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Abstract

The digital age has long dawned in many of the Tibetan Monasteries in exile. Thus, the inclusion of internet platforms and the usage of digital communication technologies was naturally part of my ethnomusicological collaboration with the Tibetan Bön monastic chant leader and scholar Geshé Dawa Namgyal Kharnatsang on the sacred recitation of the Yungdrung Bön tradition of Menri Monastery in Dolanji, India. In this article I will offer insights into Kharnatsang’s and my motivation to develop a hybrid collaboration and discuss the role and impact of the digital technologies on the traditional chain of transmission. I will draw on two of our projects concretely related to the transmission of the sacred recitation of the Bönpos. In the first project, we audio recorded a collection of recitation formulas as performed in the Menri tradition and made them accessible online. The second project belongs to the artistic part of our collaboration. We recorded and arranged three of the central mantras of the Bön tradition at the recording studios of Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. While in the first project Kharnatsang was focused on implementing and adapting digital technologies into the traditional way of teaching ritual recitation, in the second project, he granted the collaborating musicians a surprisingly high level of artistic freedom regarding the musical interpretation of the mantras. I will argue that the reason for this difference in handling of the sacred recitation has to do with the different audiences targeted in the two projects and is in accordance with the Bönpos’ traditional way of transmitting sacred recitation.

Author Biography

Christiane Strothmann is currently an acting professor of ethnomusicology at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen (Germany). She also teaches Tibetan ritual music as an adjunct professor at the Centre for Comparative Theology and Cultural Studies at Paderborn University. Since completing her Ph.D. in 2023, Strothmann has worked as an adjunct professor of ethnomusicology at both Folkwang University of the Arts and the Department of Musicology at the University of Music in Detmold/Paderborn University.

Strothmann holds a Master’s degree in linguistics and Slavic languages from Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a Diplom in Music with a focus on electronic music composition from Folkwang University of the Arts. From 2016 to 2018, she served as an artistic researcher and electronic composer at the Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media (ICEM) at Folkwang University, where she led the project “The Five Elements – Electroacoustics Meets Bön.” As part of this project, she conducted field research at the Menri Monastery, the main Tibetan monastery in exile in India, where the former Abbot facilitated a collaboration between her and the monastic musician and scholar Geshé Dawa Namgyal Kharnatsang.

A year-long grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) enabled Strothmann to extend her artistic research into ethnomusicological fieldwork, concluding with her Ph.D. dissertation, titled “Learning from a Monastic Musician: Masters of Chant and the Function of Ritual Music in the Tibetan Yungdrung Bön Tradition,” supervised by Prof. Dr. Andreas Meyer of Folkwang University of the Arts. To support her research, she conducted extensive fieldwork at Menri Monastery and throughout the Himalayan region from early 2019 until February 2020. When she returned to Menri in March 2020 to attend a significant ritual, the Indian COVID-19 lockdown prevented her from leaving, leading to an extended stay of another nine months, during which time she deepened her understanding of the systematics of melodic formulas () in the Bön tradition.

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Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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