ethnomusicology

Learning Tibetan chant with Dr. Ricardo Canzio

We will soon start another cycle of classes in Tibetan Bön chanting in Taipei. In this post I explain more about the teacher and the content of the classes. Dr. Ricardo Canzio is a retired professor of Musicology at National Taiwan University and to my knowledge the world’s foremost scholar on Tibetan chanting and ritual music in the Anglophone / Western world. In-depth knowledge of the very esoteric traditions of Tibetan religious music is really hard to come by. I got to know musicologist Ricardo Canzio in 2007 in Taipei, after doing a search for materials on Tibetan chanting. I found extensive course material from professor Canzio at NTU, Taiwan’s top university. I contacted him with my questions, and it turned out he lived more or less around the corner. I was stupefied that such a repository of knowledge about Tibetan religious music was living nearby, and very willing to share his knowledge (I had tried to contact another prominent scholar on Tibetan ritual music, Ter Ellingson, with my questions, but never received a reply).

 

What’s more, I soon found out that Dr. Canzio was the producer of an album of Tibetan chanting that I regarded as one of the most intriguing and well-recorded albums I knew. Most of my collection consisted of albums by the Gyütö Tantric College, with some by the Drepung and Gyüme monasteries, and a few from other lineages. This one, from the Bön-Po, stood out from the rest. Why exactly is an interesting story which I will explain another time – you can listen to the album first.

 

Ricardo, as I came to call him soon after, helped me make sense of my fieldwork materials from Darhamsala and began sharing his vast knowledge of ritual music chanting. He explained various topics to me showing his own materials on his computer. He put Tibetan texts, their transliterations and the curly ‘music’ notations together with the actual sound files into a special multimedia .pdf format. It took him hundreds of hours to create such lucid visual tools to understand these chants, making use of different software programs. Painstaking work, which he was and is still doing. Meanwhile he told me stories about the collection of these materials, which began in 1970 in India and also continues to this present day: decades more of patient work, often under difficult conditions, compared to the situation today. Dr. Canzio is well past 80 now but is still undertaking research, mostly in Nepal, during regular stays in local monasteries.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Canzio’s early training was as a player and a composer. He was born in Argentina, and undertook music research in indigenous communities in the Amazon rain forest, which he also published on an LP album. He studied Sanskrit, Indian Philosophy and Religions and Indian Music in Benares (India) and received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London in 1979. He taught ethnomusicology at universities in Basel (Switzerland) and Paris (France) and was asked in the mid 1990s to help set up the Musicology Department at National Taiwan University, with Dr. Yuh-Fen Wang. Since that time he lives in Taiwan.

Dr. Canzio’s research output began with a translation of one of the first works in Tibetan dedicated to music. Not long ago a book was published that came out of that early work: the translation of Sakya’s Pandita’s Treatise on Music (Kathmandu: Vajra Books, 2019). Again and again Ricardo showed me his newer research, which is neither historical nor theoretical, but down-to-the ground analyses of the music chanted today in certain Tibetan (refugee) monasteries. It intrigued me, but the chants were very long and it did not seem likely I could learn to chant them myself. I had struggled to learn the subfundamental Tibetan chanting of the Gyütö and other schools since the mid-1990s, without much succes. I finally decided to try to learn one short chant for which I received detailed instructions from a chant master in Mundgod, India, in 2017. For that research I benefited greatly from Ricardo’s many pointers how to approach this task of collecting material.

Although I know could chant an actual prayer with the correct pronunciation and melody, many questions remained: there was still a large gap between the theoretical knowledge we discussed and the things that I read, and the recordings I listened to. I was looking forward to Ricardo’s publication, where I would certainly find many more answers and have the possibility to go over the audio and texts again and again.

Then during a visit in 2022, I asked Ricardo if he would be willing to teach me and some other students a few pieces from the Bön repertoire he knows so well. I wanted to understand its secrets and to see if we could achieve such great coherence among our voices as on the album. Ricardo graciously agreed, and so began a regular meeting at his home for a few patient learners. The chanting is low, but it is not the very deep, subfundamental singing. It does not involve explicit use of overtones either. However, the scope of the lessons was much wider than I had imagined. We not only learn to read, recite and chant texts. We also learn the many intricacies of drumming patterns and hand gestures; we hear about the complex relationship between text and melody, which is often counterintuitive; we study traditional notations and how to read them; we discuss the subjects of the chant and all kinds of terms, including questions of English and Mandarin translation. All of this with frequent excursions into many other subjects, directly or remotely related, such as European plainchant and its notations, history, language and music of India, Central Asia and the Middle East, and of course Tibetan religious history and ideas.

If you happen to live in Taipei and are interested in joining, please contact me. We will start again on Thursday November 16 at 10:00, we finish between 12:00 or 13:00. The place is on Heping East Road near Linguang MRT, Muzha.

 

 

Special Journal on Tuvan music

Here is the latest issue of  the journal The New Research of Tuva, dedicated this time to the music of Tuva. Many articles are in English, some in Russian, by a wide range of authors including Valentina Suzukey/Валентина Сузукей, Robbie Beahrs, Malgorzata Stelmaszyk, Maxim Chaposhnikov, Morten Abildsnes, Tadagawa Leo, Hsu Shen-Mou, Sauli Heikkilä and myself. The chief editor is Chimiza Lamajaa and this edition’s guest editor is Valentina Suzukey. This is a wonderful and diverse issue of new research on throat singing, Jew’s harps, shamanism, popular music and much more from Tuva.

You van find the Table of Contents here , a pdf of the entire journal here, and you can start the download if you want to have the issue on your own device here.
My own article about Maksim Dakpai’s throat singing is available for download here, and for online viewing here.

These are all 15 contributions:

Ethnomusicology
Issues of academic study and practical acquisition of Tuvan music (a case study of Tuvan instrumental music)
Suzukey, Valentina Yu.

What does Dakpai Maksim do when he sings sygyt? A preliminary investigation of one throat singer’s personal style
Van Tongeren, Mark

Nomads in the Global Soundscape: Negotiating Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Tuva’s Traditional Music Productions
Beahrs, Robert O.

From the sound of throat singing to the sounds of shamanic practice: Structural organisation of shamanic rituals in Tuva
Stelmaszyk, Malgorzata

Tuvan music and World Music
Chaposhnikov, Maxim V.

Tuvan music and its discography (principal names, titles, issues of description)
Abildsnes, Morten

“The khomus is my red deer on which I fly through the middle world” (Khomus in the shamanic practice of Tuva: Research issues)
Tadagawa, Leo

Social and cognitive functions of music based on the example of Tuvan throat singing
Hsu, Shen-Mou

Let me sing your songs: how Finns found xöömei
Heikkilä, Sauli

Tuvan music in schools in the United States
Quirk, Sean P.

The development of contemporary music culture of Tuva (a view from Japan)
Terada, Mao

The language of poetic texts in contemporary Tuvan pop songs
Saaya, Oyumaa M.

Psychological features of the professional activities of Tuvan musicians
Sandyi, Anna D.-B.

On the composition of modal structures of Tuvan traditional songs
Baranmaa, Ayasmaa D.-B.

The song folklore of Tozhu Tuvans: collection, publication, research
Tiron, Ekaterina L.

 

Sangpuy’s new cd Dalan

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Today is a special day for the Katipul tribe in Jrben village, Taidong. It is the end of the Big Hunt Ceremony, an age-group ritual held every year where boys learn about hunting and traditional territory, the social system of the tribe, perform dances and songs in the night, and where respect is paid to elders and those who have suffered from loss and tragedy in the past year. Once I had the privilege to join the ceremony. That was in 2004, when I spent two months in Taiwan learning traditional songs and dances from the Katipul, Amis, Bunun, Saisiat and Tayal tribes.

I vividly remember those days spend down in the valley where the Jrben hotspring hotels are, at the riverside. It began with rituals in the village to mark the places of various historic events and to visit traditional tribal boundaries. Today, as then, the morning of the 31st of december marked the return of the men from their hunting camp. Women dress up beautifully to receive them, and a series of rituals is performed in an open field.

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Performing songs and round dances in Jrben’s Katipul community (photo by Mark van Tongeren)

Later in the morning young men go through the community to visit private houses of those who lost a family member in the past year. At every courtyard the men line up in their traditional dress to perform a song and dance that ends the period of grieve and isolation of the widow or widower and other relatives. At times this is a very moving ceremony, where the tragedy of loss is felt by all present. The words spoken, and the songs and dances energetically re-enacted by beautiful and strong young men, provides genuine relief and consolation and shows how closely knit the Katipul community is. (for completeness sake, I should add that the cd uses ‘Katatripul’ instead of Katipul).

A central figure in the ceremonies, then and now, is multi-talented performer known by his tribal name as Sangpuy Katatepan Mavaliyw. He belongs to this rare species of individuals who tend to be the focal point for many people around them, whatever they do. They may be performers, they may be natural leaders, or they may be ruthless dare-devils. When such talents are bestowed upon someone already at a young age, it is easy to become engulfed in one’s own power. Not so with Sangpuy: it was clear, also in 2004 when he was in his mid-twenties, that he carried his responsibilities towards the younger age group and the elders. Sangpuy formed a natural bridge between elders, such as the much respected elder singer Valikay, and his own and younger generations.

Valikay and Sangpuy at the Big Hunt Ceremony, december 2004

Valikay and Sangpuy at the Big Hunt Ceremony, december 2004 (Photo by Mark van Tongeren)

In 2004 Sangpuy taught me some of Katipul’s songs and dances, made a double-nose-flute (‘ma-omui’) for me and showed me how to play it. I did my best to learn a melody played by him for a year or so, but did not get very far, mainly because playing requires considerable control over a very small airflow coming out of the two passages of the nose. But Sangpuy quickly picked up some of my throat singing techniques and quatrain-singing from Tuva (Siberia), which he immediately transformed to quatrains and guttural sounds in his native tongue, causing roaring laughter from everyone present.

Making of the ma-omui double-nose-flute Sangpuy offered to me. As he writes in the cd, "Every hand-made nose flute is unique, exclusive, one and only."

Making of the ma-omui double-nose-flute Sangpuy offered to me. As he writes in the cd, “Every hand-made nose flute is unique, exclusive, one and only.” (Photo by Mark van Tongeren)

I was struck by the ease and fluidity with which Sangpuy sang, by the pleasant sonority of his voice whether singing or speaking. Last year, when I visited the men coming back from the hunting camp, I saw an exhausted Sangpuy who had missed many hours of sleep (if he had slept at all), dragging himself from one ceremony or function to the next. His voice, though rough and tired, kept a convincing, natural power: there was no question that anyone else could take over his functions.

Already in 2004 I heard Sangpuy’s characteristic voice on several cds. During the Bihg Hunt Ceremony we often woke up at the river bank with a fine cd of his singing accompanied by guitar and a choral group. The night before we had heard him and the other men singing. I am lucky to have heard how Valikay at his old age could still produce his typical, forceful falsetto, either alone or alternating with Sangpuy and another elder singer, because several years ago Valikay has passed away.

Perhaps Valikay’s passing away is part of the reason why Sangpuy is taking his calling to a new level. He spend much time to set up his own studio, with the aim of producing a new album of his own music. About two months ago I received an invitation to the launch of this new cd, called Dalan. Upon arrival, and seeing the art-work, I noticed that Sangpuy had gone through a considerable transformation: he has adopted a new look and had enlisted the help of many others to produce a cd that is, again by the looks of it, ready to compete with top-quality world music acts. The cd-package is a gem, with fantastic photos and artwork in black, greys and browns, and extensive lyrics and texts in three languages.

Artwork for the cd (photo courtesy of Katatepan Studio)


Artwork for the cd (photo courtesy of Katatepan Studio)

I wondered how much Sangpuy’s new path had changed his music. And I must say, he did an admirable job. He uses the possibilities of the studio and his network of music professionals sparsely and with intelligence. There is a grand opening theme song praising the Lord with big orchestral sounds, but there are also intimate solo songs and instrumental pieces. The dance song Malikasaw, a sort of ‘anthem’ for the Katipul, is captured with its characteristic, optimistic energy with a chorus responding to Sangpuy’s leading voice, and also in a minor-key version. In some traditional songs recordings of the voice of Valikay are blended in, creating a clever post-humous studio collaboration with a voice of the past. Several other sounds from the environment and social gatherings evoke the communal atmosphere of Katipul music and emphasise its deeply social nature. Acoustical music predominates on Dalan, but the closing song uses some looped samples and field recordings to great effect.

With Dalan, Sangpuy stays close to his roots, and focuses on boosting the production side of Katipul music compared to older cd releases. It is clear he will develop his artistic vision step by step, with a strong sense of commitment to his tribal lineage, but with a professional attitude toward the world music business. He wisely demands patience from admirers, of which there are plentiful, who wonder what other new musical directions or collaborations he envisions. Stay tuned!

Mark van Tongern and Sangpuy


With Sangpuy at the cd presentation (photo by Hao Sheng-Hsin)

SANGPUY – DALAN.

14 tracks, 49 minutes, 44 page booklet with high quality b/w and color prints enfolded in luxurious cd-package.

Produced by Katatepan Cultural Studio. Tel. 0975689462.

Distributed by / available through Wind Music

http://www.windmusic.com.tw/en/pro_detail.asp?PDT_NO=SKM-001

More about Sangpuy’s cd, concerts and activities:

https://www.facebook.com/sangpuy

http://blog.yam.com/sangpuy