Empowering music sustainability

27 Feb 2025

There is a growing movement amongst researchers to encourage ethnic communities to curate and conserve their own heritage, including music. Lijuan Qian is principal investigator of the five -year community-engaged ERC-funded research project ECura, Everyone’s a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China.

The project attracted a transformational €1.5million ERC Starting Grant for pioneering research.

Working with villagers in three ethnic minority communities in Southwest China, ECura is studying how they can use digital media technologies (mobile phones, TikTok, etc.) to support their traditional expressive practices. Qian explains: ‘Researchers have recognized that culture bearers need to be more centrally involved in music sustainability, both for these programmes to prove practically effective and because it is ethically essential that community members determine what music might be shared with others, if any, and under what conditions’.

'It is ethically essential that community members determine what music might be shared with others, if any, and under what conditions'

ECura has designed a new research framework for applied ethnomusicology (and related areas) that allows indigenous musicians to capture music and performance via mobile digital media platforms.  The hope is that this will transform the ways ethnomusicologists, folklorists and others can work with other communities, since the ECura framework can be applied to a broad cross-section of endangered cultures globally. For more information see the ECura website: Everyone is a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China (ecura.ie)