Tibetan and Gaelic music fuse as monks tour Argyll and Lochaber

Audiences can experience the sacred, traditional music of Tibetan chanting from the Dalai Lama’s world famous Gyuto monks in a one-off collaboration with Gaelic singer and piper Griogair Labhruidh of Ballachulish, as they tour Argyll and Lochaber next month.

Scientists from NASA and MIT have studied the monks and concluded that they can produce the lowest sounds capable of a human being. Their sound has been compared to the resonance of a drum or didgeridoo, and is believed to have a transformative effect on the listener.

Regarded as masters of rites and rituals within Tibetan Buddhism, the Gyuto monks are famous around the world for their mastery of the tantric arts, which includes their especially unique form of deep harmonic chanting, sand mandalas and painting.

The monks will be singing Gaelic songs with Griogair Labhruidh is a performer on the Great Highland bagpipes and smallpipes, a traditional Gaelic singer, storyteller and a Gaelic poet with a huge interest in world music.

The UK tour is raising funds for the order’s monastery in India, which holds more than 500 Tibetan refugee monks.

The Gyuto order was originally based in Lhasa, Tibet. In 1950 the Chinese invaded Tibet and massacred thousands of monks. Fifty-nine of the Gyuto Monks managed to escape across the Himalayas with His Holiness Dalai Lama into India. These 59 monks founded the Gyuto Monastery in Dharamsala. There are now more than 500 monks living there as refugees with ages from four up to 94.

Gyuto’s monks are known for their unique tradition of overtone singing (also known as ‘chordal chanting’) which is said to have been transmitted by their founder, in a tradition dating back more than 600 years.

The Gyuto monks are masters of Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual and their lives are dedicated to practicing tantric ideals.

One hundred years after the Tibetan Declaration of Independence, the Gyuto monks made more headlines by visiting the UK for the first time in 40 years to perform in the Green Fields at Glastonbury 2013 and then again in 2016, performing at the opening ceremony of the festival to an audience of 100,000 people.

Organiser Jean-Paul Mertinez said: ‘I am honoured to be welcoming His Holiness’s Gyuto Monks of Tibet back to the UK; they are very special people. To witness their culture and chanting concerts in community settings is to be transported and connected to a 600-year-old living musical tradition that I’m sure is as powerful and profound today as it was way back then.’

The Gyuto monks will perform at St Columba’s Cathedral Hall in Oban on Thursday December 14 at 7pm, then the Abbey on the Isle of Iona at 2pm on Friday December 15, Ballachulish

Village Hall on Saturday December 16 at 7.30pm, and finally Ardgour’s Watercolour

Studios on Sunday December

17 at 3pm.