1 Hutchins

Kip Hutchins DDRA Proposal and Bibliography

Shadows in the Valley: Movement and Musical Transmission in Contemporary

“In youth, knowledge fills your mind, as the shadow of a bald mountain fills a valley” -“Xuren Tolgoitoi Suuder,” traditional Mongolian long-song

My research asks how nomadism is experienced, negotiated, and communicated through musical transmission. For this project I will examine how music in Mongolia is used to conceptualize and create nomadic interactions with landscape. Expanding on literature that examines soundscapes (Stokes 1994, Sterne 1997, Samuels et. Al 2010) and musical constructions of place (Wilgus et. Al 1970, Cohen 1995, Feld 1996, Thomas and Enders 2000,

Fox 2006), I will examine how ideas about rural nomadism become connected to sound in the transmission of performance techniques, aesthetics, and canons of the Mongolian , or horse-head fiddle. Particular sounds, songs, and playing styles are mobilized to evoke understandings not simply of place, but of a way of being in space the is intrinsically related to a particular kind of social movement. This approach opens up the theory on soundscapes beyond theorizing how sonic environments are built (Sterne 1997) and how understandings of place are related sonically (Feld 1996), to include considerations for the sonic articulation of people's engagements with space.

I will focus on the transmission of three musical styles associated with the morin khuur, or horse-head fiddle. The horse-head fiddle holds a special place in Mongolian society as a visual and aural symbol that has been employed by cosmopolitans, nationalists, rural nomadic herders, wealthy urban elites, and other Mongolians to make a variety of ideological claims to the 2 Hutchins instrument. The three genres I will focus on in particular are folk short-songs, urtiin duu or

"long-song," and a kind of dance music known as biye . These are the three most commonly performed styles of music on the instrument, and each has a central position in

Mongolian national discourses on musical heritage, in which they are ideologically associated with different geographic regions of Mongolia. By examining the social values and ideas associated with the horse-head fiddle and transmitted along with its canons, techniques, and aesthetics, my research will work towards uncovering the role of music and music education in this post-Socialist context.

To conduct this research, I will engage in observations and participant-observations of the transmission of horse-head fiddle techniques and aesthetics in a variety of contexts, rural and urban, state-sanctioned and informal. By observing lessons with Mongolian students, as well as continuing to study the instrument myself I can gain an greater insight into the experiences of the other students. These approaches will also help me to connect and build rapport with Mongolian musicians and music teachers. To supplement these observations, I plan to conduct interviews with students and teachers of the instrument about their motivations for pursuing this instrument and ideas about pedagogy. I will also collect oral histories from musicians and music teachers.

I draw upon Bourdieu's (1990) idea of embodied knowledge, a field of knowledge than can only be accessed and experienced through bodily sensation. Taking an acoustemological approach (Feld 1997) I focus on the production and consumption of sound as a primary field of engagement through which people experience an embodied understanding of the world that is multi-sensory as multiple different senses become tied to aural experience. My research in 3 Hutchins particular examines how knowledge related to mobility and nomadism becomes embodied in contexts of transmission of musical knowledge. I draw upon Sterne (1997) and Feld's (1996) theories on place as experienced via the total sonic environment, or soundscape, taking music as both a primary factor of a soundscape and as a reflection of an ideal soundscape as the sounds of the horse-head fiddle become overwritten with a sensory attachment to the multi-sensory experience of being in and moving through a place.

This study takes any form of musical transmission to be a continuum that includes both official, institutionalized conservatory education as well as informal contexts of music performance and listening. I argue that the manifold contexts of musical transmission in

Mongolia constitute what Lave and Wenger (1991) refer to as"legitimate peripheral participation," in which people of differing levels of expertise are transformed into full participants of a community of practice, learning the skills and canons of a musical practice while also learning and shaping social values held by the community. Katz (2013) argues that all forms of education are multi-modal, as multiple senses are engaged in the transmission of a subject and become intertwined in the process. Meanwhile Rice (2003) argues that contexts of music education cultural knowledge and competency is transmitted alongside the technical aspects of the production of the music. Writing on dance, Hahn (2007) and Bizas' (2014) theories place them at the intersection of embodied learning and artistic production. They argue that the sensory processes of teaching and learning music and dance shape and are shaped by individual's social realities exceeding the context of the art itself. Hahn (2007) writes that the multi-sensory processes involved in the transmission of dance instill profound cultural beliefs 4 Hutchins upon the body.

Harvey (1990) and Giddens (1990) argue that modernity, and later post-modernity, led to major reconstructions of the ways in which time and space are experienced. For both Harvey and Giddens, these reconstructions of society have transformed the way people engage with the world, leading towards increased mobility of people, objects, and ideas. Hannam et. al (2006) pick up and expand this theory, arguing that these new forms of mobility emerge from and are enabled by the fixities, spatial attachments, and institutions that they destabilize by cutting across, replaced rooted attachments to one place with rhizomatic attachments across space.

Kaplan (2006), Pritchard (2000), Tsing (2002) and Ahmed (2004), critique these new mobile forms of subjectivity as privileging masculine cosmopolitanism in such a way that reinscribes older models of domination, though these mobilities often do open up new spaces for marginalized people to gain power and renegotiate local power stuctures (Rasmussen 2005).

To conduct this research, I will engage in the classic anthropological method of participant-observation by taking part in the performance and transmission of horse-head fiddle techniques and aesthetics in a variety of contexts, rural and urban, official and unofficial.

Following Rice (2003) I will take situations in which the instrument is taught and learned as sites in which general cultural knowledge and understandings of the world are taught and learned alongside the primary transmission of musical performance techniques. Furthermore drawing on

Hahn (2007), and Bizas (2014) I take musical transmission to be characterized by synesthesia, as the visual, aural, and tactile become entangled through the processes of demonstration and repetition, while the sensorial experiences of performing, seeing, and hearing the instrument 5 Hutchins become imbued with social meaning. By observing lessons with Mongolian students, as well as continuing to study the instrument myself I can gain an greater insight into the embodied experiences of the other students. These approaches will also help me to connect and build rapport with Mongolian musicians and music teachers. To supplement these observations, I plan to conduct interviews with students and teachers of the instrument about their motivations for pursuing this instrument and ideas about pedagogy. I will also collect oral histories from musicians and music teachers.

The primary ethical concerns associated with this kind of research are loss of confidentiality and the inherently colonial endeavor of a privileged westerner coming to

Mongolia to take advantage of Mongolian cultural resources. To address the first issue, I will continue to take all of the necessary precautions against loss of confidentiality that I have with the data I have collected from my previous projects in Mongolia. Following the IRB human subjects research guidelines, I use pseudonyms for my collaborators, keep all of my research data on a non-internet-connected hard drive, and allow my collaborators to see what I will be writing about them before I publish to see if they approve of my usage of their words and descriptions.

One of the major goals of my most recent trip to Mongolia in the summer of 2015 was to address this second ethical concern of cultural colonialism. During this time I met with a long- time collaborator of mine to discuss how we could work on a project together that would be mutually beneficial to both of us. He suggested collecting legends associated with folk songs used in rural areas as part of the transmission of these musical traditions. Our goal is to put together a book to be produced in Mongolia and made available to horse-head fiddle teachers 6 Hutchins and interested students and scholars that presents the score for a number of traditional songs along with their lyrics and the legends associated with them, written in both Mongolian and

English. Over the course of my research I will contribute to the collection of legends and songs and their translation into English, as a way engage in a form of anthropological research that is responsive to the needs of the communities with which I will be engaging.

I have been working with with Mongolian musicians and music teachers for the past five years. Over the course of thirteen months spent over four trips to Mongolia, I have developed contacts with horse-head fiddle, , and poly-phonic throat singing teachers based out of the capitol city and in rural parts of the and the . I have already conducted, recorded, transcribed, and translated several hours of interviews with horse- head fiddle and long-song teachers in Ulaanbaatar and rural Dundgovi province. I have also conducted several hours of participant-observation in contexts of conservatory education in urban areas, as well as contexts of musical transmission and performance in rural areas of the middle Gobi. The observations and interviews I have conducted up to this point have been open- ended investigations of musical pedagogy and the performance of the horse-head fiddle across settled and nomadic contexts. Recurring themes of place, heritage, and nomadism emerged in my fieldwork with both urban and rural teachers and have directed my research towards the acousetemological experience of nomadism.

I have built my current research plan based on the data I have collected over the course of my previous research trips. In previous participant-observations I have found a variety of ways in which various aspects of playing the horse-head fiddle, from bodily posture while holding to 7 Hutchins instrument to the minute movements involved in producing and modifying the sound of the fiddle, encode ideas about nomadic movements. The movements embodied through music education have ranged from the small-scale everyday movements of pastoral life such as horse- riding and manual pastoral labor, to the long-distance movements of traveling form rural to urban contexts in response to climate change and traveling to and beyond state borders in response to economic conditions.

Movement between rural and urban spaces is relatively common in Mongolian life; even many non-nomadic Mongolians lead highly mobile lives. This is especially true for musicians, as many rural musicians travel to the city to receive training at national conservatories and then return to their rural homelands or to other rural areas in search of work. As such, I must adopt a research plan follows this movement between rural and urban spaces. I plan to travel to

Mongolia from October of 2016 until the following October of 2017.

During this time I will travel back and forth between the capitol, Ulaanbaatar, and three rural sites: Dundovi province to the south, Khovd province to the West, and Arkhangai province to the north. While in Ulaanbaatar I will analyze official musical pedagogies and ideas about traditional music by observing lessons and taking interviews from horse-head fiddle teachers and students in the city. While in the Gobi desert province of Dundgovi, I will observe long-song lessons and interview rural teachers and students of the horse-head fiddle. In Arkhangai province my plan is to interview a horse-head fiddle builder and teacher who has started a movement to support movement of fiddle players, builders, and teachers back to rural, nomadic spaces. In the western province of Khovd I will conduct research on biye biyelgee dance music and work with 8 Hutchins fiddle players and teachers who are members of Mongolian minority ethno-linguistic groups, such as the and Urianghai. I have chosen the above-mentioned sites for their importance in Mongolian ideologies of traditional music in relation to place, as each has been widely referred to in my interviews to date as being connected intimately connected, both socially and geographically, to a particular genre of music.

I plan to spend my first two months, October through November of 2016, in Mongolia's capitol, Ulaanbaatar. While there I will conduct participant-observations at the conservatory of the National University of Arts and Culture and the Music and Dance College of Ulaanbaatar, analyzing the official pedagogies used at the conservatories both in contemporary classrooms and historically through use of the university's archives and taking interviews from horse-head fiddle teachers and students. While in the capitol I will also conduct interviews with horse-head fiddlers performing in emergent genres such as “folk-metal” (, Khusugtun) and

“ethno-jazz” (Arga Bileg) bands.

From December through January of 2016 I will travel to a rural county in the Dundgovi province in the middle of the Gobi desert to observe long-song lessons and interview rural teachers and students of the horse-head fiddle. I will follow up on contacts I have made in the summer of 2015 with three teachers in particular, as well as a builder of the instrument who lives in the the county and has a small business distributing musical instruments that he has built to herders in the area. While in Dundgovi I will also consult the local archives for information on twentieth-century performers of the instrument and the institutionalization of musical education in the region. 9 Hutchins

From February through April of 2017 I will return to Ulaanbaatar to continue work with the University of Arts and Culture and Music and Dance College. Returning to the capitol during the winter will give me an opportunity to catch up with the performers of emergent genres, exploring how professional musicians in Mongolia maintain their practice and make ends meet during their off-season. During this time I will also conduct participant-observations of musical practice at the three days of Mongolian New Year's celebrations, taking these ceremonies as contexts of informal traditional musical performance and education as has been suggested by collaborators in previous interviews that I have conducted.

In May 2017 I plan to travel to Arkhangai province to interview a horse-head fiddle builder and teacher who has started a movement to support movement of fiddle players, builders, and teachers back to rural, nomadic spaces. I will interview this luthier on his process and the relationship of craft to the nomadism, and profile his method for constructing, testing, and disseminating instruments. From June through July of 2017 I will travel to the western province of Khovd to conduct ethnographic research on biye biyelgee dance music and work with fiddle players and teachers who are members of Mongolian minority ethno-linguistic groups, such as the Zakhchin and Urianghai.

From August through October 2017 I plan to wrap up my research by returning to

Ulaanbaatar to observe final tests and graduations at the University of Arts and Culture conservatory, and to follow up on interviews with the graduating students and urban-based performers. During July, in conjunction with the Mongolian national celebration of , the

Mongolian hosts a number of musical and cultural events organized around the 10 Hutchins mobilization of musical nationalism to develop patriotic sentiment, so while I am back in

Ulaanbaatar during this time I will conduct performance analyses of these events, as well as interview the performers and organizers of the events on the role of the horse-head fiddle in national projects and perceived efficacy of such events.

My research brings theories from anthropology, geography, ethnomusicology, and educational policy studies into to conversation. While Hahn (2007) and Rice (2003) write of a uni-directional flow of the transmission of cultural knowledge, this study takes contexts of musical transmission as sites of negotiation, where ideas about Mongolian society and constructions of space are mutually constructed in the articulation between teacher and student.

Further, my study focuses on how the ideas inscribed on the experience of the body through music become translated into ideas about mobility at a larger scale.

Mongolia is an interesting field site for this kind of work, as much of what has been written in anthropological and sociological studies on post-socialist education has been focused on eastern Europe and historically settled societies (see Grabher and Stark 1997, Verdery 1998,

Sabloff 1999, Bloch 2004, Fournier 2012, for studies on music education in particular see Rice

1996, Rice 2003, Buchanan 2006). Meanwhile, the literature on mobility and nomadism in the face of post-socialist institutional breakdown in central has concerned collectivization and subsistence activities over education and music (Humphrey and Sneath 1999, Humphrey 2002,

Sneath 2003). These approaches focus on the political economy of nomadism, leaving open the question of how mobilities are constructed and experienced musically. As a non-Soviet post- socialist state situated between and , Mongolia's political, ideological, and 11 Hutchins economic position is both unique and geopolitically critical. Constructions of a romanticized nomadic tradition come into conflict with enduring socialist institutions and capitalist commodification in both official and vernacular contexts of musical transmission.

Hannam et. al (2006) associate mobilities with a deterritorialization and detachment made possible by the very spatial, infrastructural, and institutional 'moorings' that cause and are caused by settled attachments to place. (Myadar 2007) argues that nomadic mobility in Mongolia, often

(problematically) misunderstood as just such a deterritorialization, can be better understood as a particular engagement with territory. Kaplan (2006), Pritchard (2000), Tsing (2002) and

Ahmed's (2004) critiques of mobility depend on the idea that mobility is inherently cosmopolitan, but Mongolian present a case where a long history of internal mobility engages both cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans.

Two-thirds of the population of Mongolia travels on historical nomadic pastoralist routes, while the increasing development of infrastructure within Mongolia and across its northern and southern borders with China and Russia respectively lead to the development of new circuits of travel and changing economic realities engender distinctly twenty-first century forms of

Mongolian mobility. The case in Mongolia represents the confluence of a historical, nomadic mobility of transhumant pastoralism and the deterritorialized mobility of Bauman's (2000) liquid modernity. Through my examination of musical education contexts, my research will provide new insight into how strategies for navigating major social shifts and managing tensions between nomadic and settled life are relationally developed, contested, and transmitted through art, education, and commodification. 12 Hutchins 13 Hutchins

Bibiliography

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics Of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity At Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bizas, Eleni. 2014. Learning Senegalese Sabar: Dancers and Embodiment in New York and Dakar. New York: Berghann Books. Bloch, Alexia. 2004. Red Ties And Residential Schools. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline Of A Theory Of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buchanan, Donna Anne. 2006. Performing Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On The Move. New York: Routledge. Feld, Steven, and Keith H Basso. 1996. Senses Of Place. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press. Fournier, Anna. 2012. Forging Rights In A New Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences Of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Grabher, Gernot, and David Stark. 1997. Restructuring Networks In Post-Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hahn, Tomie. 2007. Sensational Knowledge. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Hannam, Kevin, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry. 2006. “Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities And Moorings.” Mobilities 1(1): 1-22. Harvey, David. 2008. The Condition Of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell. Humphrey, Caroline. 1998. “Marx Went Away--But Karl Stayed Behind.” Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The End Of Nomadism? Durham: Duke University Press. Kaplan, Caren 2006. “Mobility And War: The Cosmic View Of US ‘Air Power’.” Environment and Planning A. 38(2): 395-407. Katz, Mira-Lisa. 2013. Moving Ideas: Multimodality and Embodied Learning in Communities and Schools (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies). New York: Peter Lang. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myadar, Orhon. 2007. Imaginary Nomads. Manoa: Univeristy of Hawai'i at Manoa. Ong, Aihwa. 1996. “Cultural Citizenship As Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial And Cultural Boundaries In The .” Current Anthropology 37(5): 737-751. Pritchard, Elizabeth. 2000. “The Way Out West: Development And The Rhetoric Of Mobility In Postmodern Feminist Theory.” Hypatia 15(3): 45-72. Rasmussen, Susan. (2005). “A Temporary Diaspora: Contested Cultural Representations in Tuareg International Musical Performance.” Anthropological Quarterly. (78)4: 793-826. Rice, T. 1996. “Traditional And Modern Methods Of Learning And Teaching Music In Bulgaria.” Research Studies In Music Education. 7(1): 1-12. 14 Hutchins

Rice, Timothy. 2003. “The Ethnomusicology Of Teaching And Learning.” College Music Symposium 43: 65‐85. Sheller, Mimi, and John Urry. 2006. The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A. 38(2): 207-226. Sneath, David. 2003. “Lost In The Post: Technologies Of Imagination, And The Soviet Legacy In Post-Socialist Mongolia.” Inner Asia 5(1): 39-52. Sterne, Jonathan. 1997. “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architec- tonics of Commercial Space.” Ethnomusicology 41 (1): 22–50 Tsing, Anna. 2000. “The Global Situation.” Cultural Anthropology. 15(3): 327-360. Verdery, Katherine. 1998. Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, And Property. American Ethnologist. 25(2): 291-306.