After hours of planning, meeting, researching, writing, organizing, contemplating, and finally completing, our project is at an end. I’d like to use this post to voice my thoughts on the last days of this process and showcase some of my findings that didn’t quite make it to the team StoryMap.
I found Tengger Cavalry and Hanggai through a music discovery platform, and a few posts from the same platform popped up in my searches throughout the project. A number of these mentioned an individual called Ethnic Zorigoo, a singer who, like many other Mongolian musicians, incorporates elements of throat singing and traditional themes into his work. Unlike many of the other musicians I’ve found, he doesn’t shy away from more modern genres like hip-hop and techno. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any biographical information or news articles about him that also happened to be in English, but I found his music interesting and unconventional enough to merit a mention.



My search for information on Tengger Cavalry actually turned up a second metal band, Nine Treasures, based in Inner Mongolia. I decided not to include them on the story map as I already had a metal band, but I thought I’d include some of their music in this post to showcase another style of Mongolian metal.

The last few weeks of our project have been at once intense and relieving for me. Once we had put everything together, it was just a matter of adding the finishing touches and preparing for our presentation. On one hand, I appreciate having some academic weight lifted off my shoulders. On the other hand, I really enjoyed working with the wonderful people in Team Heart and I feel that I gained quite a bit of knowledge and a number of valuable experiences over the course of this semester. It’s been a wild ride, but I don’t regret it in the least.

It’s been a long time since my last blog post, so I thought I’d make this one a double post of sorts. Since our “soft final deadline” before the real final deadline is more or less right now and I’m running a bit behind, I’m hoping to use today and tomorrow to blog about and finalize my work before the Heart Group StoryMap is complete.
I’ve refined my research topic to focus on modern Mongolian music groups, and I’m hoping to have a point for each one. I’ll be covering the first two of these in this blog post.
The first music group I chose to research is a metal band called Tengger Cavalry. I actually happened upon this band on a music discovery platform long before the beginning of this course. Although I was surprised at first to learn that a Mongolian metal band had made inroads into the American metal scene, I later discovered that Tengger Cavalry was, oddly enough, based in New York City. It turns out that even though the band’s lead, Nature Ganganbaigal, was born in China and is proud of his Mongolian heritage, he started the band while attending school at NYU.
The music may be made in America, but it’s true to its Mongolian roots. The band’s name is derived from Tengger or Tengri, the sky god in the Mongolian shamanic tradition, and their songs derive themes from shamanic ritual, cavalry exercises, and ancient war campaigns. The music itself is performed using a mixture of typical metal instruments such as drums and electric guitars, and traditional Mongolian instruments like the morin khuur, better known as the horsehead fiddle. Their songs also feature Nature’s throat-singing (also known as khuumei/khoomei/xoomei), a technique in which a single singer manipulates their voice to produce multiple overtones.


My second music group is also a rock band, but of a very different genre. Beijing-based Hanggai combines traditional Mongolian folk themes and lyrics, sung in Mongolian, with elements of punk and alternative rock. Like Tengger Cavalry, they also integrate throat-singing techniques and the morin khuur into their music.
Hanggai was formed by its singer and frontman Ilchi, who was born in Inner Mongolia but moved to Beijing with his family when he was 12. He has since returned to Inner Mongolia, where he learned throat-singing and began to write songs for his newly-formed band. To some extent, Hanggai’s songs reflect Ilchi’s own journey to rediscover his ancestral culture in the environment of modern China, where it seems to be rapidly disappearing.

Before I end this blog post, I’d like to talk a bit about the research process so far.  Although I’ve managed to locate numerous Mongolian music groups, it’s been much more difficult to find information about them. Most of my knowledge of these bands comes from their own bios and scattered news articles, and the few scholarly sources I have refer not to them, but to broader topics such as the cultural role of throat-singing and the rise of Mongolian hip hop. As a result, some time ago, I shifted my focus away from in-depth analysis of any one group and towards the production of a “tour” of modern Mongolian music. There are countless different bands, and given my time constraints and the limitations of our project, I can’t hope to cover more than five. That said, I do want to cover a few prominent groups, and at present it looks like I’ll be able to arrange my points so that the StoryMap viewer travels closer to Mongolia as they progress through them. Crunch time is upon us, so I hope to have another blog post with another group or two ready by tomorrow evening.
Sources:
Pegg, Carole. “Mongolian Conceptualizations of Overtone Singing (xöömii).” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 1 (1992): 31-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3060726.
Marsh, Peter K. 2010. “Our generation is opening its eyes: hip-hop and youth identity in contemporary Mongolia.” Central Asian Survey 29, no. 3: 345-358. Humanities International Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 7, 2016).
“Tengger Cavalry,” Tengger Cavalry. 2015, accessed November 7, 2016. http://www.tengger-cavalry.com/
Great Big Story. One Part Metal, One Part Mongolian Throat Singer. Video, 2:00. November 10, 2015. https://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/one-part-metal-one-part-mongolian
Kelly, Kim. “Heritage, Horses,and Tengger Cavalry: Inside the World of Mongolian Folk Metal.” VICE Noisey. April 30, 2015. https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/tengger-cavalry-interview-stream
Lim, Louisa. “Hanggai: Chinese Punk Looks to the Past.” NPR. November 10, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95430242

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been so occupied with our first map test, thesis work, and other assignments that I allowed myself to put blogging and research, with their indefinite deadlines and relatively low pressure, on the back burner for a while. As I mentioned in my initial blog post, time management isn’t a major strength of mine, and I have some work to do before I’ll be able to develop a consistent blogging schedule. That said, I regret going for so long without so much as a single post, so I’ll use this one to explain a bit of what I’ve been doing since my first.
Team Heart has been meeting fairly regularly, and while we all have busy schedules and a multitude of intellectual endeavors demanding our time, we still manage to get together once or twice a week to discuss research and classwork. We’ve all been wonderfully supportive of each other as we embark on this part-journey, part-experiment of a course. Our research topic has changed a few times as we’ve uncovered new information or come up with new ideas for our narrative. At the moment, each of us is pursuing a different aspect of our central focus, music and religion in the Mongolian steppe (or roundabouts). At our last meeting, we decided it might be best to shift our focus from a study of the past up to the present, and seek instead to examine some practices of music and ritual in the present and trace their origins back to the past. Our exact geographic region, and the path taken by our story map, will become more clear as our research progresses.
My own research topic has also changed somewhat. Previously, I was looking into the use of music in shamanic ritual. While I have found some information on that topic, it’s still relatively scarce. There are two different (but by no means mutually exclusive) directions I’m considering taking my research in. Not too long ago, I recalled that I had heard of throat singing, an interesting vocal technique practiced in multiple regions of Central Asia including Mongolia and Tibet. I plan to do some research on throat singing in the Mongolian steppe and see if it’s involved, or has been involved, in any religious rituals or healing practices.
The second avenue of research I’m considering involves choosing a modern music group and examining different aspects of their performance and instrumentation with the hope of uncovering the roots of each. Although I haven’t begun any scholarly inquiry about the subject just yet, I have heard of at least one Mongolian metal band that employs throat singing and traditional instruments to produce their music. I may be able to examine a few of their songs and determine the cultural influences contributing to their style. For now though, I’m mostly just hoping to survive midterm week. With luck, I’ll have some time over Fall break to catch up on the research I’ve missed over the last couple of weeks.

Hello everyone. I haven’t really blogged before, so I’m not quite sure how to begin, but I’ll give it a shot. I’m a member of the Heart Team, although, like Emily, I was previously a member of the Earth Team. My team transfer initially left me a bit out of the loop. The Heart Team already had a general idea of their focus when I joined, but my new group members and our Silkworm Elena were kind enough to get me up to speed. We eventually decided, based on the collective interests of all Heart teammates, to chart a dual course combining elements of music and dance with religion and ritual. Our newly-established focus led us to examine the cultures of the steppe, where we discovered Mongolian horse culture and the horsehead fiddle. Our topic is temporally broad at the moment, stretching as far into the past as the invention of the iconic instrument and as close to the present as the Mongolian metal scene, but I’m confident that we can create something great out of the wealth of information we stand to uncover.
I serve as the facilitator for the Heart Team. I took on the role when group members noticed that even in my first meeting with the team, I was listening to everyone and offering solutions to potential conflicts in an effort to help guide the brainstorming process. My role also involves keeping group members up to date on the research process and organizing meetings and discussions as they become necessary throughout the process. I haven’t had to perform these duties just yet, but I’m prepared to help keep things on track whenever the need arises. In terms of research, my focus is primarily on the role of music in religious ritual. I also hope to look into how music might be involved in medical practices, if I can find resources on the subject. I’m planning to focus on steppe practices of Shamanism first, and branch out if I can’t find enough information on that topic, or if I come across anything else that I find particularly interesting.
I’ve never conducted a project like this before. From the looks of it, neither have most people in this (completely new) class. I have some limited experience with programming within the relatively specialized setting of a physics laboratory (and maybe a little dabbling with Python), but I don’t consider myself very technologically proficient when it comes to creating digital content. Most of my code has been written for machines (or bewildered humans who aren’t quite sure why hypothetical rockets are hitting the center of Andromeda at the speed of light), so I’ll have to learn a new design mentality alongside any new coding skills I acquire. That said, I have used programming languages before so I hope the thought process isn’t too foreign to me should I need to pick up coding again. Web design on the other hand is an entirely new experience for me, and while it feels relatively intuitive at this early stage, I’m sure the project will find ways to challenge me that I haven’t even begun to think of just yet.
It might also be prudent to mention that I don’t have much of a background in history or religious studies. Although I greatly enjoyed the one religious studies class I’ve taken here at Guilford (Eric’s Tibetan and Himalyan religions comes highly recommended, just be prepared for a challenge), as a lab science double major (Biology and Chemistry), I haven’t had much space in my schedule to take any others. That said, religion and spirituality have always interested me. I don’t consider myself religious or particularly spiritual (I don’t have any adamant convictions one way or the other), but I enjoy learning about and considering all sorts of spiritual and philosophical traditions. I bring this up because I realize that in this endeavor, enthusiasm may be no substitute for genuine depth of knowledge and experience. I expect to learn a whole host of new terms, ideas, modes of thought, customs, rituals, worldviews, and much more. I also expect to have to ask for help somewhere along the way. There will likely come a point where I’m researching a topic that requires insights that others may possess. In this case, I plan to bring up the issue with my teammates and see if our combined capabilities can’t take care of it.
In a similar vein, I don’t have much musical experience. Long ago in ages gone past, my teenage self purchased a guitar to practice with for the summer and more or less forgot about it around a month later. Aside from that non-expertise, I don’t really have any musical background to speak of. Nevertheless, I’m excited to look into musical traditions in the hope that I might learn more as I progress. If our musical research becomes too technical for my limited expertise, I’ll focus more on the ritual side of things and leave the more advanced details to those with the skills to handle them. I’m also looking forward to listening to many different musical pieces as the project progresses, and potentially broadening my taste in music as well.
As I’ve already repeated more than enough times, I haven’t really done anything like this before. I’ve tended to do well with writing-focused research projects in the past, so I’m fairly confident as far as the research side of things is concerned. I do sometimes have issues with time management and sometimes find myself submitting assignments just past the deadline (look at the time this post was created), but I’m aware that I’ll have keep such tendencies in check for the benefit of the group. That said, I also do my best work when I’m given ample time to produce it. As a result, I’ll have to keep constant track of deadlines and make sure to set aside enough time for each stage of the project if I want to succeed. Though it will likely test many of my current skills and a few I haven’t learned yet, I’m looking forward to working with the Heart Team on this exciting endeavor.