Sounds that will be recorded and stored for the ages

Li Qi walks into a room and stands near a table on which sit seven different musical instruments, including drums, cymbals and gongs. Before sitting down he picks up a drum stick and ties it to his left lower leg since there is a percussion instrument set under the table. He is familiar with the locations of all of the musical instruments and finishes the preparations by himself.

Li, 51, the leader of a folk band in Xianghuan county, southern Shanxi, was in Beijing on June 13 with five other blind musicians, including Du Ying, Ma Xingping and Lu Shuiqing, with an average age of 60 years old.

They performed on an outdoor stage in downtown Chaoyang Park that day, and the next day recorded folk songs with a total length of nearly six hours in a Beijing recording studio.

Like neighboring Zuoquan county in eastern Shanxi, Xianghuan has a group of blind musicians who have been taken their performances from one village to another since the 1950s. Their style is called Xianghuan Gu Shu, which refers to the blind musicians telling stories while playing their instruments. Their performance combines solos, duets and narrating the plots. In 2008 Xianghuan Gu Shu was put on the list of national-level intangible cultural heritage items.

One of the songs they recorded in Beijing was a 48-minute piece titled Gu Lyu (Rent A Donkey), which tells of a swindler named Li Youneng. Performed in local dialect, the song has the band members playing different roles, including Li as a judge.

"The song is still performed nowadays," says Li, who joined the blind musicians band when he was 15 years old. "My part is the most difficult because the performer needs to master all the musical instruments. These days no more than three people in our county could play that role."

Their recordings will soon be released on the China Database for Traditional Music, an online music database set up by Huayun Culture&Technology Co Ltd in 2018. It has about 2,000 hours of audio and video materials under nine headings, including Chinese folk music, traditional Chinese music, traditional Chinese opera and Chinese folk dance.

On May 25 three blind musicians from Zuoquan county, Liu Hongquan, Wang Shuwei and Zhang Jianzhong, traveled to Beijing to record songs. More blind musicians from around the country will have their songs preserved through the China Database for Traditional Music, says Gong Yujie, a musicologist who has worked with Chinese blind musicians since 2007.

"We will have more than 200 blind musicians from all over the country, including Shanxi province. The provinces of Shaanxi, Henan and Anhui province also plan to join the project, which aims to keep their folk songs alive."

Gong, born and bred in Jinzhong, Shanxi, with the Taihang Mountains to the east and Hebei province to the north, graduated from Jinzhong Normal College in 2010. From 2011 to 2016 he worked at the China Conservatory of Music in Beijing with Liu Hongqing, the elder brother of the blind musician Liu Hongquan, who has been researching and promoting blind musicians and their folk music.

"I've been interested in local folk music since I was a child," Gong says. "Blind musicians are invited to perform on various occasions, for example at weddings, funerals and to celebrate the arrival of newborns."

The first time he watched Zuoquan blind musicians' perform was in 2007 in a class given by Liu Hongqing, he says.

"They suffer a lot because of their disability. However, their attitude toward life is open and optimistic. They're not looking for pity; they just want their tradition to be passed on."

Last year Li Jianzhong, 21, joined the Zuoquan Blind Men's Publicity Team and became a student of Liu Hongquan.

"What we can do now is to keep their songs alive with recordings," says Wei Xiaoshi, 38, editor-in-chief of China Database for Traditional Music.

"We want to present their songs to audiences through live shows."

Wei has developed an interest in ethnomusicology, the analysis of music from the cultural and social perspective of those who make the music, which was the subject of his doctoral study studies at Indiana State University from 2016 to 2018.

Wei says he first saw blind musicians' perform in Zuoquan county in 2016 and was impressed by the outdoor performance, which attracted about 500 people.

"Unlike live shows in cities, where audiences are liable to play with their smart phones, the audiences at these shows are fully attentive to the music, and for me that was a great experience."