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An Evening
With
Huun Huur Tu
(Throat Singers of Tuva)
Date:
February 19, 2004
Doors: 7:00 PM
Show: 8:00 PM
Tickets:
On Sale Now
$22
General Admission
Dinner
Ticket $40.95
Download ticket fax form here
Tickets available on-line at Virtuous.com
and Tickets.com
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outlets including
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Tickets also available via phone at 415-478-2277
Age Restrictions:
All Ages Always
Kitchen:
Regular Menu Available
Seating: Limited |
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Ted Levin, an American ethnomusicologist
who has been working in partnership with the musicians, talks about
his introduction to Tuvan overtone singing in the early 80's:
"I first found out about the Tuvans when the physicist Richard
Feynman sent us a tape from an old record he had, from Russia, (with
a note) that said, 'Thought you guys might be interested in this.'
When I heard it, I was blown away. I decided then and there I had
to meet the people who were making those sounds."
Richard Feynman, once a participant in the Los Alamos project, was
fighting cancer, and his lifetime dream was to visit the mysterious
land of Tannu Tuva, the origin of the exotic stamp collection he had
acquired as a youth, and to get acquainted with its musical tradition
of throat singing.
His heroic attempt to overcome the seemingly unending obstacles in
obtaining a visa to Tuva is chronicled by his friend and drumming
partner Ralph Leighton in the book 'Tuva or Bust!'. Feynman passed
away early 1988, just a few weeks before the Soviet authorities agreed
to issue the visa. Leighton and friends undertook the journey in honor
of Richard. In the meantime, in 1987, Ted Levin became the first American
to do ethnographic fieldwork in what was then the Soviet Autonomous
Republic of Tuva, a sparsely settled region of grasslands, boreal
forests, and mountain ridges that lies some 2,500 miles east of Moscow,
and is situated at the geographical centre of Asia, north of Mongolia.
Sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the USSR Union of
Composers, Levin's American-Russian-Tuvan expedition surveyed the
traditional expressive culture of Tuva's sheep and reindeer herders,
focusing on the musical technique of "xöömei"
or throat-singing, in which a single vocalist simultaneously produces
two distinct pitches: a fundamental note and, high above it, a series
of articulated harmonics that are sequenced into melodies and manipulated
with extreme virtuosity in several canonical styles. These field recordings
became a CD released in 1990 by Smithsonian Folkways called Tuva:
Voices from the Center of Asia.
Traditionally, Tuvan overtone singing had been performed by soloists,
each specializing in a particular style of xöömei. In 1992
Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, Alexander Bapa, his brother Sayan Bapa, and Albert
Kuvezin founded the quartet Kungurtuk, as a means of concentrating
on the presentation of traditional songs of their homeland. While
they devoted themselves to the preservation of these songs, their
concerts have always demonstrated the significance of combining tradition
and innovation. The musicians later decided to rename the ensemble
"Huun-Huur-Tu".
Leighton and Levin played a central role in bringing Tuvan musicians
to the US, and a visit of members of Huun-Huur-Tu and the Tuva Ensemble
(Khovalyg, Kuular, Kongar-ool Ondar) in 1993 sparked a collaboration
with musicians such as Frank Zappa, Ry Cooder, the Chieftains, Johnny
"Guitar" Watson, the Kronos Quartet and L. Shankar.
In the course of the years two of the founding members took on different
directions. Albert Kuvezin became more involved as a vocalist on the
frontiers between folk, avant-garde and rock, and founded the group
Yat-Kha. Anatoli Kuular took his place, and has added to the sound
of the quartet with his unique 'borbangnadyr' singing style, and his
instrumental expertise on the mouth harp (xomuz) and the byzaanchi.
The ensemble percussionist Alexander Bapa left the group after his
decision to focus on producing, and now he resides in Moscow, where
he manages the Tuvan group Chirgilchin. Bapa was replaced by the young
Alexei Saryglar, a talented percussionist, sygyt singer and string
instrumentalist.
Huun-Huur-Tu has an extensive tour record in the States, Europe and
Japan, and makes its debut in Australia in 1999. While intent on preserving
the Tuvan musical heritage, they also recognize the need for vitality
and "room to move" in the performance of traditional music.
This has inspired a musical collaboration with Angelite, the Bulgarian
Women's Choir, under the direction of Mikhail Alperin; also with Sergei
Starostin who worked with the ensemble on "If I'd Been Born an
Eagle" to emphasize the relationship between older Russian and
Tuvan music; and finally the Scottish- Canadian collaboration with
Niall MacAulay and guest artists on their latest album "Where
Young Grass Grows".
(Program Notes Excerpts by Ted Levin)"Huun-Huur-Tu, having completed
its fourth tour in North America, and a veteran of concert and festival
performances in nearly every country of Europe, has emerged as the
foremost international representative of Tuva's remarkable musical
culture. Representing such a culture, however, is surely a delicate
task. For how can one convey to outsiders the subtle sensibility of
a music so intimately tied to a sense of place — a place whose
landscapes and soundscapes are unknown to most listeners in the West?
Must one experience the place to understand the music? Or do the sweeping
melodic contours and poignant timbres of Tuvan music touch something
in all of us — a vestigial collective memory of one of humankind's
most ancient livelihoods: pastoralism?
It is indeed the Tuvan pastoralists' keen perception of natural landscapes
and soundscapes that has most conspicuously shaped their music. The
Tuvans, a South Siberian Turkic people who number some 150,000, preserve
what are arguably some of the world's oldest forms of music-making.
What binds these forms together is their use of mimesis, or imitation
for aesthetic purposes. By imitating or aesthetically representing
the sounds of nature, human music-makers seek to link themselves to
the beings and forces that most concern them: in the case of the Tuvans,
domestic animals, the physical environment of mountains and grasslands,
and the elemental energies of wind, water, and light. The best known
genre of Tuvan music, xöömei (throat-singing), comprises
what one might call a lexicon of musical onomatopoeia in which natural
sounds are mimetically transformed into musical representations. Tuvans
not only transform the sounds of the natural world into music through
imitation; they also make sonic "maps" of physical landscapes
which may be expressed in texted songs, throat-singing, whistling,
or other types of vocal production. For the Tuvans, one of the purposes
of music seems to be to offer detailed and concrete descriptions of
topography. In short, Tuvan music is not abstract, like most Western
music, but radically representational, the product of a cult of imitation
that ties it to an animistic understanding of the world.....
While the Tuvans' legacy of animism is at the core of their musical
tradition, the tradition itself has broadened. How could it be otherwise,
for in order to be "authentic," traditional music must maintain
its relevance to the life of a community. Tuva has changed. Decades
of Soviet rule brought influences from Russia and from the West as
well as a cultural politics that strove to transform indigenous music
and musical life into European-style practices. Now the Soviet Union
is gone, but the transformations which it wrought still cast a long
shadow over Tuva.... Tuvan music, like many indigenous musical traditions
around the world, has become de-territorialized.
Huun-Huur-Tu's community of listeners is a worldwide community, and
its tradition is a reimagined one. The tradition's authenticity stems
from the group's effort to bring their own life experience into their
music, and to build a rapport with their audiences, as any tradition
must to remain alive. In serving their community, the members of Huun-Huur-Tu
have of necessity reverted to their forebears' way of life: nomadism
— but nomadism that takes place largely beyond the borders of
Tuva. We can only wish the group well in their travels, and hope that
the collage of landscapes and soundscapes they encounter can continue
to nourish their music and help it remain vital and relevant —
to their lives and ours."
— Theodore Levin © 1999 |
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