Keynote Speaker - Professor Helen Rees

Helen Rees is a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was one of the founding members of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research. After obtaining a B.A. in Chinese from Oxford University in 1987, she spent two years as a British Council postgraduate scholar at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, then went on to a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Since 1989 she has made many trips to Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southwest China to conduct research on the traditional and tourist-oriented musics of the Naxi ethnic minority, the Han majority, and several other ethnic groups in the region. This work has resulted in the book Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2000) and in numerous collaborative CD and video projects with her Yunnanese colleagues Zhang Xingrong and Li Wei; these are published by Pan Records (Leiden), Ode (Auckland), and Apsara Media for Intercultural Education (California).

Rees is also the editor of the biographically-oriented essay volume Lives in Chinese Music (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and is currently completing a book on the lay musico-ritual Dongjing associations of southwest China. During spring semester 2008 she was a visiting professor at the Yunnan Art Institute, teaching music ethnography and world music for their Music College, and guest-lecturing for the anthropology programme at Yunnan University.

It has been through ongoing engagement with China's cultural outreach that Helen Rees has developed a strong interest in the country's policies and practices of intangible cultural heritage protection, the re-envisioning of the role of traditional performing arts in today's modernized and globalizing environment, and the impact of the new concept of intellectual property on traditional music. She first got involved with cultural outreach in 1995 through helping negotiate the first ever international concert tour by the Naxi Dayan Ancient Music Association; since then she has interpreted and presented for Chinese musicians at several such events, including the Amsterdam China Festival in 2005 and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2007. She has also followed the increasing number of lawsuits filed in China concerning ownership and use of folk music materials, and has tracked the recent burgeoning of cultural heritage protection initiatives. In 2008 these included her own qin (7-string zither) teacher Lin Youren being named one of ten "transmitters" of qin music for the entire country (a newly instituted honour similar to Japan's "living national treasure" and South Korea's "poyuja" titles). Rees's publications to date on these issues include articles, essays, and lectures in English and Chinese on the intersection of traditional music with today's preservation, legal, economic, and globalizing trends in China and the United States. Currently in the works is an ethnographically based book on the meshing of top-down and bottom-up intangible cultural assets preservation initiatives as enacted at regional and local levels in the People's Republic.