A group of Chinese musicians have been working arduously over
the past two years in ethnic minority villages in south China's Guangxi
Zhuang Autonomous Region and northwest China's Gansu
and Qinghai
provinces.
With notebooks and recording equipment, they interviewed people
of the Dong,
Yao,
Zhuang,
Tu,
Salar,
Yugur,
Baoan, Dongxiang,
Tibetan
and Hui
ethnic minorities and recorded their music and transcribed the
lyrics in the ethnic languages and in Chinese and English as
well.
The fruit of their work is a compilation of 385 recorded folk
songs, 42 hours of field recordings, 57 hours of filming,
transcriptions of the complete lyrics of all of the songs, a
full-color brochure aimed at young Chinese readers interested in
China's cultural heritage and a 45-minute CD-ROM overview.
All the lyrics are printed in Chinese, English and the original
languages with transcriptions in the International Phonetic
Alphabet.
Their work marks the beginning of a project under the auspices
of UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization) and the Chinese Folk Artists' Association to preserve
all the folk songs of China's ethnic minority groups.
It is also tied to the "Project to Preserve the Intangible
Cultural Heritage of China's Ethnic Minority Groups," which was
launched in December 2000 to research and protect the dying
heritage and cultural traditions of the country's minorities.
The current initiative is part of the "Masterpieces of Oral and
Intangible Heritage of Humanity," a UNESCO program created in 1998
in response to the urgent need to raise public awareness of the
value of oral heritage and to encourage governments to take legal
and administrative steps to safeguard it.
The project to preserve the folk songs of China's ethnic
minority groups is also supported by the Japanese Funds-in-Trust
initiative, which was established by the government of Japan in
1993 to protect and promote all forms of intangible cultural
heritage.
Based on scholarly research and using advanced methods of
audio-visual documentation, the current project seeks to record the
lyrics and musical arrangements of ethnic folk songs in three
stages: investigation, recording and transcription.
The initial work "has succeeded in presenting living musical
traditions as a social act between performers and audience," said
Yasuyuki Aoshima, director of the UNESCO Office in Beijing. "In
addition, it serves as an invaluable example for our society of the
value of international cooperation and as a source of inspiration
for further work."
But according to Liu Chunxiang, vice chairman and deputy
secretary of the Chinese Folk Artists' Association, the work has
just started, as they have only covered 10 out of the 55 ethnic
minority groups in China.
Liu says that they are planning to record minority folk songs in
southwest China's Sichuan
and
Guizhou provinces, and if possible they will also expand their
work to Inner
Mongolia, the
Xinjiang Uygur and Tibet
autonomous regions and Yunnan
Province.
Liu says they will go back to the areas of their field work in
April to deliver the CD-ROMs and anthologies of folk songs to the
local primary and middle schools, in an effort to help in the
preservation of traditional culture.
But so far there are no plans to release the recordings made
during the project to the general public.
(China Daily March 20, 2004)