ICH North – passing on our musical heritage

Branch: Wellbeing and health

Duration: 1.2.2023-31.12.2025

Region: International

Financed by: Interreg Aurora
The Regional Council of Lapland
Region Västernorrland
Nordisk Kulturfond
Troms og Finnmarks fylkeskommune

https://www.interregaurora.eu/approved-projects/ich-north-passing-on-our-musical-heritage/

Project Manager: Sara Kåll-Fröjdö

What we do
Newsletter
Project materials
Contact information to Project Working Group

ICH North will promote cross-border cooperation related to musical ICH and enhance the role of musical communities in the area, building bridges between institutions, educational institutions and heritage communities. The project will develop new joint innovative services and products in cultural and creative industries, including digitization and digital innovations. The project is community-based in accordance with the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and will use co-creation between communities and institutions with a bottom-up approach.

The approach of the project is demand-based and sustainability is a keyword. The project will give musical heritage more visibility, using social innovations to transfer knowledge and revitalize ICH/music, thus furthering safeguarding.

The project is funded by Interreg Aurora, with co-financing by Region Västernorrland, Troms og Finnmarks fylkeskommune, Nordisk Kulturfond and Lapin Liitto as well as the project partners: Centria University of Applied Sciences, Kulturens Bildningsverksamhet, KulturÖsterbotten, Novia University of Applied Sciences, The Arctic University of Norway UiT, the Finnish Folk Music Institute and Västernorrlands Museum. The project was planned as a part of an Interreg Nord-funded project, also called ICH North.

The Aurora area has a very rich and distinctive immaterial cultural heritage in the form of music. The musical heritage in the Aurora area has both similarities and distinct local and regional differences, and includes heritage of minorities. Immigrants bring their own musical heritage with them. In today’s society, it is not certain that the transmission of musical heritage to new practitioners will happen. This leads to a loss of traditional knowledge. The causes might be migration, urbanization, social distancing between age groups, low media visibility/low interest due to lack of information, networks or good safeguarding practices. Safeguarding that support performance and transmission are called for.

ICH North tackles the challenges with a number of actions that deal with different aspects on how to promote the transmission of musical heritage in the Aurora area, considering that the area is sparsely inhabited with long distances. Traditional music in the Nordic countries has very limited human and financial resources, across the board. Cultural cross-border partnerships, networks and joint development and implementation of actions through the project will strengthen the sector and promote transmission more effectively.

Intangible cultural heritage, especially musical heritage, and communities upholding it, cross all administrative borders.

Musical heritage as a concept might be strongly connected with folk music, but there are also a lot of other vocal and instrumental traditions that can be seen as musical heritage, as well as f.ex. the knowledge on how to build instruments. Following the approach of Unesco’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, any living musical tradition or a related skill that a community or individual feel that is important to pass on to following generations, could be seen as musical heritage.

During the three-year project several different project actions will be developed and implemented in a total of five work packages:

1. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

The subject of the course is safeguarding of musical heritage in the north of Finland, Sweden and Norway, including Sápmi. Anyone can attend and course material will be open source.

2. A digital map of musical communities practicing and transmitting their musical heritage

The content is co-created with communities throughout the Aurora area, consisting of video material with members of the communities describing how they pass on their musical heritage.

3. Educational material on intangible cultural heritage for non-formal education

The goal is to use social innovations in order to promote the transmission of knowledge/intangible cultural heritage and enhance participation and inclusion.

Activities include:

educational material on ICH
educational workshops and inspirational meetings
a pilot group/community for testing actions taken to increase social inclusion and webinars with physical nodes.

4. Musical heritage, entrepreneurship and cultural tourism

These will be promoted through cultural innovations, tandem meetings for musicians and entrepreneurs and a community. This work package will focus on branding and promoting local cultural and musical heritage with possible products and innovations for cultural tourism.

5. A joint strategy for community involvement in safeguarding musical heritage for archives in the Aurora area

The project will establish a network of music communities and museums and archives in the Aurora region, map the community level needs and opinions and elaborate a joint strategy and road map ahead. Main topics in the road map are ownership related to traditional knowledge, community involvement in the documentation work and dissemination of the materials (community and general levels). The actions include negotiations with other heritage organizations, practitioner workshops and open webinars.

HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE:

Share your ideas about Intangible Cultural Heritage with the ICH North working group. We would love to hear your tips about good practices or recommendations which community experts we should interview about passing on musical heritage. Hearing your views and ideas about these issues would be very valuable to us, and answering might also give you new aspects of intangible cultural heritage to think about! Questionnaire link

Call for material / WP3

Wanted: contributions to new pedagogic materials!

Work package 3 is currently working on two different pedagogic materials that will assist practitioners in passing on musical heritage. We now ask for your help! We are looking for examples of traditional repertoires from all over the Aurora area – language and age is not important in this case.

If you feel that you want to share a part of your tradition, please let us know through this form. 🚩

We are currently looking for:

traditional children’s songs, rhymes, clap games and so on. We want to create a YouTube playlist as inspiration for new parents and are looking for suggestions of what could be included. Does your family or community practice meaningful, happy or action filled children’s traditions? Please tell us about them!
good tunes or songs for teaching musical traditions to new practicians. Here we wish to be in touch with anyone that has experiences in teaching music traditions within the Aurora area – what works? Please let us know about your best pieces for teaching traditional skills!

Through the link above you will reach a form where you can suggest up to 5 tunes or songs at once together with context information. As you submit the form you will receive a link where you can upload files, such as recordings or sheet music renderings of the traditional music.

Part of the contributions will used for development work within the project and be included in the new pedagogic materials we are working on. We are very much looking forward to diving into the musical heritage of the Aurora region in this manner and creating new, meaningful and diverse pedagogic materials!

Please do not hesitate to contact Johanna Björkholm of work package 3 if you have questions or would like to discuss the development of teaching materials – you can reach her at johanna.bjorkholm@kulturosterbotten.fi!

Recommend music to the ICH North Spotify playlist with music from the Interreg Aurora Area

The ICH North Spotify playlist with heritage music in the Interreg Aurora area already consists of hours of music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0hmavbKZojjM6WboB1XRKX?si=16d9878ffbc244da

The aim of the playlist is to get an overview of the heritage music and the playlist would be one way to discover what the musical heritage in the region really consists of. Can you help us with adding music? Do you think somethings is missing from the list?

Please send information (songs/artists) to Mats Granfors at Novia University of Applied Sciences: mats.granfors@novia.fi

There will also be a YouTube list, later on. Any suggestions of videos, for example with local musicians/music communities? Please let Mats know!

You can also organise your own cultural heritage discussions or tandem meetings between enterprises and musicians. Feel free to use the project materials we have prepared.

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Folk like a local

The “Folk like a local”-poster is an easily printable, nice looking A3 poster with a QR-code to a YouTube-playlist that contains heritage music from a village or a region. The posters can be put up at appropriate places such as museums, restaurants, common gathering places, notice boards, libraries, harbors and wherever people tend to hang around.

The aim is to make local musical heritage visible in new places, for tourists, local inhabitants and anyone interested to discover. The QR-code make it possible to follow how many have scanned the code. You can also see how many that have listened to the playlists.

We thought it’d be good to include information of the name of the playlist on the poster, so you can search for it in case you don’t usually scan QR-codes. It’s also good to provide contact information in case someone wants to add material to the lists.

The “Folk like a local” poster is currently piloted in Replot, Vallgrund & Björkö, Lappfjärd, Närpes, Kälviä, Ångermanland-Medelpad and North Ostrobothnia. As you can see, the poster can be made both for a smaller village or municipality – or a larger region. See the materials in Project materials section.

Do you want to have a poster for your area? Contact Mats Granfors at Novia UAS for more information (mats.granfors@novia.fi).

Kälviä Folk Like a Local mini poster on stand

What does ICH North do: ICH North project leaflet

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We’ve made a poster with some questions regarding musical traditions and cultural heritage. You are welcome to use it too for discussions in your own groups and communities:
ICH North discussion poster (ENG/FIN/SWE)
ICH North discussion poster (ENG/NOR/Northern Sápmi)
or only in Finnish.

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We have made printout cards with questions that will help getting a discussion started, for meetings between an entrepreneur and musician/representative of music community. With the help from these cards you can arrange a tandem-meeting, combining entrepreneurship and traditional music! ENG SWE NOR FIN

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Folk like a local

A4 posters pdf:

Replot – Björkö – Vallgrund * Lappfjärd * Närpes * Kälviä

Flyers:

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Workshop on connecting cultural heritage and travel

Product planning form in Finnish (3 pages pdf)

Bingo form for extra fun and helping the planning in Finnish

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ICH North webinar recordings

Webinar on Folk Music Pedagogy

Webinar on Music collections, ownership and community involvement

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For producing and co-producing content for the different activities in the project, we will gather material such as interviews, photos, videos. We have made a privacy statement for the project and you can read it here:

in English * in Swedish * in Finnish