Ethnomusicologists and others who consume a broad range of music may assume that the various genres referred to collectively as “throat-singing” have been widely and popularly known for a decade or more. But Levin shows us that as late as 1999, the Tuvan music ensemble he escorted on its tour of the U.S. was still confronted with the kind of early reactions typical of listeners with little understanding of or exposure to throat-singing. In Santa Fe, the ensemble Huun-Huur-Tu (HHT) finds only few appreciative listeners, a sound engineer unable to program sounds he can’t understand, and a manager who threatens to cut the Tuvan act short to oblige the rowdy fans of the main attraction, a country-western singer. In Los Angeles, the ensemble encounters two electroacoustic music geeks who have rigged up a couple of computers capable of processing the sounds of throat-singing in real time, yielding results that the Tuvans find strange and unrelated to their own music. In Portland, HHT performs in a hall whose backstage area is prey to New Age enthusiasts who rush back after the performance to demonstrate their own throat-singing prowess and to discuss the healing power of harmonics that “harmonize the body at the cellular level” (7).
Levin covers a great deal of time and distance in Where Rivers and Mountains Sing, and the book zigzags through both dimensions at its beginning and end. In these sections he treats the following subjects: his struggle getting to Tuva in the early days of perestroika; his first visit in 1987; the difficult task of finding the music he sought behind the carefully choreographed performances instituted according to the Soviet national culture policy; his making of the first commercial Folkways recording of throat-singing; the eventual dispersal of Tuvan performers to the West; and the surprisingly warm reception and, ultimately, appropriation of Huun-Huur-Tu’s music for the film The Fast Runner. For readers interested in this rich history, including insights on many of the issues inherent in this example of globally peripatetic music, these sections might be most thoroughly absorbed by breaking Levin’s graceful narrative weaving into a timeline that clarifies the chronology and relevant issues over the long duration of his Tuvan experience.
For the present reader, however, the most interesting parts of Levin’s work occur between the sections that begin and end the book. Throughout the book and by design, Levin may offer generalities concerning the topic he addresses, but he focuses on the members of the HHT ensemble, their music, and their observations on the current and historical place of throat-singing. Luckily for him, they are not only talented musicians, but articulate, self-aware, and forthcoming with information that is often difficult to elicit from performers.
At the end of chapter 1, Levin introduces the dense aurality of Tuvan rural culture that will be the subject of much of the rest of the book with a thesis concerning the origins of throat-singing: “Throat-singing...had not been a performance art among the Tuvan herders. On the contrary, it was part of highly personal dialogue between humans and the natural world.” He begins the large middle section with a description of two expeditions he takes with members of the Huun-Huur-Tu ensemble. During the first, Levin comes upon Tolya Kuular singing borbangnadyr (“rolling”) at a distance from his comrades. Their conversation at the conclusion of Tolya’s song lays out for the reader the origin of the genre called borbangnadyr, whose sound is intended to imitate the flow of water: its musical form arises from the sounds of the private correspondence between the singer and what Levin translates as “local spirit-master.” By extension, other genres performed in imitation of nonmusical phenomena comprise conversation between the performer and the spirit associated with the imitated phenomenon.
The second adventure consists of the search for a cave known among musicians for its reverberant properties and its resident spirit master. After a long hike, Levin’s small team finally finds the cave, climbing upwards toward its entrance and inward to the deep area, cold and damp, where the resonances are right. Levin admits that the atmosphere inside the cave does not seem particularly congenial to any being, spirit or human, and indeed Tolya and Sayan Bapa perform only a short while before their hands are too cold to play. Nonetheless, the two musicians are thrilled with the effect of the cave’s reverberation on the harmonics of their songs.
This account leads into a short section on natural reverb and its special significance to Tuvan (or at least the HHT ensemble) musicians for whom density of reverb is evidence of the efficient transmission of their music’s message. Particularly susceptible to reverb is a genre of song called “long song” whose prolonged syllables sustain a reverb that amplifies them when sung in an appropriate context. The capriciousness of suitable natural reverb becomes obvious in the attempts of Kaigal-ool to demonstrate for Levin the power of a long song washed with the resonance of its own sound. On the first attempt to record in Kaigal-ool’s favorite reverberant context, he claims that the “echo is muted,” and that they must return at night for the cool air; when they return later at night, the wind and rain prevent Levin from recording; on the third try, conditions are exactly right, and Kaigal-ool tunes his voice to the natural resonances of the cliff which provides the echo. Though the natural elements of the place prevented Kaigal-ool’s performance until they were ready to participate, once willing, the cliff and surrounding features sing back to the musician in what Kaigal-ool calls “a kind of meditation--a conversation that I have with nature” (38).
The core of this long middle section begins with a chapter entitled “Listening the Tuvan Way.” With the help of Valentina Süzükei, a Tuvan ethnomusicologist, Levin distinguishes between timbral and melodic or pitch-centered listening, of which the former seems unnatural to Western listeners whose own music is thoroughly pitch-centered. Having traversed the distance between pitch and timbre herself on the way to a grasp of Tuvan instruments and music, Süzükei has a keen instinct for timbre as a perceived quantity and has found methods to help pitch-oriented listeners begin to practice a different way of listening. She urges Levin to listen to an example of xoomei by focusing first on the deep lower pitch of the drone, while actively ignoring the high pitches of the overtones. Next she instructs him to move his focus to the middle part of the sound, still ignoring the highest overtones, and then, to practice moving back and forth between regions of the sound. Ultimately, Levin devises a continuum of throat-singing genres, on one end of which are those most timbrally-centered, those whose Tuvan names often include the designation “those in themselves,” with the other end represented by genres with fixed melodies, thus most pitch-oriented.
In a later section, Levin constructs another degreed contrast to describe the kinds of imitation throat-singing employs. The contrast hinges on the degree of literal similarity or iconicity, distinguishing mimicry which is entirely literal from imitation which is somewhat less literal from mimesis which is least literal and most representational. This is a three-way contrast that is very nearly a continuum, except that Levin does not specify that there are genres of throat-singing which might fall between mimesis, imitation, and mimicry. Since one might guess that genres with the most degree of literalness are those whose harmonics are most pronounced--hence most audible as pitches--relative to the rest of the tone (i.e., the fundamental and its harmonics), one wonders if the literal/representational continuum might not parallel the pitch-centered/timbre-centered continuum. This makes logical and acoustical sense, but only Levin has the experiential evidence to know if it is so.
I would encourage readers who are especially interested in this material, which continues on for several sections, or who are intrigued by the sound orientation of Levin’s book generally, to read these passages along with listening to the appropriate CD tracks. Best of all would be to find a simple sound-analysis program that would allow readers to actually see the sounds that Levin and Süzükei discuss. For Süzükei’s exercise for Levin, for example, readers could filter the relevant xoomei (track 7 on the CD) according to the regions of the sound where Levin directs his focus. Both the CD and the DVD included with the book are wonderful, but the CD really follows the course of Levin’s discussion, with tracks containing herding sounds, aeolian Tuvan instruments, and samples of music that bring the reader right into the experience Levin describes. For many discussions of specific songs, readers who undertake a bit of spectral exploration will find that descriptions based on Levin’s aural analysis or on the Tuvan’s acuteness of hearing are acoustically-validated in almost every case.
This is a complex, informationally-dense book that fits well into recent trends toward aural phenomena. But Levin began his work long before these trends surfaced, and the nature of his research is so timbrally oriented that he could hardly have approached it in any other way, trend or no trend. No brief review could touch much of the material Levin covers--the categorization of kinds of sound imitation mentioned above is fascinating, and though his discussion is more conceptual and abstract in this section than sound-based, many of his distinctions are again confirmed acoustically. Levin has succeeded in providing even those familiar with the sounds of throat-singing a depth of ethnographic and performative substance that can only make the music more meaningful.
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[Review length: 1583 words • Review posted on September 10, 2008]