Music and Musical Heritage as Factors for Rural Development: Searching for Good Practices

Introduction

Music has been scientifically proved as a very important factor in human lives since the beginning of human culture. In fact, it is intertwined with other fundamental human activities in most cultures, in a way that it is difficult to talk about music without talking, for example, about agriculture (Stobart, 1994). So does religion or a spiritual dimension of human beings, still remaining in some cultures and being revitalized in post-industrial societies, like the movement around some American cultures medicinal chants that are exchanged, taught, learned and used by more and more occidental people in and out of ceremonies celebrating human beings’ connection with the Earth and the main elements and directions (fire, water, wind, ground) (Gómez-Ullate, 2009).

Indeed, music is present in the five domains of the UNESCO`s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (UNESCO, 2018):

• 1.

  Oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage

• 2.

  Performing arts

• 3.

  Social practices, rituals and festive events

• 4.

  Knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe

• 5.

  Traditional craftsmanship

As a central element, we can see its importance in the actual World Intangible Heritage constellation (see figure 1).

Figure 1.

UNESCO’s constellation of intangible cultural heritage

Source: UNESCO.

Music is present as a central element in the categories of Vocal music, Instrumental Music, Dance and Festivals. But it is also fundamental in some cases of oral tradition as the Pansori Epic Chant, in the Republic of Korea, where “during performances lasting up to eight hours, a male or female singer, accompanied by a single barrel drum, improvises on texts that combine rural and erudite literary expressions” or the Music of the Bakhshis of Khorasan in Iran, where the ''dotār,'' a two-stringed, long-necked lute accompanies the recounting of Islamic and Gnostic poems and epics containing mythological, historical or legendary themes (UNESCO, 2021). It is also a central element in some declared rituals as in Malawi’s Vimbuza healing dance or Mexico`s Ritual ceremony of the Voladores.

In the year 2005, it took place in Paris an expert meeting on “Music, dance and theatre traditions”. So, as anthropologues as Clifford Geertz (1973), have shown in the Javanese puppet theater, Wajang, and we can see in many of the manifestations in the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage list, theater and music are absolutely intertwined. In Portuguese Alentejo, we find the Bonecos de Santo Aleixo (Puppets from Santo Aleixo), always accompanied by a Portuguese guitar, and a repertoire composed of works from the secular tradition, of an essentially religious genre, but also from popular literature. The performances always begin with the Baile dos anjinhos (Dance of the angels) or the Contradança (Contradance). (World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts, 2016)

In populated developing countries, music has served as a vehicle for health and safety campaigns or to change traditions attempting against human rights as ablation or arranged child marriages. According to a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study on folk and traditional media for rural development:

“If we are to properly communicate with rural communities, we must learn more about and better understand how to channel our development work through those communities' traditional communication channels” (Ng'ombe, 2000, cited in Kumar et al., 2011).