Kulning (scandinordic herd calling) and throat-singing on Wheel of Time

[cimorene]

We were tickled to notice kulning, or herd calling, native to around these parts, as well as Mongolian (?) throat singing in a different scene of last weekend's episode.

The loud, long notes of kulning, often quite high-pitched, were used to call cows and goats home from mountainous pastures at night. I found a great video from a Swedish news site filmed at a summer farm with a musicology doctoral researcher talking about it in reenactment clothes surrounded by heritage cows, along with a cute little old lady who also practices the art with an adorable regional accent:

Watch on YouTube

I was introduced to it by the Finland-Swedish world music band Gjallarhorn's song Kulning from 1997. I also discovered this hilarious uh... kulning... influencer... who quit her urban life and moved to the north to cosplay 24/7 in faux-old-fashioned Romantic outfits and film herself doing laundry without a washing machine and emerging from ice-swimming holes in her underwear, you know, playing a horn in a white fake fur duster... just all those Things that are The Way We Do in the Exotic North, according to her. (Common sense and other sources suggest people in northern Sweden typically wear modern winter clothes and use washing machines, just like people in northern Finland.)

I'm mostly familiar with throatsinging through the fantastic Mongolian heavy metal group The Hu (for a great audiovisual introduction try Wolf Totem for example), but here's a more traditional and straightforward example of Mongolian throatsinging:

Watch on YouTube

(I liked that in the show you could actually see the throatsinger - they just stuck him in the scene in costume and without any lines, just standing among the actors and singing, lol.)

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

amazeballs!

[ilyena_sylph]

In the ep5 commentary short Rafe said something like they wanted the strongest noises that women made, and that men made, and that's why those two vocal forms were chosen.

I kinda loved it.

[cimorene]

Ah, that's interesting. And makes sense. Although I know there are female throat-singers... and I have to wonder if there are male kulning singers as well? Kulning doesn't have to be clear and high-pitched...

[ilyena_sylph]

Maybe he meant both 'traditionally done by this bio-gender' and also 'in this octave-range with this carrying power' and was saying it badly?

Like, he's obviously invested in messing up RJ's gender and sexuality binaries and i love him for it, but that doesn't mean he's got a super-precise vocabulary.

[senmut]

It was amazing.

[daegaer]

I will forever now picture you as taking a bath in frozen lakes with a bar of Dove and an underwater camera. You can't fool us! That's what happens in your snow-covered lands!

[cimorene]

And doing my laundry on a stone in the river?

[daegaer]

That seems a bit too much like hard work :-D (I had a look at another of her videos- she has a perfectly functional kitchen! Stick a washing machine in there, woman!)

[conuly]

(Common sense and other sources suggest people in northern Sweden typically wear modern winter clothes and use washing machines, just like people in northern Finland.)

Hey, if she wants to be cold and do her own laundry by hand, let her shiver.

(Historically, I suspect the far north was like everywhere else - anybody with two coins to rub together spent them on sending laundry out.)

[cimorene]

Oh yes, professional laundresses were definitely a thing in premodern Finland (and likely Sweden since it's the next-door neighbor), but that would only apply in urban areas of some sort - even in villages probably, but not out in the country where the neighbors are not close by, which certainly applies to the mountainous farming area where the influencer was. And more recently, from the... 1800s maybe? until the 1960s perhaps when indoor plumbing in smaller middle-class houses became widespread, most houses had outhouses for doing the washing.