This morning as I was running through the sunlit forest I momentarily hit a pocket of warm air and with it came a smell that I associated immediately with the sunburnt steppes of Mongolia. Before my mind's eye emerged the view I saw from the air 7 or 8 years back when I flew over this vast emptiness for the first time (altogether I visited the country four times). Then the unruly shantytowns of Ulaanbataar, the dust clouds trailing the vehicles as they make their way through this endlessness.
I remembered having a photo book that came with a CD containing impromptu recordings of Mongolian folk songs. So tonight I listened to this modest audio testimony of simple folk singing their music. I tried to imagine how Bartok spent a large part of his life collecting, transcribing and analysing this sort of material and distilling from it the building blocks for a highly refined musical language that fused the East and the West.
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