Folk Music of the Khơ Mú in Điện Biên Province: Characteristics and Potential for Community-Based Tourism Development

Abstract

AbstractThe Khơ Mú people in Vietnam’s Điện Biên province still preserve and promote their unique forms and genres of folk music, which has an important place and role in the cultural life of the people and acts as a means of identifying their traditional culture. Amid the current strong development of domestic and international tourism, research aiming to identify the unique values of the traditional music heritage of the Khơ Mú should be further promoted to introduce their folk music to a wider audience and develop community-based tourism.This article aims to identify the entire folk music of the Khơ Mú and discover the unique values of this ethnic group. In addition, the study also aims to analyze the tourism potential and connect the introduction of the Khơ Mú’s folk music with the promotion of community tourism, further contributing to the preservation and development of folk music in the area.The study will use ethnomusicological and cultural anthropology methods, combined with research from ecotourism, to analyze folk music and ways to bring it into the tourism development of the local community. Direct field surveys and other fieldwork methods have served as the key research methods of this study.The results show that the folk music of the Khơ Mú people of Điện Biên province has unique features compared to other Khơ Mú groups and other ethnic groups in Vietnam, as the folk music of the Khơ Mú people still preserves its traditional and unique values. The results also show that bringing folk music into community tourism development can help to preserve and develop these musical genres in contemporary society.Based on the research objectives [7], this report does not delve into the decoding of folk music in terms of musicology, which is a limitation of this research. However, through studying the folk music of the Khơ Mú and proposing connections to develop community-based tourism, this report offers important findings in the context of today’s Vietnam.KeywordsKhơ Mú peopleCommunity tourismEthnomusicologicalCultural anthropology