Welcome to the Kalmyk Music Collection of Gordon Bok
This collection features recordings of Kalmyk music given to Gordon by Kalmyk immigrants living in New Jersey and Philadelphia in the 1960s and later in the early 2000s. While it offers a glimpse into a rich musical heritage, it is not a comprehensive or definitive record. Instead, this archive is a living, open repository, and an invitation to all, particularly any Kalmyk people, to explore, learn, and contribute. Feel free to listen, download, and share these files.
This collection is housed in both the United States Library of Congress and The Austrian Academy of Sciences Department of Vanishing Languages and Cultural Heritage, and we are also sharing it here for anyone to enjoy. If you have additional recordings, knowledge, or context that could enrich this collection, we welcome your input. Please reach out to help us preserve and expand this musical legacy for future generations. You can email us at music.timberhead@gmail.com or call us at +1(207) 236-2707.
Downloadable from the collection archives:
- CD audio tracks
- CD Creation Notes
- CD Track lists
- Kalmyk Music: The Celebration of an Immigrant Culture, a dissertation by Virginia Houpt
- Kalmyk Music in America: A Songbook
The collection includes twelve compact disks of music and spoken words. Notes taken back in 2002 while creating the CDs are also in the archive, as are track lists of the titles of tracks on the CDs.
It also includes an essay titled Kalmyk Music: The Celebration of an Immigrant Culture by Virginia Houpt of Dickinson College dated April 15, 1983. The scanned original paper is here and you can read it with samples of the music embedded here.
The archive also includes a book of simple Kalmyk songs and tunes with samples of the originals, which includes just some of the music Kalmyk people brought with them when they came to America in the 1950s and 1960s. Of the songbook, Gordon writes:
“In the 1960s and ’70s I spent the winter months working in Philadelphia. During that time I spent a lot of time singing with Kalmyk friends and playing in their small ‘orchestra’ for dance performances. In the course of this I made some amateur recordings, and Kalmyks and other people, seeing my interest, gave me some of their recordings. I gave those recordings to the Library of Congress when I left Philadelphia around 1975, for them to copy. That was useful, as I lost the originals in my relocations over the years.
When the Kalmyks invited my wife and me to the 50th anniversary of their emigration to America I realized that no one had been keeping the dances and songs alive amongst my Philadelphia friends. So, in 2001, I managed to retrieve a set of DATs of my recordings from the Library of Congress, and I sent copies to some Kalmyks.
In 2003, I had Maine Folklife Center clean the recordings up as best they could. I catalogued them as well as I could from memory, my notes, and the songs in my written collection. I have made copies of these recordings, the catalog and the written collection, for any interested Kalmyk families.
Since 2005, I have continued my visits whenever my tours took me through the Philadelphia/NJ area, recording, cataloging and getting translations when I could. About this time we conjured the idea of making a simple music book that Kalmyks in this country, or anyone else who spoke only US English, could use to access the collection.
That project became a small book with tunes and words written in basic form, using a phonetic system that I cobbled together from various people’s attempts. I only included songs that I had sung and could remember words and tune as my friends had taught them to me. For every song in there, we have examples on an accompanying CD. We have tried to include more than one version of each piece when possible. This book is now a PDF and can be shared with anyone interested.
Some thoughts about the book:
The tunes are not written down as they were sung. They are a melodic sketch and you must go to the originals in the collection to sing them as they were really sung. (No one in this project knows how to annotate these things accurately, but we are doing what we can.)
The songs in this book are newer Kalmyk songs that the people of my age-group were singing. Some of the old, long-songs are represented in this collection, but we did not have the language or the musical sophistication to learn them.”
In 2011, Gordon was honored at the New Jersey Folk Festival in New Brunswick, New Jersey with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his many years collecting and preserving the folk music of the Kalmyk people. Click here to read more and to see photo from the ceremony.
- More from Gordon on this collection:
“One must respect the Kalmyks, for their culture is their home.”
~Virginia Houpt
“When I came to work in Philadelphia in the 1960s, the Kalmyk folks took me in and made me part of their musical community. They gave me most of this collection during those years. These songs have wandered through many different countries for many years, and each place left its mark on each song, some of their tunes originated in some of those countries.. We’ve tried to show some of those different origins here.
The language has been changing all this time, too. Many of the words in the songs are no longer in use, so any translations involve a certain amount of guess-work . As Gawril Budschalow said, “If you got a hundred Kalmyks to translate one song, you’d have a hundred translations.” We have come to understand this: There is NO right or wrong way to do this music. The only way you can hurt it is not to sing it.
Some of the people who have made this book and collection possible are Gawril and Allison Budschalow, Alex and Sara Goripow, Lidia and Gerel Buruschkin, Ginger Hildebrand and especially Nadja Stepkin Budschalow, who kept so many songs alive and taught us how to sing them. What I’ve been trying to do is to make what I have left of the music they shared with me available to them, when or if they should want it. I’ve had great help and encouragement from Kalmyk (and other) friends. Allison Budschalow is an anthropologist, but none of the rest of us are trained in what we are trying to do, so it’s slow plowing and often a pretty crude furrow.
For 400 years, without a homeland, Kalmyks have kept their language, legends, epics songs and religion alive: that’s an amazing achievement. This is great, powerful music, unique in the world.” ~ Gordon Bok
For more information about the Kalmyks, please the Wikipedia on Kalmyk History or visit the Kalmyk Road Facebook Page.