I will not abandon my xoomei

Huun-Huur-Tu, the Tuvan throat singers, were at Grinnell College last night. They played at Herrick Chapel which has a beautiful, wooden and stained glass space. Very intimate. The acoustics were perfect, and there must have been about 150 people in attendance. Huun-Huur-Tu were solid, and I only wish Masha could have been there.

Tuva is a remote country located in southern Siberia. A thinly populated region of grasslands, tundra forests, and mountains about 2,500 miles east of Moscow; I've been told at its capital there is an obelisk which marks the geographical center of Asia, north of Mongolia. Tuva is the center from which all of Asia expands. There is evidence, too, that Native Americans originated in the geographic center of Asia and slowly migrated along the continent until they reached North America. An interesting idea, considering the music I heard last night had much in common with Native American songs. In part the melody, but it was the animism and spirituality behind the music that brought the songs full circle. (Huun-Huur-Tu was actually commissioned to write a few songs for the film Geronimo).

This place which apparently has so much to do with American Indians is about a 4 hour plane ride from Moscow, and I hope to one day go there and see and hear the landscape for myself. The reports all say the land has shaped the music, and last night I fully understood that meaning.

The music of Huun-Huur-Tu is that of a nomadic people. In the traditional sense they are farmers, and herders of reindeer, ox, sheep, and cattle. The physical location is an isolated steppe, virtually unheard of 25 years ago. The physicist Richard Feynman was the first to become fascinated by its orientalism mystique. Feynman had a recording of xoomei that he sent to a friend, but had no real, solid idea of where the sound came from. Apparently Feynman had a stamp collection with "exotic" stamps from Tuva, and became very enthusiastic about finding this place. Although in the throes of cancer, Feynman’s search was on, but the maps didn’t represent the physical location of Tuva. It didn’t exist to anyone in America for sure, and to those in the West of Russia during the Soviet reign it was nothing more than myth. It did indeed exist; Feynman finally found it. But, after an exhaustive paper trail to secure a visa, Feynman unfortunately died just weeks before the Tuvan government granted the long awaited paperwork.

After his death, Ted Levin finished the trip in his friend’s memory. In the film Ghengis Blues there is a scene in which a Tuvan car has the bumper sticker "Feynman Lives!"

From Scientific American.com, Levin, et al. describe the xoomei sound: "For the semi nomadic herders who call Tuva home, the soundscape inspires a form of music that mingles with these ambient murmurings. Ringed by mountains, far from major trade routes and overwhelmingly rural, Tuva is like a musical Olduvai Gorge--a living record of a protomusical world, where natural and human-made sounds blend a remarkable singing technique in which a single vocalist produces two distinct tones simultaneously. One tone is a low, sustained fundamental pitch, similar to the drone of a bagpipe. The second is a series of flutelike harmonics, which resonate high above the drone and may be musically stylized to represent such sounds as the whistle of a bird, the syncopated rhythms of a mountain stream or the lilt of a cantering horse." This is a good description. The instruments were made from animal hydes; the strings were horse hair, and one instrument which resembled a maraca was made from a horse scrotum. One instrument, the byzaanchi, was played like a cello, but doubled as a hunting bow.

During an intermission I had the opportunity to meet Sayan Bapa, one of the founding members of Huun-Huur-Tu. We stepped outside and he bummed me a pungent, Camel filter. The kind that begs for a strong brandy or hot tea. We made small talk about Tuvan music, his music, and Russian music and influence. We talked briefly of Russian politics, and he was kinder to the imperial power than I would have imagined. He said there was a period in early 1990-91 when things got rough for Tuva and Russia. When Tuva felt the presence and weight of the Kremlin. But Sayan said it has been over 40 years of Russian domination, and it was "ok." I believed him when he said this. He had a genuine way of talking to me. And after pondering the downfall of so many Soviet republics after the fall of communism, I didn’t feel like pressing the point. There is a delicate balance between colonizer and colonized, and the two countries have apparently found it. Plus, there is an art to making conversation during the brief moment a cigarette affords; and if you time it properly you can just about solve the riddles of the world.

I told him about my trip to Russia and he asked why I went there. (They always ask why I went there: "what took you to Russia?") I told him about my wife and our travels from Moscow to Samara to St. Petersburg and all the villages in between. I told him about my current house in Ames being "full of Russians," and he laughed at that repeating the line, "house full of Russians." It always signifies chaos of some kind when Russians congregate. And those that know really know. I told him my mother-in-law was feeding me well, and he laughed again with admiration, adding, "If she loves you she will feed you well."

We talked of traditional music and he spoke to me of female vocalists in his region. He said there is a rising movement of female throat singers, and that their sound was really beautiful. We discussed how hard it is to find "good" traditional Russian music, and he said the current state of Russian pop was "bullshit." I would have to agree. He invited me to his manager’s van, where his stuff was, and he gave me a copy of a band from Northern Russia called Va-Ta-Ga (English phonetics). He said they are friends of his and their music sticks to a traditional progression. Seeing as the xomuz (mouth harp) is part of Huun-Huur-Tu’s repertoire, I went to my car and retrieved a copy of Daniel Higgs’s Magic Alphabet. An entire album of solo Jews harp experiments. Right now Higgs is off to Tuva, and I hope Sayan enjoys it. I know driving home south on IA-146, at 11:30 pm last night, I found Va-Ta-Ga to be one of the best things I’ve heard in a long time.

And so is Huun-Huur-Tu. I finally got around to asking Sayan if his band would play Orphan’s Lament. He smiled and said it was one of his favorite songs and they would. We crushed out our cigarettes on the brick wall behind us, and shook hands and went inside. The band took the stage and launched into the greatest jams I’ve ever heard on horse hair, and 3 songs in played Orphan’s Lament. I was glad they did so. The sound filled the wooden church room well.

The little places in the world are where some of the biggest weight comes from. Not only in rhythm, but in spirit and community. The band ended with a song called "Aa-Shuu Dekei-oo." The song, Sayan explained, is about the Tuvan way of life: "how we live, breathe, and believe." The song was strong and proud, and when it was over, without a doubt, the crowd knew where Tuva was.