It is late evening in a ger in Arkhangai, the fire settled to embers. A man begins to sing. There is no introduction. The sound seems to come from somewhere beneath language. It splits into two notes, then three. This is throat singing, and it stops your breath.
The Rara Avis Team
You are hearing it before you understand it. The fire in the ger has burned down to embers. Outside, the steppe stretches away under stars so vast they make silence seem noisy. A man sitting across from you begins to sing without preamble or explanation. There is no introduction because none is needed. The sound comes from somewhere below speech. A vibration that seems to start in his chest and move upward, becoming audible somewhere around his throat. But it doesn't sound like a throat. It sounds like wind moving through a canyon. Like stone. Like multiple voices occupying one body. A low drone, steady and almost subsonic. And above it, a melody, thin and whistle-like, impossibly pure. He is singing khoomei. Throat singing.
He is producing multiple pitches simultaneously by manipulating the resonance of his vocal tract. One fundamental pitch. One or more overtones amplified by precise positioning of tongue and lips. The result is a voice that contains multitudes. The technique has deep roots in shamanic and Buddhist traditions. UNESCO designated khoomei as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, but that title is a century too late. This is music that emerges from the landscape itself. On the steppe, sound travels far. Wind produces harmonic complexity. Animals call in overtones. For a person living in that landscape, learning to hear and produce multiple pitches simultaneously isn't exotic. It is a way of listening to and singing with what is already there.
There is another instrument central to Mongolian music, equally impossible to categorise in Western terms: the morin khuur, the horsehead fiddle. The scroll of the instrument is carved into the shape of a horse's head. The strings are traditionally made from horsehair. The legend behind the instrument speaks of a man named Namjil whose beloved horse died. His grief was so profound that his neighbours carved a fiddle with a horse's head, and when they strung it with the dead horse's mane hair and he played it, he heard his horse calling back to him. This is not a story about sentimentality. It is a story about loss and the object that carries loss forward. The morin khuur's sound is warm, almost vocal. It can whine like a living thing. It can sound like lamentation.
When you visit Mongolia with Rara Avis, we can arrange an evening of traditional music during your stay in the countryside. You may hear a master throat singer. You will certainly hear the morin khuur. You will sit in a ger or beneath stars and listen to something that the steppe itself has been singing for centuries. The technique is extraordinary. But the gift is not the technique. The gift is hearing what the landscape sounds like when a person from that landscape sings it back to you.