What follows is Part 7 of an interview series with the diverse musicians whose music is heard in the feature documentary "Echoes of the Invisible," directed by Steve Elkins. This interview was conducted in Kyzyl, Tuva in March 2014. 

Tuva is the epicenter of a rare form of throat singing, in which our ears seem to “magically” hear multiple pitches and melodies emerging all at once from a single note sung in a drone. Valentina Süzükei is the world’s leading expert on Tuvan music, especially the variant known as Xöömei. Unfortunately, her research and preservation of Tuvan culture has never been translated into English, despite its invaluable significance illuminating profound musical practices not well known outside of Tuva. This was one of many reasons I traveled across the world to interview her in 2014. Together, we journeyed to remote villages near the borders of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China to meet musicians, shamans, hunters and instrument builders. These remarkable people embody the unique ways traditional Tuvan culture syncretizes music, spirituality, and a quantum perception of nature. The following is an excerpt from a considerably longer interview with Valentina, some of which is included in “Echoes of the Invisible.” The accompanying photos were taken by my production crew (Melissa Sakal, Jan CieÅ›likiewicz and Ted Trager) and I.

STEVE ELKINS: Most music only allows us to hear the surface of musical notes. But Tuvan throat singing breaks down the surface of musical notes to unveil what is inside them. It’s almost like using the human throat as a microscope. How does Tuvan singing enable our ears to perceive the hidden universe inside musical notes?

VALENTINA SÜZÜKEI: When light goes through a prism, it is separated into the color spectrum. This is a useful analogy for understanding what happens in Tuvan music. In Xöömei, the human body is a prism unleashing the inner sub-harmonics and partial tones of musical notes. The throat is firmly tensed, which allows us to break down the drone. Tiny movements of the tongue, and slight changes in the size of openings in the mouth cavity produce audibly different overtones. It can be compared with a multi-faceted diamond which changes colors when you turn it in the sunlight. Almost the whole color spectrum begins to play, like a crystal. By filtering out some frequencies and opening others, we get different colors of light.

Tuvan Singers In Kyzyl and Teeli

ELKINS: I find striking parallels between Tuvans breaking down sound into its internal subharmonics and the physicists I filmed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider breaking down sub-atomic particles to explore their hidden, inner life. But the physicists had to build the largest and most sophisticated machine in human history to accomplish this, whereas Tuvans use the human throat.

SÜZÜKEI: Tuvan music produces sound on a sub-atomic level. So I have come to the conclusion that Tuvans have a quantum understanding of the world around, because quantum theory suggests a vision from the whole to the partial. Xöömei actually encompasses all audible frequencies; a massive sound space. It is a stereophonic sound which includes infra-sonic and ultra-sonic frequencies. People usually only hear two sounds, but in actuality there are many sounds here. Some of them can’t be sensed, but they are there in the space. So it’s not just music; it’s a nanotechnology that illuminates aspects of nature we don’t always perceive. And just like technology used by physicists, its deepens Tuvans’ understanding of their place in the cosmos.

ELKINS: How so?

SÜZÜKEI: There are three levels of sound in Xöömei. The first level is the drone. The second level is the sonic background. And the third level is the melodic overtones. 1,2,3 – three levels. In our shamanic mythology, the universe is also made up of three levels. The areas of middle, lower, and upper worlds. So we can connect shamanic conceptions of three worlds with these three levels of sound in Xöömei.

The middle world is where we as people live, this mege örtemchei [“false world” in Tuvan], an illusory ghost world, but people have a tightly interconnected relationship with the upper and lower worlds. No level can exist by itself without the others, just as the musical overtones cannot exist without the drone in Xöömei. If the drone disappears, so do the overtones. They are inseparable from each other. It’s like an umbilical connection.

ELKINS: So by singing, Tuvans perceive an interconnectivity in the world that spans from the microscopic to the cosmological.

SÜZÜKEI: And this connection allows us to see the entire system in any one point. That’s why it can be said that this is holographic music – any part shows us the whole system, from the microcosmos to the macrocosmos. When shamans converse with any of the spirits of the upper, lower, or this world, they use sound. Other than their algyshtar [shamanic songs] there are also instruments on the clothes that they wear. Since Tuvan people are mostly shamanism-oriented, and believe in the existence of cher eezi, sug eezi, taiga eezi, art eezi [“spirit” masters of places, such as bodies of water, the taiga, mountain passes], they make music when they travel places, because the “spirit” masters enjoy listening to it, and "open" their road. Tuvan people still know this, still believe it.
 

SÜZÜKEI (cntd): They also use the dünggür for communication. That’s communication via sound. In that way, the helpers of the shamans, their familiar spirits, come in the form of animals. If the shaman's familiar is a bear, then they master bear imitation. If the shaman’s familiar is a wolf, they master wolf imitation. Tuvans are better than anyone at imitating animal and bird sounds. The complex musical timbres produced by the drone and overtones in Tuvan music allows us to very accurately portray the sounds of the environment — not just living nature like birds and animals, but sounds of inanimate nature – wind, water, echoes, rivers. Water eeler really like it when people sing the byrlang style along with the sound of water.

Any performer of Xöömei tunes himself to the tone of the water in the rivers, the wind in the mountains, or how the birds sing. So Tuvan music is something that for the longest time has been played not for a human audience, but that comes from peoples’ desire to sing in harmony with nature. The music is really a reflection of our environment. Which means that now Tuvans also tune themselves to computers, refrigerators and lamps, each of which have their own unique humming tone.

ELKINS: Does this mean Tuvans perceive their environment is singing as well?  

SÜZÜKEI: Many Tuvan people say that everything around us is music. The art of throat singing, was born in the process of imitating and transforming the sounds of nature. When I was visiting a remote part of Tuva, there was one musician who said: “Do you see those mountains over there? I look at the contour of the mountains and that’s the melody I play.” Then he performed that melody without an instrument. He just took his hand like this, moved his fingers and whistled, but his performance sounded like playing on the limbi (flute). Another time, a woman I didn’t know asked me if I sang. I said “no,” but she said, “even if it’s not audible, you should sing inside.”

Musicians and Steve Elkins in Tuva

SÜZÜKEI (cntd): Then there are “long songs” which are reflected off the mountain. In this form of singing, the landscape is embedded in the music, which makes a sonic image of the steppes. I think that it formed from shepherds out with their herds, playing with the echo effect. The life of Tuvans is closely related to their livestock. In earlier times, they would talk about the animals like living people, and use music to communicate with them. They had songs that they would use to help a mother animal that wouldn’t milk its calf or foal or kid.

ELKINS: I once saw an incredible Mongolian film, Byambasuren Davaa's "The Story Of The Weeping Camel,” about a shamanic ritual in which music is used to make a camel cry, so that she will feel empathy for her newborn that she has rejected. I originally thought it was scripted, but later learned it’s a documentary. Such a powerful testament to the transformative relationship between music and nature.

SÜZÜKEI: Music has an extremely deep world-view basis, which depends on the relation of people to nature…from their perception or understanding of their own place in Nature. European theoretical musical knowledge was formed on the basis of the Christian worldview. The Tuvans have a more mystical understanding right, so they saw a person as a part of living nature. But the Christians did not even allow the thought that a person could be similar to an animal, so therefore there is no animal or nature sound imitation in classical musical culture. But Tuvans saw themselves on the same level as all the living beings in this world.

SÜZÜKEI: Yes, in European music, the semantic load is placed on the pitch-height organization of notes. African music — the music of African peoples — places more semantic meaning in rhythm. They can even use rhythm to talk to one another. But in Tuvan music, the main semantic meaning is carried by the timbre. People know how to use timbre in such varied ways, their music is also based on it.

Once the USSR started to meddle with it, special Tuvan features began to be lost. They tried to understand Tuvan music through standard classical theory, which is rooted in the concept of written notes. They didn’t understand that the melody in Tuvan music is INSIDE the notes, so their entire system for writing music cannot capture it. Tuvan music has an absolutely different nature. Lots of changes happened after the beginning of socialism, because a lot of conceptual things came and were simply thrust upon the Tuvans.

SÜZÜKEI (cntd): In traditional culture, there was no understanding of ‘stage culture.’ Then, when socialism began, the concept of ‘entertainers’ came about, entertainers who are separated from listeners on the stage, performing for the listeners. Tuvan people didn’t know that there could be such a separation. Music wasn’t a profession, it wasn’t a trade, and they didn’t make a living on it. Music was simply a spiritual state of any given Tuvan, and 95% of them sang. Older Tuvans have told me that any person who can open their mouth should sing. It was the norm. But now you can’t ask just any Tuvan to sing. They will say, “what are you talking about? I’m not an entertainer,” and they’ll excuse themselves right away. There you have it. The context of traditional culture has changed.

Traditional Tuvan instruments began to be modified in Moscow, Tashkent, and Alma-Ata. They were brought here, and yes the sound was louder but they did not sound Tuvan. Now young musicians have begun using the traditional instruments again, which Aldar Tamdyn makes. Aldar’s father was a famous musician, and Aldar remembers his ideas about music, and they affected Aldar. He makes instruments the way Tuvans did a long time ago.

ELKINS: It seems that worldviews are manifested in musical instruments too. Christian musical instruments were built to evoke a sense of eternity, while many Tuvan instruments distinctively evoke impermanence, such as instruments made from leaves which can only be used once. Does the impermanence of the instruments reflect the Buddhist aspects of Tuvan culture?

SÜZÜKEI: Tuva is the only place in the world where Buddhism and shamanism are inseparably intertwined. When Buddhism came into Mongolia and Buryatia, it was in conflict with shamanism. Buddhist lamas ran out the shamans until they were nearly destroyed, like the communists did. But in Tuva, for some reason, when Buddhism arrived at the end of the 18th century, it didn’t exile the shamans, it just sort of very peacefully ingrained itself. It didn’t try to change anything shamanic, and lamas began to participate in all the sanctification rituals – ovaa, for instance. Then, the syncretism of Shamanism and Buddhism reached such a high level in Tuva, that the shaman and lama combined in one individual. A lama could even be married to a shaman. It’s only in Tuva that Buddhism and shamanism were intertwined, interwoven like this.

SÜZÜKEI (cntd): There’s a lot of Tuvan musical instruments: Igil, chadagan, byzaanchy, doshpuluur, xomus. But yes, there are other instruments made from plant material, like the shoor, which would only be made in the spring when the sap begins to flow. The murgu, terezin ediski would be made in the fall when the grass is full-grown and has begun to dry, so it breaks very quickly. But it’s a material that exists abundantly in nature, so you can make as many as you want, then just throw it out once it disintegrates. Tuva is part of the Turko-Mongolic musical world, but other Turkic peoples don’t have Buddhism. When Buddhism entered Tuva an entire Orchestra of instruments arrived with it. But when people would play at the temples, even though there was a canon that came from Tibet, Tuvans would play these instruments in their own way.

I should add that Tuvan music is tuned differently than others. Tuvan musicians play with the pure fifth, the natural fifth, in which notes an octave apart don’t sound in unison. There’s a small difference. It’s called the Pythagorean comma. This natural fifth and the Werckmeister fifth are two different things. In the 18th century, a German musician, organist, and mathematician named Andreas Werckmeister made a reform by reducing the natural fifth a little bit, so that octaves would sound in unison. European musicians were furious with him, because in nature the most consonant interval is the fifth. How could he touch the holy of holies in Music? It’s a natural sound, a natural interval, and he made it a little smaller so that it would be possible to change keys without retuning the instruments. After that, Bach wrote the Well-Tempered Clavier, an organ piece for all 24 keys. Only then was this change accepted in Europe. But Tuvan drone-overtone music is tuned on the pure fifth, the natural fifth.

ELKINS: Earlier you talked about how Tuvan musicians “tune” to their environment. Ted Levin, who I know you’ve worked with (the first Western researcher ever allowed to study Tuvan music in Tuva), wrote a fascinating study of Uzbek and Tajik music called “The Hundred Thousand Fools Of God.” In Sufi tradition, the “fools of god” are musicians or dervishes who likewise view tuning as a spiritual activity, an all encompassing idea that “A musician must tune himself. Then he must tune his instrument. Only then can he tune the listener to be in harmony with you. This is the ultimate aim of music: to create harmony.” They embody the spirit of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, when he said: “If I won’t burn, where will the light come from?”

This makes me wonder: does Xöömei induce altered states of consciousness?  Nearly every religion — including Christianity — has a long history of trance induction practices, in which music is not seen as a form of self-expression, but as a technology, a bridge, between states of consciousness; awakening a pre-verbal mythical state running deep in our trillions of cells that alters the regular habits of mind and body.

SÜZÜKEI: Xöömei is meditation. This is music that has the ability to bring about very powerful associations, especially in those who understand where this music comes from. It forces the listeners to forget about their normal mode of existence. Turkic-language speakers, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, etc, those people would say “I listen to Tuvan music and it seems to me that I began to remember something very familiar but long forgotten. What exactly it is I can’t remember.” I think this must be some ancient genetic memory. It’s music that is able to rescue people from the doldrums and send them to the cosmos.

POSTSCRIPT: My crew and I were invited as guest speakers at the Tuvan State University in Kyzyl. To our astonishment, a young student told us she was about to go to the US to spend time with the famous physicist Ralph Leighton. I had just met Leighton one year prior, and was puzzled that someone from this remote corner of the world would know him, especially someone so young. It turned out she was the daughter of Kongar-ool Ondar, one of the world's great masters of Xöömei, who I was also lucky enough to meet in California the year before, just a few months before he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away. In an incredible coincidence, I had taken a photograph with both her father AND Ralph Leighton, which — in a very moving moment — I was able to share with her.

Leighton had published a children's book about her father called "The Legend of Ondar The Groovin' Tuvan.” He also wrote an early '90s cult classic “Tuva Or Bust!”, about his persistent attempts to gain entry into Tuva with Richard Feynman — the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of quantum electrodynamics — during the Cold War. Despite their perpetually doomed attempts to visit Tuva, together they founded the "Friends Of Tuva" society in the United States as a gesture of goodwill amidst the otherwise strained political tensions of that period. http://www.fotuva.org

My interest in the exploration of the subatomic realm through Tuvan music made it only appropriate to remember Leighton and Feynman on this trip. Feynman was renowned for his pioneering visual representations of the behavior and interaction of subatomic particles (known as Feynman Diagrams). But he also had a poetic way of writing about physics that sometimes reflects a Tuvan perspective. I scribbled the following passage from Feynman’s published lectures on physics in a notebook I brought to Tuva.

According to Feynman: “A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”

One could easily imagine a Tuvan nomad writing these words about music, rather than wine. The opening line might read: "A Tuvan once said, 'The whole universe in a musical note.'" Physicists may have much to learn from their perspective. Not long before I visited Tuva, astronomers at the South Pole discovered that the structures of galaxy clusters are formed by the same elements heard in Tuvan throat singing: a fundamental frequency (i.e. drone) and it’s harmonics, in this case resounding from the Big Bang. This phenomena is now visible to the naked eye through our most powerful telescopes. I am reminded of the musician Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Secret Chiefs 3), who once wrote: “When we stop to consider that man is the mediator between knowable and unknowable realities, between created and Uncreated existences, and that his very existence is the ‘mesocosm’ of harmonization between these two realities, we can begin to appreciate why his dramatic role in the universe can become so intimately understandable in musical terms.”

Thanks to our Tuvan translator Shonchalai Targyn for providing invaluable assistance throughout Tuva, and Sean Quirk for translating Valentina’s complex mix of Tuvan and Russian into English.

Valentina Suzukei and Steve Elkins