This grass-roots preservation project offers hundreds of recordings of folk songs and folk tales, recorded since 2005 by local volunteers from the English Training Program at Qinghai Normal University (Qinghai Province). Beginning in late 2007, the project expanded to record endangered songs of other ethnic minority groups such as the Naxi and Pumi ethnicities in China’s Yunnan Province.
Description per Digital Himalaya (U of Cambridge): "These songs were recorded in Skar ma Village, Chab mdo City, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. Skar ma Village is an agro-pastoralist community about 1,080 kilometers from Lhasa; all residents are Tibetan. The songs in this collection were recorded in 2007 by Bsod nams dung mtsho, and all were sung by Bsod nams 'byor ldan, a male who, at the time of recording, was in his sixties. Except the first track, all are dancing songs."
Includes biographies for several leading Tibetan singers, as well as other resources. For example, a truncated keyword search for "Tibet*" retrieves more than 100 search results. Access restricted to subscribers. At Columbia, use a campus computer or log-in remotely via proxy.
This database, which requires log-in with a Columbia UNI, contains audio recordings, videos, field notebooks and journals that document musical traditions and how music interacts with different societies and cultures all over the globe. The resource provides a wealth of materials for the interdisciplinary study of ethnomusicology; whether the focus is on music, anthropology, dance, religion or spirituality. Recordings of Tibetan music are primarily in two collections: Fredric Lieberman Collection (Sikkim, 1970); and the Peter Crossley-Holland Collection (Sikkim and Ladakh,1961).