Tuvamania is sweeping the country.
Wherever the Tuvans go, amateur bellowing and mouth-wiggling follow shortly behind - and compulsively, almost like rabies, the audience introduces others to the music of Tuva. Each soon-to-be acolyte hears, without really believing at first, one person... singing two notes at the same time.
Yet another hooked by the Tuvan siren.
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Last Saturday night at the Chicago's Park West, the young Tuvan group Huun-Huur-Tu performed arrangements of many of the land's traditional folk melodies, highlighted by the popular "throat-singing." Despite the fact that only a few recordings of Tuvan music are commercially available on this continent (one, Huun-Huur-Tu's own Sixty Horses in My Herd), the club was full, most drawn by the unquenchable mystique.
Part of the group's allure is undoubtedly the mystery shrouding Tuva itself. Officially off-limits to foreigners for most of recent history, Tuva had achieved legendary status among a small group of devotees, including Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynmann and showman Frank Zappa, long before westerners first entered this modern-day musical Xanadu.
Tuva is a mountain basin about the size of Illinois, nestled between outer Mongolia and southern Siberia, pretty much smack in the middle of the Asian landmass. Turkic-speaking descendants of aboriginal Siberian forest people live there, herding reindeer in the taiga, blood mingled with their longtime Mongol oppressors.
By precisely controlling the movements of lips, tongue, jaw, velum and larynx, a single Tuvan vocalist can produce two (occasionally three) distinct simultaneous notes, controlling the mouth's and throat's resonance. There is a low ("fundamental") tone, much like a bagpipe's drone, and a higher, flute-like melody played in a scale of harmonics, notes whose frequency is an integral multiple of the lower frequency.
Either, on its own is striking, is striking. The singers' bass is startlingly brash. The Tuvan adept can also produce just the harmonic (by completely muting the lower note), a sound which, compared with the deep growl, seems unnervingly inappropriate. Together, the voices are a disconcerting spectacle.
There's not enough room for the five members of Huun-Huur-Tu, their instruments, and audience in a yurt, the felt and canvas tent that serves as the nomadic herdsman's cultural home, the "state opera house" of the rural Tuvan world. No one can offer Huun-Huur-Tu professional equipment to play a larger venue, or pay them enough to survive even modestly as professional musicians. Consequently, Huun-Huur-Tu is better known in America than at home.
What reputation they have, though, is deserved. Founded by members of state-run "song and dance ensembles," the group traded instruments, performing each adeptly while singing. Of note were the igil, a two-stringed fiddle played much like a cello, the chanzy (a three-string bowed instrument), the doshpuluur (a banjo-like plucked instrument), conch shell, guitar, bells, Jew's harp, a large goat-skin shamanic drum and an imposing rattle made from a sheep's ankle bones enclosed in a dried bull testicle.
While researching the tradition of khoomei and the other "throat-singing" arts, Huun-Huur-Tu has transformed the traditional solo skill into an ensemble art. The songs, adapted from those historical laments and celebrations of nature's beauty sung by herders alone on the grasslands, are haiku-like verses about simple topics, often favorably comparing women with horses - in Tuvan, at least, a great compliment.
Other songs tell of the yearly journey to market in Beijing, a trek which once took about three months. Huun-Huur-Tu's spectacular CHING SÖÖRTÜKCHÜLERINING YRYZY, which translates loosely as "Song of the Caravan Drivers," is an adaptation of this epic.
The young Tuvans embellish this story by adding a verse which describes what the trip is now like... in an automobile.
-- Chris Crone Huun-Huur-Tu performs at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Saturday, Februrary 22. Shows are at 7 (sold out) and 10 pm. Call Old Town for more information.
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