Preserving Living Traditions: a cultural exchange project creating a digital archive of the folk music of Tibet.

The Preserving Living Traditions project, directed by John Flower of the UNC Charlotte history department, is an on-going collaboration between the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences and the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital library at the University of Virginia. The research project and cultural exchange was funded by a grant from the United Stated Information Service.

In the first phase of the project, during the summer of 2000, a group of American and French scholars and technicians travelled to Tibet, to work with the Academy of Social Science in Lhasa on the recording of Tibetan folk music, and to study the social context in which that music exists.  Members of the group made recordings in Lhasa, Basum, Shigatse, and Ngari.

In phase two of the project, the three scholars from the Tibet Academy of Social Sciences who worked with us in summer 2000 came to the US to take part in a study tour of the Appalachian region, during October and November 2000.  Tenzin, Konchok Jiatso, and Tsering Gyelbo participated in the Old Time Week at the Augusta Heritage Center (Elkins, West Virginia), attended and gave a presentation at the American Folklore Society annual meeting, and took part in a number of workshops and site visits on Appalachian music and its community context, set up by the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, and coordinated by Mary Greene.  As part of their study tour, the group gave several presentations of their research to students and to audiences from the broader community (for example, at the Great Aunt Stella Center in Charlotte).  The group wrote a brief reflection on their experiences during the study tour. 

In the final phase of the project, the Tibetan visitors stayed at the University of Virginia for five months intensive training in digital archiving.  In addition, the Tibetan scholars collaborated with American colleagues to begin the work of putting the audio and video materials documented in Tibet into a web-accessible archive of Tibetan folk music.  This work can be seen in the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library in the music section.  The archive includes song recordings along with some contextual information, transcripts, and translations in a database accessible through both regional and song genre interfaces.  The archive also includes a number of interpretive essays, and other multimedia resources (to view this essays follow the links on this page).

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