Lancaster Countians get a crash-course in Tuvan culture when Alash Ensemble, a quartet of master throat singers, visits the area for a special performance.
Tuva, a Siberian neighbor of Mongolia and a republic of the Russian Federation, has inspired curiosity around the globe with its singular form of singing, in which the vocalist produces a low, guttural tone and, through careful manipulation of the vocal tract, splinters the tone into two, three or even four notes simultaneously. Depending on the singer’s specific mode of throat singing, the “extra” tones resemble anything from a whistle to a songbird to, in the “kargyraa” style, the cries of a yak. It’s a surreal, improbable-sounding exercise that requires excruciatingly nuanced control of muscles that most humans rarely, if ever, use.
The only thing as unlikely as the sounds these men are producing is the story of Sean Quirk, an Ohio-born, Wisconsin-raised man who now travels the world as manager and interpreter for the group.
Quirk first encountered throat singing while in school in St. Paul, Minnesota. His fascination with an album he heard by master singer Huun-Huur-Tu eventually led him to try the artform for himself – for better or worse.
“I started imitating a couple months after I first heard and was blown away by the music,” he says in a Fly Magazine interview during Alash’s latest North American tour. “I made a lot of bad noises.”
After learning what he could on his own, Quirk earned a Fulbright fellowship and soon packed his bags for the south of Siberia to study at the feet of the masters. Soon after arriving in Tuva in 2003, he met Alash, a group of young men as beloved for their steadfast commitment to tradition as their vision for marrying the music with modern influences.
“They had been an ensemble going on five years at the time and were all members of the newly formed Tuvan National Orchestra,” Quirk recalls. “Being of a similar age, and musicians, they and the orchestra took me on as a student in Tuvan music. Naturally, we became friends, as the orchestra kind of adopted me in a sense, to the point of letting me sit in on the bass doshpuluur [a Tuvan lute], a post which eventually became my official job in Tuva to the present.”
Over the next six years, Quirk would marry a Tuvan woman, have two daughters and set up a permanent home within the culture that still holds his fascination today.
“Nothing can describe hearing and feeling it live. I have been living there a long time and seen a lot of Alash shows, and it still gets me deep each time to hear it up close,” he attests. “People also shouldn’t just expect ‘fancy vocal tricks,’ but rather a deep and richly developed music involving instruments and vocals which simultaneously feels exotic and intimately familiar.”
*Reprinted from Fly Magazine
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