Cradle of Drone-Overtone and Timbre-Centered Music: Cultural Landscapes of the Indigenous Peoples of the Altai Mountain Range and Its Neighboring Areas

This paper argues that the cultural politics of drone-overtone music ("throatsinging," or "overtone-singing") should more often consider the voices of its heritage bearers, formerly nomadic peoples of the international Altai Mountain range and its adjacent areas, also referred to here as Greater Altai. Drawing on fieldwork in the Mongolian Altai and Russian Altai, it presents a series of mutually implicated local cultural landscapes into which Indigenous heritage bearers place themselves during drone-overtone performances. Finally, it juxtaposes these local scapes with those of the Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese states, of nations and federative units within which those peoples now dwell, and of global flows, including those engendered by UNESCO s Intangible Cultural Heritage lists.