Mongolian throat singing is Hacked by China

by Mongol

I came across the following article about Mongolian throat singing been hacked by China in UNESCO and was very angry.

If you are Mongolian and think you have been robbed of your cultural heritage, please, spread the word out by all means in your sphere of influence.

Mongolia fights China's claim to throat-singing's cultural roots

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — For nearly 20 years, Odsuren Baatar, a master of Mongolian throat singing, has been visiting China to teach his craft: making the human voice soar, quiver and drone, its pitches in eerie unison like a bagpipe.

When he started going there, his students were all beginners because nobody in China knew much about throat singing. But they were eager to learn, and, after years of sharing his techniques, Odsuren took pride in having helped promote an art form prized in Mongolia as a singular national treasure.

His pride, however, turned to dismay and then anger when he saw a copy of a video China had submitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): It featured one of his former students pitching a bid by China to have throat singing registered by the United Nations as part of the "intangible cultural heritage of humanity," with China getting the credit.

"I was in shock. I taught them, and then they say it is theirs," Odsuren said.

Throat singing — a fiendishly difficult practice that musicologists know as overtone singing — often has attracted interest, sometimes covetous, from outside Mongolia. The Russian region of Tuva, which borders Mongolia, tried briefly in the 1990s to brand it as Tuvan and impose a licensing system on throat singers.


Frank Zappa, the late American musician, jammed with a throat-rock ensemble called Huun-Huur-Tu, and folk-music aficionados around the world have long marveled at how a good throat singer can produce two or more distinct pitches simultaneously in an otherworldly mix of melody and tone.

But China has proved the most zealous fan of all: Its pitch worked, and the country got UNESCO to list Mongolian throat singing under China's name.

Odsuren, 63, fumed at the betrayal: "I don't like people lying and claiming something that everyone knows is Mongolian."

A listing by UNESCO doesn't bring any money or copyright privileges, but it does confer bragging rights, and it helps China reinforce cultural claims viewed as essential to holding together a vast territory populated on the fringes by ethnic minorities of often uncertain loyalties. That includes a population of ethnic Mongolians, most of them in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, which was hit by a wave of unrest in May and further protests in June fed by resentment against the area's majority Han Chinese.

For full article go to:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/musicnightlife/2015896486_mongolia13.html