Exploring Taboos In Music
The kind of music that gives us goose bumps
Music, as an art and a social ideology, reflects the social life and thoughts of human beings. It infects the listener through a perfect combination of rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre. It is often said that music can soothe wounds and purify the soul, which, of course, is inseparable from the characteristics of music and people’s psychological perception of music. As we generally think, the mention of music is bound to be associated with the words “beauty,” “warmth,” and “serenity,” such as Mozart’s Serenades, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, etc. Some music, however, has nothing to do with the perfection of beautiful words, and even shocks the senses like a horror movie. So why does this sort of music exist? Why is it so popular and loved by some of the audience?
Several years ago, a song named “Lost Rivers” was widely spread on major social networking sites around the world. The various voices in the song challenged the limits of humanity, making the song’s clicks and comments exceed millions, with many people commenting on this song, “The average person can’t insist on listening for 10 seconds.” This weird song is a famous vocal experimental music piece from album Lost Rivers by Sainkho Namtchylak, which was released by 1991. This collection of 13 pieces, many of them improvisations, is an attempt by Namtchylak to let the listener in to witness how she organizes that world. From growling, gurgling, bleating screaming, cooing, whispering, singing, clucking, roaring, and whooping, patterns of interaction emerge between the living world and the inanimate world, all within the context of spirituality. Sainkho Namtchylak (Сайнхо Намчылак, born 1957) is a singer originally from Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation just north of Mongolia. She is an experimental singer, known for her Tuvan throat singing or Khöömei (also known as overtone singing — a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances created in the vocal tract, in order to produce a melody). Her music encompasses avant-jazz, electronica, modern composition and Tuvan influences.¹
When I first heard this song, which lasted more than seven minutes without any instrumental accompaniment, lyrics, melody, I felt it was only a woman’s roar, accompanied by fear, pain and other subtle emotions. Undoubtedly, this experimental music explores the taboos in music.
What are taboos in music?
Taboo refers to a range of actions that members of a given culture categorize as forbidden or abhorrent. A broader meaning of the term includes experiences that we normally avoid for one reason or another, such as fear of bodily harm and aversion to pain. Such natural and constructed restrictions are empowering in that they promote well-being, but they are simultaneously disempowering in that they restrict certain behaviors. A by-product of such restriction is the possibility of violating a given restriction for aesthetic purposes, and the arts offer ways of exploring various taboos in a normally safe environment. These include opportunities to enjoy surprised or frightened, to enjoy being made sad, or the chance to explore subjectivity of a villain. Not everyone is able to anesthetize these experiences — not everyone enjoys roller coasters, sad songs or scary movies — but for those who can, we can understand the process in part as involving a sense of empowerment that results from “surviving” these artificially negative experiences.
-Arnie Cox²
Let’s see what is in this song
Then I tried to dig deeper into the meaning of this piece. According to Namtchylak, “Lost Rivers” is purely improvised music, a so called “ prenatal” form of music, based on her memory of a dry river as a child.³ She said, “Sometimes people ask me why I am screaming there. It’s about tariffing, about having trouble, about dry out rivers and it was Boris Yeltsin’s time in Russia, suddenly everything changed, communistic region was falling down. The whole country didn’t know what to do, what is going to happen next. It was a dangerous time.”⁴
When I listened to this piece for the second time, I found that it was not as simple as screaming arbitrarily. Throughout the song, the singer’s mood is changing, not just an irregular broken screaming.
The whole song can be divided into six parts:
In the first part, when the first scream came out, the feeling was to me, God, why does this woman cry like this? The feeling is a painful experience, and this pain is constantly increasing.
In the second part, the roaring sound gets yet louder and louder. When the roaring sound reaches the extreme, the voice can’t be heard, and we can hear the trembling noises. My ears seemed to be extremely deformed, and I was afraid that she would faint and go out of it.
In the third part, the painful feelings continue to increase, and new outbreaks are brewing.
The fourth part, the extreme pain, brought despair. The large amount of crying and roaring with a broken voice exposed her inner despair without any scruples. Vulnerable people will shed tears to accompany her when they hear it. But instead of crying needlessly, it was better to find a way to get rid of all this, so she was ready to resist.
The fifth part: fight, must fight, never yield! So her roar became full of anger, and she wanted to use her anger to break the cage that locked her. But the greater the rebound, the greater the pressure, and it seemed to be a battle doomed to fail. But she didn’t give up. She chose desperate fighting. Especially at 6’12’’, this determination reached its peak. She was extremely angry. She had lost her mind and madness. She lost control and put all her bets on her final blow. However, she still failed and lost the last hope.
In the sixth part, like the last straw that crushed the camel, she had already endured the unbearable weight, and the failure to resist in the end made her completely desperate. She has completely collapsed. She was really crazy, so she hummed some unknown minor tunes, like a lullaby that her mother hummed as a child.
After listening to this piece, I felt that my whole body was tired. Although this is a spiritual battle, the stimulation to the body is enormous. Especially when she cried, or howled to the extreme and could not make a sound, at the moment of her consistent painful change, it seemed as if I myself changed from a bystander into an experiencer, experiencing a despair and desperate. It felt like watching a scary movie or riding a roller coaster.
Why does such music exist?
As Cox states,
If chill-inducing moments are favorite moments, it is not simply because they produce chills; rather, chills are a symptom of having made oneself receptively vulnerable. This perspective takes the musical situation to be a specific manifestation of the principle that being moved by art involves adopting an attitude, an aesthetic attitude, in which one can be moved. This perspective also applies to aesthetic sadness, in music or any other aesthetic context, and its psychological correlates of tears, a lump in the throat, irregular breathing, and so on. The chance to make oneself receptively vulnerable to one’s environment and to explore and aestheticize the normally taboo experiences of fear and sadness is one of the avenues of musical affect.⁵
Therefore, as in this piece, we are not actually enjoying what fear and pain bring to us, but because of this frightening sound, we become vulnerable, sensitive and able to produce emotionally resonance, and then go further to explore the experiences hidden behind such fear and pain. Just like this piece, after I was deeply shocked by it, I searched for various background information about the singer, trying to find the singer’s creative intention or expression, and to explore the story and purpose the behind the song. I think these are all the meanings of this weird experimental music’s existence and the reasons why listeners are willing to listen to this piece.
[1] Nickson, Chris. “Biography: Sainkho Namtchylak.” AllMusic. Retrieved 19 October 2010, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/sainkho-namtchylak-mn0000831206/biography.
[2] Cox, Arnie. Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017), 192.
[3] “Sainkho Namtchylak Interview 2013,” Signalraum, accessed May 7, 2020, http://www.signalraum.de/sig/namtchylak.html.
[4] Sainkho Namtchylak, “ YIXI, I was only screaming for eight minutes” Video, https://v-wb.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzkwOTU1ODg3Mg==.html.
[5] Cox. Music and Embodied Cognition. 194–195.
