Raising their voices

Singers from the Dong ethnic group of Liping county, Guizhou province, will also bring their folk music, including the polyphonic Dongzu Dage ("grand song of the Dong people") choir, which was listed as a national intangible cultural heritage in 2006.

"When you visit the villages of those Chinese ethnic groups, you listen to songs and watch them dance. There is a saying that: 'they sing when they learn to speak and they dance when they learn to walk'. It's a natural gift," says composer Liu Xiaogeng, who was born and raised in Yunnan province's Luquan Yi and Miao autonomous county. He graduated from Yunnan Arts University as a composer in 1981 and has traveled around the country collecting, researching and adapting ethnic music into songs for choral singing. So far, he has collected over 6,000 folk songs from ethnic groups in Southwest China.

"It's a pity that some of those ethnic folk songs are disappearing because the people who can sing them are getting old and are dying. Many of those folk songs have mainly been passed down as an oral tradition, which means that there are no written lyrics or musical notes. It is crucial that they are put down on paper, recorded on CD or in videos, and adapted into songs, which are teachable," says Liu. "The value of those songs goes beyond music itself. They need to be preserved because they provide accesses to the origins of the cultural identity of those ethnic groups."

On August 20 and 21, veteran conductor Wu Lingfen will perform with the China NCPA Chorus at a concert featuring musical works adapted from Chinese folk songs, including One Bamboo Pole is Easy to Bend, a folk song traditional to Hunan province, Ascending a Hill to Look at the Plain, a folk song originating from Qinghai province, and Clouds Flying in the Still Sky, a folk song from Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.