Snakes have swallowed the singers 1
Part 1 The watershed
The other day I was asked why I gave up recording and documenting traditional music of ethnic minorities, which had been my main interest for several years. I had travelled over a wide area in Thailand, Myanmar and Laos and made over 700 recordings of music from over thirty ethnic groups. None of those I recorded were professional musicians; I recorded them in their homes or the fields where they worked. I had met some remarkable people and learned smatterings of a few hill tribe languages. I had heard some truly heartfelt music and discovered instruments I never knew existed. So why, they asked, did I call it a day? The short answer was that it was getting much harder to find the sort of music that interested me. Changes were not to my liking but, I felt, inevitable. Traditional music had reached a watershed moment and I decided to move course and devote my spare time to recording the sounds of nature, which, fortunately, still offered a rich vein to explore.
Traditional music has always evolved shaped by the interplay between the stability of the society and culture on the one hand and the vitality of social forces and individual creativity on the other. When I first started recording in 2005, I found people in many villages who sang the old songs and played traditional instruments. By the time I was ready to quit (sometime around 2015) I had noticed that the impact of change had been so great that the music had not only got scarcer but had fundamentally changed its character.
In the next part, I’ll give some thoughts on the diversity of music in the different ethnic communities of the Golden Triangle.