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

by Theodore Levin (Author)
Key Phrases: Inner Asian, Siber Chyltys, Tolya Kuular (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"...[an] immensely readable and thought-provoking book..." -- Simon Broughton, editor, Songlines and Rough Guide to World Music

"Entertaining, fascinating, and well written" -- Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, author of The Tenacity of Ethnicity

"No other writer could extract such a delicate mélange of philosophy, acoustics, and aesthetics from... vocalization over a running stream" -- Michael Church, BBC World Service

"Ted Levin has given us a window into a world of traditional music we might never otherwise know." -- Yo-Yo M

Leavin weaves personal narrative with interviews documenting how Tuvan music has changed music and musicians in Europe and America." -- Dirty Linen, Michael Parrish

Review

This is a complex, informationally-dense book that fits well into recent trends towards aural phenomena.Nina Fales, Journal of Folklore Research, October 15, 2008

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (January 11, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253347157
• ISBN-13: 978-0253347152
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #460,491 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Listening with New Ears, December 26, 2006

By	Dr. Debra Jan Bibel "World Music Explorer" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly professional and easy and rewarding reading, July 22, 2008

By	Joseph Jordania "Dr J.J." (Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

4 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative but tedious, June 18, 2006

By	Jonathan L. Stewart "jonathan_stewart2" (Thousand Oaks, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.