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

Hello there!

This week has been a very interesting one in regards to this course, and I am excited to fill you in!
Last Tuesday, we took a class field trip to Chapel Hill, where we got to see a performance by Youssou N’Dour, one of the most famous pop musicians in Senegal. The entire show was brilliant and full of incredible energy; even when I couldn’t fully grasp what was going on (there was a point where people handed the performers handfuls of dollar bills?), I could sense how much the event meant to the West African members of the audience. My favorite part of the show was that a group of audience members went up to the front and danced. Something that I found really cool was the way that Youssou N’Dour incorporated a narrative-style storyline into his performance and, of course, this sparked some ideas regarding our silk road project.
I’ve become a lot more interested in the role that the Cultural Revolution played in the current shape of modern Shamanic practices. Of course, the region that I am the most focused on (as far as origins go) is  Mongolia, but as we have learned most recently in class,  the regions of Mongolia fluctuated quite a bit. The regions that were heavily impacted by the Cultural Revolution were also impacted by the reign of the Mongols.
An article that has been especially helpful to me recently is called New Material on East Mongolian Shamanism, and it was written in 1990. Of course, newness is relative here because it is now 2016, but a lot of the content has been instrumental in my research and I am learning that when you delve into the depths of history like this, sometimes the best source really is a rather old one. This field of study (although I definitely agree with our professor Eric’s ideas about the limitations of typifying disciplines) is different from psychology in that it is not necessarily detrimental to cite a source that is old. Additionally, as I become more specific with my research the range of sources diminishes–thank god! This particular article focuses on the Shamanism of the Mongol population north and east of the Hsiang mountains up to the Yablonoj mountains, and it includes names for types of Shamans and semi-Shamans, which I thought was really cool. For instance the word for male shamans is “boge” and the word for female Shamans “iduyan.”
Anyway, I look forward to sharing how our week shapes up–on Thursday we are meeting with Tierney to put all of our research up on the StoryMap!
xoxo

This is my first blog post. Had I actually kept up with them like I was supposed to (I’m sorry) I could have given you (and me) a more fluid and clearer image of my process these past…well, this whole semester. Once I missed the first one, the big one, I kind of slipped and didn’t know how or where to pick back up. I continued my work with my fellow Hearts, but the website became this foggy intangible element that I was scared to approach. In fact, the whole researching/attacking a theme and direction process was foggy. Were any of these notes and findings actually applicable? Am I branching too far away from our decided central theme? Do I even have a firm grasp on what that theme is? Nothing felt solid or accomplished, in our group and in my own understanding of our individual and collective voice/role. Without that solid evidence and feeling, I had no idea what I could possibly write. Obviously, it would’ve helped had I just reached out immediately, but I didn’t. And here we are. So while I’d like to dump all those notes, feels, conflicts, and mini breakthroughs onto this entry now, I’ll allow this post to be a platform of moving forward: addressing the present as it is, and the hopes and goals to come.
Today was actually perfect for regaining my momentum with this project. Gavin Douglas (the professor of Ethnomusicology at UNCG who presented in class) reignited my confidence and excitement as he basically walked us through exactly what my group and I have been trying to attack. Our original idea having been following an instrument’s development and use across time and land, Gavin provided the foundation of a concrete history and narrative to easily follow. I was almost pissed sitting there thinking: yup, yup that’s what we’ve been looking for. No, don’t show the class the horse-head fiddle! That’s OUR thing. I’m pretty sure Emma and Emily, (who were sitting next to me, and definitely maybe sharing my thoughts), and I were ready to invite Gavin then and there into our group. Maybe interviewing him could actually be a helpful tool for us. We’ve already decided to use today and the contemporary use of musical performance as our vantage point of time to work backwards from. What if we used here, in Greensboro as the locale we’re traveling back from? Gavin even mentioned that the banjos we use in North Carolina are directly linked to movement from West Africa. Our narrative could be not only easier and more accessible for people stateside to comprehend, but it would be that much more intimate and personal to our own journey academically and physically. Musical tradition has moved and shifted a lot, and music also moves us. That’s something we should and can embody in the story and map we weave.
 

Hello old friend!
Fall break came and went, far more quickly than I think any of us intended! The day I got back on campus I holed myself up my room, picked up the books I’d left in piles on my desk, and proceeded to get really excited about our project!
We met with Eric the day before break began, and he suggested that we funnel our new direction into an even more specific area: the internationalization of silk road performative traditions and their relationship with authenticity. More colloquially, we are describing what is happening now by relating it to what it once was. This change is going to make our final map product look a whole lot cooler because the topic has the potential to span more geographical regions than our original idea did. For instance, Jilly has shown some interest in dance. Performances of traditional Mongolian dance are actually occurring across the globe now, and we could very feasibly plot a point for our project in New York City. This sense of a geographical journey will lend really well to the narrative that Eric and Zhihong are looking for.
This honestly doesn’t change my research too drastically, but it does give everything a clearer shape for me. My most recent research has involved the age of current Shamans in the regions of Mongolia. I have found that the majority of current Shamans in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia are over the age of seventy–they took up Shamanizing in their youth, thus narrowly escaping the attempts to eradicate Shamanism during the cultural revolution.
Our most recent readings for class also filled in some gaps I’ve had in my brain about Shamanic practices and their intersections with musical traditions: I learned about the way that the shamanic drum is actually traditionally played in a dissonant manner. This style of drumming is rhythmically asymmetric in an attempt to imitate the sounds of the natural world, such as whistling winds or the thumping of horses’ hooves, which I think is extraordinarily beautiful.
I think that we are going to be having a lot of really fascinating conversations about what this “authenticity” in our new topic really means; I know that in my research I have already run into a lot of seemingly silly new-agey approaches to Shamanism that seem appropriative to me. I am very interested in concepts of performativity and what necessarily makes one spiritual practice more authentic than another, so I am excited to connect my research to these new more philosophical ideas.
 

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.

A common theme in our past few group meetings has been a lack of relevancy: we all feel so caught up in current events that are taking place a mere hour from our school and therefore have been struggling to feel invested in research on something so far away, both geographically and time-wise. Elena, our angelic silkworm, was able to synthesize this uneasy sentiment and proposed a solution in last night’s meeting: what if we worked on the music and ritual of the Karakorum region right now and then worked backwards into history from there? Up until now we have been confusedly sifting out certain chunks of information because we felt like they weren’t relevant or weren’t the right era, but this way we can include any valuable items of interest. I think that this change will allow us to feel more directly connected to our research, and it will make Youtube a more relevant resource for us: we can actually watch current musical rituals online.