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235Case Study #7Overtone Singing of Central AsiaThe Central Asian tradition of overtone singing is a unique singing style thatposes another puzzle for ethnomusicologists. Overtone singing is distributed amongseveral Central Asian peoples - primarily in Tuva, Mongolia, Altai and Khakassia. Thisphenomenon is mostly known by the Mongolian term khoomei or hoomii (throat, orpharynx). During the 1930s and 1940s hoomii was elevated in Mongolia to a “national”art form (Pegg, 2002: 1009). Here are a few questions that I will attempt to answer in this“case study”:(1) In the first place, it is not clear whether this is monophony orpolyphony. As I have mentioned earlier, from the musical point ofview it is polyphony, as we have two obviously functionally differentparts (drone and melody), but from the social point of view, this is notpolyphony, as the main element of polyphonic singing – group musicalsocializing, is absent.(2) We need also to ask why the “usual” forms of vocal polyphony areabsent in Central Asian cultures, where the two-part overtone singingtradition is so developed and widespread?(3) Another important question would be whether different forms ofovertone singing from different regions of the world are connected toeach other, or whether they represent the result of convergentevolution.(4) And finally – the question about the beginnings: where and when dowe propose to find the origins of overtone singing? Without going intodetails of the technique of producing the audible overtones (there are afew good publications on this subject, (see reviews in Tongeren, 2002;Levin, 2006) we need to ask whether this is (a) a relatively recentphenomenon, or (b) this is a survival of a very ancient soundproducingmethod.As the most of the prime territory of distribution of overtone singing (Tuva,Khakassia, Altai) is within the territory of the Russian Federation, and the second mostimportant region – Mongolia - was also under the political and cultural influence ofRussia (more precisely – the Soviet Union) during the major part of the 20 th century, it isnot surprising that the majority of early scholarly works on overtone singing werepublished in Russian. Here is a brief account of the important publications and a fewrelevant ideas on the subject:• The Russian linguist N. Baskakov described in the 1940s solo two-part overtonesinging in epic singing traditions among Altai mountaineers. He mentioned the existenceof three different styles, known as kuulep kaila, kargirlap kaila, and sygyrtip kaila (kai isa generic name for overtone singing in Altai) (Baskakov, 1948).• The Soviet archaeologist and ethnographer S. Vainshtein proposed in 1980 thatthe origin of the Central Asian overtone singing tradition was connected to the Turkic