Singers can do amazing things with their voices, but producing two or three notes at the same time has to be one of the strangest.
Stranger still is the way it sounds: eerie, ghostly whistles rising above lower notes in a guttural, rumbling drone.
It's called overtone, shuang hou (雙喉) or throat singing, and it's the specialty of Sayan Mountains, a national ensemble of song and dance troupes from Tuva, a Russian republic bordering Mongolia. Sayan performed Wednesday at Taipei's Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and is touring Taiwan through Aug. 25.
PHOTO COURTESY OF EI TALENT AGENCY
In throat singing the singer manipulates the harmonic resonances created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocal folds and out of the lips. The overtones are heard when portions of a sound wave produced by the human voice are amplified by changing the shape of the cavities of the mouth, vocal cords and throat. By tuning his or her voice in this manner the singer can create more than once pitch at the same time, with the possibility of creating as many as six pitches at once.
The result is a kaleidoscope of sound that defies easy explanation. The style known as khoomei, which is what the singers from Tuva call their variant of throat singing, resembles the pulsing notes of a didgeridoo grounding layers of higher octaves that sound like a fluttering fifes. These sounds are said to mimic the birds, wolves, horses and natural phenomena like wind and waterfalls that the Tuvans encounter on the steppes of Central Asia.
Khoomei has been practiced by Tuvan herders for generations, and scholars say it is an important part of the region's ancient pastoral animism, or the belief that natural objects and phenomenon have souls or are inhabited by spirits. According to Tuvan animism, the supernatural reveals itself not only in the location or shape of objects in nature, but in their sounds as well. Throat singing is one of the many techniques that the cultures of Central Asia have developed to mimic the sounds of wind, water and animals, with the aim of harnessing the power of these sounds.
While khoomei and other forms of overtone singing are a common feature of nomadic life in Central Asia, for the first-time listener the experience is nothing short of a sonic adventure. One Tuvan ensemble, Huun-Huur-Tu, has been touring the world for the last decade as a trio or quartet. A dazzled US reviewer called their music “otherworldly, but deeply spiritual.” Another wrote that, “The Tuvans will ride into your brain and leave hoof prints up and down your spine.”
As traditional Tuvan life is based on herding, which is usually performed alone or in small groups, khoomei has historically been a solitary endeavor. (It has also, until recently, been an exclusively male one, due to a belief that throat singing harms a woman's fertility.)
If Huun-Huur-Tu's tours showed the power and popularity of a capella throat singing, Sayan is taking the approach several steps further.
Their performance Wednesday evening at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall featured a soloist, a quartet who sang and played a skin drum and traditional stringed instruments, several larger ensembles that included women and children, and a number of dance routines.
Most memorable were a solo and a quartet performance that featured Kongar-Ool Ondar, a burly, red-faced man who could sustain powerful, bellowing growls and clear, soaring flute-like sounds for astonishingly long periods of time. Both segments occurred early in the concert, well before intermission, with the result that the remainder of the show was a bit of a letdown.
The dance routines did not feature live singing and resembled the sort of ethnic performances that tourists see in China's autonomous regions. Much more interesting was a dance by a “shaman,” who pounded on a small drum, as he appeared to be summoning or fighting spirits.
The quartet and Ondar's solo, however, were nothing short of amazing, and worth the price of admission. Ondar and the quartet did indeed capture the beauty of the Siberian steppe, or so it seemed.
When asked before the concert if this is what he thinks about when he performs, a singer who gave his name as Ayan paused briefly before saying through a translator that the songs he sings were passed down to him by his ancestors.
“When I sing, I can see our nature,” said the 24-year-old, who explained in Russian that he started singing when he was nine and has performed in places like Chicago and New York.
But sometimes he just thinks about how he's singing in a concert, and he often just thinks about the girls back home.
“Tuvan girls are beautiful, because girls in other countries are different,” he said.
Performance notes:
What: Sayan Mountains, an ensemble of throat singers, musicians and dancers from the Republic of Tuva
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