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A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia
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- [00:00]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Every drop of Jack Daniels is mellowed through sugar maple charcoal, giving Jack its smooth taste. That's what makes Jack Jack. Please drink responsibly. Jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee this episode.
- [00:17]
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- [00:47]
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- [01:21]
Maggie Freeman
Hello and welcome to Nomads Past and Present, a podcast about nomadism and nomadic peoples around the world and throughout history. I'm your host, Maggie Freeman and my guest today is Kip Grosvenor Hutchins. Kip is a cultural anthropologist and currently visiting Assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College. His research examines the relationship between music and the environment, especially in post socialist Mongolia and Southern Appalachia. His book A Song for the Musical Heritage for More Than Human Futures in Mongolia was just published by the University of Arizona Press and that's what we'll be talking about today. So thank you so much Kip for joining me.
- [02:04]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Thank you for having me.
- [02:05]
Maggie Freeman
So I'm very excited to be talking to you today about your work. I have followed you on first Twitter and now Blue sky for a long time, but I hadn't read any of your work and didn't know too much about its actual content until reading your book. And so my impression of your work from just like social media was that it's sort of about like Mongolia and music, but also maybe about Appalachia was just the general like impression that I got. So I was very happy to be able to learn more about your actual research from reading your book and to be able to talk to you about it today. And I'm also really interested in learning more about this Mongolia Appalachia connection. So we'll get there. But first, if you could just explain to listeners just the kind of general gist of the research that went into this book. What's the kind of context of your research that this book is about?
- [03:18]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Right, well, so I'm a cultural anthropologist with a music background. So when I started first going to Mongolia, I asked people like, what should I do with my life? I was asking my teachers and everything, said, we want you to write a book about Mongolia. And so I was like, okay. So then I went back to the U.S. did my Ph.D. in anthropology. And then when I was doing my research, I asked all these musicians like, what's really important to know about Mongolian traditional music, especially this key iconic instrument in Mongolian traditional music called the modenkur, or I translate it as the horse fiddle. It's commonly rendered in English through actually a Japanese neologism as the horse headed fiddle. Because it's this two string bowed lute with a trapezoidal body has this really iconic horse's head carved into the scroll. And it's actually an instrument that a lot of Americans have heard, even if they don't know that it's Mongolian music. Like the first big Chinese metal band to make it to the West, Tang Dynasty, had a moronhoer player from Inner Mongolian. So it of permeates the soundscape of North Asian music that we hear, but we don't know that much about. And so when I was asking people in Mongolia, I want to teach Americans or Anglophones something about this instrument, what's the most important thing they need to know. And all the people that I was talking to, all my teachers and the good old teachers at the Arts and Culture University and National Conservatory at Ulaanbaatar, more or less like started with, if you want to know about the horse fiddle, you have to know about horse sciss and the role that they play in the way that you learn the instrument, the way that you learn to be a listener of the instrument, and so on and so forth. So that was step one was, okay, now I'm going to ask people about the relationship between this instrument and horses. And it's a deeply entangled thing. 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. It's really close physical relationship. There's a huge canon, like one third of the songs for this instrument are mimicry of different gates of horses running over different kind of parts of the step. So that's step two. But then when you want to know about the role of livestock in a nomadic encampment, and especially through a cultural or a philosophical kind of sense, then you have to know about the landscape. What is the quality of the step that the horses are running over that you're trying to mimic? And so then 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. Because if you really want to know about the social role of a landscape, if you want to know about the social role of the steppe in a nomadic context, then a whole host of other spirits get involved or other non human entities. So at the end of the book, we're really thinking about the relationships, relationship between music and non human animals and the environment. And the more than natural, I guess we could say, like ghosts come in to play ancestors. Conceptions of interstellar aliens kind of find their ways into the music in ways that typically when we talk about something like cultural heritage or traditional music, the box is really small and it's very past looking. It's very 19th or 20th century looking. But we end up in this space by the end of the book that this research has kind of taken me to every kind of relationship that a person can really have with something other than human that is facilitated through the performance of this music.
- [07:32]
Maggie Freeman
Yeah. Something that stood out to me in your book is you write about, correct me if I'm recollecting the details of this wrong, that this form of music was enshrined in the UNESCO intangible Cultural Heritage whatever list thing as an example, as a kind of. I think it was the first example from Mongolia, if I'm correct, the first example of intangible cultural heritage from Mongolia to be kind of designated as such by UNESCO. But then I think a couple of the interlocutors that you write about in your book sort of make the point that for them it's not intangible. It's actually very tangible for a lot of those reasons that you just mentioned, like the form, the kind of materiality of the fiddle itself, its relationship to living horses, and then its relationship as they kind of perceive and practice it, its relationship to the actual living physical environment. So could you talk a little bit more about that, I guess about just how this form of musical practice is sort of integrated into people's just like everyday lives? I guess because you have a lot of interesting examples of individuals who practice this who play the horse fiddle in so many different contexts and for so many different reasons. So could you talk a little bit about just like how it shows up in just like daily life in Mongolia? I guess.
- [09:19]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah. So, you know, there is this kind of tendency in the Western institution to kind of alienate things, right? Or at least render things alienable into these kind of discrete categories. And one of these categories is like intangible culture versus tangible culture, which becomes really relevant when you're in the heritage space, right? Like funding streams become available to your practice on the basis of what kind of heritage management you're doing. And there's this tricky kind of division there where something like music becomes intangible but in the lives of everyday people. The reason why we could even start to consider music as a multi species or like a more than human endeavor is that you can't really alienate it out from this context. Right. Like the horsehead fiddle does have a body, it does have certain material needs. This is of course not exclusive to Mongolia. Right. Like in Japan, like the Sanshin is dependent on groves of ebony trees, right. So there's this necessity of a certain kind of set series of ecological and social relations that go into making instrument, keeping it rosined up, making sure that it has hair, and then giving it things to play and entities to play for, not just people. And so you kind of find in practice that the range of who's going into the performance of these instruments, either participating in its construction, inspiration, or as audiences, is a lot bigger than we might give it credit for in a kind of Western institutional setting. So, like, there's parts of the book where, you know, there's a guy that I work with a lot in Mongolia, his name's. Or who was. Was always saying, like, you know, for many years my only audience was the sheep in the fields. He was always singing on horseback to his. To sheep. He's an inveterate nomad for all of his life and really, well, kind of attuned to what kind of singing, what kind of fiddling would be calming to hear in an environment where there are these, you know, skittish livestock animals people play or say in that kind of same sort of nomadic environment, people are singing lullabies to new mother sheep and orphaned lambs to create this calming environment that allows for them to nurse and then ends up creating this. What we. I mean, we could call it an adoption, I guess, in a way, this bonding between these livestock animals. But also, you know, there are people in the book that are singing for holy mountains or playing their fiddle for holy mountains. And in and around the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, which is. I mean, as far as these things go, I mean, for Mongolia, which has a population only 3 point, like maybe 4 million people, is a mega city. Right. It's like at certain times of the year, 50% of the population. So, you know, there are all of these really urban concerns that people go to the holy mountain on the south side of the sea and then do their traditional performance as part of maybe a little bit of a modernized and secularized, but still kind of spiritual tradition of accruing good luck through performance for sacred landscapes or things like that. But I mean, also, the horse fiddle is a mainstay of contemporary rock music. Most horse fiddle performers who go through the professional education route, very few of them actually do most of their performing in Mongolia. A lot of them pursue work in Beijing or in other parts of China or in Japan or Southeast Asia to play this kind of neo traditional canon of Mongolian music for international audiences. And there's this pretty significant industry of people moving all around Asia and like in Germany and stuff like that too. So it's kind of. It's a capacious instrument, right. Like, it has all of these different roles of plays. People are playing it for, like heavy metal or like at Harsh Noise Fest. There's like one Harsh Noise Festival in Ulaanbach. People play it for. People play it like for their own amusement out on the step. People play it in the. As backing tracks for hip hop songs. And people play the fiddle to, you know, to help camels nurse they're young, which iconically brings the camel to real tears. Right. So there's this pretty wide range on how people interface with it.
- [14:23]
Maggie Freeman
Yeah, I think what you just touched on is a big theme of your book, which is this like urban, rural, or maybe more accurately, like city step kind of divide between how horse fiddle music is learned and practiced today was sort of the sense that I got that there's this disparity between this kind of the institutionalization and maybe also commodification of horse fiddle music that's kind of concentrated in Ulaanbaatar in the kind of in the national music schools and things like that versus how it's practiced by people practicing nomadic pastoralism in the steppe regions. And I understand that there's definitely that that's not like a sort of fixed binary, that there's a lot of potentially overlap and exchange between those types of musicians. But that did seem like a really just important phenomenon in Terms of understanding how horse fiddle music is practiced and experienced in Mongolia today is this kind of distinction between in Ulaanbaatar versus in the steppe. So could you give listeners a little bit more of a sense of those kind of institutions and the different, just like sort of geographical places where horse fiddle music is taught and played?
- [16:01]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah, so this is kind of. There's an interesting aspect to this question, I think, that is sort of unique in Mongolia, because Mongolia is basically a nomadic country, right? It has a nomadic political structure. And unlike everywhere else in the world, for the most part, during the 20th, 19th and 20th centuries, it wasn't forced to adopt a sedentary political economic system. You know, when the split of the socialist world comes down and all of the other parts of nomadic North Asia eventually become absorbed either by the USSR or by kind of nascent China, the political systems in those countries are very sedentary oriented. And then you look at cases throughout, you know, the Sahel region, in the kind of in between, kind of northern and central Africa. These are all countries that have typically a sedentary political base and then a nomadic group that's like an ethnic minority. Often there's significant tension between those two groups. But Mongolia is part of this at the beginning of the 20th century, is part of this three country group of sovereign Soviet aligned nations, Tuva, Mongolia and the Far East Republic. The Far East Republic and Tuva become absorbed by the USSR around World War II. Mongolia just stays independent. And so there's a real significant difference between the relationship between nomads and the state in Mongolia and like say Kazakhstan, where there ends up being like more of a schism. Nomads end up having to kind of sort of claw back some sovereignty over the course of the 21st century. Whereas Mongolia and originally Tuva, although that, you know, it gets absorbed as part of USSR and now Russian Federation. Mongolia has this coral system. It has a nomadic economy. They tried to do collectivization in the Soviet way and it didn't work. And they had to retry again in the 1950s in a more nomadic, friendly way. So for that reason, like, the distinction between nomadic and settled in Mongolia, I think is not on a personal level. It's sort of a spatial or temporal thing, which is to say most people in Mongolia do a little of both. Even like really like dyed in the wool. Urbanites born and raised in Ulaanbaatar, many of them will spend the summer at a rural encampment. And that's a kind of nomadism. And most people who are rural Nomads spend some part of their life, maybe some part of every year in the city, either going to school or working. I stayed with a couple of nomadic pastoralists in the Gobi for a while and then came back and I just assumed they'd always been nomads because I have this hard wired into my brain that you're either a nomad or you're sedentary. And part of that is this assumption that we live on this scale of always moving towards sedentarism, like nomadism always kind of going away. But I went back to the capital after having spent the spring with these two nomadic herders. And I was just talking to a friend in the capital and she said, oh, who did you stay with down there? And I said their names. And she said, oh, next time you go, let me send you some chocolate for one of the guys that you were staying with. And I was like, well, you know him. And she said, yeah, we used to work together here in Ulaanbaatar. And I interviewed another guy who's a 75 year old herder, who is considered a lifelong herder in, in the Gobi. But 30 of those years he spent in a little tiny box in a settled kind of a small town as a train track switcher. So he's, you know, these are the thing that is like nomadism, like comes back as often as it goes away. But there is a distinction, there is a distinction between living nomadically and living sedentarily, but it just plays out at different points and different points of the year. During the winter you don't need that many people at a nomadic encampment. A lot of people can go back to the city and during the spring and fall a lot of people are needed around. You have to do a lot of milking and a lot of butchering and there's livestock breathing season. So nomadic encampments really swell and lots of people come and join. And so there's a kind of like new 21st century version of nomadism. But that distinction exists in the form of like, there are certain temporalities when you are in the pasture. There are things that you need to do. There are kind of folkways and sort of ways of being that are unique to the steppe. And one of those is kind of a way of learning. Traditionally, in a kind of pre modern setting, you wouldn't teach anyone the horse fiddle. Officially you would not be expected to. It would be considered inappropriate in fact to play the fiddle if you couldn't already finish the song that's the like deep kind of pre modern, pre socialist kind of tradition. And so you would learn in secret, basically, you'd watch and you'd listen and then you, you kind of take in the thing and then you'd steal the fiddle. When the older people in the ACM in are out doing something and practice and practice and practice. And then one day I know how to play jonang ha and you play jon hung ha, right? That's like the kind of premier ends. So that's very tactile. It's very mimicry oriented. It's not we. I guess in ethnomusicology you could say it's kind of an informal style. It's non institutionalized. And then there's this institutional style that's really rolled out in a major way in the 20th century in the kind of Soviet conservatory model, which itself was a French conservatory model. And those are always urban, those are urbanizing centers, right? Anywhere you put one of those cultural centers, you create a town around it, basically, right? That is a conservatory system that I think is very recognizable to people in the United States. Like I spent a lot of time in conservatories on both sides of the. Of. Well, I mean, not the ocean, the ocean of grass, I guess. And again, it's very similar. It's very structured. Time is very regimented. You have certain things you have to do. You have to learn Western music theory. But there are certain genres that you can still only really learn in that mimicry oriented way. And when the institutions were being established, early thinkers like in Outer Mongolia, this would be Jamian is the big name on this, on the modernizing. He's a cellist and a horse head fiddle and a horse fiddle player who really modernized the instrument and created the institutional form of education. And in Inner Mongolias would be chi bullock. And basically independently around at the same time, they both came up with the idea that you could write sheet music and you could do music theory for a lot of Mongolian music, but for the two kind of key heritage genres. Long song in Mongol and then another genre called tatlgan aez, which literally means like kind of what means like pulling, right? So it's this kind of rhythmic dance kind of genre that is really mimetic of horses and camels and to a lesser degree bulls that you couldn't write it down. Long song's very improvisational, it's very personal, it's very tied to landscape. And tatlik or tatlik and Aya's is not really meant to be really Firmly regimented according to the rhythm, There should 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. And so neither of them do well. Like if you look at, you look at sheet music for a long song that has been written and it will be like six notes that have been written to encapsulate a three minute long song. Right. So there's a lot more going on there. Right. And the idea with that is that you need to learn that in a kind of pastoral way. That for Tatul Ganayas, you need to really be able to inhabit the space of like the horse riding the horse across the step, or the kind of particular moaning and bellowing that mother camels do at dusk. That these are nomadic sounds that do not travel well into the institution and that for long song there needs to be. You need to be kind of drenched in a particular landscape. To some degree, throat singing is that polyphonic throat singing is like this as well. That you need to be able to really perform into a landscape, a rural landscape especially to play in a way that other musicians will catch as being or will interpret as being really authentic. Now, authenticity obviously is a tricky term in music, but that's generally the local definition. And part of the reasoning behind that is pretty much every music teacher who's like 40 or older grew up in a nomadic encampment nomadizing, or at least spent some part. I mean, a lot of them go into the conservatory system at like age 10 or maybe as early as 6. So they have this close relationship with like kind of urban life as well. But also during the socialist period, you were expected as a professional musician to go around to rule encampments and perform. That was a big part of the socialist kind of system, was you had all these cultural centers and you didn't just sit in Ulaanbaatar for your whole career. You spent months out of the year going to these rural encampments. So even people I interviewed who really were like born and bred city people who had didn't have any experience with nomadism before, over the course of being a professional musician, were going out to nomadic encampments and riding horses and doing this and that and learning new songs, they do, they attribute these trips as being really useful for learning new songs. If you are my age or younger, after the transition from socialism to capitalism, we have this kind of 10 years of basically no economy in Mongolia throughout the 1990s, very difficult time. And then Climate change really comes online for North Asia around the same time. We've got permafrost melt going on in Siberia for a long time at this point. So it gets really tough. And the tough times are really hard on rural people, especially on nomads with mass urbanization, huge growth in urban settlements, especially Ulaanbaatar, So that most of the people who are younger, going through the conservatory system, many of them do not have this nomadic background. That is a schism that for sure, the older teacher, or like the teachers, the teacher's generation, the kind of older generations are nervous about, but they conceptualize it not so much as, like, a distinction in the character of the students themselves as being, like, urban versus rural or nomadic versus settled, but as a lack of access as, like, how can we make sure that our students have enough access to horses, for example?
- [27:47]
Maggie Freeman
Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think I'm also thinking about, though, like, you just brought up, you know, I understand that in Mongolia, sort of practices of nomadism at some point in people's lives is just much more common than in any other part of the world, really. But you just brought up anthropogenic climate change, which is really affecting the just viability of nomadic pastoralism, at least as a lifestyle. And that's a kind of concern that many of the people you interview express that sort of anxiety about the changing environment and really experiencing very immediately the effects of climate change on themselves, their families, their lifestyles, their herds, et cetera. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that kind of the environmental aspect of your research, which is really about how the musicians that you worked with, how they are envisioning futures within, despite, against this sort of backdrop of contemporary climate change, how they're envisioning that and expressing that through music. So can you talk a little bit about that kind of environmental element of your research?
- [29:25]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah, There's a funny story in this that comes out in the book too, where I was doing an interview with a musicologist in Ulaanbaatar, and I just, like, you know, it wasn't somebody I knew really well ahead of time. And so I always like to kind of throw out a couple of just sort of softball, I guess I would say, questions in those cases to get the conversation started. And, like, one of my softball kind of like puff piece questions that I start with is like, where do you see this genre of music? So, like, where do you see horse fiddle music going in 20 years? Like, what do you see down the line for it. And she responded with, if you're asking me if I think that the world is ending for country people, then I would say yes. And I was kind of like, okay, all right. Like, let's get into it, right? Let's. That's a really, like, iconic, I would say, way to start a conversation. And so I asked her, like, what does she mean? She's like, well, you know, you look at Mongolia, right? And it's. It's between two of the waves of anthropogenic environmental degradation on fragile ecosystems. So we have climate change pushing down from the south, right? Like, permafrost melt's been going on forever, and Siberia kind of cuts a little bowl out of the top of Mongolia. And so the permafrost melt's been going on in Mongolia, in the Mongolian parts of Siberia, and it's kind of like creeping down, it's trending down. We have more often and intense and unpredictable winter disasters, which in Mongolia and Kazakhstan are referred to as dud z u d, which is like, we actually have the. This is one of the Appalachia crossovers, actually. We have these in Appalachia as well. But it looks different where what happens is a sea, a season of drought that is then followed by heavy precipitation will create this really fragile kind of where we'll take an already fragile ecosystem, especially one where mining is really prevalent, for example, and make this kind of set of conditions that layer and become greater than some other parts. So with Azold, like a summer of drought that's followed by a winter or even a spring, more often of really heavy snowfall will create this system where the soil is thin, the forage is really low growing or really sparse, and a layer of snow melts into a layer of ice and then a new layer of snow comes over it. And so the livestock can't get through the layer of ice to get to the forage. And we just see massive tens of thousands of heads of livestock deaths in those cases. This totally wipes out. This could potentially erase the entire wealth of a nomadic family overnight. This is the big thing, at least in kind of the north and into the west, that drives people to the city and drives people to urbanize and is really transformative, especially people's relationships with. With Siberia and the Altai. And it also, I mean, it totally eradicated the repatriation of the Jawalski's horse or the tag in western Mongolia. So there were two zones where this extinct horse was being reintroduced and it just mostly killed all of the ones that are on the Xinjiang border, right. And then coming up from the south, we have the desertification of the Gobi, which gets in American culture kind of hand waved as like those people are doing too much nomadism and that's why it's happening. But we like, no, that's like factually incorrect that the reason why this is happening is intensified agriculture as part of the Great Leap Forward dug up. I mean, it's the Dust bowl, right, that happened in the United States, also happened at the, you know, a little bit later, but in kind of the same vein in the northern part of China. And that's why the desert part starts further south, right. But it keeps creeping north. So like I work in middle Gobi province, province, which is the very northern, most northern part of the Gobi, despite its name. And so middle Gobi Province, like should be a grassland year round. Maybe at the very south it gets into kind of like sagebrush. Like in the United States you might, you might compare it to like really central Washington is the closest I've seen as a kind of calc, but, you know, kind of semi arid area. But it should never be a desert, right? That's like not what it should be. But year by year, like it gets desertier and desertier. And so people in the Gobi are aware of that. Like people in the Gobi really depend on seasonal lakes in the summer to like keep their livestock alive. And I've been working in this province since 2010. It only took five years for the first seasonal lake to dry up. So I'm 10 years deep into some of those lakes being memories. And that's like, there are parts of the country where that's not as big a problem. The far eastern parts of Mongolia, closer to the Manchuria kind of area, those are doing pretty good. Forage is still good. It's not desertifying that quickly. But this middle zone where Siberia is kind of melting downward and the Gobi is kind of drying out upwards is, is something that people are really aware of. That being said, the way that people conceptualize it kind of, there's kind of a gamut, I guess I could say the way people think about it. The woman I was talking to who brought this to my attention in the first place, who said, I think the world is ending for country people and basically conceives of history as a series of world ending events, right? That in the, like the, the. In the 1930s and 40s, the Great Purge, Stalin's Great Purge, had a Mongolia offshoot and it killed 20% of the population of the country more people per capita than were killed in the Soviet Union. This is a hugely history shattering event, right, that she, that her family lived through it. She was a victim of this and she conceptualized that as a time where people really, in order to survive, dwelt in there more than human relationships, that people depended on land and livestock in a big way to survive, that people moved with their livestock. The, you know, there's the famous story of the monastery in the southeastern part of Mongolia, Khamaringhid, which when they were destroying all the monasteries, the head monk there took all of the artifacts of Danzanoravja, who's kind of Mongolia's like Renaissance saint of Nyingma Buddhism, and buried them in the middle of the desert. And then on his deathbed told his kids where to find it. And eventually when the, the purges were over, the descendants of this original monk used their deposits knowledge of the landscape to find all of these artifacts and rebuild the monastery. It's very flourishing. It's the most well functioning Nyingma Buddhist monastery in the country today. So all these kind of stories like that, and there's a story like that that emerges in the book as well, where one of the Dai Tsu Nguy, the guy that I mentioned earlier, the old guy, maintained this really important song for Mongolian culture. Like the sun over the Plastic World is like maybe the most iconic long song. And he maintained this during a time when its public performance was banned, when the person who taught him that song was killed for disseminating Buddhist ideology by singing to sheep. Right. So he kind of tied his own survivance kind of of this time with a relationship with non human animals. And so for her at least, she conceptualizes this upcoming world ending event as a time in which people will need to rely on those same kinds of networks that human centrism is what happened. Human centrism is what's destroying this. The Gobi is what's melting the permafrost. And it's not the human centrism of the humble nomadic herder. It's, you know, in, in Mongolia or in the Saha Republic or wherever. Right. But what those herders have access to is this more than human community that is sharing a precarious landscape with them. And for her, she's sort of ambivalent as to whether she thought this was going to be possible to survive, but she just kind of was like, I have a toolkit for surviving this and that's what we're gonna start kind of needing to rely on. But I have Another kind of story in that vein, too, where I have another friend who's from Ulaanbaatar, and we were talking about the Ulaanbaatar's holy mountain on the south side of town, and she was like, oh, well, we have this mountain and it always protects us. Right. And so when the whole world floods, we're all going to sit on top of the mountain together as a kind of joke, you know, sort of grim kind of humor. But there's, you know, the similar train of logic there, I think.
- [39:09]
Maggie Freeman
Yeah. I think I'll just interject for listeners if you're interested in learning more about the. I'm going to pronounce it incorrectly, the zud. I interviewed Kenny Linden about two years ago, whose research deals quite intensively with that and its effects on livestock herding in Mongolia. I also, in January, interviewed Zozan Pehlevan, researches the effects of El Nino climate events on nomadic peoples in Anatolia. So two kind of related interviews to what Kip was just mentioning. Related to what you were just saying. You brought up the long songs, and I was really interested in their inclusion in your book because it does form a, for me, I think, a really useful kind of archive of the lyrics of these songs that, you know, a theme that comes up on this podcast invariably in every interview that I do is just like, the difficulties of accessing written sources when dealing with the histories of nomadic peoples. And this is, you know, maybe not an issue you face as an anthropologist, but for any historian, you know, just finding documentary sources is really difficult when many nomadic peoples practice a more kind of oral form of history and history kind of making and history transmission. So I really enjoyed reading just the lyrics of some of the long songs that you included. So I was hoping you could just shed a little bit more light for listeners on these long songs of sort of what the nature of their content is often like their typical form, common tropes, maybe that might appear in them, things like that.
- [41:16]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah. So the songs that appear in the book are ones that I learned from, mostly ones that either learned from people in the Gilby or in the conservatory. So I had to, like, you know, source the lyrics from them and then translate them, which is, like, kind of difficult for, I guess, reasons. I'll get into here in a minute, but I will say before I mention that, that I would be remiss if I didn't shout out a musicologist based out of Ulaanbaatar, whose name is Alima Ayushav, who has a huge collection of long Song recordings and transcriptions from all around the Mongolic speaking world. So Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Boreatia, Kalmykia. Right. Like anywhere where long songs are sung. It's just a huge, huge collection in her archive. So if there was anyone out there who wanted to do long song research, that's. I wish I had known about it before I had done all my work. But, yeah. So long song are really interesting. They are. They have this. These short, really kind of dense, poetic texts that usually kind of tap into traditional, I guess we could say, like a pastoralist philosophy. They often will pair the behaviors of natural phenomenon, like where certain trees grow, or the activities of horses of different ages and colors and temperaments or things like that, or. Or the migrations of birds as kind of an entry point to then discuss some of the kind of like big philosophical questions in life. You know, the duties of parents and children, the experience of life and death and mourning, just passing of the seasons, even these kind of cosmological kinds of issues that are then sort of unspooled over the course of these really long, semi improvisational melodies where people take that kind of core key, melodic, kind of center and improvise in between the notes to such a degree that two performances of the same song should be recognizable but wholly distinct. Right. Still sound very different. So part of the kind of pastoral philosophy that goes into these long songs is that that improvisation that really makes it a unique performance should be based on the landscape it's being performed in. So if you go to Professor Alima's collection, you will find certain long songs like Arhopcingonak, Right. The. The foal on the forested mountain that is performed in Mongolia in. In Kalmykia, you know, all the way in the Caspian Sea. Right. And performed in all these different Mongolic languages and dialects. But that each performance will have this relationship with what is sort of considered the moral character of the landscape that it's being performed in. So in the Gobi, which is the kind of standard, like if you're listening to a professional long song singer, that's the sound that you're probably going to hear, because the dundruff, the middle Gobi sound, was really popularized in the 20th century by Mongolia's equivalent to Umm Khuth um or Edith Piaf or Namjali Notaban said she's from the Gobi. So her version of singing is Gobi ish, which is to say her improvisations are really long and they unspool and they warble and they kind of push out into the step. And in order to fill the step, if you're performing outside, you have to really push, you have to really extend your voice outwards. So she has this like powerful, booming, stadium filling voice. Whereas people that I know, I work with a lot of performers from the Altai as well, right? So Altai mountain regions, relatively young mountain range is really very peaky, you know, very high. People set up their, especially their like fall encampments, right? Nestled in these little valleys out in the middle of the mountains. And performances of the same song will be more like quick, more bouncy, more upbeat, more high up and down. And the joke that long song singers tell is that when they look at the horizon, they read it like sheet music. Where when, like if you look at the horizon on the step and you get that kind of heat mirage that gives it a little kind of trill, then you do a little warbling or like if you're looking out over the mountains, then it's like, okay, I gotta go up and down and up and down in terms of the pitch height of the ornamentations that I'm doing, things like that. So that's kind of a. That's part of the concept with it. And all of these have within the kind of local, like landscape based cosmologies, particular social characters that they're affiliated with. So the step is really serene. The woman that I interviewed who said that, you know, the world might be ending for country people said, I'm from the east, where the step is really vast. And so if you look out and you see one little hill in the step, it's like it stands up high and everything else is kind of laying down flat. And in the same way, if you're playing, if you're singing at a feast, or if you're reading a poem or something in the east, then the way she conceptualized it was one person stands and the rest listen as kind of a measure of socially approved of behavior, right? It's like very polite. It's very kind of quiet in a sense, in a way, and very well. In Mongolia there's a term tefcerte, which literally means to be able to withstand. It's kind of, not exactly stoic, but just sort of patient. Whereas in Altai everybody sings together, right? The mountains are all there, they're all standing all next to each other. You can't pick one off the other. And so in this kind of sort of cosmology, that way of performing that is based in Altai is like garrulous. It's friendly. It's very eusocial in that way, that everyone is kind of participating equally. So there are these kinds of moral ideas that become encoded in the physical landscape of the step that then get pulled out in the act of performance. And people will tell you, because I learned how to play fiddle from. From a person in the hall tie like a. A guy from the far northwest of the country. So my fiddle playing is a little bit faster, it's a little bit bouncier. And my Long song, I kind of move through them at a pace that Gobi people don't like that, you know, and like, you know, the. They're quick to remind me, like, this is not the peaceful way. Like, you need to be performing Serenity, like you're doing the kind of boisterous performance. And we want it kind of more step, like, right. More expanding and just kind of things like that that go into it. So it's this genre that has a real deep immersion in a particular landscape to the degree that, like most of the long song students at the Arts and Cultural University, where I did some of my research, are actually from Inner Mongolia. They're actually from, you know, the kind of the Chinese side of the border. And so a lot of them, like, were having to learn how to imagine Mongolian, like, outer Mongolian landscapes, like the Duntolof Province landscape, for example, having come from places like Hudinburg, which just look different, they have their different kind of physiological landscape, and they would sing those songs normally on their own for their own amazement in one way. But if you want to be a professional singer, you have to learn the landscapes that have sort of been enshrined in the institution. And so that's always kind of a tricky thing too, because then you literally have to take the students to Dundruff, for example, and like, try to cram, you know, this. This landscape knowledge into their head over the course of, you know, an average college semester, which is not a lot of time to really have for that kind of field type learning experience.
- [50:06]
Maggie Freeman
Yeah, that's really interesting to think about just how the landscape shapes the music and just the importance of this really kind of, like, immediate experience of the landscape, how important that is for a musician, and that the, you know, the landscape itself becomes. The classroom is a kind of. Is a really necessary classroom as well for performing this type of music. So I'm curious if you could say a little bit more about your own musical journey in learning the horse fiddle as somebody who's not Mongolian, who I'm assuming came to the horse fiddle. As someone who trained in Western music, had a previous background in Western music, what that was like for you, sort of accessing this instrument and this style of music that is, from what you've been saying, very rooted in just like a particular lifestyle and a particular place and a particular way of seeing places that is, like you said earlier, not one that we tend to embrace in Western culture.
- [51:25]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah. So I mean, yeah, I have a musical background. My, my mom is a professional cellist and my family on that side is mostly like bluegrass, old time country musicians. Like that's kind of their, their careers like mandolin, banjo and fiddle and that kind of thing. And so I had this sort of multi kind of instrumental rule music background going into the situation. And then when I started learning, part of the reason why I started learning Mongolian is my dad really liked Hunherto and he was like, you can translate my Hunhe 2 tapes if you learn Mongolia. Because that was just like, here are the languages I can learn at IU Head Indiana. Right. And it took me, whatever, 10 years of learning Mongolian to realize that Tuvin and Mongolian are not related. They're more distant from each other than English and Farsi. And so. But you know, I get a lot of the songs are about horses. Right? That's kind of the gist. But so when I went to Mongolia for the first time, it was to attend language classes, the American center for Mongolian Studies. And I had a friend in my class who was ethnomusicologist as well, Joanne Curtet, ethnomusicologist from France, who works on throat singing. And he was like, oh, I have a friend. We had talked about music stuff and I mentioned my mom plays cello and I had played a little viola da gamba, which is a Western baroque instrument. And he was like, oh, I have a friend who teaches the horse fiddle. Would you want to just take some lessons? Because it's kind of similar to the viola da gamba. They're both instruments that don't have an end pin that you hold between your legs. You bow them underhand instead of overhand, which is pretty unique for Western boat instrument. And so I just kind of fell into it and it ended up being a space of learning the instrument where I had to learn a lot of other stuff. Like it improved my language learning. It really jumped me in, in a big way into kind of Mongolian culture, generally speaking, both traditional and like contemporary culture in terms of what's going on in contemporary music world. And so that really became, in a big way, my primary way of interacting with people in Mongolia's either playing the fiddle or singing. And then as like a music anthropologist, there really hasn't been a better tool for me than being like a kind of bad fiddle player. Like, I think if I was really good at it, that would be, you know, that wouldn't be that useful. But being somebody like cultural anthropology is sort of entering the position of the child, like, over and over again. Because in order to sort of learn what the unspoken rules of social interaction are, you kind of have to get people to speak them. And so 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 of the. What otherwise people might not think about or might not say to themselves. This is what I'm thinking. But forces people to kind of reckon with with these kind of deep ideas about aesthetic and cosmology and the role of music in society and things like that. So, yeah, it's been really useful. And there is a certain degree to which it can be difficult to talk about compared to writing about the experience of playing a music with this particular knowledge of camels. When I first started in 2010, and I didn't have any particular knowledge of either of those things, versus spending time in a camel pasture, like, trying to figure out how to play this song and then getting it right, and then having the, you know, my, like, people in Mongolia be like, oh, you're playing it right now. And here's why. Does kind of make it make a lot more sense, I guess, in a way. But I've always just kind of been a casual. Like, I just play for my own amazement and then I'll play in a kind of research context.
- [55:53]
Maggie Freeman
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's also very good career advice for any aspiring anthropologists out there. I feel like there's so much more that we could talk about, but I've taken up plenty of your time today. But I do have one final question, which is that I'm so curious about this Mongolia Appalachia connection, which you mentioned. One facet of that. But if you could just share a little bit more about your research or your interest or your background in Appalachia, how that kind of shows up in your scholarly work.
- [56:26]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Yeah. So this is like, you know, to some degree, being from the background. I am. I think there's a lot of stuff that made sense to me early on in a way, because I had kind of similar experiences or experiences that could kind of calc onto it. I'm from rural southern Appalachia, from the North Carolina Blue Ridge. And I went to, you know, I went to college in the Midwest. When I went there, I kind of found that I had a really easy time sort of connecting with the Mongolian community in town and sort of a more difficult time figuring out like Midwestern culture in a big way, which is kind of just funny, sort of funny happenstance. But there just at the time at least felt like there were these resonances that if I could just get people in, in Appalachia to like have heard of Mongolia, to like know a little bit about Mongolia, that they would really like it, that there is a lot in common, that this, this, even this fiddle that's like a really complex timbre, really hoarse kind of sounding, pun not intended, kind of double stoppy fiddle is like, you know, anytime I play it for somebody back home, they're like, oh, hey, that sounds like kind of like our version of the fiddle. And.
- [57:52]
Maggie Freeman
And.
- [57:54]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
So that kind of part, these sort of superficial kind of resonances really sort of pulled me in, I guess, at first. And like, what kind of made it easier to figure out all of this stuff about landscape philosophies and like how it turns into this multimodal performance practice and learning from the environment is that I had a similar education in rural Appalachia that I had that old time music does rely on things like the high lonesome sound, which is simultaneously like the sound of the wind on the high part of the mountain that kind of whistles, but also it's a certain kind of old man voice, but also it kind of evokes certain things about, about the cosmology of the mountains in a certain kind of way that then when I started to notice a bigger similarity of these two both being sacrificed zone regions, right? Regions that pay the ecological or the sociological or the economic price for development in other regions, right? And this, you know, dovetails heavily with places where coal is mined or other things, right? In Mongolia there's some coal, but there's also copper and molybdenum for cell phones and things like that. That these are places where you have these communities that are under ecological pressure that have benefited relatively little compared to the areas that are actually extracting a lot of the value from them in which 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, where you have to rely on your small scale community because, you know, the Government's not really coming. And there's a, there's this reliance on knowledge of the mountains and knowledge of community and things like that to really recover from things like the flooding that came through Eastern Kentucky not that long ago. And then of course, you know, Hurricane Helene came through that hit my hometown, that just destroyed my hometown. And that was for me, a moment where the, like, having lived through it in a way in the Gobi previous, like, I had this experience of watching these lakes dry up, but it wasn't like my lake that I grew up with. And that kind of intensified this sense of like, okay, the world's gonna end somehow. So if you're this kind of powerless community, if you're this sacrifice zone community that like, is out of the way of the kind of brokers of power, but in the way of the flood and the coal ash and the, and the, and the, and the spoil heaps, knowing that you're not going to save the world, what does surviving this look like? And then having survived this, what's the world that you would want to try to come out on the other side of with, how does that look like? And for people in Mongolia who have been conceptualizing this for a long time, who are not as closely tied to this sort of teleological way or even, I mean, we have a very evangelical country right now. It's really a millenarian way of thinking about the world that it's about to end and then it's all over. So what? So who cares? What does it matter? But thinking in this kind of cyclical way, like, what blueprint do you want to put down for the world that comes out on the other side, and then not worrying about if you actually do the surviving or not, but that you put together a society that has survival capabilities. And, you know, for some of the people that I worked with, it wasn't even about the surviving. It was just about leaving a mark on the planet. So that if something else came along at the end, some alien comes down from the sky, or the bodhisattvas go away and the Maitreya era begin, and these superhumans come down to Earth or whatever comes after, or just ghosts or birds or, you know, like very long lived salamanders, 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 and destroying everything, in this kind of pyrrhic drive for growth.
- [62:25]
Maggie Freeman
Wow, what a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much for joining me and for sharing all of your research and your personal insights. I learned so much from reading your book and from talking to you just now. So thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
- [62:45]
Kip Grosvenor Hutchins
Well, thanks for having me. You know, this is my favorite thing to talk about, so I'm happy to always talk about it at length, as anyone who knows me will tell you.