Singing outside Tibet

 The De Werfkring restaurant, right next to the canal in the Dutch town of Utrecht, serves what its owners call "earth cuisine". This turns out to be vegetarian food, mainly comprising multi-grains and various types of rice, served with fresh vegetables and soup. Every evening, when it opens for dinner, businessmen, artists, writers, poets and students throng the place, despite the fact that it does not serve alcohol and smoking is prohibited.

But the real story of De Werfkring takes place before it even opens. Music is practised here – day in and day out, whenever owner Namgyal Lhamo is in town. Admittedly, the food is sumptuous, but the music that emanates from behind the closed doors is even more so. And why not? The one who supervises the cooking every evening is, after all, known unabashedly as the Nightingale of Tibet, despite the fact that she has never set foot in her motherland. Like most Tibetan refugees except the very elderly, Lhamo has always lived outside Tibet, but remains nonetheless inextricably tied to her ancestral land.

This is the world of Namgyal Lhamo, born in Nepal, raised in India, currently living in the Netherlands, and devoted to ensuring that the purity of Tibetan music lives on. The danger to traditional music in Tibet, Lhamo believes, comes from Beijing's attempts to integrate the area into the rest of mainland China. Over the past half-decade, however, traditional Tibetan music has found a vibrant new modernist outlet in Lhamo. Today she is perhaps the only internationally recognised proponent of Tibetan music. Neither has the Tibetan community dismissed her: she was recently given the Best Female Singer award at the 2007 Tibetan Music Awards, an annual gala held in Dharamsala.

Lhamo says that she has long sought to connect with her unseen homeland through her music. "Though I have never had a chance to visit Tibet, I have been greatly rooted in my culture since childhood," she says. "My mother influenced me greatly by exposing me to sound at a very young age, singing lullabies and folk songs, and as a little girl I would take to singing at every opportunity."

That early passion paid off. Lhamo says that her understanding of Tibetan music became codified, amplified and disciplined when she was selected, as a young girl during the 1970s, to study at Dharamsala's Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA). "The organisation plays a vital and engaging role in Tibetan cultural and aesthetic conservations," she says of TIPA. In 2002, when her first CD, Songs from Tibet, hit the international charts, Lhamo became TIPA's best-known graduate.

Since then, Lhamo's work has reflected her international stance – with one foot in her Tibetan upbringing, and the other wherever it is she is currently based – working within a philosophy of exploring new musical territory, in reference to the modern Tibetan communities spread across the world. At live performances, Lhamo introduces her audience to the music of her land. Accompanying herself on the Tibetan lute (dranyen) and celesta (gyumang), her music straddles the pure notes of traditional Tibetan music while blending modern sounds.

On Lhamo's recent album, The Enchanted Land, composer Arnav Srivastava's musical score likewise offers a rich blend of the ancient and modern. "Some songs make you want to hit the dance floor instantly, while some make you want to stare out the window and dream," Lhamo says of the new album and her experience singing the repertoire. "It is a journey of sorts, and is a tribute to the modern Tibetan and young Tibetans in the international community, who often interpret their music as being either very classical or very popular." She says that her music is intended to break down language barriers, and is emphatic that music needs an element of adaptability in order to achieve a strong connection with the audience. "Experimentation is the source of creation," she notes. "It is a risky business, but it can take an artiste a long way." Despite the urge to push the limits, Lhamo has not forgotten her classical roots, and continues to work tirelessly in an attempt to keep Tibetan operatic music alive. "In Tibet," she says, "operatic music often extends beyond its boundaries to assume an integral role in the portrayal of theatrics and storytelling."

Musically, however, Lhamo is adamantly a global citizen. "I listen to everything," she says. "I can appreciate a great opera piece, ponder over Leonard Cohen, and switch to the thumping tempo of Paul Van Dyke the very next minute. I am a great lover of Indian music and Nepali folk music – and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ashaji and Lataji are legends. They will remain forever." With people like Lhamo spreading the word, the hope remains that the same thing will be able to be said of traditional Tibetan music. 

~ Utpal Borpujari is a journalist and film critic for the Deccan Herald, based in Delhi.