“Pasture Land Cultures”
The vast prairie in north China has nurtured the strong character of the herdsmen in the Mongolian, Xibe, Manchu and Kazakh tribes. Taking the Mongolians as a representative example, they have lived in tribal groups since ancient times, enduring an extreme climate and landscape, with rugged mountains and desert in the south, and dry steppe lands and harsh winters in the north. The Mongolians believed in shamanism in ancient times, and they have a fine cultural tradition. They have made indelible contributions to China in culture and science. They created their script in the 13th century and later produced many outstanding historical and literary works. Mongolians grow up on horseback, and horses thus play an important part in their lives. Every Mongolian loves to prove his worth by showing good horsemanship, as well as skills in archery and wrestling. They are also well known as a people of music and poetry. Their singing, sonorous, bold, passionate and unconstrained, is the true reflection of the temperament of the Mongolian people. There is a traditional Mongolian cultural fair called “Nadam”, meaning games, which is held in July and August each year. At the fair, people wearing their holiday best participate in horse racing, archery, singing, dancing, chess playing and wrestling. The Mongol wrestling dance has its original forms in shamanistic rituals where people imitated movements of various animals. Today, apart from its obvious aesthetic value, the dance is also regarded as a warm-up and cool-down procedure before and after an intense fight. Good wrestlers treat the dance with great earnestness and they are often skillful dancers. The Mongolian dance style is straightforward and bold, with few steps, but the arm actions are powerful, and the wrist, shoulder and waist move briskly. In their dances, there are images and actions of hawks, swans and horse riding. Mongolian dancers do not simply imitate the appearance of a horse. They pour their deep feelings into the horse characteristics. By arm, shoulder and body movements, they reveal the valiant and heroic bearing of horse riders and various horse images. Watching these dances, the spectators can image how the Mongolian warriors on horseback, led by the powerful and vigorous Genghis Khan, swept the Asian and European continents and overcame almost all the resistance in the Mongols’ way to conquer most of the known world in the 13th century.
Besides dancing and wrestling, Mongolians are also good at a variety of performing arts, such as singing, chanting and praising. Vocal music holds a special place in the life of the Mongolian people. For Mongolian people, singing is not only a form of entertainment, but also a part of their culture and history (Figure 2 shows Mongolian vocal musicians singing in their unique techniques). Solo singing is the most important part of Mongolian vocal music, of which the best-known styles are "urtinduu" and "bogoniduu." Urtinduu, or long tune, is a representative solo singing style of Mongolians. In this old singing technique, the singer takes a long and deep breath through the nose before singing. The singing method is characterized by its wide range, excessively long breathing and free rhythms. The overwhelming majority of the themes of these songs consist of horses, camels, herds of sheep, blue sky, white clouds, and water and grass. They are mostly sung using the natural voice, but a type of glossy intonation is used to produce a long, drawn-out effect and give the songs a richer sense of the flavor and vigor of the grassland space. In contrast, bogoniduu, or short tune, is a style with strict rhythm, comparatively short phrases and less ornamentation. Besides these solo forms, the Mongolian people also sing in the chor form, in which a lead singer sings a melody in long tune, while a group of bass singers sing a ground bass in unison. "Chor" means using the throat to produce more than one sound. The singer sings in a very low voice with his vocal cords, chest and throat. High vibrations, involving the resonance of the uvula, create an overtone two octaves higher than the base sound. Chors may be accompanied by musical instruments, such as the matouqin, a two-stringed Mongolian bowed instrument with a wooden horsehead at the top. The enchantment of voice and harmony can break the barrier of language. Though most of the chor's works are sung in Mongolian, a listener who doesn't know anything about the language can still enjoy the singing. In the songs of these people, one can hear the cries of stallions; see the mirages on the Gobi Desert; feel the wind over the steppes; and experience the Mongolian people's happiness and joy. Other ethnic nationalities in northern China have also contributed performing arts with their own ethnic identities. The common characteristic cultural styles they share are that the dancing and songs may be an expression of their hunting/fishing activities, their totem worships, or their praying to gods, sacrificing, dispelling evils and curing diseases.
