Music is a universal language that expresses oneself to the outer world, not necessarily speaking the same language. Mongolian music has been forged for thousands of years. Thus Mongolian songs and music are very melodic and naturalistic. Over the years as civilizations evolve and their music evolves accordingly, the same goes for Mongolian music as well
There are several types of traditional music in Mongolia that include Khoomii or throat singing, long and short songs, and tuuli or Mongolian epic or poem. In this article, we discuss each of these music genres in Mongolia.
1. Khoomii or Throat singing
Throat singing or also called overtone singing originated from Mongol and Turkic tribes in central Asia, Mongolia, and Siberia. So what is exactly Khoomii? A form of singing in which a single voice produces more than one tone at the same time, usually as harmonics of a main tone or drone. Throat singing is divided into 2 major styles which are Mongolian throat singing and Tuvan throat singing.
Not long ago there is a Mongolian rock band called “The HU” gained popularity among rock music lovers all over the world. The HU was founded in 2016 by Mongolian singer and producer Dashdondog. B
The distinct feature of The HU is the combination of the Mongolian traditional musical instruments as well as the way of singing with the rock music style. This genre is also classified as Hunnu rock or hu rock which is inspired by the ancient nomadic empire Hunnu. Hunnu or the Huns are considered to be Mongols and many other Turkic tribes nowadays.
2. Mongolian long and short songs
Mongolian traditional songs are divided into 2 main categories: long song and short song which literally means short song.
“Long song” not only because the songs are long, but also because each syllable of text is extended for a long duration. A four-minute song may only consist of ten words. Certain long songs such as Uvgin shuvuu khoyor, also known as Jargaltain Delger (lit. ‘Old man and the Bird’) has a length of up to 3 hours if sung in full length with 32 stanzas.
Long songs are less in lyrics, long melodic, boundless, and descriptive. Long song and morin khuur or horsehead fiddle together to give a good representation of the culture of nomads and their mentality. Long song lyrics are mostly about the endless steppe, horse, nomadic culture, or day-to-day life of nomads and mother nature.
On the contrary, what is a short song?
“Short songs” are formed and created over the hundreds of years but there is no certain creator of the song or owner; it is solely created by nomads and transmitted by mouth to mouth to next generations.
3. Tuuli or Mongolian epic poem
Mongolian epic poem or Tuuli is incredibly poetic as well as represents poem traditions that were left untouched, ancient sayings also illustrate distinctive features of each ethnicity of Mongols.
Mongolian Tuuli is an exceptional genre of Mongols ancient oral poetry. Tuuli lyrics consist of ancient beliefs such as shamanism, Buddhism, myths of аrtistry and mentality layers in it. More specifically legend, myth, praise, proverb, blessing words and methodology, spelling, and folktales all together create the tuuli. Tuuli consists of several thousand to tens of thousands of stanzas of poems which makes it a massive novel. There are Tuuli that take a whole night to perform, some tuuli’s can even take several nights to complete it.
Mongolian tuuli poems are incredibly rich in terms of lyrics that keep well the tradition of ancient Mongols. Also, tuuli requires a lot of skill, passion, tolerance, and knowledge of tradition from the tuuli performer. Mongolian famous scholar Damdinsuren.Ts once described tuuli and tuuli performers as a one-man theater of nomadic Mongols where you can watch, listen and read at the same time
Listen to the most famous tuuli performer in the Mongolian world by clicking here.
The Mongolian world is rich. We are not able to mention every beautiful music and story of Mongols here in this article. It is best to explore Mongolia by yourself.
