Le chant diphtonique mongol

Just I wanted to inform you, may be you will like it, in next year Tyva Kyzy group is organising the
tourist tour in Tuva for 15 days. There will be the teaching of throat singing, songs, and the real tuvan
culture with learning to prepear the tuvan meals (like etnografical and musical). So, if you will
interested in it, please tell to me.

we may never know how or when Tuvans began throat-singing, but the art has become an integral and cherished element of their culture.

Very little is known about when throat singing may have originated,
but there are two facts to suggest that it may have been fairly early,
perhaps with the beginning of the Turkic peoples themselves. First, the
Bashkirs have a throat singing tradition. This would place throat singing
at least as far back as the 13th century, if we assume the Bashkirs had the
tradition when they migrated to their current home, as is likely.
The second fact of interest is a quote from Mahmud al-Kasgari's work
"Diwan Lughat at-Turk." In it, he quotes a portion of a heroic weeping song,
as follows: "The men howl together like wolves; while howling they tear
their collars; their voices whistle like those of a singer; they cry until
their eyes become reddened." (Winner, 58) This may speak of throat singing,
as normally singers do not whistle, they sing. But there is a style of
throat singing, mentioned later, which is in fact called whistling. Since
Mahmud's work was written c. 1077 (Winner, 56), this would place throat
singing even earlier, if it is in fact a reference to it.
The liner notes from the album Uzlyau suggest something similar to
what I have written above. This is what they have to say about the
potential origins of throat singing, which they call guttural singing.
Although nowadays guttural singing is used for artistic and
aesthetic purposes, investigators think that such a form of
vocalization has a ceremonial origin. To a certain extent in the way
it sounds it is reminiscent (forms, types, or styles) of guttural
singing with the denotation of magical acts. So, one of the most
diffused forms of Tuvan guttural singing is called sygyt. This Turkic
word consists of two composite parts: syg (to press, suppress) and
yyt (voice). Without any doubt this points to a way of producing
sounds: 'pressing out a whistling sound by one's throat', or 'to
whistle with one's throat'. But at the same time the words sygyt, syg,
sy-t and yg denote ceremonial weeping or lamentation with several
Turkic peoples.
The melancholic, husky-sounding Tuvan kargyraa by it's denomination
is linked with the Turkic word forms kargaar (to curse, scold, swear, be
hoarse, chuckle, seethe), which by its meaning also denotes 'to conjure', and
yraa (song). I.e.: song-conjuration. It is very well possible that in the old
days conjurations of shamans were realized in such a way.

Here's the citation for Winner, if anybody's interested.

Winner, T. G., The Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central
Asia. Durham: Duke University Press, 1958.

By the way, there is:
http://egitim.selcuk.edu.tr/akademik/tu ... /dlt/s.htm
(click on letters at bottom for something else than 's')
which translates old turkish to new turkish.

Here is what my girlfriend explained to me for kargyra and sygyt.

We have "karga" which means crow. It makes sense, no? The voice
of a crow sounds a bit like kargyra. But there is "ira", which
seems to mean "be ashamed", I don't know if there is a meaning
there.

For "sygyt", it is linked to "ag,lama" which mean "to cry", "to weep".
It is also linked to "ag,it" which is linked to songs that you sing
when someone dies, done by women, "crying women", as we find in some
cultures when someone dies. It might be related, or maybe not.
In fact it is sung by anyone (male or female) when something sad
happens, some very catastrophic event.