When traditional music is politically useful, its preservation becomes government policy. Japan, perennially obsessed with preserving its cultural uniqueness, led the field in this respect with its Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1950. Its 35-year occupation of Korea inspired a similar decree in that country; Taiwan followed suit, and there were parallel movements elsewhere. ‘Living treasures’, or their equivalent, were singled out and celebrated in Thailand, the Philippines, France, and Romania; in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan; in Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic; and in Vietnam and the Lao Republic; ‘perishing professions’ like music and theatre became protected in Poland. But it was UNESCO – which in 1961 had begun sponsoring recordings of traditional music – which turned all this into a global campaign.

Prompted by Egypt’s flooding of the Abu Simbel temples as well as by Venice’s ecological plight, UNESCO’s 1964 Venice Charter established the principle of protection for buildings, from which it was but a short step to the protection of ‘intangibles’. It issued a mission statement arguing that cultural heritage should be protected, including ‘the works of its artists, architects, musicians, writers, and scientists, and also the work of anonymous artists, expressions of a people’s spirituality, and the body of values which give meaning to life’. It then broadened the issue to take account of the damage caused by ‘colonialism, armed conflict, foreign occupation and the imposition of foreign values: all these have the effect of severing a people’s links with – and obliterating the memory of – its past.’ Wise words, which could make a perfect epigraph for this book. In 2003 UNESCO agreed the Convention for Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and in 2008 it began listing the genres to be defined and enshrined.

It has not all been music: Kirkpinar oil-wrestling and Croatian ginger-bread craft have been among the genres singled out, as has, preposterously, the ‘French restaurant meal’, but the musical choices in the project’s first year could not be faulted. Uzbek-Tadjik shashmaqom, Pygmy polyphony, and Iraqi maqam had all been on the danger list, and all were indeed treasurable.