Keynote address for the Third Mount Allison Folklore Symposium -- March 10-12, 2000
 

If you'd asked me ten years ago about music and the rhythms of everyday life, I would have been mystified. Music WAS the rhythm of my everyday life. I got up in the morning, made a cup of coffee and started playing scales on my cello as soon as I'd finished driving my morning school-bus run. By noon I'd worked my way through my practice routine, and was ready for rehearsals. Another break for the afternoon bus run, and then, if I was lucky, a gig in the evening. I lived and breathed music. Everything from classical to jazz and the folk music of the Celts, Jewish Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I created music for dance and theater. The rhythm of these styles pulsed through my days and nights, magnificent as a storm at sea or simple as the wildflowers in a mountain meadow. The energy flowed down my arms and out through tingling fingertips. There was no end to the intricacy of learning, the joys and frustrations of working with other musicians, chastising ourselves over every nuance. Something about the fact that music contained enough challenge to last a lifetime reassured me.

Human beings have a passion for music and we'll be hearing and experiencing it this weekend. I believe one of the most basic things human beings do is to express ourselves through sound -- which connects physical movement with our creation of a life-story, our bodies with the rhythms of the earth we live on. We sense and send messages through our singing, drumming and playing -- a gift from the muses and tricksters of music. Music is one of the things that keeps us alive, that moves us through life's difficulties.

Not everyone lives the total absorption in music that I once did--although it is a huge part of most of our lives. Not only those who consciously devote themselves to it full-time, but also everyone who uses musical sound in therapeutic work and education, who plays for pleasure and release, who picks at an instrument, dances, sings in the shower (or anywhere else!) and listens to music for relaxation, renewal, and just for fun. But for me, music was life. And since I was incapable of talking or thinking about anything else, all my friends and lovers were also obsessive musicians.

About ten years ago everything changed--I realize now that it was a profound musical and emotional crisis, although at first it seemed like a brief phase, a period of being down in the dumps. It had happened before and would pass. I've never been sure what set it off, but most likely a growing disillusionment with love -- music at its best is an expression of love, whether it be for another person, for the natural world or for music itself.

This time it didn't pass. A low-grade buzzing in my head acted as a kind of musical interference. The sounds coming from my cello were hugely distant. I could not contact the energy necessary to play, and found that the very touch of my fingers to the strings sent waves of emotional pain up my arms, only to get lost in my internal fog. Plagued by tiredness I'd start to practice, then put the cello down, putter around, clean the house. Even the my favorite cello recordings sounded dull as muzak, and those wild and crazy folkdance tunes failed to ignite my blood. Group interaction was too much to contemplate. As days turned into months and years, music faded into a silent death. Recovery has led me across continents and into the vitality of spiritual traditions I had never heard of -- which turned out to be rich in music.

During the phase when I wasn't playing, I returned to the other ruling interest of my life -- language. I began to write -- and to tell stories. The flow that once came from the friction of horsehair on catgut now came through words. I also rediscovered the Russian language which I had learned in school and later forgotten -- and found a book of Siberian folktales, which I soon began to tell in public performance.

One night in 1991 I was visiting a friend who is an avid collector and player of banjos. We pushed back our chairs after a delicious lobster dinner in his old Maine farmhouse. I was talking about my new-found interest in storytelling and the peoples of Siberia, especially the republic of Tuva, just north of Mongolia. One of the things I was enjoying about it in those early days was the shock value of saying anything at all about this unknown part of the world--a place of exile and endless winter as far as anybody knew. Even I may have half doubted that Tuva existed.

"Tuva?" said the banjo player. "They have fantastic music. Guys who can sing two notes at the same time. And they play something like a bowed banjo."

Impossible, I thought. How can he have heard of Tuva?

Now he was rummaging through a stack of CDs. "I heard this on the radio not long ago, and ordered it. Here it is: `Tuva--Voices from the Center of Asia'." The cover showed a man in a burgundy silk coat and brown fedora hat standing against a backdrop of treeless mountains, waving at the camera.

The music started.

A single male voice rang out, strong, deep and resonant, singing one long note -- a sound like nothing I had ever heard. Softly rumbling, it hit me like a gentle blow to the chest. In that split second, I was out in those mountains, hearing the wind hum over the rocks. Tuva became real.

(The recording I heard was Tuva: Voices from the Center of Asia. Smithsonian Recordings. Available from The Tuva Trader)

A few months later the Vancouver Folk Music Festival asked me to translate for a group from Tuva, and my journey began. Three young men took the festival by storm with their stunning ability to sing two or more notes at the same time, their silk coats and fur hats. Over the next two years I toured several times with members of what is now "Huun Huur Tu", hearing the rhythms of riding a camel train to China, a man's lament for the loss of his horse. I told Tuvan tales to the accompaniment of those same skin-headed and wooden instruments that had caught my banjo-playing friend's attention. The musicians came to my home on a small island in the Strait of Georgia and slaughtered a sheep in the traditional way, becoming a local island legend. In the fall of 1993 I flew to Tuva, where I began to meet storytellers and shamans and heard more music.

I learned folk tales from indigenous tellers, retelling them at home in Canada (with their permission), and writing about spiritual life, including the ancient practice of shamanism which was reviving before my eyes after seventy years of persecution under communism. Siberian shamans of the past were well-known for their dramatic shows of power, and their ability to predict the future and to journey in altered states of consciousness to retrieve souls which had been stolen or shocked from the body. They journeyed to the beat of single-sided drums, which often had elaborate drawings on the head and jingling metal pieces on the inside.

Through the heroic epics I learned that the path of an Asian warrior is also a spiritual one, moving toward the opening of the heart, a path parallel to the shaman's healing journey. It's only now that I can see how my own musical recovery was linked to this shamanic and cultural revival, and to these images. And how it was facilitated by the friendship of the warm and gentle people I met, and the mingling of their stories with my own.

The central image of shamanic philosophy is death and rebirth, and it is the drum's heartbeat and the warmth of the human voice that provide the movement for a return to life. Spirit communicates through sound, which acts directly on our energy systems and aids in forming evocative visual images.

Before talking more about that, I'd like to share a story about a musical instrument very much like my own cello, one that I'd heard on that first CD. Storytellers in Tuva accompany their tales on the igil, an instrument two strings, tuned roughly in cello range. It is played with a bow, and has a similar emotionally evocative quality. But it has a skin head like a banjo, and instead of a scroll at the top of the neck, it has a carved horse's head. Stories tell of how the instrument was lovingly fashioned from the healing power of friendship and the death and rebirth of a heavenly horse.

A long time ago there lived a poor orphan boy named Ösküs-ool. The sum total of his worldly goods was just three goats. Ösküs-ool worked for a wealthy khan, looking after his sheep.

The khan had a large herd of fine horses. From time to time he put on a horse race, and was gratified that his own horses always won. But among the khan's fine horses there was one skinny old mare. That skinny old mare gave birth to a skinny colt and then she died.

When the khan found out about it he called his servants. "Get rid of that colt," he said. "I am not going to be impoverished by feeding a motherless animal. Take the colt out into the forest and leave him for the wolves to eat."

Now like most Tuvans, those servants loved horses more than almost anything in the world. To leave a baby horse to the wolves was a very hard thing. So when Ösküs-ool said, "Give me the colt. I'll take care of him," the servants were happy to give him the animal.

Ösküs-ool took the colt home and fed him with milk from his goats. And the two of them grew up together. The colt grew into a powerful grey stallion with a white star on his forehead, and Ösküs-ool grew into a fine young man. It would be hard for me to tell you whether the boy trained the horse, or the horse trained the boy. But however it was, soon they began to enter the horse races. Soon they began to win the horse races.

The khan was angry that someone else's horse was winning. And when he found out that this was the very same colt that he had ordered to be left in the forest for the wolves to eat, he was furious! He called his servants.

"I told you to get rid of that colt!" he roared. "And this time I mean it. Take that horse to the top of the steep overhanging cliff and push him over the edge. And see that you obey me this time."

The servants had no choice. They took the horse to the top of the steep overhanging cliff and pushed him over the edge.

All that day Ösküs-ool searched for his beloved horse--his best friend in all the world-- but he could not find him anywhere. At last he got exhausted from searching and sat down under a big larch tree. He fell asleep and had a dream. In the dream his horse spoke to him.

"Look for my remains at the bottom of the steep overhanging cliff," he said. "Do not grieve when you find me. Instead take my skull and hang it from a larch tree. Take wood from that tree and fashion a musical instrument. Use my skin to cover it and make strings and a bow from the hair of my tail. When you play the instrument, look up to the top of the mountain, and you will see my double coming down to you."

Ösküs-ool woke up. When he found the remains of his horse, his best friend in all the world, he did grieve. But then he remembered what the horse had told him. He hung the horse's skull on a larch tree, made a musical instrument from the wood of that tree, covered it with the horse's skin and made strings and a bow from the hair.

He sat down and began to draw the bow across the strings. He remembered his friend and how they had played together and won the horse races. All of his grief and rage at the loss of his friend found expression in his music. People gathered to listen. When Ösküs-ool sang of the good times, they laughed with him, and when he sang of the sad times, they wept. He played for a long time.

Then he looked up to the top of the mountain. The clouds parted and he saw a magnificent horse coming down to him. It was a fine grey stallion with a white star on the forehead--the exact double of his own horse. And with the stallion was a large herd of horses!

From that time on Ösküs-ool was poor no longer--he had a whole herd of fine horses. And from that day to this, the Tuvan people have had the sounds of the igil to express their joys and their sorrows.
 

I became curious about the ways music works in shamanic diagnosis and healing. Shamanic practice went silent during the Soviet period, when these wise healers and spiritual leaders were considered "enemies of the people", and many lost their lives in the gulags. Those who survived found ways of working silently to avoid unwanted attention. But before that a traditional ceremony was full of musical sound, from the drumbeat and the ringing of metal pieces on the costume to the singing, whistling and animal imitations coming from the shaman's own body. Today music is slowly regaining its rightful place in spiritual practice.

There is a shaman's ritual on the recording Özüm. Available from The Tuva Trader)

But what do these sounds mean and in what way are they essential to the shaman's activity? Sound connects the inner and outer worlds. Musical vibrations including tone colour and rhythm have subtle effects on the human body and spirit. Music therapists work with this consciously, and players largely unconsciously. My long experience as a cellist gave me some insight on the alteration of consciousness that happens when we concentrate on details of sound vibration in the resonance of wood, horsehair, metal, and gut -- and also the emotional effects music has on players and listeners. Now I learned that precise musical techniques had been thoroughly developed and used in indigenous healing practices for millennia.

Shamans have figures made of metal, wood, bone, and leather sewn to their costumes and other ceremonial objects, which make specific resonant sounds. These enable the shamans to enter the inner world and to call spirits, in particular by recalling places in physical geography that correspond to those in the spiritual world. Musicians often leave spaces in the music for the sounds of the natural world to answer them. Especially important is a person's birthplace -- where we cross from the world of our ancestors to the world of this physical reality. The words of a song, especially the descriptions and names of spirits and places contribute to this recall of the native land.

I made friends with a thoughtful Tuvan musicologist, Valentina Süzükei. "When you listen to one of these singers, you will see the place he sings about," she said . "These people are masters at evoking nature. It would be impossible to mistake a song from the steppe for one from the forest or the desert."

Valentina described a musician she talked with, trying to understand this relationship. "I came to understand that traditional musicians can't use such terms as pitch, scales, interval, timbre. This is a different culture with different values and criteria. (Although Süzükei is Tuvan, she was brought up in the city with a western education.) I began to listen for those criteria. The man began to play the khomus (jaw harp) and I asked, `How do you think that melody is built? How can you describe it?' He said, `How can I explain it to you? Look at those mountains over there. They have layers of brown and blue with snow on top, different colours as it gets further away. Then the nearer mountains--shadow and a patch of sun--then shade again. And then in the heat everything is moving, like a mirage. So there you see how my melody sounds.'" Valentina now laughs at her inability to understand this answer. "At the time I thought, `What is this? I ask about melody and he talks about the mountains!' If only I could talk with him again." In the interim she has taken up a meditation practice and feels she understands much better what the man was telling her.

Siberian musicians and shamans always devote attention to connecting with the spirits of the land. While traveling with me around sacred places in her homeland, shaman Tania Kobezhikova stopped at each fork in the road, each mountain pass, at burial sites, petroglyphs and sacred caves. The first thing she did was to play her instruments--the jaw harp and the drum. She explained that the musical sound conveyed her greetings to the spirits of that place, her apologies for disturbing them, our requests and thanks. For me as a listener, the sounds of her instruments combined gracefully with the breezes and sounds of birds and crickets, the pungent smells of prairie grasses, the profound silence of a cave--bringing me to a deeper appreciation of that place.

(There is wonderful jaw-harp playing on the Smithsonian recording and others.)

People say that the jaw harp communicates thoughts without words. One of the Tuvan singers, Kongar-ool Ondar, told me this story to illustrate how it can work. (In fact they are speaking the words, but you have to really pay attention to get them through the musical sound. Unlike, say, playing guitar and singing - here both the instrumental and vocal sounds are coming from the mouth, which obscures words.)

Since Tuvans love horses more than almost anything on earth, it stands to reason that they can't help secretly admiring a good horse thief!

It happened that one man crossed the mountains and made off with a fine stallion. The owner of the horse could hear the thief in the distance and set out chasing him.

The owner rode over the mountain, came to a yurt and went in. It was the home of the horse thief and his wife. They gave the guest tea and while he was drinking it the host began to play his khomus. The horse thief had the ability to communicate through his music without using words. And this is what he conveyed to his wife.

"This is the man whose horse I stole. You'd better go and move it to a better hiding place, further from the yurt."

But before she could leave the guest said, "What a fine instrument you have! May I try playing it?"

The host handed over his instrument and the guest began to play. And he too had the ability to communicate through music without using words. This is what he conveyed to the horse-thief's wife.

"It's too late to move the horse. I already know that you have him and I am going to take him back!"
 

Both storytelling and music can heal the human body and spirit, and they often work together. In some Siberian traditions storytellers sing the most important conversations, and lines which emphasize the important lessons.

In Khakassia, just over the mountain from Tuva, a man told me this, "Some things in life are too important for speech -- and then you must sing! For instance, before the Soviet period when a young man wanted to propose marriage, he would come with his family and friends to the girl's home and sing his proposal."

This man also recalled a time when a young woman he knew had been deserted by her boyfriend. She rode to the place where he was with his new girlfriend, and sat outside on her horse, singing out her anger and disillusionment -- and what she intended to do about it!

A singer, Albina Kurbizhekova sang a similar song to me, which she learned from her mother. During the time when Khakassia was being colonized, a Russian official had seduced a beautiful Khakass girl. She gave birth and then killed her child -- whether by accident or on purpose we don't know. A Russian prosecutor came out from the regional capitol to judge her case. The girl was watching as he talked with the official who had seduced her -- she didn't understand the Russian language but realized that the man had no intention of protecting her as he had promised. At last she couldn't restrain herself and sang out the pain of her betrayal. Albina was forbidden to sing the song when she was younger, and still doesn't perform it in public. Her elders were afraid she might attract a similar experience to herself by repeating those words aloud.

Shamans fine-tune the inner senses which perceive the spiritual world. Often they cover their physical eyes to enable seeing with the inner eye, which is awakened by visual images evoked in words, through story and poetry. What the shaman sees and hears may or may not be the same as what the listener perceives.

We all contact the inner spiritual ear through music. But how exactly does this work? Timbre, or tone color, plays an enormous role, allowing the listener to go deeper into the spiritual realm. Timbral variations are vital to shamanic music, calling attention to minute sound details. Süzükei points out that Western music focuses largely on melody and harmony, and African music on rhythm. But Asian music plays with tone-colour, through intricate manipulation of overtones and frequencies.

To a western listener the most striking use of those vibrations is in overtone singing, often called throat singing in English. The performer sings two or more pitches at the same time using overtones produced in the throat and chest. In several styles of overtone singing, one fundamental tone is held constant while melody can be heard in the higher voice. The result is two part music, with melody and drone produced simultaneously by one voice.

The storyteller's igil is also ideal for producing fundamental and overtone. The strings are made not of a single strand of gut, metal or nylon, like the strings of western instruments, but of horsehair. Each string is made up of numerous parts which resonate individually, producing a rich collection of overtones. These can be manipulated through the use of the bow, the fingers of the left hand, and pressure on the skin head.

(For a fine example of igil playing, listen to Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, on Huun-Huur-Tu's recording "Sixty Horses in my Herd" and others. Available from The Tuva Trader

The shaman's most important instrument is the drum. It too produces rich overtones owing to variations in the thickness and tautness of the head. The large drums have a tremendous dynamic range. Metal pieces hanging on the inside, and on the back of the drumstick make their own sounds, which add to the overtone possibilities. Even when played in rhythm as steady as a heart-beat, the drum sound never feels monotonous because of the variations in the overtones.

One of my favourite stories about shamanic healing with the drum is the tale of the first Buriat shaman, Morgon Kara.

Morgon Kara

The first Buriat shaman was called Morgon Kara, and he was a very powerful shaman indeed. He could do all the things shamans today can do: he could heal the sick, predict the weather, find lost livestock and call the animals to the hunt. And besides all that, he could even bring back the souls from the dead!

When Erlik Khan, the Master of the Land of the Dead, heard about this, he was angry. He went to the Upper World, to the great god Tengri, and he complained bitterly.

"This Morgon Kara has got to be stopped!" he said. "Once the souls get into my realm, they are supposed to stay there."

"Leave it to me," said Tengri. "I will deal with Morgon Kara."

And so the great god Tengri came down into the Middle World. He found a man who was taking a nap under a tree, and he stole that man's soul. He took the soul back to the Upper World, put it in a bottle, covered the top of the bottle with his thumb, and sat down to wait.

Of course the man got very sick, and his family called for the shaman. They called Morgon Kara. The great shaman took out his drum. Now in those days the drums were not the same as they are today. Instead of having one head and a narrow frame, they had wider frames with a head on each end.

Morgon Kara began to beat his drum. Riding on the drum's beat, he travelled down into the Lower World and looked for the stolen soul. He rode over the mountains and valleys, but he didn't see the soul anywhere.

Next he looked through our middle world. Along the rivers and through the great forests he rode, searching for the missing soul. But he could not find it.

And so he went to the Upper World. There too he looked everywhere. Morgon Kara had almost given up, when at last he saw the great god Tengri sitting with his thumb over the top of a bottle. He guessed that the soul he was looking for was in the bottle.

But how to get it out?

Morgon Kara got an idea. He turned himself into a wasp and began to buzz around the great god's head.He buzzed and buzzed, and then he landed on Tengri's forehead and stung him a hot sting!

Just for a second Tengri let go of the top of the bottle. He slapped at the wasp, but Morgon Kara was already back on his drum, holding the soul, which had escaped from the bottle. They headed back for the Middle World.

It only took a moment for Tengri to realize he had been tricked! He was furious! He grabbed a thunderbolt and hurled it after Morgon Kara.

The thunderbolt struck the drum and split it right in two. Still Morgon Kara managed to get back to earth and breathe the soul into the sick man. The man got well.

But they say that ever since that time the shamans have not been quite as powerful as they were before. And ever since that time, the shaman's drums have only had one head.
 

Years have passed since my musical crisis and initiation into Siberian storytelling. During that time I've listened to a lot of music, some familiar and some completely new to me, like the music of Tuva. I've become a dedicated CBC addict, and I especially like those programs where people write in elaborate letters detailing their encounters with specific pieces of music, how music connects to significant times in their lives. They tell of the ways music can recall places, people, smells and emotions. The music we choose to have around us can both reflect and complement the rhythms of our daily lives, and express the rhythm of city streets and or rural scenery, work and rest.

Gradually I returned to cello playing and began to really dig into details -- how much bow movement produces what sound, the amount of pressure on the string, the width of vibrato--it was the first time in years I'd felt that music was so much fun. I believe that it is through that close attention that the excitement sparks, that we go deeper, bringing the music alive for ourselves and others. For me, that was the beginning of playing again from the heart

While I was in Khakassia, a young musical-instrument maker, Petya Topoev took a newly made string instrument on a trip we made to the mountains, to consecrate it in a traditional way. The instrument had the shape of a swan, who is known as a communicator between the worlds since it can fly to the upper world and dive under the water. Petya held it in the wind to "enspirit" the instrument. We held it close to our ears and heard clear melodies played by the wind as it passed over the strings and skin head. They reminded me of choral singing in an ancient cathedral. Now the instrument was ready to play.

Each person has a unique voice, as do cultures and time periods. For me the voice now emerges through music and story -- bridging cultures. This weekend we will explore the many other ways people unite music with the rhythms of life, as expressions of our vitality and humanity. For each person this is an individual passion -- finding the music that enriches our story, that gives us voice, and tunes the body instrument we live in.