subscribeThe Lian and Chirgilchin Ensembles Collaborate
by Nancy Cantwell and Aram Yardumian
On April 9th, a Friday night at California Institute of the Arts, there took place an intimate and profound collaboration from a far away part of the world. The Herb Alpert School of music hosted The Lian Ensemble and Chirgilchin in their The Wild Beast music pavilion (aptly named after composer Morton Feldman’s metaphor for the untamable in music) and a new sound emerged. The Lian Ensemble, a Los Angeles based group whose roots lie in the Persian classical and mystical Sufi traditions are no strangers to the idea of fusion. Each of their nine albums incorporates such diverse different musical styles as jazz, Flamenco, and Hindustani. The addition of Chirgilchin, the Tuvan throat singers, whose music emanates from Buddhism and Shamanism practices, was a seamless and inspired choice. The resultant recording “The Window“, which will be released in May 2010, explores this passionate blending.
The Wild Beast was the ideal environment to experience this synthesis of musical styles. Designed by architects Hodgetts + Fung in consultation with a team of acoustical engineers, the resonance of every Tuvan harmonic overtone produced an elixir of aural delight. We were lucky to find a seat in the 3,200-square foot structure that merely seats 100 people when closed and 750 when in its open-air “bandshell” configuration. Fresh faced students took advantage of the floor seating and their dogs were welcomed as the animal spirit representatives. The musicians were arranged in a u-shape, the four Tuvans in full costume occupied the left hand side of the stage while the Lian Enselmble sat stage right. Not all the talent present was on stage. A convergence of other musical notables present in the audience including composer, percussionist John Bergamo and tabla master Swapan Chauduri, made the night feel ripe for generating alchemy.
The music of the evening began with three performances by Chirgilchin of pure Tuvan origins, and progressed to the collective concert by Lian and Chirgilchin of the music of “The Window.”
Tuvan throat singing is said to have originated less as an aesthetic form and more as a form of landscape-specific communication. This part of Siberia is and remains quite open and unpopulated and therefore, the frequencies of these overtones may have developed as a way to transfer information over long distances. The deep history of this tradition may be seen in its striking resemblance to other a cappella musical forms of the Eurasian steppe, such as the yoik of the Sámi and the Shamanic traditions of northeastern Siberia and Korea. Some of the tones may indeed hark back to animistic rituals that involved communication with (or mimicry of) animals. Even today some Siberian vocal music is sung to animals. That the tradition has lately been filed under the rubric of entertainment has not diminished its power in the slightest.
The Persian classical tradition has perhaps a more complex history—also for reasons of geography—by virtue of the Persian heartland’s situation between east and west. Very little is known about the music of Iran and Greater Persia until the Medieval period—a time in which people, goods and ideas were flowing freely across the steppe from China to Europe and back. That octave and scale are arguably concepts foreign to Persian classical music distinguish it from European modes, while the idiosyncratic rhythms present in Persian music may be related to poetic forms of the East. Yet the use of lute, harp and bagpipe in the Persian court probably originated further west, in Egypt or Anatolia. That improvisation has long been a feature of Persian music gives the Lian Ensemble’s tilts into free jazz, and their stitching-in of other traditions and modes, such as Tuvan throat-singing, seem natural.
Listeners to “The Window” should realize that the experience of the collaboration belongs strictly in the realm of the senses and trust in nuance, since few people are fluent communicators in both Farsi and Tuvan. Moreover, since the styles of music have distinct formal and functional histories, such a collaboration might at first seem as incongruous as, say, a didgeridoo player performing with the Berlin Philharmonic. But this cosmic untranslatability and miscegenation make the results all the more dynamic, since the emotive power of the vocals transcend, in a sense, whatever their message may be, and speak directly to the universality of music as a language.
From “The Window”, The Basis of Creation
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In 2008 Lian Ensemble’s Houman Pourmehdi was asked by Judy Mitoma, the director of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance, to arrange a composition for the World Festival of Sacred Music’s opening gala concert. Houman arranged a traditional Sufi piece to be performed by Lian Ensemble and Chirgilchin along with several other musical groups. The musicians had one rehearsal the night before the performance. Houman said the resulting union “provided a night of sound so varied, unique, and seamless that it was as if a window had been established. To listen that night was to be transcendent.” – from the Liner Notes by Richard Barton
