“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.