Video of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba

Another Liam Clancy obit (NYT)

NYT
[Columbia]

December 5, 2009
Liam Clancy, Last of the Folk Group, Dies at 74
By BRUCE WEBER

Liam Clancy, an Irish troubadour and the last surviving member of the singing Clancy Brothers, who found fame in the United States and helped spread the popularity of Irish folk music around the world, died on Thursday in Cork, Ireland. He was 74.

His death was announced by his family and reported on the Web site www.liamclancy.com. He had been treated for pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, The Associated Press reported.

Wearing white Aran sweaters, the Clancy Brothers, joined by a fellow Irishman, Tommy Makem, won fans with musicality, sentimentality and irreverence, not unlike the Smothers Brothers a few years later, though without their penchant for patter.

Both authentic Irish and expatriate Irish, they were cultural crossovers, and, for a while, celebrities. When they were criticized, it was as the epitome of staged Irishness, as a documentary about Liam Clancy put it.

Mr. Clancy played guitar, sang in a bell-clear baritone, wore a friendly, slightly roguish expression and exuded a humorous world-weariness that made him beloved by his countrymen as quintessentially Irish. But he and his musical clan made their name in America.

It was in 1956 that Mr. Clancy, then 20 or 21 and intending to be an actor, immigrated to the United States, joining two of his older brothers, Tom and Paddy, in New York. He achieved some success as an actor; he and Tom starred as prison guards in a well-received stage dramatization of the Frank O’Connor story “The Guests of the Nation,” and he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of James Costigan’s “Little Moon of Alban.”

In the meantime, the brothers and Mr. Makem, a friend of Liam’s who had also immigrated, began singing together, performing rowdy and sentimental Irish folk tunes at clubs and fund-raisers and developing a local following. They recorded on a label established by Paddy Clancy, and in the early 1960s, billed as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, they made a career-changing appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” They soon found themselves in the midst of the folk music revolution, touring and recording several albums.

Liam Clancy lived in Greenwich Village, where he befriended another young folk singer, Bob Dylan. They dated a pair of sisters, Mr. Clancy told interviewers. Recalling that time in an interview on Irish television two years ago, Mr. Clancy said that he, a Roman Catholic from rural Ireland, and Mr. Dylan, a Jew from a small Minnesota town, shared an important quality.

“People who were trying to escape repressed backgrounds, like mine and Bob Dylan’s, were congregating in Greenwich Village,” he said. “It was a place you could be yourself, where you could get away from the directives of the people who went before you, people who you loved but who you knew had blinkers on.”

Mr. Dylan told an interviewer in 1984: “I never heard a singer as good as Liam ever. He was just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life. Still is, probably.”

....

read the rest HERE

Liam Clancy, last of the Clancy Brothers, dies at 74

MSNBC/AP

Irish folk pioneer Liam Clancy dies at 74
He was last member of Clancy Brothers, which took U.S. by storm in ’60s

updated 1:38 p.m. PT, Fri., Dec . 4, 2009

DUBLIN - Irish balladeer Liam Clancy, last of the Clancy Brothers troupe whose feisty, boozy songs of old Ireland struck a sentimental chord worldwide, died Friday in a Cork hospital. He was 74.

Clancy died in his hospital bed flanked by his wife Kim and daughters Siobhan and Fiona, his manager and family said. He suffered for years against incurable pulmonary fibrosis, the same lung-destroying disease that claimed one of his older singing brothers, Bobby, in 2002.

Ireland's arts minister, Martin Cullen, led nationwide tributes to Clancy, praising his "superb singing, warm voice and gift for communicating in a unique storytelling style."

"It was always so obvious with Liam Clancy that he loved what he was doing and his very presence made you feel welcome," Cullen said.

Clancy, the youngest of 11 children in a County Tipperary household filled with folklore and song, emigrated to the U.S. in 1956 to join two elder brothers, Tom and Patrick, in New York City who were singing on the side as they pursued budding careers as Broadway actors.

But after recording a 1956 album of Irish rebel songs, they grew a New York following as musicians and formed a partnership with Northern Ireland immigrant Tommy Makem. Soon they were earning more as weekend singers in Manhattan bars and clubs than as full-time stage actors.

Scouts for U.S. television's flagship “Ed Sullivan Show” spotted them performing in Greenwich Village's White Horse Tavern, and their 16-minute appearance in March 1961 on the program — extended because of the last-minute cancellation of another act — turned them into an Irish-American folk phenomenon.

Their agent cultivated a schmaltzy appeal to Irish emigrants worldwide, encouraging the Clancy Brothers and Makem to perform in cream-white Aran wool sweaters hand-knit from home as well as tweed fishermen's caps.

But their up-tempo resurrection of traditionally slow, sad Irish songs made a deeper impression on much of America's emerging folk artist movement, including Bob Dylan, who paid tribute to Liam Clancy as "the best ballad singer I'd ever heard in my life."

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performed Carnegie Hall, toured Ireland, Britain, Australia and repeatedly throughout the U.S., and recorded more than a dozen albums before breaking up amid arguments over bills, babes and booze in 1974.

....

read the rest HERE

Travis Edmonson, Influential Folk Singer, Dies at 76

NYT





May 14, 2009
Travis Edmonson, Influential Folk Singer, Dies at 76
By BRUCE WEBER

Travis Edmonson, who brought a Mexican flavor to the fertile San Francisco folk music scene of the 1950s and who, with the duo Bud and Travis, influenced Bay Area groups that lasted longer and became better known, died Saturday in Mesa, Ariz. He was 76.

The cause was heart failure, said Mike Bartlett, a friend and family spokesman. Mr. Edmonson had an aneurysm and a stroke in 1982 that curtailed his performing career and had been in declining health recently, Mr. Bartlett said.

A witty and mischievous man with an irrepressibly arch style of stage patter, Mr. Edmonson was a gifted natural singer, with a bell-clear, versatile tenor capable of romantic crooning, cowboy yodeling and folksy, up-tempo harmonizing. Along with comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, and musicians like the Kingston Trio, Lou Gottlieb of the Limeliters and the Smothers Brothers, Mr. Edmonson was among those who made San Francisco generally and two nightclubs particularly (the hungry i and the Purple Onion) a rebellious center of Eisenhower-era hip culture.

With Mr. Gottlieb, he was a member of the Gateway Singers, a seminal quartet. In 1958, Mr. Edmonson and another guitarist and singer, Bud Dashiell, formed the duo Bud and Travis. Over the next seven years they recorded eight albums and played innumerable concerts and club dates, and their musical virtuosity and seemingly effortless comedic teamwork — not to mention their telegenic looks — earned them appearances on television variety shows and even comedy series like “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

In a tight-knit music scene, Bud and Travis shared stages, a gift for potent harmonizing and even individual songs with the Limeliters, the Kingston Trio and the Smothers Brothers; according to Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Edmonson claimed to have lived in the same house with Tom and Dick Smothers in San Francisco at one point, and to have been their landlord.

In performance, what distinguished Bud and Travis more than anything was Mr. Edmonson’s passion for mariachi and the other Mexican musical traditions that he had absorbed as a boy in Arizona. Many Latin numbers — “La Bamba,” for example — were part of the Bud and Travis repertory, and Mr. Edmonson’s own signature song, one that he considered his favorite piece of music, was “Malagueña Salerosa,” a folk lamentation with a tinge of both heartbreak and religious supplication.

“I idolized him,” Bob Shane of the original Kingston Trio said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “He had command of the stage better than anyone I’d ever seen. He had a wonderful feel for whatever music he was singing. And then, of course, he was this straight-looking white guy who sang these beautiful Mexican songs.”

Travis Jerome Edmonson was born on Sept. 23, 1932, in Long Beach, Calif., but he spent much of his childhood in the Arizona border town of Nogales, where his mother, Lillian, was a teacher, and his father, Everett, a social worker who also ran a grocery. Everyone in the family — Travis had three older brothers — played guitar, and he spent a good part of his young life in Mexican villages, chasing after the sources of the musical sounds that drifted across the border.

His parents sent him to high school in Tucson, and he later attended the University of Arizona there, studying anthropology (and also classical guitar, his first formal musical training). He never graduated, but he and a friend, Roger Smith — who would later star in the television series “77 Sunset Strip” and marry Ann-Margret — became locally famous for serenading college girls on behalf of themselves and classmates who would hire them for the purpose.

Mr. Edmonson served in the Army in the early 1950s and afterward began his career as a solo act in San Francisco before Mr. Gottlieb invited him to join the Gateway Singers. Playing a gig with them in Los Angeles, he ran into Mr. Dashiell, an Army buddy of his older brother Colin, and their partnership was born. It lasted for seven years, after which Mr. Edmonson continued to perform solo until his stroke in 1982. Mr. Dashiell died in 1989.

Married and divorced five times, he is survived by his companion, Rose Marie Heidrick; a son, Steven, who lives near San Francisco; five daughters: Tammy Edmonson of San Francisco, Elizabeth Edmonson of Las Vegas and Ellen Murphy, Erin Kissel and Linda Schneider, all of Tucson; and several grandchildren.

“We didn’t think of ourselves as folk singers; we were entertainers,” Mr. Shane said of the circle of San Francisco performers that he and Mr. Edmonson belonged to. “And all of those early people you could say were influenced by Bud and Travis. Of course you could also say Bud and Travis were influenced by them.”

Tom Paxton Humbly Garners Lifetime Grammy for Folk Music

WaPo
Power Of Just Plain Folk
Tom Paxton Humbly Garners Life Grammy

By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2009; C01

Tom Paxton, an icon of the 1960s folk music movement, is riffing in a coffeehouse. Perfect!

Of course, it's a Starbucks near Paxton's townhouse in Old Town Alexandria -- nothing like the small, homey cafe in New York's Greenwich Village where he landed his first singing job nearly 50 years ago after crash-landing in the creative center of the American folk scene.

"It was happening right as I got there," Paxton says of the folk revival that was underway when he moved to the Village from New Jersey's Fort Dix, where he'd been posted with the Army. "On weekends, you couldn't move on the sidewalk, and all the coffeehouses would be crammed. It was the tail end of the Beat generation, and the Gaslight actually featured some of the Beat poets; the folk singers were kind of interspersed between them. But that didn't last long. Pretty soon, it was folk singers, period. It was exciting to be part of that."

Paxton never really moved on: The "small-town yokel from Oklahoma" who as a kid favored Woody Guthrie and the Weavers over the pop stars of the day has been almost singularly focused on folk music for the entirety of his adult life. For his efforts -- for five decades of writing, recording, performing, straw-stirring, self-editing, influencing, hamming, mentoring, teaching and rewriting -- Paxton, 71, will receive a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award today in Los Angeles as part of the Recording Academy's Grammy Week festivities.

The award, which honors artistic contributions to the field of recording, will be announced on tomorrow night's live Grammy telecast and will place Paxton in pretty fine company. Previous Lifetime Achievement Award recipients include some of the most famous of all folkies: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.

"One of the things with Tom Paxton is that while he might not be as much of a household name as some of the people we've honored, his music has been really influential," says Bill Freimuth, vice president of awards for the Recording Academy, which gives out the Grammys. "He's very much considered a mentor to many, many musicians; he's been an inspiration to so many other folks who've continued the tradition of making great music.

". . . And Tom always stuck to his heart, sometimes perhaps at the cost of his wallet. He did not go the commercial route. People really respect that about Tom."

Paxton's take? "The English have a word for it: gob-smacked. It's recognition I never thought I'd get. You think of the Grammys as billion-selling artists. I've never had a hit record myself; other people have had hits with some of my songs, but I haven't. Not even close. I'm stunned."

For the uninitiated (basically, anybody who doesn't have a subscription to Sing Out! magazine), Paxton's catalogue is filled with both satirical songs and serious songs, almost all of which have choruses constructed for sing-alongs. They're songs about adult relationships, children's songs and pointedly topical songs. Lots and lots of those, including "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation," "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" and "I Don't Want a Bunny Wunny," about Jimmy Carter and the "killer" swamp rabbit that the president said attacked his fishing boat in 1979. (That one still gets requested in concert, though Paxton is down to about 40 dates per year. Loves the interchange; hates the travel.)

There was also "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler," about the controversial 1979 federal bailout, and the recent update/sequel, "I'm Changing My Name to Fannie Mae." Also: "The Bravest," a poignant song about the heroic efforts of the 9/11 firefighters, and "Sarah Palin," a silly song about, well . . . you know.

Over the past half-century, other artists have recorded plenty of Paxton's songs -- none more frequently than the regretful lover's farewell, "The Last Thing on My Mind," which has been recorded by something like 200 artists, from Baez and Judy Collins to Neil Diamond and Charley Pride. It's been performed so many times, by so many artists around the world, that some people apparently think it's a traditional folk song of unknown origin, as Paxton's youngest daughter, Kate, discovered at a pub in Scotland.

"True story," he says. "A musician at the pub sang 'The Last Thing on My Mind,' and during the break, Kate went over to him and said, 'Thank you for singing that song; my dad wrote it.' He said: 'No, he didn't. . . . He couldn't possibly have written it. That's an old Scottish folk song that I learned from my dad.'

"And she said: 'I'm telling you, it was my dad!' 'Who's your dad?' 'Tom Paxton.' He thought for the longest time and then said, 'Well, he might have written it.' "

He laughs. "I've decided to settle for that: I might have written it."

Paxton still sits down to write several times each week at home in Alexandria, where there's a framed manuscript of "This Land Is Your Land" -- in Woody Guthrie's own handwriting! -- on a living-room table. (It was an anniversary gift from Midge, Paxton's wife of 45 years. They moved here in 1996, from East Hampton, to be closer to their brood: Kate lives a few doors away in Old Town, oldest daughter Jennifer is in Bethesda with her husband and three children.)

So how many Tom Paxton songs might there be?

"It's a meaningless statistic," he protests. "I could say a couple thousand. But it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how many songs you'll admit to having written. That could be 500."

The first one worth owning up to was "The Marvelous Toy," a whimsical, oft-covered children's song written during his stint as Pfc. Paxton. "I wrote it on an Army typewriter," he says. "I was in the clerk typist school at Fort Dix, New Jersey. But I was bored out of my mind because I could already type!"

Paxton became a folk artist because, he says, "I couldn't not."

Explain, please.

"I was always a sensitive child and young man, and I was very passionate about the things I was passionate about. One of those things was music in general and folk music in particular. There was something about folk music that spoke to me very personally, even when the songs were nothing about a life I knew. They seemed to be a window into a broader soul. They made me feel connected somehow."

He'd been born in Chicago and raised mostly in Bristow, Okla., and enrolled in the drama program at the University of Oklahoma because he'd always been in school plays and always loved to perform. But he became increasingly interested in folk music, eventually forming a group with two like-minded classmates. "We had our own little imitation Kingston Trio/Weavers trio, singing in a coffeehouse off-campus for no money," he recalls.

Listening to "The Weavers at Carnegie Hall" changed his life. "By the last track, I had undergone a chromosomal change. I had gone from somebody who loved this music to somebody who had to try to do it."

When he came to New York, courtesy of the Army, he'd found his spiritual home. "I began making friends right away: Dave Van Ronk, Noel Stookey from Peter, Paul and Mary. I stayed in the Village and slept on a lot of sofas and somehow began to make my way."

Pete Seeger took Paxton under his wing and sang "Ramblin' Boy," the young, still-unsigned artist's elegy to a lost friend, at a Weavers reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1963. Nice introduction. (It became the title track of Paxton's 1964 debut recording for Elektra and remains one of Paxton's best-known songs.)

More stories?

The owner of the soon-to-be-legendary Gaslight Cafe, where Paxton often performed, was convinced that the singer-songwriter with the Army haircut was an undercover cop. "But nobody really thought of me as an Army guy; I was one of them."

Paxton ran with Van Ronk and Stookey and Phil Ochs, and he talked shop with Dylan. "One night, in the Kettle of Fish, which was the bar above the Gaslight, a bunch of us were sitting around a table, as we usually did between shows. Bob was sitting next to me and said, 'Listen to this.' And I leaned over, and into my ear alone, he sang a new song called 'Gates of Eden.' I said: 'Bob, I really like that song. I really like that song.' He was really exploding creatively then."

Did the positive feedback flow both ways? "Oh, yeah," Paxton says. "We had a drink one night . . . and Bob told me that he loved my song 'Annie's Gonna Sing Her Song' and that he'd actually recorded it, though he didn't know if it was going to come out. He told me several times over the years how much he liked that song."

Funny thing about the scene, Paxton says: "We were all competitive and supportive at the same time, and there was no apparent dichotomy. We were supportive, but of course you wanted to do better."

Some did better than others, of course. Dylan took off like a rocket before plugging in to play rock-and-roll. Others became marquee stars, too: Baez, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul and Mary. That gave everybody hope. "Looking back, the thing that one is apt to forget is the insecurity of it," he says. "Nobody knew if they were going to be able to actually sustain a living doing this. "

Paxton, though, couldn't land a record deal during his first four years in the Village. "And it wasn't like now, where you can put out your own record; you had to wait until you got a contract," he says. He wondered if he'd ever make it.

But he had steady employment, performing at the Gaslight and elsewhere. And the songwriting was really working for Paxton, who had received his first big break in fall 1960. He'd auditioned for the Chad Mitchell Trio and was picked provisionally as the group's newest member, but it turned out that the voices didn't blend quite right. But he'd sung "The Marvelous Toy" for the group, which ultimately had its one hit with the song. More important, Milt Okun, the founder of Cherry Lane Music and the Chad Mitchell Trio's producer, wanted to publish Paxton's work. "That was the only good song I had at that point; I thought I had more, but I didn't," Paxton says. "But it was enough to let Milt know that I was already a songwriter. . . . And we're still together, damn near 50 years later."

At the time, Okun was producing for multiple artists, including Peter, Paul and Mary, and he wound up getting several of them to record Paxton's songs, such as "I Can't Help but Wonder Where I'm Bound." As a result, Paxton had a modest, steady income even before he was signed to Elektra in 1964. "And it was tremendously supportive morally," he says. "I knew that I was not kidding myself if other people liked the songs well enough to do them.

"It was exciting to think that, my God, I can actually do this."

Still can. Still is.

"I wouldn't be able to define success in folk music; it's almost an oxymoron," Paxton says. "It really doesn't fit. But I suppose one measure of success is that I'm still doing it nearly 50 years later."

Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience (Roots music reissues)

Read the original (w/photos) at the CSM HERE
Long-forgotten old-time music finds new audience
Roots music from the early 20th century is experiencing a mini-revival with a series of new CD releases.
By Mark Guarino | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the January 2, 2009 edition

Entertainment galas like next month's Grammy Awards are festooned with fresh faces, trim bodies, and the latest couture. Yet in a second ceremony, when the television cameras are off and the shrieking masses have yet to gather, The Recording Academy acknowledges the less glamorous side of the music industry, which includes awarding artists who not only did their best work before Justin Timberlake was born, they also happen to be dead.

The Grammy category for Best Historical Album was launched in 1978 to little fanfare and designed mostly for compilers of big band or opera recordings. But in recent years, as record companies mine their vaults more aggressively to repackage early recorded music in box sets, and patch together snatches of lost tape to create wholly new albums, the category has grown to represent not just the legacy of a certain era or artist, but also an important new revenue channel.

This year, the category is split among a group of independent labels that are innovating how we listen to and appreciate early-century music, some of it predating electrical recording and performed by entertainers whose names are largely forgotten. Instead of shoving the music into the marketplace and waiting for it to sell, these small operators have lovingly filtered it through an interpretive lens to discover thematic connections between where we came from and who we are today.

As a result, boxed compilations are not just bringing forgotten voices back to life, they are making them suddenly relevant. Here, African-American comedian Bert Williams and popular singer Billy Murray can finally be recognized as the greatest recording stars of the Edison cylinder era.

With technology allowing access to centuries of culture through the click of the mouse, having someone curate the past is becoming more essential.

"One thing we strive for are the historical liner notes and photographs and trying to recreate the time period you just don't get with an MP3," says Lance Ledbetter, founder of Dust-To-Digital, an Atlanta independent whose biggest seller is "Goodnight Babylon," a six-CD collection of early Southern sacred songs and sermons, packaged with a 200-page book in a cedar box with pieces of cotton nestled inside. The box has sold 7,500 to date, a smash hit for a label with little overhead, no staff, and marketing the old-fashioned way: word of mouth and print reviews.

That kind of traditional business model works especially well, Josh Rosenthal says, when targeting the two audiences major labels tend to ignore: well-educated and culturally curious baby boomers and 20-somethings who ignore mainstream media channels and listen to college radio. Collectively they are the two groups that helped make "People Take Warning!" a hit for Tompkins Square, the New York City label Mr. Rosenthal has singly operated for three years.

Endorsed by Tom Waits, who contributes an essay, the three-CD set assembles hillbilly songs, blues, country, and general esotery between 1913 and 1938 into three categories: "Man V Machine," "Man V Nature" and "Man V Man." Followed in that order, the songs unfold like a news ticker detailing the hardships of the first half of the last century, when disease, shipwrecks, and floods shaped the nation's character in the industrial age, and created its folk heroes, like Casey Jones, Stack O'Lee, and Tom Dooley.

Some songs double as historic documents, written in the immediate wake of the event they describe. This includes "Fate of Will Rogers and Wiley Post," sung by West Virginian singer Bill Cox two weeks after the 1935 plane crash that killed the American humorist and his pilot. Seventy-eight years later, the tremors in Cox's voice remain harrowing.

"All these forgotten stories" in the box makes it "a tribute to these lost people," Rosenthal says.

The renewed interest in early recordings is connected to two landmark reissues of the 1990s: the "Anthology of American Folk Music" in 1997 and the box of complete works by the blues singer Robert Johnson, the latter which Rosenthal helped produce in 1990 in his former life as a vice president of marketing and sales at Sony Music.

Both releases benefited by arriving alongside the Internet explosion. As adventuresome music fans unplugged from the mainstream to hunt online, music that was long marginalized began to be heard by greater numbers.

Having a digital benefactor for such primitively recorded music is an irony not lost on Richard Martin, cofounder with his wife, Meagan Hennessey, of Archeophone Records, in Champaign, Ill.

Mr. Martin says the recordings on his label, which specializes in minstrelsy, early jazz, ragtime, and vaudeville singers from before the advent of electrical recording, can often be unsettling for listeners used to the sleek production standards of today. Before microphones and consoles to manipulate signal frequencies for intimacy and depth, singers were relegated to shouting into conical horns that etched physical imprints onto discs, a primitive process resulting in recordings that today can sound murky and distant.

"You don't have lows or highs, it sounds like a telephone receiver. When you're used to that, like we are, there's a certain beauty. I like the sound of a good, clean record from 1912," he says.

Younger musicians who are inspired by early century music are likewise not bothered by the primitive sound. For them, including Andrew Bird, the acclaimed fiddler-songwriter, the purity is in the performance.

"It's good to remind yourself now and then what it is to be truly naturally musical," says Mr. Bird. "A lot of that stuff is social music, it served a purpose and was not part of the recording industry. That's a big thing for me. It's not one person's headphone symphony and not a personal ego project, it's part of a living culture."

Growing listener interest has created a demand for deeper excavation of sonic antiquity. Because Archeophone deals in the earliest era of recording, that process means salvaging archaic artifacts of a lost era (wax cylinders and heavy shellac discs), transferring them to CD, and packaging them with exhaustively researched booklets. The pursuit leads Archeophone and other labels through collector vaults, flea markets, and even eBay. But no recent discovery is as special as a 10-second recording of the French folk song "Au Clair de la Lune," sung by a young child in 1860, 17 years before Thomas Edison's recordings that, until last March, were considered the first document of the human voice.

Already a free stream via firstsounds.org, a site run by a collective of researchers and historians, which includes Martin, the recording will make its official public debut as a 45-r.p.m.–-vinyl single on Dust-To-Digital later this year.

Using a credit card over the Internet to purchase a vinyl record of a song recorded before the light bulb may just represent how far technology has come in cross-wiring history, making it possible for Polk Miller, a Virginian bandleader who died in 1913, to receive Grammy consideration the same year as Coldplay.

"This is part of the cultural subconscious," Martin says. "Reminding us of our history is a very good thing."

Kumbaya: How an innocent campfire song got warped by the cynicism of our times.

The Root
Oh, Lord, Kumbaya
How an innocent campfire song got warped by the cynicism of our times.
TheRoot.com
Updated: 2:31 PM ET Oct 10, 2008

Oct. 13, 2008--At this moment in history when we may need it most, "Kumbaya," a folk song that started its life as a quiet prayer and became a spiritual rallying cry for millions during some of this nation's grimmest days, has morphed into something that couldn't have been imagined during your Boy or Girl Scout days: a kind of metaphorical sneer at the service of politicians, pundits and the CAPS LOCK cognoscenti of the blogosphere (OK, me included).

Decades ago, the song "Kumbaya" (alternatively spelled "Kum Ba Yah") first became part of the national songbook as a call to peace. Since then, the message and meaning has been twisted into something altogether different. Derision of the song and its emotional foundation has become a required sign of toughness and pragmatism in American politics today, and this is especially true since the Sept. 11 attacks. That's a little sad, or a lot, depending on your point of view.

That journey from folk anthem to butt of jokes has been strange and singular, with murky origins. Some have said the song synonymous with s'mores around the campfire has origins as a Gullah spiritual (the title is said to mean "come by here" in the Gullah tongue). Some recordings of it were made in the 1920s; published versions appeared in the 1930s.

Wikipedia says the song, titled "Come By Here," first appeared in a collection by musicologist Robert Winslow Gordon in 1936, and in "Revival Choruses of Marvin V. Frey," a lyric sheet printed in Portland, Ore. in 1939. In 1946, the song returned from Africa with a family of American missionaries who toured the United States performing it.

After a long gestation, the song achieved prominence in the United States some time in the 1950s, its pacifist spirit dovetailing with the rise of the folk-music movement. It was recorded by Pete Seeger; the Folksmiths; the Weavers; the Seekers; Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming a staple of the protest rallies of the Civil Rights Movement.

Oh, how things have changed. In November 2004, on the day that the William J. Clinton Presidential Library opened in Little Rock, Ark., Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly interviewed Geraldo Rivera. "It was a wonderful day, Bill, and I think we should put aside these issues of what was in, what was left out," Rivera said. "The fact of the matter is you had President Carter, first President Bush, the current president, all of the first ladies …"

Now did you sing 'Kumbaya'?" O'Reilly asked.

In the summer of 2004, Townhall columnist and radio talk show host Doug Giles made some comments about radical Islam. "They want us exterminated. … That said, what do we, Christians in particular, do when faced with an implacable radical enemy? Just sit around, sing 'Kum Ba Yah' and hope these bad guys will leave us alone?"

In 2006, condemning the impotence of the church preceding the rise of Nazism in pre-WWII Germany, Giles commented: "The German Church, which should have been a major player in defying Nazism, instead kum-ba-yah'd their way into Stupidville…"

In July of this year, in a condemnation Sen. of Barack Obama's courting of the evangelical right, Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council, another conservative evangelical group, told CNN that "talking about faith issues is not about singing 'Kumbaya' … It's about the public policies the person is going to put in place."

Even the current political beneficiary of the song's original spirit, Obama, has used it to his own devices. In October 2007, in a bid to clearly delineate differences between his own policies and those of Sen. Hillary Clinton, Obama said the idea that he and Clinton were "holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya'" on political issues was wrong.

Maybe the corruption of "Kumbaya" is a sign of the rudeness at the root of the current political discourse, or it's just proof of what happens to something in the culture—anything in the culture—that's been around long enough.

Or maybe it's an indication that without the personal compass we lost on the trail years ago … we can't find that campfire anywhere.

Michael E. Ross is a West Coast journalist who blogs frequently on politics, pop culture and race matters at Culchavox; and is a periodic contributor to PopMatters. His writing has appeared in msnbc.com, The Loop, Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times.

NPR story on folk singer Karen Dalton

NPR
Weekend Edition Saturday, July 12, 2008 - Karen Dalton's new album, Green Rocky Road, was 45 years in the making.

The folk singer made the record at her cabin in Colorado with nothing but a 12-string guitar, a banjo and her voice. Joe Loop captured the recordings on a reel-to-reel tape deck in 1963.

"I can still see her in my mind, sitting in her rocking chair with that long-neck banjo, rocking back and forth playing," he says.

At the time, Loop owned a coffee shop in Boulder called The Attic. Young singers who were just discovering traditional folk music would stop there on the way from coast to coast — people like David Crosby and John Phillips. Loop says Dalton put most of them to shame.

"She was the real deal," he says. "Karen had been living the life and doing it for some time."

Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday, and she had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans dustbowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.

She never enjoyed much commercial success, but her emotional performances and tragic life story continue to attract new fans. Fifteen years after her death, her music has never been more popular.

A Singer's Life

Dalton grew up in Oklahoma, and was married and divorced twice by the time she was 21. In the early '60s, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she crossed paths with Dylan, who occasionally backed her up on harmonica.

Dalton also got married for a third time, to folksinger Richard Tucker. "If you saw her on a stage in a small club and heard her voice, it was just awesome," Tucker says. "My favorite was [when] she did blues, really slow. The slowest blues I ever heard in my life."

It wasn't just Dalton's singing that drew comparisons to Billie Holiday: Her tumultuous personal life also became part of her mythology. Her daughter, Abralyn Baird, says that Dalton lost her two bottom front teeth when she got in the middle of a fight between boyfriends.

"The man she was living with at the time, he came home and found her in bed with my soon-to-be stepfather," Baird says. "Heh and, yeah, a fight ensued. She got punched in the face. She always said when she got that big recording contract and became famous, she was gonna have teeth put in."

But that big recording contract never came through. Dalton was tall and beautiful and certainly looked like a star. But veteran bass player and producer Harvey Brooks says she wasn't interested in playing the music industry's games in an era when musicians had little other choice.

"Karen came from the backwoods of Oklahoma," Brooks says. "She was different. She was very laid-back and reserved. ... There was no fire behind her. By the time the fire came, her personal fire was not up to it."

On Her Own Terms

Dalton did manage to record two albums, with Brooks producing the second one. But he says her personal problems — including a growing reliance on hard drugs and alcohol — made recording them difficult and touring to promote them impossible.

Record companies might have taken Dalton for a rube, but Baird insists her mother was anything but.

"She was very well-read," Baird says. "Our house was always full of books. She knew what was going on in the world, about literature, the whole bit. When people approached her as being the stupid farm girl from Oklahoma, it could really piss her off in a hurry."

And when record executives tried to change her music, Baird says, it made her even angrier.

"She wanted to have her sound," she says. "That's what they told her they wanted to hear, and then she'd get in the studio, and they're like, 'Well, we'll just add a couple tracks to this.' And she's like, 'No.' She'd get furious. My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers."

But at the same time, Dalton was a reluctant performer, according to cafe owner and recordist Loop. "She had a way of carrying herself and an aura of strength that made it surprising that somebody who had such a strong personality would get in a situation like a recording situation and be really shy and intimidated by the whole thing," he says.

Mysteries Of Revival

She isn't around to resolve that personality contradiction. Dalton died in 1993. And if she gave any recorded interviews, they're nowhere to be found.

The mystery that surrounds her life may be part of the reason for her recent comeback. In the last two years, independent labels have put out three CDs' worth of reissued and previously unreleased material.

Loop says he's not surprised that she's having more success now than she did in her own lifetime.

"Most people they were recording in the late '50s, early '60s were the Weavers and Pete Seeger and Joan Baez," Loop says. "Kind of the Ozzie and Harriet people of the folk-music world. Straight, cleaned up. Karen didn't belong in that world."

Dalton's stormy personal life may have scared away record executives 40 years ago, but it also may be one of the reasons new fans are discovering what many of her peers knew all along.

2008 NEA National Heritage Fellowship Recipients

NEA
National Endowment for the Arts Announces 2008 NEA National Heritage Fellowship Recipients

Award is nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts

May 21, 2008


Media Contact:
Victoria Hutter, NEA
202-682-5692
hutterv@arts.gov
Program Contact
Barry Bergey
202-682-5726
bergeyb@arts.gov

Washington, DC – The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) today announced the 2008 recipients of the NEA National Heritage Fellowships, the country's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Eleven fellowships, which include a one-time award of $20,000 each, are presented to honorees from eight states and Puerto Rico. The NEA National Heritage Fellowships program is made possible through the support of the Darden Restaurants Foundation and family of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze, and Seasons 52 restaurants.

These awardees were chosen for their artistic excellence and contributions to our nation's cultural heritage. They represent a cross-section of ethnic cultures and traditions including Native American, Peruvian, Ethiopian, Brazilian, and Korean and art forms ranging from saddlemaking and dance to bluegrass music and drum making.

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia said, "It is important to recognize the diverse traditional arts that enrich America's cultural landscape and to award those whose dedication and artistry are so integral to the continuation of these art forms."

The 2008 NEA National Heritage Fellowship recipients are:

Name/Tradition
City, State

Horace P. Axtell/Nez Perce drum maker, singer, tradition-bearer
Lewiston, ID


Dale Harwood/Saddlemaker
Shelley, ID


Bettye Kimbrell/Quilter
Mt. Olive, AL


Jeronimo E. Lozano/Peruvian retablo (portable altar boxes) maker
Salt Lake City, UT


Oneida Singers of Wisconsin/Oneida hymn singers
Oneida, WI


Sue Yeon Park/Korean dancer and musician
New York, NY


Moges Seyoum/Ethiopian liturgical musician/scholar
Alexandria, VA


Jelon Vieira/Capoeira (Afro-Brazilian art form) master
New York, NY


Dr. Michael White/Traditional jazz musician/bandleader
New Orleans, LA


Mac Wiseman/Bluegrass musician
Nashville, TN


The 2008 Bess Lomax Hawes Award goes to traditional arts specialist and advocate Walter Murray Chiesa of Bayamón, Puerto Rico.

Profiles of the artists are available in the Lifetime Honors section of the NEA's Web site.

Another feature of this year's fellows is the role ritual plays in their art forms: Horace P. Axtell makes drums as part of the traditional religion of the tribes of the plateau; Sue Yeon Park is a master of the salpuri-chum (Shaman ritual dance) and seungmu (Buddhist ritual dance); the Oneida Singers perform at funerals and tribal ceremonies; and Moges Seyoum is the only practitioner living in the United States of an elaborate style of movement of the Ethiopian Orthodox prayer staff (takla).

These honorees join the ranks of previous Heritage Fellows, including bluesman B.B. King, Cajun fiddler and composer Michael Doucet, cowboy poet Wally McRae, gospel singer Shirley Caesar, and bluegrass musician Bill Monroe. Since 1982, the Endowment has awarded 338 NEA National Heritage Fellowships.

Fellowship recipients are nominated by the public, often by members of their own communities, and then judged by a panel of experts in folk and traditional arts on the basis of their continuing artistic accomplishments and contributions as practitioners and teachers. This year a nine-member panel reviewed 235 nominations for the 11 fellowships. The ratio of winners to nominees indicates the extraordinary level of competition for this national honor.

The 2008 awardees will come to Washington, D.C. in September for a series of events including a banquet at the Library of Congress and an awards presentation on Capitol Hill as well as a concert scheduled for Friday, September 19, at the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland.

The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest annual national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases.

China: Amy Tan Reveals Stories of Dong Folk Songs

NPR All Things Considered

All Things Considered, April 25, 2008 - In the Southwest China village of Dimen, song takes the place of the written word. People in Dimen learn to read and write in the official national language — Mandarin Chinese — but they speak in their own tongue: the language of the Dong people.

Their voices imitate cicadas in the fields above the village. Dimen is isolated, but like most places in modern China, it's learning the greater world is not so far away. With the recently released collection, Dong Folk Songs: People and Nature in Harmony, people everywhere can now hear this unique song style.

American author Amy Tan has been a repeated visitor to Dimen. She wrote about her experience in National Geographic Magazine — the May 2008 issue is devoted solely to the country of China.

Before All Things Considered staff members left for Chengdu for a China series, Tan sat down with Robert Siegel to recall the first time she set foot in Dimen.

"Entering into the village I had little girls singing those songs — those dong songs, the welcoming songs — one at each elbow," Tan says. "However, the singing isn't just to welcome tourists, it's how the culture communicates with each other."

While these "gate-barring songs" are reserved mainly for tourists and official guests, the Dong song-style is a form of communication every child learns from the age of 5. "And they sing on key, on rhythm, perfectly a capella, in tune with one another," Tan says.

Young children not only sing to greet but also talk about community and the changing of seasons. The song "Spring Is Here, Swallows Fly" talks about the shortness of childhood, using birds as a metaphor:

After winter we get spring / Swallows fly amidst green leaves / Cicadas sing on top of berry trees / High and low sounds fill the mountains / Cicadas' songs are so beautiful, let's stop and listen / You can hear the mountains and forests resounding / Even the birds would stop and listen / There is music, there is love / All four seasons are filled with happiness / We are happy in our hearts

Across the Dong culture, most of the songs celebrate the natural world.

"Many of the songs are about nature, listening to nature," Tan says. "There's a lot about being out in the field working and realizing that even though your life is very hard and you're working constantly and it never stops, no matter what the season or the weather, there is this beauty."

But Dimen's rich oral history is at risk. Only one woman can sing the hours-long story that recounts the entire story of the Dimen people and the younger generation doesn't seem interested in learning it.

"There was a couple, two couples, on a bridge — Lover's Lane — smooching," Tan says. "And I asked them what they like to sing. 'Karaoke.' I asked them about their other songs. Yes, they do sing the Cicada songs, they love those songs. How about the song about the history of their village? 'That song is boring.' 'Would you ever learn it?' 'No, I don't think so.'

"So it was a very sad feeling, as I listened to this woman sing this song over dinner, that she would probably be the last person to know this song."

Travelers in Search of Mexico’s Magic Find Town of Witches and Warlocks

NYT
March 28, 2008
Travelers in Search of Mexico’s Magic Find Town of Witches and Warlocks
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

CATEMACO, Mexico — To kill a man, Alejandro Gallegos García explains, all you need is a black cloth doll, some thread, a human bone and a toad. Oh, and you must ask the devil permission, in person, at a cave in the hills where he is said to appear.

Assuming you have these things, plus the green light from the prince of darkness, you simply lash the doll to the bone, shove it down the unfortunate toad’s throat, sew up its lips and take the whole mess to a graveyard, reciting the proper words.

“The person will die within 30 days,” Mr. Gallegos said matter of factly, as if he were talking of fixing a broken carburetor. (The toad dies too, by the by.)

“There exists good and bad in the world, there exists the devil and God,” he went on, turning a serpent’s fang in his rough fingers. “I work in white magic and in black magic. But there are people who dedicate themselves only to evil.”

Mr. Gallegos, 48, is a traditional warlock, one of dozens who work in this idyllic town, nestled near the Gulf of Mexico by Lake Catemaco in the state of Veracruz. Like most witches here, he melds European and native traditions in his work, a special brew of occultism he learned from his uncle.

His cramped cement workroom holds an image of the Virgin Mary and a large crucifix with a bloodied Jesus. A six-pointed star is painted on the floor, with a horseshoe to one side and a St. Andrew’s cross on the other. Candles dedicated to various saints crowd his table, most with photographs lashed to them. Some are photos of men and women whom the client wants to ensnare in love. Others are of barren women who want children. Others are of people with maladies from asthma to cancer.

Beneath the table Mr. Gallegos keeps ragged boxes full of herbs, bark and roots that have been used in these parts for medicinal purposes since before Hernán Cortés was a gleam in his great-great-grandfather’s eye.

He has dead bats, used in certain love charms, and ground-up rattlesnake, for curing illnesses. He uses oils extracted from lizards and turtles, the dried tongues of certain fish, coyote skin, eggs, chickens, holy water from the church and less-than-holy water from the lake. He knows dozens of local plants and their attributes. And he wields the tooth of a venomous snake.

“This goes back to ancient times,” he said. “There were witches here before the Spanish. Here there is a mix of everything, even of God.”

Catemaco is known throughout Mexico as a center for witchcraft and, to the dismay of some hard-core practitioners, magic has become a big tourist draw. The town holds an International Congress of Witches on the first Friday of every March.

During the event, a black mass is held at the mouth of the cave where the devil supposedly loiters. An oversize six-pointed star — they call it a Star of David — is set alight, to the delight of photographers. Politicians show up to receive amulets for good luck at the polls. Believers flock to the town to have their auras cleansed.

Sandra Lucía Aguilar, a 25-year-old cashier, traveled 22 hours by bus from Cancún for the black mass. A few days later she found herself in the waiting room of a popular witch doctor known as “The Crow,” hoping for a little black magic to force her errant boyfriend to return.

“I lived with him for five years, and then, overnight, he ran off with another woman,” she said. “I want him back. He humiliated me a lot and I want to humiliate him.”

The Crow turns out to be a slick-looking fellow named Héctor Betaza Domínguez, who wears white guayabera shirts and sits in a candlelit room among effigies of La Santa Muerte, a Mexican icon resembling the grim reaper in drag.

Mr. Betaza says people come to see him from all over Mexico and from major cities in the United States with large Mexican communities. Many simply want “una limpia,” or cleansing, to ward off evil spirits. But a majority of the complaints are broken hearts.

Asked where he learned his craft, Mr. Betaza, who calls himself a “master of occult sciences,” becomes evasive, muttering something about his mother having practiced magic. “This you don’t learn,” he said. “It’s something that you carry in the blood.”

Not everyone is convinced. The Rev. Tomás Alonso Martínez has the unenviable job of parish priest in a town best known as a haunt of the devil and witches. “It’s farce,” he said, “a lie, a fraud.”

In his five years in Catemaco, Father Martínez says he has seen so-called witches practice all sorts of confidence schemes, extracting money from gullible and vulnerable people.

One common trick is to tell someone he is hexed and then remove the hex for a fee. Another is to tell people they are sick, then offer them a traditional cure for an outlandish sum.

“They attribute to themselves power they cannot have,” the priest said. “The fundamental problem that exists with these people is that there are people who believe them. Anyone can set themselves up as a witch.”

Even Father Martínez acknowledges, however, that mixed in with the questionable practices are vestiges of a pre-Hispanic past. The use of Catholic saints also bespeaks a syncretism of beliefs, he notes.

In his church, an icon of the Virgin Mary sits in an alcove directly above and behind the altar. Before Mass, many go to the shrine and pass herbs over their bodies to cleanse themselves. Some leave pictures of loved ones, amulets and prayers.

That syncretism also emerged clearly when Mr. Gallegos performed a cleansing ritual on a recent afternoon. The client was a taxi driver named Santos Luna Cruz who wanted protection from envious rivals.

Stripped to the waist, Mr. Luna stood on a worn piece of velvet in the center of a chalk Star of David. Candles burned at each point of the star. A horseshoe was to one side, a St. Andrew’s cross to the other. Two glasses of water, believed to absorb evil spirits, were placed in front of him.

Mr. Gallegos sprinkled holy water, garlic and ammonia over him. Then, chanting the common Catholic prayer to “the father, the son and the Holy Ghost” and invoking a long list of saints, Mr. Gallegos held eggs to the man’s head and rubbed them over his body.

He scratched crosses with his serpent’s tooth on Mr. Luna’s face, arms, chest and abdomen. He took a live chicken and passed it over his client. He blew the holy water from his mouth in a fine spray at the man, and beat him with clusters of herbs.

When it was over, Mr. Luna, 34, grinned and ran his hand through his wet hair. “I felt very stressed out at first, but now I feel lighter, better,” he said. “I feel like he is taking away from my body the bad vibrations.”

Mr. Gallegos pointed to two eggs that broke during the ritual. “When the egg breaks, it is because it has absorbed the pain inside the young man,” he said.

Public singing in America

NYT

February 10, 2008
Music
Shared Song, Communal Memory
By BEN RATLIFF

EAST LANSING, Mich.

THEY meet on the first Monday of the month at the Universalist Unitarian Church here, not to worship but to sing. Just to sing. There are song leaders, some with a guitar or a banjo or an autoharp, but this isn’t a class or a choir; the singers, not the leaders, choose the tunes. Most hold copies of a spiral-bound songbook of folk music called “Rise Up Singing.” They perform songs like “Keep On the Sunny Side” and “This Land Is Your Land.” No one minds a voice gone off-key.

From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory.

If there is a natural opposite to gold-plated pop irony and faceless file sharing — music as the American majority knows it in 2008 — this is it. These meetings are earnest, participant directed and person to person: a slow-going, folkish appreciation of American vernacular culture.

Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ”

Amateur group-singing has been around forever, of course, at bars, churches, schools, camps and stadiums. Community sings like the one in East Lansing are pitched halfway between the ritual of the campfire singalong and the self-conscious American folk-music movement of the 20th century.

In 1945 Mr. Seeger founded the People’s Song collective, which disseminated its own songbooks, thereby helping to popularize songs like “We Shall Overcome.” The folk revival of the late 1950s and the subsequent rise of folk festivals, some of which included song-circles as special events, furthered the idea that singing together could reseed a homegrown culture and empower the ordinary citizen to change society.

In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.

A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each.

It’s hard to gauge the size of the community-sing movement because by its essentially casual nature it resists documenting. There is no central organization, no comprehensive Web site of regular events. Groups of the kind that use “Rise Up Singing” are not registered with the American Choral Directors Association and have no academic or institutional affiliation.

But Mr. Blood, who now lives in Amherst, Mass., said that by a conservative estimate at least 100 regular singalongs around the country use the book, in cities including Santa Cruz, Calif.; both Portlands; Rochester; Chicago; Milwaukee; and Atlanta. Some of these are easy to find in an online search; some are publicized through regional folk-music society newsletters, church bulletins or strictly by word of mouth.

In East Lansing, Sally Potter, 47, a frank, energetic presence, leads the monthly sing. In early December the event drew about 80 people. Everyone gathered in the rear of the chapel, where the ceiling is low, “so you can get the chills more easily,” as Ms. Potter explained.

The chairs were arranged around an open square, the better to hear the blend of voices. The singers ranged from teenagers to the elderly; some had strong, penetrating voices, some murmured with wobbly pitch. They sang about 20 songs, including “Star of the County Down” (18th-century traditional Irish), “The M.T.A. Song” (a 1948 update of the early 20th-century American ballad “The Wreck of the Old 97”) and “The Rose” (1979, soft-rock radio).

The force of their voices grew during 90 minutes, with harmony occurring in unexpected places. In between numbers Ms. Potter waited for people to raise hands and politely make suggestions.

“Page 117, ‘Julian of Norwich’?” someone offered, referring to a selection from “Rise Up Singing.”

“Great!” Ms. Potter responded quickly. “One of my favorite songs.”

“Is it ‘Nor-witch,’ ” another voice asked, “or ‘Nor-rich’?”

“I don’t know,” Ms. Potter said, shrugging, though she did. “It’s your song.”

Some sang the word one way, some the other. But Ms. Potter does have a few guidelines, including this: If someone picks a song, and it takes more than 45 seconds for everyone to learn it, let it go. There were no nonstarters on this particular Monday. In general, Ms. Potter said, she believes that people should get to sing what they came to sing.

The combined area of Lansing and East Lansing, which has a population of about 165,000 and is home to Michigan State University, has a perfect sense of scale for community projects: it’s not too small, not too big, and despite a perpetually slumped economy, it has a great deal of civic pride. It also has a famous guitar store, Elderly Instruments, a folk-music locus open since 1972; the Ten Pound Fiddle Coffeehouse, a folk-concert producer that has put on events for almost that long; and a popular local folk-music radio show on the NPR-affiliated WKAR.

Ms. Potter teaches high school history and economics in nearby Williamston. She has lived in Lansing for the last 23 years, during which time she has owned a restaurant, run the local farmers’ market and a used-sporting-goods store, and toured the Midwest in a folk trio, Second Opinion. Her interest in community sings goes back to the Hudson River Clearwater Festival in 1994, where Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, led a singalong group in a tent. Ms. Potter saw the same people returning day after day to sit cross-legged and sing, and she realized that participation was folk music’s core pleasure.

In 2003 she helped found the annual Mid Winter Singing Festival, a two-day event featuring community sings that tend to draw 400 to 500 people each night. This year’s festival, the sixth, was last weekend. There was a blizzard the first night, yet 340 people fought their way to the Hannah Community Center, a large building across the street from the Unitarian church.

In the evening events the singers sat in an auditorium and faced the stage, referring to set lists and lyric sheets. The song leaders were folk singers with longstanding local reputations: Claudia Schmidt, Joel Mabus and Frank Youngman.

“I’ve watched so many concerts, and I know what works,” Ms. Potter said. “When people are singing, you’re giving them the power, you’re giving them the music.”

Peter Blood agrees. “A lot of the experience of music in our culture is listening to someone else sing,” he said. “What I find exciting about community sings is that people feel they own the music.”

“Rise Up Singing” includes rudimentary chord notations but otherwise gives no indication how to sing a particular song; it is essentially used as a book of lyrics. It is not the only book used for participatory singalongs (shape-note singers tend toward “The Sacred Harp,” originally published in 1844), and some singalong groups bring their own songs. But it is the breakaway hit of its kind in recent decades.

Dan Zanes, the singer and popular children’s entertainer, used to sell “Rise Up Singing,” which he called “the ultimate songbook,” at his shows. “We don’t have that many songs rattling around in our heads anymore," he said, "so we need a guide of sorts.”

BookScan, which tracks sales back to 2000 through traditional bookstores, registers about 12,000 copies sold. But Mr. Moss said that most sales of the book have not come from bookstores. Song leaders order it by the boxful, directly from the publisher, or from the authors at quakersong.org.

Mr. Moss said that although Sing Out! magazine did not map or facilitate the movement, he believed that it is “much broader than ‘Rise Up Singing.’ ”

“Often I hear from people that they hate the book for use in those settings because people keep their noses in it,” he said.

Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson organized the songs in it by theme, including “Ecology,” “Sea,” “Faith,” “Hard Times & Blues,” “Men” and “Women.” (While the “Women” section is full of feminist vigor, the “Men” section is introspective, with songs like “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” and “Let the Woman in You Come Through.”) The book includes traditional black American hymns; Cuban, Mexican, Irish and Hebrew songs; Stephen Foster; Jacques Brel; the Beatles; Phil Ochs; Bob Dylan; and Stevie Wonder. There are songs for specific holidays and songs from musicals.

With groovy spot-illustrations and hand-lettered calligraphy, “Rise Up Singing” has a 1970s liberal-progressive feel and an obvious bias toward group-singability, although Mr. Blood admitted that some of the songs were included more for lyrical content than for their significance or popularity. (The couple are at work on compiling a 1,200-song sequel that will include more selections from jazz, blues and rock.)

Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.

“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.”

At 88 Mr. Seeger is still a song leader, helping to run a singalong at the monthly meeting of a volunteer environmental organization near his home in Beacon, N.Y. “I like the sound of average voices more than trained voices,” he said. “Especially kids singing a little off pitch. They have a nice, rascally sound.”

After “Edelweiss,” and a beautiful run-through of “Song of Peace,” adapted from Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia,” the session at the Universalist Unitarian Church wrapped up. It was almost 9 p.m., but nobody seemed in a rush to get home. A scattering of regulars stayed, packing up the cider and cookies.

One of them was Marcus Cheatham, 51, who works in public health. Earlier in the evening he introduced one of his own songs, picking a mandolin to teach the melody. Mr. Cheatham started singing about six years ago, when he joined a church choir and later a “diversity choir” at work, performing on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and other holidays. The next step, he reasoned, was attending a community sing.

Asked if his knowledge of songs had grown since then, he corrected the question. “My enjoyment of songs has grown,” he said. “I’m not much of a musician at all. If you enjoy it, you can jump in and do it.”

“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”

Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”

Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”

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.”

Igor Moiseyev, 101; Russian choreographer elevated folk dancing into a theatrical art

Igor Moiseyev, 101; Russian choreographer elevated folk dancing into a theatrical art
By Lewis Segal
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 3, 2007

Igor Moiseyev, the ballet-trained dancer and choreographer whose pioneering vision of theatricalized folk dance not only created an acclaimed Russian company but influenced artists and audiences around the world, has died. He was 101.

A proud, ambitious man who once said the aim in his work was "to give the public a spiritual portrait of a people," Moiseyev died Friday in a Moscow hospital. He had been in poor health in recent years and was rarely seen in public. Looking frail, he did appear at a Moscow performance celebrating his centennial last year. For the last three days, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported, he had been unconscious.

Moiseyev virtually invented folk dancing as a professional stage spectacle, insisting that he had both a right and a duty to change a participatory endeavor to a serious choreographic idiom worthy of standing beside classical ballet and modern dance.

"Folklore in the strictest sense is confining," he told Times music and dance critic Martin Bernheimer in 1970. "I never was interested in that. I merely take the folk dance and its related customs as a point of departure for fanciful interpretation.

"My dancers are classically trained at our own school," he said. "The choreography I give them would defeat the amateurs they are called upon to impersonate."

The Moiseyev company's success led to copycat ventures in Russia and abroad, troupes that filtered national idioms through the prism of ballet, modern dance or contemporary show-dancing, emerging with impressions of folk culture more than actual transcriptions or adaptations.

Few of them, however, matched Moiseyev's "Partisans," in which a smattering of folklore and an abundance of choreographic imagination produced a stirring tribute to the guerrilla fighters who defended his homeland during World War II.

But the same formula could also generate blatant kitsch, such as his "Yurochka," in which an indecisive womanizer wooed six finger-in-the-cheek village maids, or his "Night on Bald Mountain," which descended to coarse comic mime and then sank even further to pseudo-demonic dance-charades of no choreographic distinction.

Like many of his imitators, Moiseyev may have brought a new audience to folklore by harnessing it to existing theatrical dance traditions. But some of those traditions were artistically bankrupt long before he adopted them, and they gained no credibility from their new context.

Igor Aleksandrovich Moiseyev was born on Jan. 21, 1906, in Kiev, the capital of what is now Ukraine, to a lawyer father and a mother of French origins.

He lived in Paris from ages 4 to 6, then moved back to Russia, where he saw his first ballet at age 13 in Moscow. Either that year or the year before, he started ballet studies, first privately, then at the Bolshoi Ballet School, where he became a pupil of ballet reformer Alexander Gorsky. He also studied at the Moscow School of Choreography.

He graduated from the Bolshoi school in 1924, joined the company and danced leading roles in ballets such as "Joseph the Beautiful" (1925) and his own first major work, "Salammbo" (1932), to music by Andrei Arends that had previously been choreographed by Gorsky. He also formed a partnership with leading Bolshoi ballerina Ekaterina Geltser.

His choreographic association with the Bolshoi continued long after he left the company in 1939, most notably with a 1958 version of "Spartacus" to music by Aram Khachaturian (not the choreography the Bolshoi currently performs). But he felt restricted by that company's aesthetic throughout his career there. "I left without regret," he told Bernheimer. "The Bolshoi is very beautiful, but I have managed to survive quite adequately without 'Swan Lake.' "

In 1936, Moiseyev was asked to head the choreographic department of a new Theater of Folk Art in Moscow, and he soon helped organize a nationwide folk dance festival. At a program of works from all parts of the country, he formed the plan of creating a professional company dedicated to folk dancing, edited and adapted for the stage.

In 1937, the State Folk Dance Ensemble -- soon also known as the Moiseyev Dance Company -- was founded with the participation of 35 dancers, most of them amateurs. Moiseyev had to train them and also re-choreograph the Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Byelorussian, Armenian, Kazakh, Azerbaijani and Moldavian folk dances that were seen for the first time in Moscow's Hall of Columns. Other regional specialties were soon added.

At the time, his creative objectives included "perfecting" traditional ethnic dances using the aesthetic principles and technical disciplines he had gained from classical ballet.

His success in achieving this goal proved not only a major reason for the growing popularity of his company with audiences unfamiliar with his source-idioms but also, much later, for controversy over the extent to which he had adulterated them. "We are not a folklore collective," he always insisted. "We are a creative collective."

By 1941, the company had 70 professional dancers trained under Moiseyev's supervision at either the Bolshoi Theatre School or its National Dance Department. It continued to expand and began to tour internationally after World War II ended -- the first major Russian company to do so -- visiting England and France in 1955 and making its American debut three years later.

One of the chilliest junctures in the Cold War found Moiseyev playing goodwill ambassador, wooing the U.S. public in 1958 with his company's energy and professionalism but also with prime Americana -- the Virginia Reel -- danced as a finale year after year. "No folk ever danced like this," New York Times dance critic John Martin wrote admiringly after the company's debut, and he was right in more ways than one.

In 1966, Moiseyev founded a smaller company, the Concert Dance Ensemble, to develop talented young artists. Along the way, he picked up the Lenin Prize, the Stalin Prize and the State Prize and was officially named People's Artist of the USSR (1953) and Hero of Socialist Labor (1976).

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought him greater creative freedom but also new financial realities. "The government supports the company, pays monthly salaries and pays for our studios," he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2002. "But it isn't enough to cover all our expenses." Another important upside: "Now we can decide what to do with the money we can earn from our performances."

More than once, Moiseyev attributed his longevity to staying busy and productive. "Follow a healthy routine with uninterrupted creative work," he advised in the same 2002 interview. "The most important thing in life is to do what you love."

Survivors include his second wife, Irina Alekseevna Chagadaeva. A funeral is planned for Wednesday in Moscow.

lewis.segal@latimes.com

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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