Yungchen Lhamo

Lhamo has toured extensively throughout the world, singing unaccompanied, a combination of songs of her own composition and traditional Buddhist chant and mantras. She has performed with artists including Natalie Merchant, Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan, Peter Gabriel, Bono, Sheryl Crow and Michael Stipe. She has performed in the Lilith Fair Festival and toured widely as a part of the WOMAD World music festivals.

Lhamo's name means "Goddess of Song" - a name given to her by a Lama soon after she was born near Lhasa. Yungchen fled Tibet in 1989. She has made pilgrimage to Dharamsala, to receive the blessings of the Dalai Lama (where he heads the Tibetan Government in Exile). She was inspired to reach out to the world through her music; to share the great beauty of her culture and spread understanding about the situation in Tibet. She moved to Australia in 1993, then to New York City in 2000.

Lhamo's Australian debut album Tibetan Prayer, produced by John Prior, won the ARIA Music Awards for best Folk/World/Traditional Music release in 1995. She is the first Tibetan singer to win a prestigious music industry award.^[1] The success of that record led to her signing with Peter Gabriel's Real World label. Her first record for the label, Tibet, Tibet, mainly features a cappella renditions of original compositions—authentic Tibetan Buddhist prayers and songs. Her next recording, Coming Home, was a collaboration with producer Hector Zazou, showcasing her voice, and also featuring chanting by Tibetan monks, a wide range of mostly modern Western instruments, and the benefits of multi-track recording, enabling Lhamo's voice to be layered repeatedly.

On November 20, 22 and 24 2007 at the Louvre Museum in Paris, Yungchen accompanied a site-specific dance work 'Walking The Line' by American choreographer Bill T. Jones. This performance, with solo percussion by Florent Jodelet, took place in one of the museum's locations (the one-hundred meter perspective) stretching from the Winged Victory of Samothrace, to the Renaissance Arch (from the Stanga Palace) in which the celebrated sculptures The Dying Slave and The Rebellious Slave (c1513) by Michelangelo are exhibited. Yungchen has also performed at other venues such as London's Royal Festival Hall, New York's Carnegie Hall, and Berlin's Philharmonic Hall.

Lhamo's album Ama (which means Mother in the Tibetan language) was released in April 2006 and was produced by Iranian-American musician Jamshied Sharifi. Featured artists include Annie Lennox and Joy Askew. Recently, Yungchen’s music has earned her recognition by the Province of Genoa, Italy as a “Messenger of Peace” and she was awarded the title of “Ambassador of Culture.”

She is currently working on a new album with Jonathan Elias and guests on his forthcoming Prayer Cycle 2: Path to Zero (due May 2011).^[2]

9/11 comments

"We all were living in a dream. We often do. Nobody thought something like this would happen to New York City. That day, no matter how powerful you were, the sight of people falling from those buildings made everyone numb. I remember that feeling of helplessness. I think we all felt that. Then, of course, we all cried, no matter what country you were from. I moved to New York City with my son at the end of 2000, and America seemed like a monument or a flag to look up at. Now I travel the world, and when I see a city that looks like New York, it reminds me of that day. This song begins and ends with chants reminiscent of a puja for the people who died, with prayers to ease their passage to another world.... In order for this tragedy not to happen again, what are we going to do about it? We can only hope the experience has made all of us more human."

Discography

• Tibetan Prayer (1995)
• Tibet, Tibet (1996)
• Coming Home (1998)
• Ama (2006)
• Tayatha (Yungchen Lhamo & Anton Batagov) (2013)^[3]

References

• Montague, Tony (July 24, 2008). "Treacherous Trek Led Lhamo to Musical Mountaintops". The Georgia Straight. Retrieved 2008-07-24. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yungchen Lhamo.

• Official web site
• Yungchen's Real World
• WOMAD Yungchen Lhamo page