With the support of the Nanjing Working Group of Jiangsu’s Assistance Programme for Ili and under the guidance of the Yining Municipal Bureau of Culture, Sports, Radio, Television and Tourism, Gaotai Performance initiated the New Era Ili Folk Song Collection, Documentation and Adaptation Project. Centered on Yining and the Ili River Valley, the project conducted fieldwork across the musical traditions of Uzbek, Uyghur, Kazakh, Mongolian, Tatar, Xibe, and other communities. Approximately 12 hours of audio and video materials were recorded, resulting in an archive of 45 songs and instrumental performances and six filmed interviews, forming the foundation of an evolving archive of Ili folk music.
Building on ethnomusicological fieldwork while incorporating approaches from the anthropology of sound and multimodal ethnography, the project examines folk music within the environments and everyday circumstances in which it is performed, transmitted, and transformed. Its fieldwork encompasses wedding songs in family courtyards, younger musicians’ reinterpretations of inherited melodies, long-song traditions on the grasslands, music within domestic spaces, and the sounds surrounding craftsmanship and instrument-making. Together, these scenes reveal Ili folk music not as a fixed body of heritage, but as a living practice continually moving between people, places, and generations.
From this fieldwork, six representative folk songs were selected for new arrangements and recordings in both their original languages and Standard Chinese, forming the album Two Springs. The project further extended its research into live performance through Let the Songs Speak for Him, an immersive narrative music production that brings musical traditions from different communities into a shared theatrical space. Through these interconnected outcomes, the project moves from field documentation and archival research to musical adaptation and artistic transformation, exploring how locally rooted musical traditions can continue to circulate and find new forms of expression in contemporary contexts.
