The song whisperers
Two Tibetan students with the Qinghai Normal University record a Tibetan farmer's singing. |
The women are learning by rote an ancient Tibetan song that is sung at the hair-changing ceremony, an increasingly rare rite that celebrates a girl becoming a woman. No one knows how long this has been a tradition, or how it started, but they do know the song is in danger of fading from memory.
A group of Tibetan students and their foreign teachers with the university are trying to preserve the rapidly disappearing Tibetan folk-song tradition. |
Dawa Drolma, a 20-year-old Tibetan woman, sits quietly at the front of the brick kang a traditional farmer's bed that is heated by wood burning underneath extending a large microphone toward the women. The bulky headphones dangling over her ears are broken, so she has to use her free hand to keep them from falling off.
The young woman is a member of a small group of Tibetan students at Qinghai Normal University, in China's far northwest, who are attempting to preserve the rapidly disappearing Tibetan folk-song tradition. "The goal is to digitalize the songs we record and return them to our communities," she says. "We want to record as many songs as possible."
The program got started in 2005 when a student in the university's English program for Tibetans approached Gerald Roche, an Australian anthropology professor teaching in China as a volunteer, and asked him if there was some way to save Tibetan folk music, which was gradually disappearing from Tibetan villages throughout western China.
Roche has a master's degree in ethnomusicology but says he knew nothing about Tibetan music, and so he gathered several students together for a brainstorming session. They looked at the different types of songs and the factors that put them at risk.
After two months of training in how to use the equipment and how to collect information about the songs, the first batch of about six volunteers returned home during last year's winter break armed with donated digital recorders some traveling by bus for days to reach their nomadic communities.
The students returned to Xining with close to 200 songs, or more than 10 hours of recorded music. The songs included herding and harvesting songs, drinking tunes, love ballads, lullabies, even songs meant to soothe yaks into giving more milk.
Tibetan music was first threatened during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) as all "feudal" practices of all ethnicities were banned. The order of the day was to "make art serve politics". Tibetan music was particularly suspect because of its religious themes. For close to a decade, no one dared to sing any of those songs out loud, and many were forgotten.
The biggest threat to traditional Tibetan folk music, however, has been the country's modernization. "After we got electricity 10 years ago," says Dawa Drolma of her remote village in Gansu Province, "people began buying tape recorders, radios, and TV's, and then they began losing interest in traditional things."
Anne-Laure Cromphout, a doctoral student at the Free University of Brussels, who is doing research in Qinghai for her dissertation on the relation between traditional and modern Tibetan music, points to the influence of modern pop music from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere in China. "People hear this music all the time on the radio, on VCD's, and cassette tapes," she says. "It comes in and basically takes over."
Dawa Drolma agrees. When young people hear traditional music, "they feel it's very foreign".
Mechanization has also had a huge impact. "Butter-churning songs are disappearing as there are now electric machines to do this," says Cromphout, "and so no need to have a song to provide rhythm while milking."
Recent years have seen many Tibetans, including nomads, giving up their land for homes in small towns and cities. "The village people don't get together anymore," says Galsang Tsebdan, another Qinghai Normal student volunteer, "and they have no idea what traditional music is."
Collecting what music has survived has not been easy. When Dawa Drolma tries to get the three women in Red Cliff Village to sing, they all demur, saying their voices are not good enough.
With a bit of gentle prodding, Pumao Ji is persuaded to take the mike. The Tibetan farmer, who is wearing a pink kerchief and heavy silver earrings, and a traditional maroon jacket with sleeves adorned with gold and green thread, belts out songs with a surprisingly strong voice for the next 30 minutes.
After she finishes a song, she puts on the headphones and for the first time in her 61 years hears what her own voice sounds like. Her face lights up. "I like it," she says, smiling broadly, but then adds with some embarrassment: "I'm not as good as when I was young."
Cromphout says that while she hopes traditional songs won't disappear, her research shows that modern Tibetan songs are using a lot of traditional themes. "If traditional music dies out, it will be replaced by something that is related to it, and very much influenced by it," she says.
The program has certainly had an impact on the students themselves. Like other volunteers, Dawa Drolma had no knowledge of the music until she joined the program. But she says the cultural richness of the songs made her a fan.
The students want to produce a digital archive of the music that can be put online in Tibetan and eventually in English, and hope to produce CD's that can be distributed. Some samples of the music are already available on YouTube. The students also hope that the music can eventually be taught in village primary schools.
The biggest challenge is financing, says Roche. The recording equipment is secondhand, which affects the sound quality. The equipment does not fare well in the cold Tibetan Plateau. During this year's winter break, six of the 17 students, who fanned out across Tibet Autonomous Region, and Sichuan, Gansu and Qinghai provinces, could not record music because their machines broke down.
Roche has applied for money from various agencies to buy better equipment, and he'd like to find proper space for an office so the students would have a place to work and train right now the program is run out of Roche's small living room.
But he has had no luck so far. "Cultural preservation is not very high on the list of funding priorities in an area where basic human needs still need so much improvement," he says.
Still, Roche says the quality of the work is getting better as the students learn from experience in the field and from one another. It's still an open question whether they will be able to preserve the music against the onslaught of modernity.
Back in Red Cliff Village, Pumao Ji and Pumao, the other villager who has come to learn the hair-changing song, say they're determined that it will survive them. "We'll teach this to the younger generation," says Pumao. "If we don't, the songs will disappear, and I'll feel sad."
The article is published courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the United States
(China Daily 04/11/2007 page20)
