It's a globe-girding exercise to follow Dimitri Staszewski's travels from San Francisco to Mongolia, where he is studying the country's ancient music, contributing to its preservation. Born in the city, he attended San Francisco's Urban School, playing and recording music, went to Loyola University New Orleans, where he majored in Music Industry Studies, including study abroad in Mongolia in 2013:
I used the recordings I captured to create the Mongol Music Archive as my undergraduate thesis. After graduating in 2014, I decided to take a break from music and moved to rural southwestern Colorado to learn to wrangle horses on a dude ranch. After that, I used the money I had made to travel around Thailand and Laos, and then to Lander, Wyoming, to work for the National Outdoor Leadership School. Now I'm back in Mongolia.
The return trip is supported by a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship Staszewski received this summer at Loyola, the university garnering four Fulbright Awards during the academic year. Staszewski's Fulbright-mTVu Award — in collaboration with mTVu, MTV's 24-hour college network, for research on international musical culture, and music as a cultural force — enables him to continue his work in Mongolia to document the changing nomadic culture. The goal of the project, he says:
... is to capture everyday uses of traditional music in the daily lives of Mongolian herders. As a general shift from nomadic to industrial and urban lifestyles occurs in Mongolia, it is important to capture these moments and performances. While traditional music will remain part of Mongolian culture with or without nomadic herding, these performances exhibit something that staged performances by professional musicians cannot. Herders sing about actions they carry out on a daily basis, the environment they inhabit, and use songs as tools to calm and train their animals. This project aims to preserve a specific aspect of Mongolian music to serve the tradition as a whole.
An example of Staszewski's work is recording Mongolian herder-singer Tseveng, known in the community for singing traditional folksongs. Herders and livestock production are in the heart of Mongolia's economy, but harsh climate conditions and the country's recent transition from communist control to a market economy have made it difficult for some herders to maintain their traditional way of life.
Ethnomusicologists, such as Carole Pegg, have been researching the use of "overtone singing, whistles, vocal calls, melodies, flutes" both to coax and control animals and entertain herders. She points out that the name for the West Mongolian fiddle, "ikil," may be derived from "ih hel," or "large language," that is, one superior to ordinary language. Of widespread ancient customs communicating with animals through a musical language, Mongolians may have the few remaining working communities to preserve the tradition that's the subject of Staszewski's work.
The Fulbright grant announcement says: "As the performance of traditional Mongolian music becomes dominated by staged performances by professional musicians, Dimitri's website will highlight an underrepresented and disappearing group of performers. He hopes the website will become a valuable resource and source of inspiration for academics, musicians, and music enthusiasts worldwide."