The Music of Central Asia is a class that I took in the spring of 2024, and participating in it was one of the most enriching experiences I have had as a student at Wesleyan. As a person who thoroughly enjoys music and plays several instruments myself, I had no idea about the huge range of topics, genres, instruments, ethnic peoples, and regions that this course would cover. I learned about everything from the influence of Islam on the creation of music and musical instruments, to indigenous musical practices, to epics and the bards who have recited them for centuries. The knowledge that I gleaned from this course will stick with me for lifetimes, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I wanted to showcase my final project here to further emphasize the impact that this course had on me.
How Does The Earth Speak?: Placing the Relationships Between Land and Spirituality In the Music of Altai-Sayan Peoples
There are myriad factors that encompass the ways in which normative Western society chooses not to hear the Earth speak, many of which are rooted in colonialism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism. They choose not to see the land as an autonomous actor, despite the ways in which it has shown itself to retaliate against humanity. Many choose not to see the inherent spiritual nature of the land, and how it can connect individuals back to themselves. In doing so, they effectively overlook and undermine the ways in which humanity can learn from the land, not only for spiritual purposes, but for musical ones as well.
For my creative project, I am interested in exploring the relationships between land and spirituality, and how the intricacies found within these ideas are all woven together to tell a cultural story about the unique music and instruments created by the Indigenous peoples of the Altai and Tuva Republics. Through situating the interconnectedness of land and spirituality, I aim to visibilize the Indigenous ways of being and interacting with the environment that the normative Western world has largely overlooked or ignored. In opposition to this, for my original composition entitled “How Does the Earth Speak?” I provide practical ways of seeing the world through spoken word poetry that attempts to marry Western musical traditions and mimesis found in the music of the Altai-Sayan peoples. I draw upon examples of drone-overtone music in order to do so and use a variety of electric versions of instruments such as the Turkish Oud lute and the Saz zither to create an original composition with spoken word poetry to accompany the instrumentals. I draw upon my own experiences with nature in my hometown of Marietta, Ga, which is a region that is characterized by various mountains, forests, rivers/creeks, and open fields. I would like to tell a story that can combine both Western and Altai-Sayan ways of seeing, hearing and interacting with music in order to express that all ways of interpreting the world are valid and essential.
Within the soundscapes of the peoples from the Altai-Sayan regions and that of nomadic and formerly nomadic peoples throughout the greater Central Asian region, the notion that music is tied to the landscape is critically essential to music and instrumental production and cultural identity. From the rocky steppes of the Altai Mountain range to the sprawling valleys of the Uba, to the extensive amount of rivers found within the Gobi Altai, the ethnic groups within the region have found and continue to find communion and communication not only with the nature, but also with non-human persons such as animals or spirits. From this vastly diverse ecological and spatial region has emerged a musical tradition comprised of drone-overtone and timbre-centered vocal and instrumental music that reflects the uniqueness of the landscape. According to Theodore Levin, in Timbre-Centered music, the pitch of each note doesn’t really mean much. In fact, pitch is subordinate to timbre – which is the specific quality of a tone determined by the presence, distribution, and relative amplitude of overtones (Levin 2010, 47.) This type of music requires listening with a different ear – one that is tuned to the drone rather than the melody, like in Western Music. It also requires seeing the world differently. When describing the concept of timbre-centered music, musicians often use analogies and metaphors that draw upon nature or the environment. Featured below is an example from the book, which is an excerpt of an interaction between the Valentina Süzükei and an igil player:
‘Look over there at those mountains. Look at the shadows. There’s a spot from the sun, shadows from the clouds, there are mountains that are closer, mountains that are farther away. They have different colors. Now it’s changed. A shadow has suddenly appeared where only a second before, there was light.’ (Levin and Süzükei 2019, 47)
This metaphor clearly outlines the importance of nature in the understanding of timbre-centered music.
Historically, nomadic peoples would migrate between the mountainous areas and the pastoral areas on a seasonal basis, and this frequent mobilization directly correlates with the type of instruments the inhabitants of the Altai Mountain region created and played. Thus, many of the instruments generated through the nomadic musical tradition are mimetic – they seek to “represent or imitate rhythmic patterns imported from the real world, some rhythmically symmetrical, like the gallop of a horse, and others irregular, like the lope of a camel.” (Levin et al. 2016, 35) Additionally, the vocal technique known globally as “throat-singing” or kai and khoomei by Altai and Tuvan peoples, respectively (Pegg 2023, 20), is a technique which many Indigenous peoples of this region incorporate in their music. It highlights the relationship between place and identity and is rooted in the “soundscape of their local acoustic environment” (Pegg, 22).
Another important factor in the music of nomadic peoples of the Altai Mountains is animism, which is described as the “the attribution of human(-like) subjectivity, agency, and emotion to nonhumans”(Pegg, 26). Nonhumans can include anything from plants and animals, to rivers or lakes, to instruments. There is an incredibly nuanced relationship between sound and energy, and through practices such as ritual performances, one can become aligned with a spirit-owner in the land by listening to or playing an instrument that incorporates the drone-overtone sounds. By rooting these traditions in the landscape, the Indigenous peoples of the Altai region have gleaned an incredibly essential understanding that the Western world has not seemed to grasp: that humans should adapt to the needs and nuances of the landscape, rather than the landscape adapting to the needs and nuances of humans. This is a notion that is explored in Leanne Betasamosake Simpsons’ chapter entitled “Land As Pedagogy” from her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017). While her work is centered around the Anishinaabe peoples who are indigenous to the Great Lakes region of Southern Canada and the Northern United States, I believe the sentiment still remains, as they are a people group that also hold animistic and shamanistic ideologies. She says that within the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg epistemology, “The land is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner led and profoundly spiritual in nature. Coming to know is the pursuit of whole-body intelligence practiced in the context of freedom…” This process of knowing in the context of Altai-Sayan peoples resonates heavily when considering the fact that the nature of timbre-centered music is not only rooted in the land, but also in the instruments themselves. Many of the instruments of this region are tied to the land because they draw from its materiality, whether it be a jaw harp made from the wood of a tree or a lute with strings crafted from the innards of an animal. Additionally, whole-body intelligence and experience is developed through the playing of an instrument, which acknowledges the animate nature of each instrument. When a musician plays the jaw harp, for example, it is said that they can experience spiritual and physical healing from its droning sound. It is not only a physical knowing that comes from playing this instrument, but an internal and spiritual one, emphasizing the embodied relationship between spirit and land.
The final factor I would like to emphasize that further enmeshes the relationship between spirituality and land within the music of the Altai-Sayan peoples are storytelling, legends, and folklore. Throughout Central Asia, there are several epics and legends that have existed for centuries which have morphed, changed, and expanded over time. They can serve as stories that bring the community together and create a strong sense of cultural identity. They can span a vast range of topics, from creation tales, to heroic epics, to origin stories of different musical instruments. This last topic is of great interest to me, because I have found that stories related to either the creation of or the playing of musical instruments often contain spiritual content and are rooted in the landscape as well. To return to my previous example, the jaw harp, known among the Altai peoples as the khomus, is implicated in the spiritual beliefs of the peoples, as well as their connection to the land. Although the origins of the instrument are shrouded in mystery, the cultural impact of the instrument still remains to this day. Used for shamanic rituals, it is said that the khomus has the ability to heal sickness and that its sound can induce a trance-like state. As a mimetic device, it is used for communicating and connecting with non-human actors of the environment, such as frogs, birds, insects, and plants. Below is an excerpt from the Sacred Hoop magazine, which outlines an ancient story about the jaw-harp.
Gift From the Bear
‘Long ago a great hunter, in the depths of winter, was tracking a bear that he intended to kill for its meat and fur. He spent many days tracking it through bad weather and hardship when he eventually caught sight of it further up the mountainside which he was climbing. Taking care to remain upwind so the bear would not be alerted to his scent, he maneuvered himself into a position to shoot the bear with his arrows. But as he drew closer he could see that the bear was preoccupied with a tree branch, probably searching for berries or grubs. The hunter heard the grunts of the bear but then heard something else, a wonderfully rich springy sound. Looking over to the bear, the hunter realized that it was deliberately pulling at a branch that had suffered damage by wind or lightning and was shattered into several long pieces. The bear was so engrossed in this activity that it seemed to have no awareness of the hunter’s presence. As the bear pawed again at the branch the hunter realized that it was causing the branch to make a wonderful springing sound as it vibrated, and this sound had captivated the bear. The hunter was so amazed and delighted with this that he honored the bear and let it live. He then spent many hours by the fire trying to create the same sorts of sounds himself with springy pieces of wood.’ (Sacred Hoop 2007, 20)
This story quite evidently points out the relationship between land and animism, and highlights how important both of these factors are in the cultivation of a musical tradition that is rooted in the earth.
Works Cited
“Jaw Harps – A Shamanic Tool.” Sacred Hoop, 2007. https://www.sacredhoop.org/Articles/Jaw-Harps.pdf .
Levin, Theodore, Saida Daukeyeva, and Elmira Köchümkulova (eds). 2016. The Music of Central Asia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Levin, Theodore Craig, and Valentina Süzükei. 2019. Where Rivers and Mountains Sing : Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond. New edition. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Pegg, Carole. 2023. Drones, Tones, and Timbres : Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes. First edition. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done : Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
