Mongolia


Genghis apitowboy

An Encounter Between the American West and the Mongolian Steppe

[Author’s note: in the fall of 2005, the Western Folklife apitenter in Elko, Nevada took a group of cowboy musicians to Mongolia, the second half of an exchange that had brought nomadic herdsmen and musicians to Elko in 2003 for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. My husband, Hal Cannon, the founding director of the Western Folklife Center, and I joined musicians Stephanie Davis, Gail Steiger, Bruce Stanger and Ron Kane and a half dozen other staff members and supporters of the Western Folklife Center for the two week adventure. We spent a week in the capitol city, Ulaanbaatar, and another week out on the Steppe. I took a sketchbook and spent hours sketching while I listened in on an amazing musical conversation.]

If I had imagined what music might be playing overhead when we stepped onto Mongolian airlines for the last leg of our journey from the western United States to Ulaanbaatar, I would have expected throat singing or perhaps the lonesome call of the morin khoor, the horse-head fiddle. But instead of Mongolian folk music, the airline soundtrack featured the country-western croon of Clint Black. Or maybe it was Dwight Yoakum. I don’t quite remember, but it was my first indication that genuine traditional music is buried as deep in Mongolia as it is in America. In our Ulaanbaatar hotel, Musak versions of “Somewhere my Love” and “The Godfather Theme” filled the elevator. Outside, taxis blared Mongolian hip hop and Japanese-inspired Danish techno music and cell phones squeaked out the same annoying repertoire of international kitsch as back home: “Loch Lomond,” “La Bamba,” “Hava Nagila,” “The William Tell Overture.”

But traditional music had brought us to Mongolia, and we only had to reconnect with our Mongolian friends to remember its magic. Our first day in the city we met up with four of the five musicians who had come to Elko in 2003: Tseyengiin Tserendorj, a celebrated scholar of folk music and composer of Mongolian praise songs; his son Soyol-Erdene, “Soyoloo,” a singer and virtuoso morin khoor player; Tseden Darinyam, “Daria,” a huumi or throat singer; and Badasuren Bayaksaikhan, a master craftsman who made the horse-head fiddle that Yo Yo Ma used on the Silk Road tour. We’d meet up with the fifth member of the 2003 exchange, horseman and singer Densma Tsend-Ayush, “Tseje,” in a few days when we joined him at his camp a couple of hundred miles west of the capitol to ride horseback for five days across the vast and unfenced Steppe.

The two groups hadn’t seen each other for nearly two years. Yet we stepped easily into each other’s music, appreciating familiar tunes and hearing new ones. At the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, Tserendorj had composed a praise song to Elko; now he played one to Ulaanbaatar, which Stephanie and Ron picked up on their fiddles while Bruce kicked in on the banjo. Ron played a rare cowboy tune, “Whoopin’ Up Cattle,” and Tserendorj listened intently, finding it reminiscent of the music of Northern Mongolia. Then Daria throat sang “Home on the Range.” They were back in a musical conversation that had started 6000 miles away and would continue throughout the two-week visit.

Out on the Steppe a few nights later, a folk ensemble performed. Afterwards, Stephanie learned a song about a milkmaid from a musician who played a saxophone-sounding instrument made out of yak horns and Hal taught another member of the group an old Utah tune appropriately titled “Two Friends Quadrille.” The next night we arrived at Tseje’s camp. He had invited relatives and neighbors to join around the campfire and when a woman sang about a calf calling for its mother, the cowboys responded with a plaintive rendition of “Get Along Little Doggies.” A few mornings later, when Tseje heard someone play the Latin American folk tune “La Llorona,” he piped in with a surprisingly similar Mongolian tune, “The Four Seasons.” We fell in love with the melody and spent the day humming it as we rode along.

The last night in the countryside, Gail and Bruce roped Bayambaa, our translator, into helping compose a song about friendship in both English and Mongolian. We returned to Ulaanbaatar and ended our journey with a farewell concert. Soyoloo played “The Gaits of 10,000 Horses,” Ron played “Whoopin’ up Cattle,” both groups joined for international versions of “Oh Susanna” and the praise song to Ulaanbaatar. The friendship song wrapped up the evening and its final refrain — “May your grass grow tall, may your horses never fall” — served as a blessing for both cultures. The concert took place in Mongolia’s hippest new nightspot — the Grand Khaan Irish Pub — and the audience was young and cosmopolitan. But they loved the concert, reassuring us that traditional music can still communicate across great chasms of distance, language, culture, and age.

View sketches from Mongolia

©2006 by Teresa Jordan

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