Carole Pegg came late to academia, having been busy making her mark as a singer, both as a solo artist and in the folk-rock band Mr Fox.
“We found a place in music history because we were the first group that used English traditional sounds of folk music and crossed it with the electric drums and bass of rock,” she explains. “It spread across Europe, and we’ve got a kind of cult following.”
A recently released anthology of female folk singers of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Milk of the Tree, places Carole in illustrious company, alongside Joan Baez, Joan Armatrading, Marianne Faithfull and her particular heroine, Buffy Sainte-Marie.
“I’m the only person with two songs!” she exclaimed. “One of them is in the guise of lead singer with Mr Fox, and the other is as singer-songwriter Carolanne Pegg. So I’ve acquitted myself quite well.”
Aged 32, Carole began an undergraduate degree at Lucy Cavendish College, studying first theology and then social anthropology, before returning to her interest in traditional song and completing an anthropological PhD in music and society in East Suffolk. It was at this point that a conversation over lunch with Dr Laurence Picken, a musicologist and scientist, and a Fellow of Jesus College, changed the direction of her life.
“I was trying to decide where to go, and he played me his recordings of Mongolian music. So in 1987 I did my first field trip to Inner Mongolia in northern China.”
From the beginning, Carole pursued her academic interest in traditional music in tandem with creating opportunities for the people she worked with, drawing on her experiences as a performer. A year after her first fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, she brought a group of Mongolian musicians to Cambridge to perform in the University’s West Road Concert Hall.
“I felt the need to reciprocate, to help those musicians in remote places. They had helped me, and I wanted to find a way of helping them. And because I’d done concerts, radio, and television, I brought groups from each of the places I worked, toured with them, and helped their reputation in their home countries.”
This was easier said than done, in the late 1980s.
“My first trip to actual Mongolia rather than to northern China was in 1989. It was still under the communist system, and outsiders weren’t allowed to mingle with ordinary people. I got around that because the 11 musicians, singers and dancers I’d brought to Cambridge the year before helped me. They took me to their families. We managed to avoid these communist cultural people who only wanted me to see certain things.”
Learning to speak first Mongolian and later Russian, and with the aid of interpreters who spoke indigenous languages, Carole returned to the region repeatedly over the next 40 years, while teaching the anthropology of music at Cambridge. Over the course of her two books, written 25 years apart, she has developed her fascination with throat-singing, and its connection with the landscape and nomadic ways of being (ontology).
“My understanding evolved as fieldwork progressed. For instance, throat-singing expresses that juncture between mountains and steppes. Mountain peaks are evoked when overtones form a melody and the simultaneous vocal drone below it expresses the open steppes. I realised its connection to the cross-border Altai Mountain range so throat-singing doesn’t just belong to the Mongolians, who have their own myth of origin, or Tuvans, who have their myth of origin. It’s timbre-centred music that crosses national borders.”
Now 81, Carole suffers from dysphonia, a voice disorder which has robbed her of the ability to sing and left her speaking voice hoarse. This, combined with the time constraints of an hour in which to condense a lifetime’s research, has made preparing for the Darwin College Lecture Series something of a challenge. But it’s one to which she has risen.
“It’s a kind of retrospective. Throat singing is not these musical sounds just decontextualised floating around in global space and being learned in workshops. It’s to do with the ways of life and ways these indigenous people situate themselves in their own societies, in the world, in the universe. I’ve express this in my concept ‘ontological musicality’.”
Join us for Carole’s lecture, Throat-Singing: Body, Spirit, Pathways, Place at 5.30pm on Friday 30th January.
