Tengir Too

Tengir-Too is a new ensemble from Kyrgyzstan that plays old music. The group takes its name from the mountain range that towers over the high alpine passes linking Kyrgyzstan and China and that is better known by its Chinese name, Tien Shan: "Celestial Mountains."

Founded and directed by Nurlanbek Nyshanov, a gifted composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, Tengir-Too (Too is pronounced like "toe") provides a living laboratory for Nyshanov's efforts to find a voice for Kyrgyz music in the contemporary cultural marketplace. Kyrgyz music is rooted in the sensibility of nomads who inhabit a spectacular landscape of mountains, lakes, and pristine grasslands where the elemental energies of wind, water, and echo, the ubiquity of birds and animals, and the legendary feats of heroes have inspired a remarkable art and technology of sound-making. During the Soviet era, however, much of this music was lost or adapted to European musical ideals. Orchestras of reconstructed folk instruments replaced solo performers, and the introduction of music notation undermined orality, with its deep-rooted tradition of transmission from master to disciple.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, musicians throughout Central Asia began to find their way back to older traditions. The best of them strove not simply to reproduce tradition, but to innovate within it. Nurlanbek Nyshanov exemplifies such traditionalist innovators. His life in music was shaped both by his childhood in Naryn, a mountainous region in northern Kyrgyzstan, and by his experience as a student in the music education system created in Central Asia during the Soviet era. A graduate of Kyrgyzstan's State Institute of Arts (now the National Conservatory), Nyshanov draws on his compositional skills to craft for small ensembles striking arrangements of repertories typically performed by solo players and singers. Unlike Soviet-era folk orchestras and consorts, however, Tengir-Too performs on traditional Kyrgyz instruments and works within the boundaries of conventional Kyrgyz musical forms, textures, and genres.

Tengir-Too's repertory centers around the two principal genres of Kyrgyz music: instrumental pieces that represent or tell a story about a particular subject purely through melody and rhythm, known as küü; and lyrical songs traditionally performed by singer-songwriters, called akyn. Tengir-Too frequently performs with guests artists including Nurak Abdrakhmanov, a well-known akyn and virtuoso performer on the komuz, a three-stringed fretless lute; and Rysbek Jumabaev, a manaschi, or reciter of Manas, the great epic poem of the Kyrgyz. The Manas is traditionally performed without musical accompaniment, and in the spirit of much of its repertory, Tengir –Too's atmospheric arrangement of excerpts from the Manas represents an innovation on tradition. – Theodore C. Levin