Research On Xinjiang Uyghur Muqam Education Inheritance

Uygur Muqam is a kind of traditional folk music prevalent in China’s Xinjiang Uygur neighborhoods,which integrates "song poem","dance" and "music" into a comprehensive art.This Uighur traditional music with a long history and unique geographical features evolved during the formation and development process of Uighur.It’s not only an outstanding representative of Uighur music art but also an encyclopedia with national essence,functioning as enlightening the Uighur people.On November 25,2005 Uygur Muqam became the first Chinese Minority music recorded as Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.It means that Uygur Muqam has important historical,artistic and academic value.But this traditional Minority music,rooted in the soil of folk,is suffering a huge impact of cultural and ecological environment and losing its soil and space to survive in the era of global economic integration and cultural transformation.In particular,its heir is on the verge of discontinuity.How to cope with the difficulties and crisis confronting Uygur Muqam,and protect,inherit and develop this excellent folk music,is an urgently important issue to study.The main design of the study intends to highlight "the pursuit of truth" and "the theoretical support":"the pursuit of truth" means the author,who has been living in Xinjiang over a long period of time,went repeatedly to the Uygur settlements and investigated this ethnic integrated art by doing a detailed,thorough fieldwork.In this way the author acquired a lot of first-hand materials,and then generalized and sorted them as completely as possible and summarized the specific contents of cultural inheritance of Uygur Muqam."The theoretical support" means the author tries to base the research of the heritage education of Uygur Muqam on theories about cultural and educational anthropology,cultural ecology,musical anthropology and philosophy of music education.Meanwhile this research is generalized into the vision of educational anthropology and summarizes comprehensively the noumenon composition,methods of contemporary inheritance and feasibility of educational inheritance of Uygur Muqam.The emphasis of the study is to analyze the difficulties facing Uygur Muqam as well as reasons for them,and suggests how to solve these problems.Specifically,the main contents and conclusions of this study are as follows:Firstly,the study inspects and describes,on the macro and micro level,the historical origins and development of Uygur Muqam,its morphology,the presence of noumenon composition and the natural and cultural environment from the perspective of cultural ecology,history and anthropology of music.The macro level is concerning the Uighur natural ecological environment;the micro level refers to the Uighur people’s cultural and ecological environment.These two aspects support each other and together constitute culture ecosystems that Uygur Muqam depends on for its continuity.Meanwhile,based on several field trips in the region by the author,the study conducts theoretical analysis of cultural aspects of species composition,musical form,lyrics and other features of the Uygur Muqam from the perspective of music anthropology,so that it is no longer a musical form in the simple sense,but a form of objective existence of the sound with strong cultural imprint.Secondly,this study of Uygur Muqam is closely around the theme of educational inheritance.With methods of questionnaire survey and ethnographic research methods of education,it focuses on the overall cultural space of Uygur Muqam,the community’s support for students learning Muqam in Xinjiang and the real from of inheritance--four types of Uygur Muqam areas in deep fieldwork.Research results show that Uygur Muqam,in the process of transmission and dissemination,has produced profound impacts on intellectual and non-intellectual factors of Uighur people,the breadth and depth of knowledge acquisition as well as the overall development of Uyghur community.Although Uygur Muqam heritage still exists in the private sector,in terms of transmission channels,its original ecology of succession has been closely linked with the contemporary social background,evolving into mentoring inheritance,the inheritance in folk custom,inheritance in Maqam tradition and inheritance centers,inheritance in school education and other solid state forms of inheritance.In this study,the first three will be referred to as the folk tradition of education,and the last one as the school tradition of inheritance.The real form of each of these four aspects is analyzed thoroughly and specifically in terms of the content of inheritance,the process of inheritance and the features of inheritance.Using powerful data and qualitative materials,the study demonstrates the feasibility and necessity of Uygur Muqam inheritance in today’s schools,in order to reveal fully the selection mechanism of Uygur Muqam in the context of contemporary cultural and educational inheritance.Finally,based on anthropological vision of education,the study analyzes the educational inheritance issues of Uygur Muqam.By interpreting the cultural transmission theory of educational anthropology,it analyzes,from multiple dimensions,the importance of making Uygur Muqam inheritance part of the school education,and then proposes countermeasures for protecting the cultural and educational inheritance of this form of folk music.Particularly,the study attempts,although tentatively,to build an open educational inheritance framework in which school and civic education rely on each other,based on which it proposes that music education and teaching in ethnic schools should effectively inherit the method of "song","dance","music" in the form of the Trinity teaching that characterizes Uygur Muqam,and train ethnic music teachers with "Double music sense”and "four applications",thus enlightening the inheritance and development of other types of minority Music which are in a similar situation as the Uygur Muqam.