Tonight I went to see what I thought was a performance, but was actually more of a forum, on Tuvan throatsingers who happen to be female, rather than male. The particular group, on tour in the United States now, and sponsored here by a number of things associated with the University of Washington, is called Tuva Kyzy.

I have seen throat singers before, and, although I haven’t listened to a great amount of it, I’ve heard more than your average American. I’ve seen Genghis Blues, and read Tuva or Bust. The panel of speakers, in fact, included Ralph Leighton, who joined Richard Feynman in the search for information about an obscure bit of Central Asia in the 1980s. Feynman, I think, was quite the character, and Leighton didn’t seem too dull either, although he didn’t do much of the talking. Speaker number two was a master’s candidate who did the translating for the Tuva Kyzy women, and was persuaded to try his hand at throat singing, to provide a comparison male voice.

Third speaker was a woman named Kira Van Deusen, who apparently spends her time translating Central Asian and Siberian folklore, and retelling it orally, as they would in Asia, just in English. She talked about some of the things that Tuvan women do, besides throat singing, that are assumed to be male occupations, but which the women are perfectly capable of, like slaughtering sheep. I found her story of a friend’s elderly mother killing and butchering a sheep (on the apartment balcony, no less), quite interesting, since when I was in that part of the world I had my own sheep slaughtering experience. My sheep was butchered by a leathery old Buryat (Buryatia is next to Tuva) man on the shore of Lake Baikal, but the technique was entirely the same. A slit in the chest of the sheep, then a hand stuck in to squeeze the heart and cut off the blood.

I went up to Ms. Van Deusen at the end and told her my story, which includes drinking fresh sheep blood from teacups. She recalled the first time she had drunk blood in such a situation — reindeer blood in Chukotka. I bought her translation of the epic she had told an excerpt from, entitled Woman of Steel, and a cd which says ‘GEN-DOS’ on it. The man in charge of the merchandise described it as ‘throat singing and punk.’ It doesn’t seem overly punk, certainly not in the way Gogol Bordello or Leningrad are punk, but it is fusion music and not unenjoyable.

Although it was not a concert by Tuva Kyzy, they did sing a little, just enough to mess with my head. Throat singing itself is a strange noise, and I have seen male throat singers perform before and found myself not entirely able to connect the noises with the origin. I couldn’t tell who was making which noise. In this case, the women were demonstrating different styles of throat singing, so it was obvious they were making the noise. But, it’s such an odd noise! You remember the pepsi (or was it coke?) commericial where the little curly headed girl goes up the bar and asks for pepsi, except it is dubbed in with a deep, growly male voice? And they give her the drink, and she says ‘thank you!’ in her cute little girl voice. Hearing these women was like that, except the throat singing is really them, not anything dubbed in.