How a Song can be Exhibited in a Music Museum

Abstract

This paper will focus on the folksongs of people living in Napo, Nanning, and Funin in Guangxi Autonomous Region and Yunnan province. The study was initiated with the experience of working at the new Music Museum of the city of Nanning established within the campus of Guangxi Arts University. Since this is a Music Museum, arrangements were made to exhibit a sample repertoire of folksongs from this region in addition to all the interesting musical instruments. This was a very difficult task as it is a well observable fact that a song does not exist in a single version as it moves from one place to another, and changes all the time. This paper is about the experiences during this particular activity and how these difficulties had to be mastered. There might be others who face the same difficulties. As such, this paper may help find solution for the problems encountered by other music museums. Technically, this is the elaboration about a topic strongly connected to live interviews and personally collected statistics that were found through an intense personal presence in the mentioned area. The reference style had to be adapted to these circumstances. In order to make information traceable, many parts of the references carry translations in square brackets behind the transliteration. Also, Chinese names are left as a whole despite starting with the family name, the middle name and given names are tremendously important for identification. Name characters are presented in square brackets. Material can be obtained upon request made per email to the author.