Good Horses

Title:  Eki A’ttar (Good Horses)

Performers: Paul Pena (composer of "Jet Airliner") and Kongar-ool Ondar (see "chanzy" and "xöömei" below)

Culture:  Mix of American and Tuvan

Orchestration: resonator guitar played using bottleneck slide; chanzy; singers using xöömei (Khoomei) or throat-singing techniques

I really like throat singing.  A lot.

I also think that this style of singing is a great example of how “people make music meaningful and useful in their lives.”  The people of Tuva are, or at least were once, very nomadic and dependent on horses and other animals, as well as very connected with nature in general.  The many styles of xöömei reflect this, as they are all meant to “mimic and interact with the sounds of the natural world.”  With enough chances, I might have eventually guessed that the sounds of xöömei imitate those in nature and were not just meant to be ridiculously cool—although of course they are—but it was the people of Tuva that gave the music that meaning for them.  The connection between the music and the lifestyle of the people who made it shows that this music had a lot of meaning for them.

Also, the juxtaposition of the musics of two “cowboy cultures,” on top of being a snapshot of the evolutions of those cultures, is just awesome.