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On a typically humid afternoon in Beijing, Cliina, my young Mongol friend brought me to his basement studio where his ensemble, Ih Tsetsn, was preparing to rehearse for an upcoming show.1 The group of young urban Mongols included six players of the morin huur (horse-head fiddle, matouqin in Mandarin), an upright bassist, and a drum kit player. The group played a collection of upbeat compositions and ended its rehearsal session with the rousing morin huur classic, "Ten Thousand Horses Galloping," by the Inner Mongol composer-performer, CM Bulag (b. 1944; see figure 4).2 Playing from memory, the fiddle players grinned at one another, drew their bows energetically across their nylon-stringed instruments, and rocked their heads vigorously to the beat of the drummer.
"Ten Thousand Horses," popular for its driving pace and intricate fingerwork, appears ubiquitously in stage performances by Mongols in Cliina, and I heard it on more than a dozen occasions during my two summers of fieldwork in Inner Mongolia in 2009 and 2010. What surprised me was not hearing tliis piece over and over-many minority groups in Cliina, such as the Mongols, choose to include iconic pieces of crowd-pleasing repertoire in their performances-but that I heard tliis piece performed in aMmated, inventive ways by musicians who embrace tliis decades-old composition by CM Bulag, and yet distance themselves from other aspects of the composer's creative output, including the morin huur model he developed in the 1980s.
In tliis article, I address the varied interpretations of Bulag's work by members of the music community in the city of Hohhot, the capital and cultural epicentre of Inner Mongolia (see figures 1 and 3 below). I first discuss the validity of using biography as a way to understand the morin huur in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Cliina. I then investigate the composition "Ten Thousand Horses Galloping" and explore interpretations of tliis piece in the context of its compositional style and invocations of Mongol masculinity. Finally, I juxtapose the acceptance and even celebration of Bulag's composition with the relative rejection of his work to adapt the morin huur in the 1970s and '80s. In tliis section I investigate how his modernized instrument model, though widely popular in previous decades, receives harsh criticism today as "too Cliinese" in...