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Subject · in Music

The song forms

Nangma, toeshey, the folk song and the circle dance: the genres of Tibetan song, their structure and their regions.

This page is a placeholder. It exists so that the structure does; the text will follow, and will be checked by a teacher of the field before it is called finished.

Nangma is the chamber song of Lhasa: a slow, ornamented song followed by a fast dance section, played by the small ensemble and once kept alive by a society of amateur musicians in the city. Toeshey came from western Tibet and is faster and plainer. The folk song belongs to everywhere and everything: there are songs for building a roof, for driving yaks, for the harvest, for the road, and for love. The circle dance, gorshey, is sung by the dancers themselves.

This page will present each genre with its structure, its instruments and examples of its texts.