err, something. Personally, have been a big fan of Tuvan throat singing since watching the spectacular movie, Genghis Blues on IFC late one night.
WSJ.com - Tiny Tuva Is Making Big Sound in World Of Off-Beat Music
Andy Cruz was with his family at a cultural festival in Milwaukee last spring when he heard the sound.
“I was watching a martial-arts demonstration, when all of a sudden I heard this, uuuuuuuiiiiiieeeeerrrrrrraaaaaahhhh,” says Mr. Cruz, 39 years old. “It was a deep, growling voice that raised the hackles on the back of my neck.”What made the sound even more striking was that the voice producing it simultaneously emitted a soft, high-pitched melody, like the tweeting of a bird. It came from a man in a long robe and sash on a nearby stage. Mr. Cruz and his 8-year-old son, Theodore, were so enraptured by the singing that they signed up for a workshop at the festival that afternoon.
Mr. Cruz, like a small but growing group of other Americans, had succumbed to the spell of throat-singing, or khoomei, an otherworldly musical tradition from a remote region called Tuva, which is wedged between Mongolia and Siberia.
Tuvan throat-singing first gained notice in the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Tuva opened to the outside world amid the decline of the Soviet Union. Its earliest devotees were mainly folk-music scholars and musicians.
Lately, this once-obscure vocal art has found a more diverse following. Fans congregate at workshops, bars and concerts, and swap tips and audio clips on the Internet. Some are even moving to Tuva, where throat-singing's international popularity has spawned a flourishing music industry.
New Age types are attracted to its spirituality. Rock bands use throat-singing to augment their sound. Country-Western fans hear in the music of the nomadic, horse-loving Tuvans echoes of lonely cowboys on the range.
Others, like Mr. Cruz, enjoy the challenge of making unusual noises. He now practices the two-tone singing during his night-shifts as a boiler operator at a Milwaukee medical center -- shrugging off the odd glances from co-workers. He's starting to discern multiple tones in various sounds, such as a buzzer in his boiler room. “It's opened my ears to a whole different way of listening to things,” he says.
Also good is the band Huun-Huur-Tu (suggested by reader Chicago Sage a while ago), not to mention
and
and probably more.
A typical singing voice produces multiple tones, but they are blended together. Throat-singing involves manipulating the mouth and throat muscles to isolate two or more of those tones, and amplify them to create distinct melodies. It often pairs a low, guttural sound -- like the voice of Popeye, the cartoon character -- with a prancing, softer tune.Listeners often meditate to Tuvan music, envisioning the wonders of the Tuvan landscape. But the lyrics tend toward more mundane subjects. “They usually come down to something like, 'see that girl over there on the steppe, I sure would like to roll around with her,' ” says Ralph Leighton, who helped bring some of the first Tuvan throat-singers to the U.S. in the early 1990s. “They're singing about the same things musicians the world over are singing about.”
Other Asian cultures have similar music, but enthusiasts say Tuvan throat-singing is the most developed. A mountainous Russian republic about the size of North Dakota, Tuva is home to about 230,000 Tuvans, plus about 100,000 people of other ethnicities. Over the centuries, Russians, Chinese and Mongols having taken turns occupying it.
...
During the depths of the Cold War, Tuva gained an unlikely advocate in the West: Richard Feynman, the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who took part in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. In 1977, Dr. Feynman, a childhood stamp enthusiast, wondered aloud to his friend Mr. Leighton, who was then a high-school math teacher, about what had happened to Tuva. The pair resolved to go there.
Dr. Feynman died of cancer in 1988, before negotiations with the Soviet bureaucracy reached fruition. But Mr. Leighton made it to Tuva later that year, where he heard some throat-singing and was entranced. His visit led to some of the first Tuvan throat-singing tours in the U.S. He later founded a club called Friends of Tuva, which in 1995 helped take the American Paul Pena, a blind blues musician and self-taught throat-singer, to Tuva for a singing contest. The trip was chronicled in the award-winning 1999 documentary “Genghis Blues.”
Strongly recommended for adventurous ears....
