WSJ: Access, anyone?

[throatsinger]

Article on Tuva and khoomei in today's Wall Street Journal. Anyone able to post it here?

Thanks,

[imnotelmo]

i think you can buy individual articles
for $5 once they are a week old.

i'd be interested in seeing it as i was
one of the folks Chis Rhoads interviewed.
though i'm not really sure what the scope
of the article was about, but it seemed to
be exploring the effect of media on culture
rather then throat singing itself (i.e.
how has American tastes been influenced
by Genghis Blues).

Though one can always hope.


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[hjernespiser]

I just got the article. :D I don't know if I could repost it.

[godzilla]

Andy,
don't know if you saw this already, but our article came out on front page of saturday edition. thanks again for your help with it.
regards,
Chris


Tiny Tuva Is Making Big Sound in World Of Off-Beat Music --- Fans of Two-Tone Singing Gather in Cafes, Online; Soothing a 7-Month-Old
By Christopher Rhoads
1233 words
1 April 2006
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Andy Cruz was with his family at a cultural festival in Milwaukee last spring when he heard the sound.
"I was watching a martial-arts demonstration, when all of a sudden I heard this, uuuuuuuiiiiiieeeeerrrrrrraaaaaahhhh," says Mr. Cruz, 39 years old. "It was a deep, growling voice that raised the hackles on the back of my neck."
What made the sound even more striking was that the voice producing it simultaneously emitted a soft, high-pitched melody, like the tweeting of a bird. It came from a man in a long robe and sash on a nearby stage. Mr. Cruz and his 8-year-old son, Theodore, were so enraptured by the singing that they signed up for a workshop at the festival that afternoon.
Mr. Cruz, like a small but growing group of other Americans, had succumbed to the spell of throat-singing, or khoomei, an otherworldly musical tradition from a remote region called Tuva, which is wedged between Mongolia and Siberia.
Tuvan throat-singing first gained notice in the West in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Tuva opened to the outside world amid the decline of the Soviet Union. Its earliest devotees were mainly folk-music scholars and musicians.
Lately, this once-obscure vocal art has found a more diverse following. Fans congregate at workshops, bars and concerts, and swap tips and audio clips on the Internet. Some are even moving to Tuva, where throat-singing's international popularity has spawned a flourishing music industry.
New Age types are attracted to its spirituality. Rock bands use throat-singing to augment their sound. Country-Western fans hear in the music of the nomadic, horse-loving Tuvans echoes of lonely cowboys on the range.
Others, like Mr. Cruz, enjoy the challenge of making unusual noises. He now practices the two-tone singing during his night-shifts as a boiler operator at a Milwaukee medical center -- shrugging off the odd glances from co-workers. He's starting to discern multiple tones in various sounds, such as a buzzer in his boiler room. "It's opened my ears to a whole different way of listening to things," he says.
A typical singing voice produces multiple tones, but they are blended together. Throat-singing involves manipulating the mouth and throat muscles to isolate two or more of those tones, and amplify them to create distinct melodies. It often pairs a low, guttural sound -- like the voice of Popeye, the cartoon character -- with a prancing, softer tune.
Listeners often meditate to Tuvan music, envisioning the wonders of the Tuvan landscape. But the lyrics tend toward more mundane subjects. "They usually come down to something like, `see that girl over there on the steppe, I sure would like to roll around with her,' " says Ralph Leighton, who helped bring some of the first Tuvan throat-singers to the U.S. in the early 1990s. "They're singing about the same things musicians the world over are singing about."
Other Asian cultures have similar music, but enthusiasts say Tuvan throat-singing is the most developed. A mountainous Russian republic about the size of North Dakota, Tuva is home to about 230,000 Tuvans, plus about 100,000 people of other ethnicities. Over the centuries, Russians, Chinese and Mongols having taken turns occupying it.
In the 1930s, during a brief period of independence, Tuva grabbed some international attention by producing triangular and diamond-shaped stamps that depicted exotic scenes such as men in colorful robes on camels racing trains.
After the Soviet Union annexed Tuva in 1944, the region became closed to the outside world. Soviet authorities, in their push to stamp out religion and assimilate ethnic minorities, repressed many Tuvan traditions, including throat singing. The few throat-singers that remained were forced deep into the mountains.
During the depths of the Cold War, Tuva gained an unlikely advocate in the West: Richard Feynman, the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist who took part in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. In 1977, Dr. Feynman, a childhood stamp enthusiast, wondered aloud to his friend Mr. Leighton, who was then a high-school math teacher, about what had happened to Tuva. The pair resolved to go there.
Dr. Feynman died of cancer in 1988, before negotiations with the Soviet bureaucracy reached fruition. But Mr. Leighton made it to Tuva later that year, where he heard some throat-singing and was entranced. His visit led to some of the first Tuvan throat-singing tours in the U.S. He later founded a club called Friends of Tuva, which in 1995 helped take the American Paul Pena, a blind blues musician and self-taught throat-singer, to Tuva for a singing contest. The trip was chronicled in the award-winning 1999 documentary "Genghis Blues." (Mr. Pena died last year)
These days, Tuva's music scene is thriving. Its groups regularly travel overseas for concerts, most notably a foursome called Huun-Huur-Tu. New bands continue to emerge, including the first all-female group. At least two Tuvan groups are currently on tour in the U.S.
On a recent evening in a church in New York City, a Tuvan group called Alash performed with 28-year-old Sean Quirk. The pony-tailed American moved to Tuva in 2003 to study throat-singing, and now speaks the language fluently and is engaged to a Tuvan woman. "I knew there was some music I hadn't heard yet that was going to take me," he says. When he heard throat-singing, "I knew this was it."
Throat-singing's popularity has made Tuva "the only place in the world whose main export is folk music," says Theodore Levin, a professor at Dartmouth College and author of a new book on Tuvan music called "Where Rivers and Mountains Sing." "When you consider how small Tuva is and the degree to which its music has infiltrated popular culture around the world, it's extraordinary."
Stacey Borsody, a 31-year-old computer systems administrator in Pleasanton, Calif., likes to throat-sing in her car on the way to work while listening to Tuvan CDs. Her favorite group at the moment is called Chirgilchin, which means "mirage." She has participated in a few workshops and goes to concerts in nearby San Francisco when Tuvan groups pass through.
While her husband and friends aren't wild about the sound, she has found one fan: her 7-month-old son, Alexander. When she sings kargyraa, a subset of khoomei that tends toward lower sounds, "it relaxes him," says Ms. Borsody. "I sang it when I was pregnant, so maybe he recognizes it."
Brian Grover, a 39-year-old truck driver from New Mexico, was familiar with Tibetan chanting and other offbeat musical forms. But nothing had grabbed him like throat-singing. He now performs the Tuvan art monthly with fellow enthusiasts in Albuquerque, and says he plans to move to Tuva with his wife and three young children within the next year or so.
"It's a crazy thing," he says. "But you just get obsessed with it."
---
Online Today: WSJ.com subscribers can hear a sample of what throat singing sounds like, at WSJ.com/OnlineToday.

They posted a nice pic of Huun Huur Tu as well.