About Mayer Tori
The Aims of Mayer Tori
A collective effort to preserve a way of singing and playing, and to pass it from the elders to the young.
We are a collective of singers and musicians who have taken on a single, patient task: to keep a way of singing and playing alive by teaching it directly to children.
Part of the work is an archive — recordings of the tunes and texts of the northern region. But the archive is not the point. The point is the living hand-over of knowledge from the elders to young people.
The children are taught by adults who know them by name and know their lives. To be known, beyond one's own family, is itself part of the lesson — and so the extended family and the village take part too.
The very process of teaching and being taught is collective in more ways than one.