The Inventories of Living Heritage in the UK

Is your music-making Living Heritage? We’re talking to our members and the wider leisure time music community about how a UK government and UNESCO initiative can help recognise, celebrate and protect our valuable music traditions.  

UK Living Heritage, or Intangible Cultural Heritage, is being collated in inventories by the UK Government, following on from its signing of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Everyone practising a heritage cultural activity is invited to put it forward for submission.   

A wide range of music making and performance practices can be included, not just older forms of traditional music, but also more modern forms such as brass banding, steel bands or drum and bass. The term Living Heritage means that it is both currently practised and has some heritage i.e. has been passed on over at least some generations (including activity emerging relatively recently e.g. Notting Hill Carnival, Edinburgh Fringe).   

We think the inventories are a valuable opportunity to recognise the rich musical traditions of our country, and the important place our member groups have within our cultural heritage. Being listed will bring music practices to wider public attention and could help protect them from threats. We’ve been engaging since the start of public discussions on the inventory, and we began preparing our submission when the process began in December 2025. The first submission process closed at the end of March 2026, but there will be an annual opportunity to make submissions from now on.  

Read about the background to the Inventories of Living Heritage, and the submission process here: Inventories of Living Heritage in the UK

Preparing our submissions 

We think most Making Music members’ activities in making and presenting music are Living Heritage, and that it’s important that these forms are included on the inventories. The process is designed for practitioners themselves to make a submission, so on this first year of the inventory collation, we decided our role was to submit an entry where the majority of those practising are our members;  

• Choral Societies 
• Orchestral Societies  
• and Chamber Music Societies 

We also wanted to support and encourage those members who have their own representative body (e.g. Barbershop Choirs), or whose practitioners are not majority Making Music members – Welsh Male Voice Choirs, Brass Bands, Taborers, etc - to make a submission.   

In February we hosted an event on Living Heritage in the UK with speaker Steve Byrne from Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland, a Community Support Hub with expertise on this topic. Watch the recording of this event

Later in February, we held meetings for members of Choral Societies, Orchestral Societies and Chamber Music Societies about the submission we intended to make for these three practices, to get input and consent to make a full submission that was responsible and accurate. We then worked with volunteers from these groups on a draft of the submissions. These were circulated to our mailing list of members in these groups for comments.  

The final drafts of our submissions are here to download and view. These were slightly amended - thank you to members for comments - and submitted for consideration. 

The 2026 submission process ended on Friday 27 March. We expect that the inventories will be published in late 2026.