and to its important role in the historical development of national culture and music.

The majority of Tuvan instruments are stringed instruments, i.e., chadagan, igil, byzaanchy, doshpuluur, and chanzy. but aerophones and idiophones are also prominent in this group of developed instruments existing in stable forms. For example, shoor (end-blown flute) limbi (side-blown flute), demir-xomus (metal jew’s harp) and kuluzun xomus (bamboo jew’s harp) belong to this group (the metal jew’s harp was also formerly used in the ritual practice of shamans). These instruments are considered by the Tuvans as natively Tuva, despite the etymology of their names, their construction, and the non-native materials from which some are made (e.g., byzaanchy, chanzy, limbi). These factors suggest that such musical instruments were brought to Tuva long ago, and are evidence of the Tuvans’ historical and ethnocultural connections to other peoples in Inner Asia. Over time, changing political, social, and economic conditions among the Tuvans also changed the role of musical instruments, and not all of their older social, aesthetic, and religious functions were maintained.

Instrumental Music without Instruments

An interesting aspect of Tuvan music is the imitation of musical instruments. The shoor, demir-xomus, and limbi all offer examples of such imitation.

Instrumental Music

Traditional musical instruments and instrumental music comprise a major component of Tuvan musical culture that fully displays the creative use of sound. The principal feature that distinguishes Tuvan instrumental music is that it is rooted in a drone-overtone system of sound production. That is, overtones (harmonics) are sequenced to form melodies set against a fundamental drone pitch. Drone-overtone music represents a unique sound system with its own specific rules that has to date not been thoroughly studied by musicology.

In drone-overtone sound art, the fundamental semantic meaning is carried not by the pitch organization of the sound material, or even by the rhythm, but by timbre. As the fundamental parameter of Tuvan musical aesthetics, timbre represents one of the most striking qualities of instrumental music. It is indeed the prominent role of timbre in Tuvan music that accounts for the large number of instruments on which pitch is not fixed, either in space or in time. These conditions influence morphological features of instruments such as non-standardization of size and the absence of frets on stringed instruments. Moreover, bowed instruments do not have a fingerboard on the neck inasmuch as only harmonics are played on them.

The ergonomic, morphological, and acoustic characteristics of instruments that reflect the drone-overtone system are all oriented toward representing the Tuvan sound world. A significant difference in the size of different instruments of the same type does not cause any inconvenience for a folk performer, nor does it affect the structure of the sound. The size of traditional musical instruments is mainly a function of the size of its performer, who, in the majority of cases, has made the instrument himself.

The role of timbre and texture in musical style are clearly demonstrated not only in instrumental music, but in the art of “playing” the throat: xöömei. As a sound structure, xöömei is represents a purely drone-overtone approach to sound production. Outside of this structure, xöömei simply does not exist. It is precisely in xöömei that the specific features of the Tuvan sound-ideal are brilliantly presented in their most refined form -- a complex sound world reflected in the aesthetics of instrumental music.

Xöömei can be called “singing” only because the fundamental tone is emitted from the vocal cords as a result of applying pressure in a particular way. In its sound structure, and in the logical development of its musical substance, xöömei is much more similar to instrumental music. This similarity is confirmed by the shared use of the drone-overtone system.

A.V. Anokhin was the first to understand that xöömei represented a musical phenomenon that required a hitherto unknown music theory to make sense of it: “the throat-singing of the Tuvans stands outside all established theories (my emphasis-V.S.), and perhaps constitutes a unique phenomenon in the arena of vocal art.”[iv]

Khöömei

As a specific genre of folk music in the general system of Tuvan cultural values, xöömei is an autonomous and highly specific phenomenon. While xöömei is produced by the human vocal apparatus, its sound has nothing in common with what is typically considered to be “singing.” In our time, it is still not completely understood how a single performer can produce two sounds simultaneously – a drone and an overtone melody. Still not understood in the secret art of throat-singing is the location of the second sound source. No one doubts that the drone originates in the region of the performer’s vocal cords. But where and how the whistle-like melodic overtone sounds are produced, and how their pitch changes are regulated – these questions remain to be answered.

Borbangnadyr

Sygyt

Ezengileer

Kargyraa

The art of xöömei has been passed down to the contemporary generation as an empirical system of cognizing sound space developed by their ancient ancestors. The structure, closure, and logical completeness of the system is what has allowed it to be preserved and transmitted from one generation to the next through the centuries. The real functioning of this sound system appears in practice in the sound structure of Tuvan xöömei and instrumental music.

Part II: The Musical Culture of Tuva in the Soviet Period (1921-1991)

The Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 also drew the Tuvans into the orbit of the worldwide revolutionary movement, and served as a historical boundary beyond which cardinal changes were introduced into the centuries-long nomadic way of life.

Tuvan Musical Culture in the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR), 1921-1944

Inasmuch as the founding idea of the Great October Revolution was above all the irreconcilable class struggle of the subjugated workers with their exploiters, Tuva’s pre-Revolutionary culture was also interpreted from the perspective of this struggle. For that very reason, from the entire rich musical legacy of the people, the songs that best served the “call to arms” were those that sounded themes of protest against the feudal yoke – songs about hard labor, and laments about the callousness and cruelty of the noyons, or feudal lords, who oppressed the poor arat. Great importance was attached to song texts, since only in these songs could one find concord with revolutionary ideas.

In particular it was the song genres kyska yr (short song) and kozhamyk (quatrain) that best expressed the relationship of the people to the events taking place around them. All other genres of Tuvan traditional music culture were too specific and foreign-sounding to be deployed in the service of revolutionary ideas. For that reason, it was easier to dismiss them as “primitive” or as religious vestiges of the past.

The Beginning of Professionalization

Along with the large-scale sedentarization of nomads and deep rupture of the nomadic way of life, professional musical life began to take shape in the republic beginning in the 1940s. Educating Tuvans in reading musical notation and other aspects of the European system of music education was considered as a necessary step in the evolution of Tuvan culture.

When people spoke about the professionalization of Tuvan music, in fact what they meant was academicization, i.e., the total substitution of one sound system for another. But in the 1940s, no one suspected or could admit the idea that Tuvan music had its own sound system with its own theoretical basis.

Amateur Arts Activities in the Tuvan People’s Republic (TNR)

The majority of musical genres that had not been professionalized in the first years of Socialism were actively included in the concert programs of amateur arts groups that were organized throughout Tuva. Naturally, these genres were also “reformed” in accordance with Revolutionary principles. It was during this period that Tuvan musical culture underwent a major loss in the area of traditional instrumental music. Reconstructed and modernized, Tuvan musical instruments were retooled to the specifications of European instruments, in the process losing their traditional, purely instrumental repertoire and gradually becoming merely accompanying instruments for vocal performance. In the following years, instruments were used only for playing song melodies.

During this period, academic music specialists assimilated traditional Tuvan music, in particular, songs, at the same time that they familiarized themselves with a range of foreign musics.

The Musical Culture of Tuva in the Soviet Period (1944-1991)

The unification and merger of Tuvan culture with the “great” Soviet Socialist culture at last took place. This event had been intensively prepared by the cultural politics of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the TNR during the previous 10-13 years of its existence as the world’s second (after the USSR) socialist government. From the moment that the TNR joined the USSR, an analogous model of culture was formed in which music was divided into “professional” and “amateur.” And thus Soviet Tuva also had a “professional” and “amateur” musical culture that didn’t allow for any other form of musical activity. The only kinds of performance that Tuva was missing to fill out its Soviet-style musical life were opera and ballet.

Professional Music in Soviet Tuva

By the beginning of the 1980s, the work of establishing a professional school of composition in Tuva had been essentially completed. This was largely made possible by the creation of the Union of Composers of the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1978.

Survey of Basic Genres of Composed Works

Song genres

Symphonic works

Cantata-Oratorio genres

Chamber music works

Genres particular to composers in Tuva

Amateur musical arts in Soviet Tuva

A wide network of amateur choirs and orchestras was established within the republic-wide system of culture “clubs.” These ensembles and orchestras included both Tuvan and Russian folk instruments that were played together in one and the same group.

The System of Music Education in the Republic

The uniform system of standardized state music education created in the Soviet era corresponded to the ideological directives of that time. The totalitarian regime’s bent for unifying culture throughout the territory of the super-state found a basis in theories of cultural development. New forms of culture, created in great haste, were called upon to serve as a visible embodiment of results hitherto unseen in the history of humanity, for example, the leap of many “backward” Eastern peoples from feudalism to socialism without the intermediary stage of capitalism.

The oral system that had been used to train carriers of traditional culture was ignored, and the Soviet system of European notation-based music education was instituted in its place in training folk musicians in state institutes of culture and art.

Part III: The Musical Culture of Tuva at the End of the Twentieth Century (1991-2000)

After the break-up of the USSR in 1991, Tuva, as one of the fully entitled subjects of the Russian Federation, became known as the Republic of Tyva, with all of the attributes of state power: a president elected by the populace, parliament, constitution, and so on.

The Situation in the Performance of European Art Forms

In the last decade of the twentieth century, myriad problems arose in the sphere of “professional” music (as it has become acceptable to call this sphere of musical art). Insufficient resources were allocated to training performers of ballet, opera, and orchestral music, thus retarding their growth—insufficiencies that go back to the Soviet era, when an institutional base for classical European music had not been fully developed. Neither ballet nor opera had their own organizational structures, nor for that matter, did almost all other forms of European performing arts. Qualified ballet dancers and symphony orchestra players are insufficiently represented in the Republic of Tyva, and there is not a single opera singer.

The Situation with Folk (Amateur) Arts

Following the weakening and disappearance of communist ideology in the life of the Russian public, a spiritual vacuum was created that needed to be filled. After the break-up of the USSR, there arose a sense of freedom that brought about the realization by different peoples of a desire to find and return to their own roots. Culture and religion began to play an important role in this, since they offered the possibility of finding a new purpose in life, as well as serving as a basis of morals and interpersonal relations.

Possible Directions for the Development of Culture in Tuva

Local level

Regional level

Russian and international level

Part 4: Theoretical Problems of Tuvan Musicology

The socialist cultural politics that reigned at the beginning of the twentieth century did not allow for the idea that a “backward” culture like that of Tuva could have its own theory, and led to the loss of a valuable layer of traditional culture, namely, its instrumental music. Aside from that, beginning in the first years of Soviet power, attempts to modernize traditional musical instruments amounted to making bad copies of European instruments. This was from the start an unpromising and unproductive practice that distorted not only the foundation of traditional culture but also undermined the authority of European music itself.

A theoretical summary of the way Tuvans conceive musical sounds as the smallest structural elements of a musical language point to the necessity of studying the characteristics of natural sounds that inform the development of instrumental music. The specifics of the ethnic sound-ideal as a complex sound world reflected in the aesthetics of instrumental music is examined in the first chapter.

The Nature of Sound and its Connection with Instruments

The following instruments are particularly interesting in the scheme of drone-overtone organization: igil, demir-xomus, and xöömei.

Features of drone-overtone music-making on the igil

Features of drone-overtone music-making on the demir-xomus

Features of drone-overtone music-making in throat-singing

Basic principles of performance in drone-overtone music-making

Theoretical and Practical Problems of Tuvan Musical Culture

The prominence of the drone-overtone texture in Tuvan instrumental music leads to a host of theoretical problems. One of these involves theoretical generalization about the internal organization of a distinctive musical system that exists in the aural tradition of a people and in the expressive language of its national music. The actual performance practice of traditional instruments shows that the instrumental music of the Tuvans functions on the basis of the natural scale.

Moreover, Tuvans repeatedly use the effect of a reinforced natural scale (on account of the imposition of micro-irregularities, or nonlinear oscillations). With such a reinforced dispersion of the fundamental tone due to the (extroverted) centrifugal dynamic of the emitted sound, the overtone is not separated from the fundamental, as occurs in European music in the use of flageolet (when the fundamental pitch is not heard). In the drone-overtone system, the extraction of the melodic overtone occurs only against the background of a drone pitch. If you remove the drone, all overtones will disappear, including the melodic ones. Introverted (centripetal) and extroverted dynamic characteristics of a basic sound unit in music have not hitherto been discussed in world music practice either by musicians or musicologists, and is being introduced for the first time in this work. The difference between the two systems is intuitively sensed by musicians, whose understanding of sound production corresponds to the method of sound production on the instruments they play. And here there has been – and continues to be – a lack of understanding particularly about the modernization of traditional instruments.

Oral tradition, without resorting to developed theoretical concepts, fixed its achievements in the system of the phonic complex of musical instruments and in the specifics of traditional performance styles. The more theoretically developed European classical tradition trained and trains musicologists who, in their analytical assessments, never examine the fundamental sound unit as such. All theoretical conclusions were based on – and continue to be based on – the conception of intervals between non-overtone sounds corresponding to the European sound-ideal.

From the History of the Tuvan Sound System

One of the natural, yet most complex questions concerns the origins of the specific musical structure at the root of Tuvan instrumental music. Nomadic culture did not leave written sources. Nonetheless, on the basis of many indirect sources, it is possible to speculate about the epoch in which the musical system of the nomads was formed.

The Turks – the descendents of ancient nomadic cultures of Central Asia – are one of the greatest consolidated ethnoses, today populating a significant part of Eurasia, from northeast Siberia to the Mediterranean Sea, and the world of Turkic musical culture – rich and diverse – has long served as an object of attention for scholars.

As far as instruments, instrumental music, and xöömei are concerned, Tuva itself represents a completely original epicenter of drone-overtone music, clearly distinguished from Central Asian types of sound culture.

The musical culture of modern Turkic-speaking peoples has been presented in all its richness and variety of sound material. Nevertheless, in the ancient, archaic layers of these cultures, many elements of an enduring unity unique to these cultures continue to be kept. Such a long-standing endurance, which has not been subject to destruction over the march of centuries, allows us to propose that in the period of their historical commonality, i.e., in the period of the nomadic empire of the ancient Turks (6th-8th century), a particular type of musical civilization was founded, formed on the basis of a conscious and active ideology. A somewhat more manifest support of this idea lies in the fact that “many themes, styles, heroic epics (accompanied by music), and various musical-poetic genres prove to be all-Turkic and can be traced back to the earlier and later nomads of Eurasia.”[v] Moreover, that period in all likelihood can be connected to the formation among the Turks of a special manner of absorbing a sound-space “with a love for thick, nasal timbres rich with overtones… and an abundance of drone forms.”[vi]

In very ancient musical genres such as throat-singing, epic tale-singing, performance on the khomus-kubyz-gopuz, kuraye-shoor-sybyzgy, igil-ikili-kylkoboz, etc., a single principle was used to produce specific sounds that carried in them features common to the Central Asian Turks. Musicology and music theory have yet to fully understand this sound system, in part, perhaps, because the ancient Turks did not leave written evidence about it. Nonetheless, the sound material itself – the music of Turkic peoples – can serve as an empirical “sound” document, preserving through successive centuries one important source about the ethnogenesis of these peoples. Moreover, in the absence of extensive theoretical generalizations, oral tradition has the ability not only to transmit but to reproduce the principles through which a sound-space is assimilated, and to preserve and demonstrate the principles of sound organization inside the system itself.

Conclusion

Until the 1920s, Tuvan traditional music preserved the specific character of nomadic culture. The twentieth century has gone down in history as a time of worldwide revolutionary correctives. The Tuvan people, inspired by the idea of a Socialist society, enthusiastically embraced the idea of building a new culture, firmly discarding everything that was branded as “primitive vestiges of feudalism.”

Beginning with the period of the Tuvan People’s Republic, in connection with changes in social conditions, traditional musical culture also began to change. Beginning in the 1930s, state cultural politics focused on the cultural backwardness of non-Slavic ethnic groups throughout the Soviet Union. In Tuva, the destructive influence of state cultural policies on traditional music centered on the Europeanization of musical instruments and musical repertories as part of the attempt to integrate Tuva into a unified cultural front with a Socialist orientation. Music in Tuva changed accordingly: there was a sharp decrease in work-related and ritual folklore, as well as in traditional instrumental music. By contrast, new genres of composed music appeared, including arrangements of folk music.

The last decade of the twentieth century, marked by the break-up of the USSR, weakened the ideological pressure that drove class-based cultural politics and affected science and scholarship. The indisputable value of traditional music was recognized, as were the specifics of its conceptual basis and aesthetics, knowledge of which is essential to approach traditional music as an object of research. The extraordinary phenomenon of Tuvan musical culture consists of the fact that, notwithstanding the relatively small number of carriers of traditional culture, and notwithstanding the ubiquity of Eurocentrism that came with the building of Socialism, and even notwithstanding the massive “attack” of mass culture and its novel means of audio and video recording, Tuvan music has begun to have its own significant effect on the world music community. This specific experience in the sphere of musical (or more broadly, sound) culture should be valued as the Tuvans’ unique contribution to the development of world culture.
Translated by Sean Quirk and Theodore Levin

[i] L. Feuerbach, “The Essence of Christendom.” In Selection of Philosophical Works. Vol. 2., Moscow, 1955, p. 183.

[ii] History of Tuva, vol. 1. Moscow, 1964, p. 214.

[iii] Yu. I. Sheikin, V.M. Tsekhanskii, V.V. Mazepus, Intonatsionnaia kul’tura etnosa (opyt sistemnogo rassmotreniia). Musical Cultures of the Peoples of Siberia and the Far East, 1986, p. 235.

[iv] A.V. Anokhin, manuscript, Archive of the Tuvan Institute for Humanities Research, no. 864, p. 19.

[v] Karakulov, B.O. “Perspectives on the development of musical Turkology in Kazakhstan.

[vi] Mukhambetova, A. “The Musical Space of Turkic Music.” Paper presented at First International Symposium, “Music of the Turkic Peoples,” Almaty, 1994, p. 131.

Valentina Suzukei is contactable by e-mail: vsuzukei@mail.ru