Singing Paths
The Nomadic Sensibility of Mongolian Urtyn duu
Exploring the intersection of song, land, and spirit in contemporary Mongolia
Cloth – $75
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eBook – $44.95
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Publication Date
About the Book
Mongolian urtyn duu, or long-song, is a living tradition shaped by nomadic life, ecology, and embodied experience. Sunmin Yoon draws from over fifteen years of fieldwork to reveal urtyn duu as music but also a way of knowing the world through the body, senses, and environment. As Yoon shows, rural and urban singers alike learn their craft through daily experiences of listening to landscapes, animals, and community voices. These practices forge deep links between sound, memory, and place. The singers’ use of breath, movement, and feeling produces powerful emotional and sensory experiences that connect both musicians and listeners with wider ecological and spiritual worlds. Though reflecting social change and modern Mongolia’s history, the tradition at the music’s heart continues to call upon and convey the core values of a nomadic people.Enlightening and evocative, Singing Paths offers an eyewitness account of a rarely explored musical tradition.
* Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the Bruno Nettl Endowment for Ethnomusicology.
About the Author
Sunmin Yoon is an assistant professor of world music/ethnomusicology and Korean studies at the University of Delaware. She is the coeditor of Mongolian Sound Worlds.Reviews
“Yoon traveled widely to conduct interviews in both rural and urban contexts, and she provides new and interesting details of the relatively unexplored field of Mongolian music and sound. As she explores the relationship between nomadic sensibility and traditional long-song, she reveals how these performances were once integral to Mongolian traditional ways of being, became transformed during the socialist/Soviet period, and continue to be adapted to contemporary social and political circumstances.”—Carole Pegg, author of Drones, Tones, and Timbres: Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes
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