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Below is the article you can find in the Mongol Messenger that I wrote for the series the Arts Council of Mongolia contributes to the paper each week.


Maral and Khishgee, two Mongolian musicians who recently attended Turkey's World Culture Festival

“I didn't realize Russian was so useful!” exclaimed one of the 11 young Mongolian artists at the 20th World Culture Festival in Turkey earlier this month as he observed folk dance performances by Balkan countries. The World Culture festival took place in the Turkish city of Ankara from May 13th-20th, and groups of artists, dancers, and musicians representing 61 countries and 21 regions of Turkey came to take part.
I had the chance to sit down with Maral and Khishgee, two young women from the Mongolian University of Culture and Arts who attended the festival. Maral has been playing the hammered dulcimer and Khishgee the zither for 7 years. This was the first time for each to participate in an festival abroad.
Favorite memories include the parade through the streets of Ankara on the festival's second day, with participants from all 61 different countries pouring through the streets in full costume. The girls made friends with fellow young artists from Turkey, Moldova, and Egypt, a friendship they can now maintain through email. The festival hosted folk dance, sports, and cultural art presentations, and Maral and Khishgee played their instruments alongside a Mongolian folk dance troupe while they performed. One thing they appreciated about the diversity of artists was that the performances served to illustrate the difference between the Mongolian, Kazakh, and Georgian traditions, a refreshing perspective as they are often lumped together in the minds of people from other world regions (perhaps due to the aforementioned prevalence of Russian).
The group's presence at the festival was due to the support of the Arts Council of Mongolia, specifically the Cultural Heritage part of the Council's programming (the other three are Advocacy, Artist Development, and Arts Education). The Arts Council is a prominent organization that began in 2002 under the auspices of the Soros/Open Society Foundation as the independent entity that evolved out of the Foundation's arts initiative.
Maral and Khishgee, fresh-faced young women with ready smiles and casually trendy clothes, both have mothers who are also artist/musicians and both began studying music when they were children. Maral used to sing as a child and her mother, an artist herself, taught Maral one song on the dulcimer when she was just 11 years old. Maral played that song at a contest and won first prize, a judge at the contest suggested that she should attend the Music and Dance college, and so her musical career began. Khishgee's mother was a violinist in the Mongolian State Orchestra, which shared a building with the Jazz Band and Philharmonic Orchestra. “I grew up in the building,” Khishgee laughed. Her mother took her on a tour of the three musical groups and their instruments, and Khishgee picked the zither as her instrument of choice because of its wonderful sound. Both Maral and Khishgee attended the Music and Dance college for 6 years and now study in the Folk Music Faculty of the University of Arts and Culture in Mongolia.
When asked about the future of traditional arts in Mongolia, the girls mentioned folk-rock and folk-jazz as examples of the evolution of Mongolian music in ways that integrate the old with the new. “We believe the arts will flourish,” said Khishgee, “and we'll try our best to be part of that evolution.”