Podcast Summary
Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
Host: Maggie Freeman
Guest: Kip Grosvenor Hutchins, cultural anthropologist and author
Date: October 27, 2025
Episode Overview
This episode explores the musical, ecological, and social worlds surrounding the Mongolian horse fiddle (morin khuur), as revealed in Kip Grosvenor Hutchins' new book A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia. The conversation unpacks the deep entanglement between music, landscape, animals, and non-human entities in Mongolian culture, emphasizing how these relationships shape both heritage and adaptation to environmental crises. The episode also draws striking comparisons between Mongolia and Appalachia, two “sacrifice zone” regions grappling with climate change and cultural survival.
Key Discussion Points and Insights
1. Introducing Mongolian Musical Heritage & the Horse Fiddle
[03:17]
- Hutchins introduces his research as an anthropologist-musician, focusing on how the iconic morin khuur (horse-headed fiddle) mediates Mongolian relationships with animals, landscapes, and spiritual entities.
- The instrument’s strings are made from the tail hair of living horses, symbolizing active, ongoing connections to animal life.
"The strings of the instrument always have to be made of the tail hair of a living horse, never dead. And if you find out that the horse died, you have to change out your strings." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [05:22]
- Roughly one third of the songs for the horse fiddle are musical mimicries of horses’ gaits across different kinds of Mongolian steppe.
- Understanding the music also demands understanding the environment, livestock, and even the spiritual world (e.g., ghosts and aliens make their way into the canon).
2. "Intangible" vs. Tangible Heritage
[07:32]
- Though UNESCO acknowledges Mongolian horse fiddle music as “intangible cultural heritage,” local practitioners experience it as highly tangible due to its material and ecological rootedness.
- Everyday uses: people sing to sheep and lambs to create calmness, play for holy mountains, use the instrument in genres from heavy metal to lullabies for livestock.
"For many years, my only audience was the sheep in the fields. He was always singing on horseback to his sheep, you know, his inveterate nomad for all of his life." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [11:35]
- The horse fiddle is present in both rural, pastoral contexts and urban, cosmopolitan scenes, sometimes as part of contemporary rock or experimental music.
3. Urban-‘Steppe’ Divide in Musical Practice
[14:23]
- The distinction between nomadic and urban traditions is not a fixed binary. Many Mongolians lead lives that cross between Ulaanbaatar and the countryside.
- Historic and contemporary education systems:
- Traditional steppe methods involve informal, mimicry-based, often secret learning.
- Soviet/French conservatory models formalized musical instruction, but some genres (like “long song” and “tatlgan aez”) resist notation and must still be acquired through landscape-immersed learning.
"If you want to be a professional singer, you have to learn the landscapes that have sort of been enshrined in the institution." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [49:34]
- Key challenge: ensuring urban students maintain meaningful connections to nomadic practices and environments.
4. Climate Change and Musical Futures
[27:47]
- Mongolia is caught between threats from desertification in the south and permafrost melt in the north, with climate disasters (zud) devastating livelihoods.
- Interviewees express profound anxiety about the future viability of nomadism and traditional music in the face of climate change.
"If you're asking me if I think the world is ending for country people, then I would say yes." — Unnamed musicologist recounted by Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [29:28]
- Some see hope in the resilience of more-than-human relationships—relying on animals, spiritual networks, and ecological knowledge as a form of survival toolkit.
"Human centrism is what's destroying this... what those herders have access to is this more than human community that is sharing a precarious landscape with them." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [34:35]
5. The Long Song ("Urtiin duu"): Improvisation, Landscape, and Oral Archive
[41:15]
- Long songs are semi-improvisational pieces that encode deep relationships with the landscape, birds, horses, cosmology, and philosophy.
- The improvisational style—pace, ornamentation—directly reflects the geographical setting:
"The joke that long song singers tell is that when they look at the horizon, they read it like sheet music." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [46:17]
- These oral traditions serve as a vital archive for Mongolian history and environmental memory, especially valuable given the scarcity of written sources for nomadic peoples.
6. Immersive Music Education and Insider/Outsider Experiences
[50:05]
- Musical training for Mongolian genres is inseparable from place—students must inhabit the physical environment to grasp authenticity.
- Hutchins reflects on learning the morin khuur as a non-Mongolian, with his Appalachian background providing unexpected cultural resonances.
"Being corrected or being taught or being guided through learning different songs or playing a song wrong and then asking, like, well, what makes this song sound good?—really unravels a lot... about aesthetic and cosmology and the role of music in society." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [53:50]
7. Mongolia-Appalachia Connections
[55:53]
- The author’s Appalachian roots help him perceive structural and emotional resonances between Mongolia and Appalachia: both are sacrifice zones for extractive industries, both rely on deep community and landscape-based knowledge for resilience.
"There are these communities that are under ecological pressure... people live in particular kinds of ways. And when climate change disasters kind of started coming home, I noticed people acting in similar ways as they had in Mongolia..." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [58:30]
- Both regions are shaped by “high lonesome” sounds, ecological sacrifice, and a sense of living “in the way of the flood and the spoil heaps.”
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
-
On the existential stakes of music and environment in Mongolia:
"If you want to know about the horse fiddle, you have to know about horses and the role that they play in the way that you learn the instrument... The book kind of zooms out a little bit more to not only thinking about music and animals, but music and animals and landscapes. And then it zooms out even a little bit more past that point..." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [04:50]
-
On musical learning across landscape and culture:
”You can't really alienate [the music] out from this context... The [horsehead] fiddle does have a body, it does have certain material needs... There needs to be enough space in the keeping of the tempo that you can speed up or slow down according to the kind of mood that you're trying to generate.” — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [09:41, 24:36]
-
On rural-urban identities and climate anxiety:
“Most people in Mongolia do a little of both [nomadic and urban living]... But there is a distinction... in the form of temporalities when you are in the pasture. There are things that you need to do... that are unique to the steppe.” — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [19:16]
-
On family memory and world-ending events:
"She responded with, if you're asking me if I think that the world is ending for country people, then I would say yes." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins relaying a participant [29:28]
-
On leaving a mark for the non-human future:
"It was just about leaving a mark on the planet. So that if something else came along at the end... will know that there were some people on this landscape that were invested in art and beauty and community, and not in tearing everything down..." — Kip Grosvenor Hutchins [62:00]
Timestamps for Important Segments
- [03:17] – Hutchins introduces his work, the horse fiddle, and its animal and landscape entanglements
- [09:19] – Tangible vs. intangible heritage in daily Mongolian life; music as multi-species practice
- [14:23] – The urban-pastoral spectrum, forms of musical learning, Soviet conservatory legacy
- [27:47] – Effects of climate change (zud, desertification, permafrost thaw), resilience strategies
- [41:15] – Mongolian long songs: oral history, improvisation, and landscape pedagogy
- [50:05] – Musical training’s place-based imperatives; author’s journey as outsider-learner
- [55:53] – Mongolia-Appalachia connections: sound, sacrifice zones, strategies for survival
- [62:24] – Final reflections on survival, legacy, and hope beyond apocalyptic thinking
Takeaways
- Musical heritage in Mongolia is inseparable from the ecological and spiritual landscape—it is both a material and immaterial practice.
- Climate change intensifies the urgency of preserving and adapting these traditions, which continue to offer tools for resilience.
- Connections between rural Mongolia and Appalachia highlight shared struggles against extractive economies and environmental precarity.
- Music becomes an archive, a living practice, and a blueprint for more-than-human futures.
For anyone interested in the intersection of music, environment, nomadism, and survivance, this episode offers a rich, personal, and deeply layered discussion.