Presentation by Victoria Vorreiter
25th Asia Pacific Society
for Ethnomusicology International Conference
Siem Reap, Cambodia
High in the mountains of the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar once knew no boundaries, lives a rich multiplicity of peoples, who have maintained their independence and identity to a high degree. Numbering more than 130 groups and subgroups, each represents an extraordinary world, unique in history, language, physical features, customs, arts, dress, and spiritual beliefs.
No less astounding is the diversity of their musical traditions. Living in nature and rooted in animism, these mountain peoples have developed a vast and varied repertoire of celebratory songs, sacred chants, and instrumental music that charts the arc of life, the cycles of seasons, and the wheel of generations. For the highlanders of Southeast Asia, music is ever-present and essential to their inner and outer lives.
This multi-media presentation will take listeners on a musical journey, offering a soundtrack of seven ancestral songs that ushers a variety of indigenous peoples of the Golden Triangle—the Eng, Puli Hulai Akha, Lahu She Leh, Iu Mien, Lo Shi Lisu, Hmong, and Ulo Akha—through the pivotal thresholds of their lives, from before the cradle to beyond the grave – in other words, the prelude to the postlude of life.
