Victoria's Ark
covering burma and southeast asia
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Magazine

BOOK REVIEW

Victoria's Ark


By JIM ANDREWS FEBRUARY, 2010 - VOLUME 18 NO.2


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(Page 2 of 2)

“It is said that if one generation fails to transmit its knowledge to the next, millenia of accumulated wisdom can be lost in a few decades.

“The oral traditions that were once so vital a century ago are in jeopardy of vanishing with the wind. When we lose these, we lose a part of the richness of humanity.”

Apart from her book on hill tribe music, Vorreiter has produced a CD, a documentary film and she’s now working on a series of educational videos. She also plans to launch a foundation with the aim of finding “ways to encourage passing the ancestral musical legacy on to new tribal generations before it vanishes altogether.”

That’s quite a body of work for a woman who began her professional career as a musician. She is an accomplished violinist who graduated in the US with a master’s degree in music and researched the music of Morocco before settling in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. 

A “cultural Noah’s Ark” is how her work has been described by others in her field of research. Like Noah, she probably has a long way to go yet before her task of protection and preservation is done.



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Tim Davies Wrote:
10/02/2010
I see there is more information about Victoria on her website www.tribalmusicasia.com and that she is openning an exhibition in the Chiang Mai Culture centre on 12th February. It should be a must see for visitors to Chiang Mai.

Kyi May Kaung Wrote:
01/02/2010
Wow!

Would love to listen to the CD.

How did the Hmong know how a snowflake is shaped unless they had a microscope?

Couldn't the motif be copied (later) from somewhere.

See how Buddhist motifs from India appear all the way to Bali and Tibet, like the setkya symbol (reverse of the Nazi one) and the swirls in the Buddha's hair, or the floral wreaths. This process happened over thousands of years.

I've looked at a lot of photos of images of the Buddha from Sarnath, Sanchi, Ghandara, etc. and was recently painting White Tara, so I know.

Very interesting.

Kyi May Kaung

Bernice Johnson Wrote:
01/02/2010
Dear Jim,
What a fine review of Vorreiter's book you have written! Do you know about the new bookstore for refugees from Burma, which is opening at the Burmese restaurant on Neimanheimen on March 4? They are asking for book donations and I'm sure they would be delighted to get a copy of Vorreiter's book.
Thanks for your good work! Bernice Johnson

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