June 20th, 2014 by Ken Smith
The rural Chinese village of Dimen, above, in southwest China’s Guizhou province, is home to the Dong minority — and the recently founded Dimen Dong Eco-Museum. (Ken Smith)
Here’s a radical way to recruit museum staff: hold auditions. The earliest employees of the Dimen Dong Eco-Museum — hired even before the museum had been formally established — were chosen not on the basis of their education or administrative abilities but rather on how well they sang.
This is hardly a model for say, MoMA, but in this case it made sense. The first initiative of the Museum’s parent organization — the nonprofit, non-governmental Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop in Guizhou Province, founded in 2004 by the Hong Kong businessman Lee Wai Kit — was to document the rich song tradition of the Dong people, one of China’s 55 acknowledged ethnic minorities. To avoid the prejudices and political tension that often accompany China’s treatment of its minorities, the Workshop sought to avoid mass tourism and professional music circles, both of which frequently put official doctrine and commercial concerns over independent research. But auditioning young locals carried an even more immediate advantage: only true singers could coax the local singing masters into recalling the near-forgotten songs of their youth.
The Workshop’s “100 Dong Songs Program” stemmed directly from the 2002 recording Dong Folk Songs: People and Nature in Harmony, a sampling of local solo and polyphonic singing collected and released by Lee’s publishing company MediaFusion. After several trips through rural Guizhou we had become familiar with Dong tourist music — the drinking songs and “nature” pieces with vocal techniques mimicking the sounds of birds and insects — but grew increasingly curious about the songs the villagers sang privately among themselves: ballads illustrating proper family relations, or epics tracing their clan origins back hundreds of years.
From:http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/rural-eco-museum-china-preserves-song-tradition-and-peoples-culture