Translator: In 2007, June 16th, at three o'clock, singer Lago, who is from Vaku Village, Wendu Township, Xunhua County, will sing a traditional song for us.

Elise Potaka: Why did she choose to sing that song? What's important or special about that song?

Translator: She likes it because it's really familiar to her. The melody is very familiar to her. But she doesn't know the meaning very clearly. Old ladies taught her this song before when she was a child.

Elise Potaka: Vaku Village is a small Tibetan farming community. There are maybe 150 families here. It's a really beautiful place. On all sides there are hills, or maybe they're mountains, and there's a small monastery overlooking it. I've come here with Lhamotso, this is her home village and she's back here to record some of the traditional folksongs. She especially wants to try and get the local kids to sing some songs, but she's having a little trouble.

Lhamotso: They start to forget. They know part of it but they don't do this kind of thing usually and they don't go out and play games with other children a lot because families have TVs and they're interested in TV, so they start to forget these things. So I want to record these sounds because it will disappear soon and so I want to save this.

Elise Potaka: Lhamotso is part of the Tibetan Endangered Music Project, which is run through Qinghai Normal University in China's western Qinghai Province. Today's she's turned her family's mud brick home into a makeshift studio, and one by one villagers and local kids, like this girl, are coming to offer up songs.

Translator: May your friends be successful, sing auspicious songs, in this season full of happiness like a flower blooming in my heart, happy memories also bloom in my heart.

Gerald Roche: One day a student approached me and said, 'Well, you know, many Tibetan songs are disappearing at the moment and wouldn't it be nice if we could do something about that.'

Elise Potaka: Gerald Roche, an Australian with a background in ethnomusicology was teaching anthropology at the Qinghai Normal University when some Tibetan students came up to him with an idea.

Gerald Roche: Before coming here I really didn't know much about Tibetan music. In the West, most of the information available about Tibetan music is about the monastic music. There's lots of CDs available, quite a few written pieces, but the folk tradition is really not very much studied. If you want to learn about that in the West you really have to know some specialist resources, and there's very few recordings. So I didn't know what the situation was at all, I didn't even know what Tibetan folk music really was.

There's a saying in Tibetan that as soon as a Tibetan person can walk they can dance, as soon as they can talk they can sing. It's also a Zulu saying, which I don't put much credence in, but it does express something about the role of song in Tibetan society, that there really was a wealth of song and that it really is closely intertwined with people's lives, but much in the same way that it used to be in the West. One good example of that are the work songs. In Tibetan areas there are songs for...well, in farming areas, for sowing, ploughing, weeding, harvesting, and then for, say, building houses and so on like that. Any work you could do in an agricultural area has music to accompany it. Same again in the nomadic areas; milking, churning butter, relaxing livestock so that they'll give milk to their offspring, for mating animals, songs to entertain yourself when you're herding, all of the daily activities in life.

Elise Potaka: This is a milking song from Guinan County, sung by 48-year-old Drolma. This kind of song is meant to calm the cows so they'll give more milk.

Vicki: My Tibetan name is Xomo Tomsu [spelling?] and my English name is Vicki. When I was young my family was in a herding place, like a nomad area, and at that time people got really special traditional song while they are herding and they are milking and all that kind of songs, but now I can't hear them anymore, because my family moved to the city and they are no longer herding and milking, so I haven't heard them for really 14 years.

Gerald Roche: We found this in our discussion early on, that the reasons for songs disappearing fall into a few very simply categories. The first one is that life is changing really quickly in Tibetan places. It's mostly economic development, positive economic development which is improving people's living conditions, such as the mechanisation of work. For instance, in some nomadic areas there used to be felt-making songs, but people now sell their wool off and the felt is made by machine. You no longer need that song. People are using machines to harvest, so you no longer need a harvesting song. People are building their houses of bricks, you don't need a song to synchronise all the workers to ram adobe anymore.

Elise Potaka: In Vaku Village after dark, Lhamotso gathers together a group of adults around the stove. Lhamotso has one song she really wants to get on tape, a song about the hole in the roof which lets in light during the day. Unfortunately, no one can remember the words, but her older brother, who's been fairly quiet the whole time, surprises everyone by singing a wall-building song.

Lhamotso's brother overheard this song when he was a child. He used to hand bricks up to some of the older men as they built walls and this was what they sang as they worked. Another woman in the room sings a song about cutting crops during the harvest.

Translator: (song lyrics) In the rectangular field, work hard, don't stand up, don't bend down for too long. The Chinese sickle, use it to cut as much as you can. In the round field finish quickly, be careful of your five fingers. The Chinese sickle, it likes fresh meat.

Lhamotso: I've never heard the words from this...the words that I heard are very interesting.

Elise Potaka: Lhamotso is so surprised. She had no idea that her village had these types of work songs.

Lhamotso: Before, I thought there's no working songs in my village and now after I interviewed several singers I realise there is a working song, like the build a wall song and also cut crops, also they say that there is a milking song, but they can cannot sing now, so maybe I need to interview some old people. I will try to get that.

Gerald Roche: Students go back to their own communities to record this music which I think is a real advantage over having strangers turn up and frighten everyone and point microphones at them. It's kind of a nerve-wracking experience for anyone to have a microphone pointed at them for the first time, and especially if it's some person from a different country speaking a different language, behaving oddly, it can be really off-putting, and then you ask people to relax and sing a song. That's difficult. But if you have your nephew or niece doing it, it's different. So these students were really able to collect much more nuanced information than other people would have.

So they were collecting these great range of songs, which even to them sometimes were very surprising in terms of...you know, perhaps they would discover that Uncle So-and-so is a great singer and they never had any idea about that, or they might discover that Grandmother So-and-so knows how to sing this type of song, and they never even knew that that was a type of song, let alone that someone in their family could sing it. So there have been lots of examples of that.

Lhamotso: I am right now in music project and I want to record some songs from my village, my home area to...it's kind of a cultural preservation rite. So during this holiday I will go home to record some songs. So, for example, I record songs like funeral songs. When people hold funerals then they will sing special songs that they will not sing usually. So this is one type and also other...like love songs.

Elise Potaka: Do you remember some songs from when you were younger that you might have heard some of the older people sing, songs that you would really like to get when you go back to your home town?

Lhamotso: Yes, when I was small I heard the old people singing songs with the mayang , Om Mani...This is very beautiful. They usually sing that song when we greet lama or something, but right now I almost couldn't heard it, so if I can I will ask some old people who can sing this song. It will be very beautiful I think.

Elise Potaka: The six sacred syllables; om ma ni pad me hum. This song is sung when harvesting crops in case the workers accidentally kill some insects or other living beings.

Of course in Tibetan villages, work is not everything, and after the sun goes down different types of songs come out; songs for greeting friends, songs for dancing, and even the odd gambling song, like this one recorded in Rebcong County.

The singer has been blind since birth and makes a living by offering up songs. Apparently this song repeats the word for the number two because the singer is trying to roll 'snake eyes' or a pair of ones.

And not to be outdone in Tianzhu County in Gansu Province, this is a kind of debating song which is sung at a party when you really want to insult someone.

Getting around Tibetan areas often involves minivans or buses blaring loud pop music of one kind or another; Mando-pop Canto-pop, Western pop and Tibetan pop.

Gerald Roche: A lot of people like to point their finger at foreign mass media, like Western pop music or Hong Kong and Taiwanese pop music. I think a lot of that is kind of an inflated sense of people's own sense of importance. It's like 'my culture is so great, it's influencing everyone else in the world, people can't help but listen to Britney Spears'. Actually in the Tibetan context that's partly true but mostly not. There's a really healthy Tibetan pop tradition, and a lot of it does include folk music, but what that results in is a loss of local variation.

Traditionally Tibetan music was highly variable across all the Tibetan areas, from valley to valley sometimes, even from village to village. So then what you might get is, say, the release of a cassette of traditional love songs which maybe once were only found in a particular area but then are taken somehow as iconic of all love songs and you get people all across Tibetan areas learning and singing those songs. So you get a great loss of variation. People have a new standard which they think is better and they apply that standard instead of the local one.

Elise Potaka: In Vaku village the kids now sing songs in Chinese Mandarin too. At school they're taught in both Tibetan and Chinese. Lhamotso tells me that these days parents worry that if their kids can't speak Mandarin maybe they won't be able to find a good job later on.

So when you were at school you always learnt songs in Tibetan?

Lhamotso: Yes, I don't know how to sing like Chinese songs and the teachers also never taught us Chinese songs and our Chinese is very poor. Now it is different. They start here in primary school and they know Chinese songs and they play games with Chinese words.

Elise Potaka: Lhamotso's village is about four hours on a bus from Xining, the capital city of Qinghai Province. Gerald Roche says that's not too far to travel when you compare it to the journeys of some of the other students in the Endangered Music Project.

Gerald Roche: There was one student who was travelling around his local area and he turned up to one township which he had gotten to on a very long and dusty road high up in the mountains, turned up and explained to people what he was doing there, and they were, like, 'Well, you could record some songs here but you really want to go a little up the road to such-and-such a place.' The only way into this village was by foot so he hiked into this village for five hours up into the mountains after already having travelled for half a day from wherever he was, which was far away from anywhere significant, and got up there and sat with the village elders and recorded some songs and then stayed the night and hiked out the next day. We had a couple of recorders which returned from last semester which broke because some of the plastic parts of them froze and snapped during the winter. Some of the conditions there up on the plateau is like minus-30, minus-40 degrees, some of these conditions.

I guess the biggest problem for me and for students is just changing people's idea of the value of this music. They go to a village and people are like, 'You don't want to hear that, it's kind of boring, my voice isn't so good, that's song's not very sophisticated.' The exact same problems would exist in our situation if you went to your home and went, 'Mum, sing a lullaby, I'm going to put it on the internet,' there's just this different value of it.

Just like Western culture, Tibetan culture has its own image of itself which includes in part an image of what is good and worthwhile and what is best. There's absolutely something which you could call Tibetan high culture and it does not include lullabies or gambling songs or songs that you sing to two yaks to help them mate if they're nervous. It just does not include those things, and that's the biggest obstacle. We can't record this music if no one sings it, and no one is going to sing it unless they think it's interesting and meaningful to do so.

Elise Potaka: All the music recorded as part of the Tibetan Endangered Music Project will be stored in archives, both in Australia and overseas, but Gerald Roche says that sending it back to the communities is the project's most important task.

Gerald Roche: Really in most villages there's at least one person who has a VCD player that can play this music, and if you can burn CDs of that music, print out lyric books and give it back to every household that has a VCD player, then those people have those songs there and what happens next is up to them. I think that that's a much more meaningful and sensitive thing to do. It leaves the decision of what happens to this music in the hands of local communities.

I think when I first started this, I had this idea that it was Tibetan music and the music somehow belonged to Tibetan communities or that it was like intangible cultural heritage and that it somehow belonged to the global community. Actually this music belongs to small communities, local communities. A lot of these songs don't make it very far past the village boundary. So returning it to those communities I think is the most responsible thing that can be done.

Credits

Producer : Robyn Ravlich

Sound engineer : Mark Don

Reader: Karl Velasco

Concert recordings by Yossi Gabbay, Ralph Lane and Owen Chambers

Music details

CD cut 10: Metal (from Symphony 1997; Heaven Earth Mankind)
Tan Dun
P and C Sony Music Entertainment
SK63368

Yo-Yo Ma, Imperial Bells Ensemble, Hong Kong Philharmonic etc: Tan Dun Symphony 1997 1'

Excerpts from Crouching Tiger Concerto, Water Concerto, Paper Concerto (soloist Haruka Fujii) and The Map (soloist Li Wei), all composed by Tan Dun.
Performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
ABC concert recordings 2003 and 2006

Further Information

Tibetan Endangered Music Project, now re-named Plateau Music Project

View video clip on Tibetan Endangered music project with Gerald Roche and Tibetan students

View video clip of Love Song recording from the Tibetan Endangered Music Project

View video clip of Nomadic Song recording from the Tibetan Endangered Music Project

Map showing Qinhai province

Details of songs composed by Yari Aso and recorded by the Tibetan Endangered Music Project

News of the Gyuto Monks' Australian activities