Throat singing

[victor steinbok]

Likely the best-known example of overtone singing is the Gyuto Order of
Tibetan Tantric monks whose "music" has been marketed by Mickey Hart. Wiki
also mentions that the style is identified as "chordal chanting".

"Chordal" is in the OED, but no mention is made of chanting, which is quite
different from the other "chordal" references (string instruments).

The OED entry for "overtone singing" (which also subsumes "overtone chant"
and "overtone chanting") has a slight geographic overstatement:

"traditional esp. in Mongolia, Tibet, and adjacent parts of central Asia"

That's like saying, "India, Indonesia and adjacent parts of Southeast Asia"
or "Norway, Italy and adjacent parts of Western Europe". At issue may be the
distinction between two traditional designations. The Soviet and post-Soviet
political designation only ascribes to Central Asia the former Soviet
"-stans"--Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The broader UNESCO definition includes northern parts of Afghanistan, Iran,
Pakistan, a small bit of India (Kashmir), the Sub-Ural part of Russia
(literally adjacent to Kazakhstan, running down along the Chinese border,
south of Taiga), Mongolia and a rather substantial part of Western and
Central China, including Tibet. Tibet (and Kashmir, I suppose) is the only
one of these that stands out as the location of a very distant culture and
group of languages, compared to all the others (although there is a mix of
Muslims, Buddhists and "animists" among the rest). Whatever the case,
Mongolia covers the Northeast of the UNESCO-defined region and Tibet the
Southeast, they are not adjacent to each other, making the adjacency claim
very odd, from my perspective. By UN definition, which follows largely the
Soviet division, they are not even a part of Central Asia at all. And, to
make matters worse, the practice of overtone singing stretches almost
continuously across nearly the entire Asian part of Russia, across the
Behring Straights into Alaska and Canada. So, the OED definition is both
overstating and understating the conditions.

VS-)

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 12:04 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at ix.netcom.com>wrote:

>
> Mongolian throat singing is in the news. =
> (
> http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/mobile/?type=3Dstory&id=3D2015=
> 896486&)
>
> The OED has it as an alternative under the entry for "overtone singing," =
> which seems to be the more general term, but you have to do an advanced =
> search to find it.
>
> Inuit throat singing =
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_throat_singing), a different sort of =
> singing is not in the OED.
>
> FWIW, according to "Throat Singing" on the Altaic Wiki =
> (http://altaic-wiki.wikispaces.com/Throat+Singing), throat singing is =
> practiced in eight different Altatic cultures.
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Seattle, WA=

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