By Andrew Gilbert
While growing up in Beijing, Jindong Cai remembers hearing exotic music from the distant northern provinces, haunting sounds that stayed in the back of his mind for decades.
Last summer, Cai, Stanford's Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies, finally traced the music back its source, taking a 10-day trip to Mongolia with his wife, journalist Sheila Melvin. They discovered a vast, sparsely populated nation in the midst of self-discovery, a serpentine process of building a modern identity out of the wreckage of Stalinist repression and a distant, epic history of world conquest.
"I've been thinking about going to Mongolia for a long time," says Cai by phone from his Stanford office. "I knew some of the music from growing up, and it's always stayed with me. The Mongols ruled most of the world for a period, including China for almost 100 years under Kublai Khan. It was a huge empire, unbelievably huge, all the way to Hungary and Poland."
The Seventh Annual Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival, which opens Friday at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, encompasses the ancient and modern story of Mongolia with a series of concerts, pre-performance discussions, symposia and lectures. Friday's program, "Melodies From the Grasslands: Traditional Mongolian Music," features throat-singer Nanjid Sengedorj with horse-head fiddle virtuoso Urtaa Gantulga. It also includes Boerte, an accomplished seven-piece Mongolian band that plays a singular synthesis of jazz and folkloric Central Asian styles on traditional Mongolian instruments (including the horse-head fiddle, or morin khuur).
No instrument better captures Mongolia's ongoing struggle to reclaim its past than the horse-head fiddle. Over the centuries when the nomadic people ruled the steppe, no yurt was complete without the instrument hanging on a felt-covered wall. In the horse-centric culture, the morin khuur was often used to evoke galloping hooves. Writing in the New York Times from Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator, Melvin detailed how in the years since the country's transition to democracy in 1990, the instrument has played a central role in Mongolia's cultural recovery from Russian domination.
"The horse-head fiddle is a soul instrument for Mongolia families," Cai says. "It has two strings, but made out of hundreds of horse hairs. It's a very fascinating instrument, but during the Soviet period they weren't allowed to continue developing it. Since 1990, it's been reborn."
The Soviets didn't merely repress Mongolia's distinctive traditions. They sought to spread European culture, and three generations of Mongolian musicians received classical conservatory educations, often in Russia. Saturday's program at Dinkelspiel, "From the Grasslands to the Steppes," explores that enduring influence. Conducted by Cai, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra will interpret Borodin's enduringly popular "On the Steppes of Central Asia" and guest composer Byambasuren Sharav's "Concerto for Morin Khuur and Orchestra," and Suite No. 2 from the ballet "Zuurdiin Oron," featuring pianist Juliann Ma, winner of the 2010 Stanford Concerto Competition, and soloist Gantulga.
"Western arts have deep roots in Mongolia as well," Cai says. "The Soviet Union controlled the country for 60 years. They built an opera house and a music school, a national ballet and music theater. In a holdover from the Soviet system they produced 14 ballets and operas every year.
"But the Mongolians suffered a lot during the Soviet period," Cai continues. "You don't see any of the original script; you see Russian Cyrillic. But it's not Russian; it's phonetic representation of Mongolian. A lot of young people don't read the old script. They can't read the old books. So there are a lot of discussions going on about how to reclaim that past, and we want to explore a very broad scope of Mongolian culture at the festival. We'll touch religion, poetry, fine arts."
The festival's second weekend takes a wider look at Central Asia. On Feb. 11, San Francisco's New Spectrum Ensemble and the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music's ensemble-in-residence, the New Pacific Trio, collaborate with Ko Ishikawa on Japanese bamboo mouth organ and horse-head fiddle player Urtnasan, exploring a program of new and recent works by Chen Yi, Keiko Fujiie, François Rose and Tajik composers Tolib Shakhidi and Farangis Nurulla-Khoja.
On Feb. 12, the festival truly lives up to its pan-Asian name, as the Bay Area's Ballet Afsaneh presents folkloric and classical dances of Central Asia, alongside performances by Mongolian, Tibetan and Japanese soloists, including Ishikawa, Sengedorj and traditional Mongolian dancer Darkhya.
The festival closes Feb. 13 with a performance by Iranian singer-songwriter Mohsen Namjoo, who is marking the release of his new CD, "Useless Kisses" (Payam Entertainment). Sponsored in part by the Pan-Asian Music Festival, the album is a collection of love songs written between 1995 and 2006.
Living in the Palo Alto area for the past year, Namjoo is a visiting artist at Stanford through the spring. Barred from recording in Iran (where he was sentenced in absentia to a five-year jail term in 2009 for his unconventional vocal rendering of a Koranic verse on a private recording), he's developed an avid following at home and in the Iranian diaspora, where the raw emotion in his music resonates with disillusioned young listeners.
"People say his music is controversial, but it comes from the heart," Cai says. "His music is so spread out on the Internet, but you can't publish it in Iran, and he's never officially recorded any of these songs."
Always looking for pan-Asian opportunities, the festival has invited a Tibetan singer to perform with Namjoo's band of fellow Bay Area Iranian musicians.
Seventh Annual Stanford
Pan-Asian Music Festival
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday and Feb. 11-12, 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13
Where: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University
Tickets: $20; 650-725-2787, http://scbs.stanford.edu/festival
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