EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 14 - Urtiin duu

Genre of the Day - Urtiin duu

Album of the Day - Mongolian Songs by Namjilyn Norovbanzad (1999)

Mongolia is a land well-noted for its endless plateaus; as the least-densely populated nation on earth, it’s a bastion of ultimate pastoral beauty. It’s romantically colored by its Khanate history and fawned over for its wild horses—there’s thirteen per person—in light of its relative obscurity in world affairs nowadays (though the country recently came under the ire of Ukraine for refusing to carry out an ICC order to arrest Vladimir Putin). Its music reflects the rarefied air of the steppes, as flowing and astonishing to take in as the language’s traditional top-to-bottom writing system bichig.

Urtiin duu simply translates to long-form song in Mongolian, a distinction from short-form, simple bogino duu songs, following a pattern of distinction between long epics and short songs throughout many Central Asian musical traditions as in Kazakh music and Sakha traditional music. Though Mongolia is often popularly depicted in alluring isolation, it’s important to remember that it is part of a cultural continuum of Turkic and and Mongol cultures spanning Central Asia—it’s easy to find the resemblance between Tajikistan’s Odyssean, sky-scraping falak epics and urtiin duu. Urtiin duu reflects the centrality of epics in Mongolian storytelling; during the country’s royal peak, after its staggering conquest of the widest swathe of Eurasia of any entity, scribes penned the Secret History of the Mongols. The work was a blend of myth and reality attributing the birth of the Mongols to the union of a grey-blue wolf and red doe. Utiin duu follows similarly ambitious themes, covering philosophical, religious, romantic, or festive storylines. 

ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠤᠨ

ᠨᠢᠭᠤᠴᠠ

ᠲᠣᠪᠴᠢᠶᠠᠨ

Urtiin duu is chiefly a vocal phenomenon, though; highly melismatic and beautifully drawn out, full-length songs aim for refined quality of its distinctive singing style rather than a great quantity of words. It’s meant to evoke a deeply meditative and immersive indulgence in nostalgia and the magnitude of the land around its singers. Its vocal traditions are thoroughly sophisticated with two thousand years of development, steeped in Mongolia’s deep connection to the cycles of land and animals in the context of its historically nomadic culture. It features awe-striking leaps, sustained notes, and unique styles of vibrato that make it on par with opera or dhrupad in vocal intensity. It’s typically performed with the morin khuur, a two-string horsehair fiddle with a profound, clear tone. 

Namjilyn Norovbanzad hailed from arid Dundgov, a region particularly noted for its singers’ tones, and rose to fame as one of the form’s best modern interpreters from the 1950s to the end of her life. Her readings of urtiin duu on this album, form the picture of a vast sky over the horizon of the steppes. Her preternaturally powerful notes, in near constant-ascendance, whisk out like into the heavens with the magnificence of cirrus clouds. She gets occasional breaks when the morin khuur or jaw harp interjects—although the instrumentation radically changes with a Chinese skew on the last few songs—but the album demonstrates how urtiin duu is ultimately a vehicle for sheer vocal prowess that connects listeners to the past and cosmos. Moments like 1:40 on “Cloud Trailes Xangai Mountain” (track 3) stop you in your tracks. Urtiin duu uniquely conveys the accumulation of wisdom and cultural potency in vocal devotion, each note as unfettered as horses running.