"...old forms of various languages are conserved in musical works in which the melody is accompanied by the words of one or another language."
Renowned Linguist Claude Hagège in the New York Times, December 16, 2009
The Vanishing Word
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Cultures in Harmony (CiH) is pleased to announce a project that will help preserve the endangered languages of Papua New Guinea through musical composition and performance. From August 23 to September 19, 2010, CiH will send soprano Tiffany DuMouchelle, percussionist Stephen Solook, and a composer to Papua New Guinea. The purpose of this project is to create living documentation of the critically endangered languages of Papua New Guinea. According to UNESCO, there are twenty critically endangered languages in Papua New Guinea. On average, approximately 32 speakers remain per language.
This project will follow our first project in Papua New Guinea. It will demonstrate to people in Papua New Guinea that Americans are deeply concerned about cultural preservation, and it will showcase the beauty of the culture of Papua New Guinea to audiences around the United States.
*Check out this video trailer for the project*
Part 1: Language Documentation and Composition Creation
Our itinerary will allow us to involve ten dying languages in two provinces in the project. In Madang province, those languages will be Mawak, Kowaki, Bilakura, and Dumun. For Morobe province, those languages will be Taap, Sene, Kamasa, Kawucha, Susuami, and Yarawi.
For each language, CiH will meet with the speakers of the language and document poetry, songs, history, and other important cultural data. The speakers (with help from CiH) will compose a poem in their language to be used in the final composition. Aspects of traditional music, history, and other relative cultural material will also be used in the final composition. All activities will be documented with photographs, video and audio recording, and journals. In each town, CiH will offer outreach activities as a part of their cultural exchange. The composer will create a large multi-movement work for voice and percussion (may also include a CD or tape part involving audio recordings made during the documentation process). This composition will depend on the use of indigenous instruments (voice and percussion) that are part of the cultures being represented.
Part 2: Outreach Performances in Papua New Guinea
Participants will travel throughout Papua New Guinea to perform the new composition, comprised of all twenty endangered languages. This tour will include outreach activities in conjunction with performances. Other musical groups from Papua New Guinea may be asked to join the members from CiH for this outreach tour. The purpose of this tour will be to help people in Papua New Guinea realize how quickly aspects of their culture are slipping away, and hopefully increase their realization of this and their appreciation for what they still have. This is in response to our previous trip to PNG, where the people we worked with said, “we knew that our culture was slipping away, but we didn’t know what to do about it, and so we were letting it go.” We hope that this may help further the process already begun by such organizations as the Culture and Environment Global Awareness Team, under the direction of Alex Korom.
Part 3:; Outreach Performances in USA; Recording and Documentation
CiH participants Tiffany DuMouchelle and Stephen Solook will continue to perform the newly composed work in venues throughout the USA (and elsewhere) through their duo, Aurora Borealis. They will take this composition to schools, libraries, and other performance venues sharing what they have learned about Papua New Guinea and the importance of cultural preservation. This composition may also be performed for future CiH projects either in the USA or other countries abroad. Actively performing this new works, along with recording and otherwise documenting the project will offer a physical means of retaining these dying languages. Concerts may be presented in conjunction with ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, music, and other such departments at Universities.
Facts
Papua New Guinea has 820 indigenous languages (over 1/10th of the world’s languages) - not including dialects. Twelve percent of these languages are endangered, and 20% of the endangered languages are critically endangered, and near to extinction. Half of the critically endangered languages have 10 people or less who still speak the language.
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Tiffany and Steve study Miani in the Yoro village. About 9,000 people speak Miani, far more than speak any of the languages covered by this new project.
