Old sweet songs(2)

His goal is to put that music together in an online library to share with music lovers. But getting it recorded has not been easy: Many old songs and singing techniques can only be performed by elderly people scattered in remote villages, since youth today seem more interested in karaoke than learning their ancestor's legacy. Traveling alone with his recording and video equipment, Hou got help from local governments, which connected him with those old artists.

Hou met A Benzhi five years ago, who took him to visit his village and interview singers who were more than 90 years old.

"Some of the music has been passed down orally through the generations, so we aren't sure how old it is," says A Benzhi. "The oral tradition, when the musicians die, they take along with them the knowledge and memory before it can be passed on, and then it's gone."

Lu Guohua, a 32-year-old singer, says that it has taken years for her to learn and memorize old ethnic tunes. "Young people today are easily distracted," says Lu, whose singing talent was discovered by A more than 15 years ago. "Some have left the village and work at bigger cities, like Kunming. They won't even return anymore, let alone learn the old songs," says Lu.

Yan Sangong, 40, a farmer from the Blang ethnic group who lives near the border between China and Myanmar, came to Beijing to perform at the concert. The shy singer couldn't speak fluent Mandarin, but listeners found his guitar-like three-string instrument to be very expressive.

According to Hou, the Blang people are good at performing vigorous melodies with improvised lyrics. The Blang ballad was listed as one of China's Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008, and Yan is an official inheritor.

"We have to keep that music alive onstage," says Hou.

Besides online sharing, Hou plans to launch a concert series, letting audiences experience ethnic cultures through their ancient music and film documentaries of their daily lives. Soon he will invite indigenous artists from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Taiwan.

"Chinese audiences rarely get a chance to watch performances from real ethnic singers," says Yu Long, the Beijing Music Festival's founder and music director, noting that this year's ethnic music performances were a first for the festival.

"But as President Xi Jinping said at a symposium in Beijing recently, it's necessary to preserve such ethnic music and dance by offering more platforms for those artists," says Yu.