Throat-Singing: Body, Spirit, Pathways, Place

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Dr Carole Pegg, University of Cambridge
• Friday 30 January 2026, 17:30-18:30
• Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson.

Abstract

“Throat-singing” is timbre-centred vocal music typified by the simultaneous separate sounding of a musical drone and its overtones or undertones by a solo vocalist. Here I also include the timbral vocal technique of heroic epic performers. Often perceived as otherworldly, these vocal sounds have entranced global listeners and inspired many to attempt the technically difficult styles and substyles. My extensive fieldwork among Indigenous nomadic peoples of Inner Asia, the cradle of this genre, revealed how these sounds “place” the bodies of performers and listeners in the local acoustic landscape and mountain-steppe ecology, enable nomadizing along cross-border pathways in an animist tripartite universe, and create kinship relations with living and ancestral humans and spirits. Tyvan “throat-singer” Radik Tülüsh’s suggestion that these connections form a “philosophy”, inspired my theory of “ontological musicality,” that is, an inter-relational musical complex that connects Inner Asian nomadic identities, ways of being, spirituality, personhood, community, and senses of place. Finally, I ask: can Inner Asian “throat-singing” as an ontological musicality, with its respect for the environment and mediation of the potentially opposing notions of movement and place, be of equal relevance to its technical accomplishment in our own “ways of being” in the world?

Biography

Dr Carole Pegg is an affiliated Senior Researcher in the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit, University of Cambridge, and alumna of Lucy Cavendish College. After gaining her degree and PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, she undertook postdoctoral research on the music of nomadic peoples of Inner Asia (Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, southern Siberian republics of Altai, Khakhassia and Tyva). Two ethnographies ensued: Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities (Washington University Press, 2001) and Drones, Tones & Timbres: Sounding Place among Nomads of the Inner Asian Mountain-Steppes (Illinois University Press, 2024). She has served as Chairperson of the British Forum of Ethnomusicology, founding co-editor of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology (now Ethnomusicology Forum), Senior Editor of traditional world music for the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians (second edition), and editorial board member of the journal Cambridge Anthropology. As an English singer-fiddler, she has recorded as a solo artist, with the folk-rock band Mr Fox, and with throat-singer Radik Tülüsh (of the Tyvan band Huun-Huur-Tu). As director of Inner Asian Music and 7-Star Records, she has toured musicians from her fieldwork areas and produced compact discs of their music.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Annual Food Agenda
• Cambridge Infectious Diseases
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Lecture Series
• Darwin Lectures and Seminars
• DevBio
• Featured lists
• Featured talks
• Graduate-Seminars
• Guy Emerson's list
• Hanchen DaDaDash
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Humanitas and General Science
• Inference Group Summary
• Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue
• Major Public Lectures in Cambridge
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• Talks related to sustainability and the environment
• custom
• history
• personal list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.