WOMAD

Huun-Huur-Tu

From Russia

Huun-Huur-Tu has emerged as the foremost international representative of Tuva's remarkable musical culture. Their music is intimately tied to a sense of place — the Tuvan pastoralists' keen perception of natural landscapes and soundscapes shapes their music. The Tuvans, a South Siberian Turkic people who number some 150,000, preserve what are arguably some of the world's oldest forms of music-making. Tuvans not only transform the sounds of the natural world into music through imitation; they also make sonic "maps" of physical landscapes which may be expressed in texted songs, throat-singing, whistling, or other types of vocal production. For the Tuvans, one of the purposes of music seems to be to offer detailed and concrete descriptions of topography. In short, Tuvan music is not abstract, like most Western music, but radically representational, the product of a cult of imitation that ties it to an animistic understanding of the world.