{"id":1023,"date":"2016-11-08T01:33:13","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T05:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/silkroad.guilford.edu\/?p=1023"},"modified":"2016-11-08T01:33:13","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T05:33:13","slug":"mongolian-music-double-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/team-heart\/mongolian-music-double-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Mongolian Music Double Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.
\nI’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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.
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