Alxa League
Music researcher Ojuna W. Pilcher has published several studies of the long song in the region of Alxa League in Inner Mongolia. She has observed that the long song today expresses a nostalgia of the past after modernization, and “visual and zoological metaphors connected to the nomadic lifestyle are not only highly significant to urtyn duu’s song texts, categorization, and singing technique but are also closely related to ornamentation, the achievement of vocal timbre, the singers’ understanding of nomadic herding life, and their feelings of longing and nostalgia as expressed through the music.”