Mongolian Music, Dance, & Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities

Book Description
This book celebrates the power of music, dance, and oral narrative to create identities by imaginatively connecting performers and audiences with ethnic and political groupings, global and sacred landscapes, histories and heroes, spirits and gods. Three distinct cultural eras of Mongolian society are represented. Many Mongols are now performing publicly the diverse traditions of Old Mongolia that they practiced in private following the communist revolution of 1921; some are perpetuating the Soviet transformations of those traditions introduced prior to 1990; and yet others are dipping their curly-toed boots into new performance arts as they revel in musical encounters on the global stage. By highlighting the sheer variety of repertories, this book illustrates the rich diversity of Mongolia's peoples and performance arts. An accompanying compact disc contains musical examples linked to the text.

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"Dr. Pegg has made full use of what is truly a unique opportunity, by recording performances, interviewing 'practitioners' including even shamanesses (who were thought to have vanished from socialist society) and presenting the recovery of tradition against her analysis of the previous regime's attempts to repudiate its existence." -- Charles Bawden, Emeritus Professor of Mongolian, University of London

About the Author
Carole Pegg is ethnomusicology editor for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and associate lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, England. As an ethno-musicologist and musician she has been working with nomadic groups in remote areas of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, China, and with urban Mongols in both countries since 1987. She has also toured with Mongol musicians in England and Hong Kong.


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The disc contains 38 examples of folk and ritual songs by herders from different ethnic groups in remote areas of Mongolia, excerpted to provide a wider range of examples. Pegg (social anthropology and music, U. of Cambridge) cites them in approximate order as she discusses performing ethnicity, history, and place; embodying spiritual landscapes; creating sociality, time, and space; and transforming political identities. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)


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