He's been in a lot of villages, and he understands folk music. Working with Sergei, we have found a lot of similarities between some of the sounds of Russian and Tuvan music. We want to show the musical colors of different times in Tuva, from old times to modern times. When you hear Tuvan music played on the flute, you hear it differently, and it shows a different side of the music. For example, it's impossible that people who spend so much time around horses one of the most rhythmic animals alive would not have absorbed their sense of rhythm.
Horses have a harmonic rhythm.
People who ride horses absorb the horse's rhythm physically into their bodies, and this rhythm is reflected in music. The music is continuous, but it doesn't break down into square phrases. Melodies can be elongated they are a function of the length of a singer's breath. You can hold notes for as long as your intuition tells you they should be held. The phrase lengths of our melodies are based on a singer's intuition, not on preserving a strict metric sense in the music.