Customer Reviews

Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond

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The ethnographer author of The Hundred Thousand Fools of God, who took us on a musical journey to Uzbekistan, truly enters new sonic territory with this account of traditional and developing Tuvan musical arts, including his fostering (as executive producer) of the group Huun-Huur-Tu. More than associating the various forms of throat singing with ambient environmental sounds, Tuvan music is based on timbre, not pitch, on relative intervals, not absolutes. Such a radical alteration of musical perspective requires new ways of listening, and here Levin helps us with a most interesting and well-written book and CD and, on the flip side of the disk, DVD. Instead of a deadly tedious textbook with some artificial, meaningless taxonomy and pages of scores, we are presented with a fascinating, lucid exploration that made me re-listen to my collection of Tuvan and Manchurian music with more appreciation and understanding. This book expanded my mind.

The book is a great contribution to the study of the unique Central Asian tradition of overtone singing. Both professional ethnomusicologist and lay person will find in this book plenty of useful information, photos, maps, transcrptions, audio recordings and DVD files, you name it. Both Theodore Levin and Valentina Suzukei are professional ethnomusicologists and international experts of thes fascinating tradition. If you already know this tradition, you would know the names of the authors, and the brilliance of the international sensation from Tuva - the ensemble "Huun-Huur-Tu", but if you are a new person in this sphere, you are going to enrich your knowledge with the unique musical culture that will change your perception of the human musicality. Highly recomended.

The DVD/CD that accompanies this book is outstaning, even though about half of the DVD's content is comprised of scenes of ambient noise from rivers, drives along California freeways and the like, there are tremendous performances of Tuvan vocal and instrumental music.

The book is highly informative, but too frequently reads like a scholarly treatise, following questionably relevant tangents at the expense of the core subject matter. Levin has admirably dedicated his professional life to bringing Central Asian music to the attention of Westerners, but his work suffers because he is more of a professor than an author. When Levin sticks to Tuva, Tuvans and Tuvan music, a lot of light is shed, but the portions of the book on mimesis, mimicry and immitation, ammong others, remind me too much of my university musicology days where I'd have to struggle in inventing something, ANYTHING, to fill up the pages on that term paper. Parts of the book unfortunately read like that and go beyond the scope of what I wanted to know about Central Asian music. Nonetheless, between those gaps lies everything I wanted to know about the music, so in that sense, the book was worthwhile.