In 1934, the state recording company, Melodiya, issued the first set of throat- singing records; ethno graphers and musicologists collected lyrics and melodies and set up archives systematising a previously oral tradition.The state groomed promising stars, held talent-spotting competitions, funded a throat-singing Philharmonic in Kyzyl and organised concerts at home abroad. They just want to keep control of everything like before.” Mrs Suzuki, the academic, is also sceptical: “This is about money, not tradition.”Along with ballet and other forms of culture judged worthy by the Communist Party, throat-singing enjoyed lavish state support during the Soviet era. “They should be licensed,” said President Oorzhak, who like countless other former apparatchiks, is now a born-again defender of pre-Bolshevik tradition. “They should be tested so that only high-quality groups, real professionals not weak performers, travel abroad.”Alexander Cheparukhin, Moscow-based manager and tour organiser for Huun- Huur-Tuu, suspects less lofty motives: “This is crazy. Oorzhak Sherig-ool, President of the Tuvan autonomous republic, a region of Russia with the same status as Chechnya, calls it the “eighth wonder of the world”. The instinct of Tuvan officials is to try and keep a firm grip on the throat-singers.

It has a following in Britain too: “The interest,” claims Jill Purce, a Hampstead teacher of throat- singing, meditation and ancillary arts, “is enormous”.So is the rivalry for control of what is perhaps Tuva’s greatest treasure. As well as the late Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel is also said to be a fan. It is particularly big in California, home to the cult of Professor Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist, eccentric and obsessive enthusiast for all things Tuvan. It is a potentially lucrative industry.While most folk music struggles to survive the onslaught of Western pop, throat-singing has not only held its own but won over some rock stars. Mrs Suzuki believes the craft, which turns the respiratory system into a human bagpipe, is best kept confined to solitary herders in the hills and family sing-songs in the yurt, the collapsible felt- covered homes of Tuva’s nomadic population: “It was never meant to be performance art.”Throat-singing is no longer mere folk music.

A backstage tantrum over T-shirts held up a concert for nearly an hour and, after starting a 25-city tour with four members, the group, back in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, to prepare for their next trip abroad, is down to three.
“The bad side of all this,” said Sayan Bapa, leather-jacketed guitarist, doshpulur player and mean improviser with the bull’s testicles rattle , “is that after each tour, the band splits up.”No longer the preserve of herdsmen, chanting shamans and reclusive Buddhist monks, throat-singing – the fiendishly difficult practice of producing two and sometimes three distinct notes (a drone and eerie, melodic whistles) simultaneously – has become big business.And the squabbling of Huun-Huur-Tuu is nothing next to the broader battle for control of what is now just another arcane commodity up for grabs.Here in Tuva, across the Sayan Mountains from southern Siberia and on down the Yenisei River towards Mongolia, the carve-up of assets has taken an eccentric turn: the throat-singers are at each others throats.On one side loom bloated Soviet-era ensembles, masterful with the music but clumsy at playing the market; on the other, upstarts such as Huun-Huur-Tuu with managers in Moscow and recording contracts abroad.Disdainful of both are purists such as Valentina Suzuki, local academic and author of a PhD thesis on throat singing, known in Tuva as khoomei and among Western musicologists as overtone, biophonic, triophonic or harmonic singing. Never mind the guest appearances on television, the compact discs, the rave review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the jam session in Hollywood with Frank Zappa (before he died), or the coast-to-coast US concert tour that Huun-Huur-Tuu has just completed

You can tell throat-singing has hit the big time: they now quarrel like other stars. “As South African society becomes more normal and the further away it moves from the apartheid past, the closer you get to the transformation of the ANC.” But before any split would occur, the ANC would finish its mission of “achieving a non-racial society”.The ANC was originally formed in 1912 by black intellectuals to oppose the onset of legalised racial discrimination, but over the years the movement has grown to include trade unions, Communists, liberals, churches and the rural poor.. He said he could foresee the ANC breaking up as the different elements within the movement identified with different schools of political thought.
“Out of the same ANC you will get a social democratic party, you will get a liberal democratic party and so on,” Mr Mbeki said. Mr Mbeki, who is proposed as President Nelson Mandela’s heir, told the Star newspaper yesterday that the ANC was a broad movement that would break up as South Africa normalised after centuries of white domination. Johannesburg (AFP) – The African National Congress, which led the fight against apartheid, will eventually disintegrate, according to the deputy president, Thabo Mbeki.