The main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the need for a comprehensive theory of music and music-making, and for studies that seek to distinguish musical change analytically from other kinds of change, and radical change from variation and innovation within a flexible system.

The central issue in musical theory is the problem of description. Neither musicologists nor ethnomusicologists have yet devised a system of analysis which is sufficiently powerful to explain what we can know intuitively as a result of experience in culture, namely, the essential differences between the music of Haydn and Mozart, or of the Flathead and the Sioux Indians.

In a Stimulating and comprehensive survey of some of the problems of ethnomusicology, Professor Mantle Hood distinguished three important aspects of our study of music: 1. The function of music as an aspect of the behaviour of man in society. 2. Characteristic musical style identified in its own terms and viewed in relation to its society. 3. The intrinsic value of individual pieces of music viewed in relation to the world of music.

The greatest problem in any talk on folk dance—whether it be during the meetings of the International Folk Music Council or in any national or international meeting of this kind—is this, namely, that the single term “folk dance” is used to mean different things. More than once I have tried to call attention to this inconsistency and even to remove it—unfortunately with only very little success.

If once more I am speaking about this problem today, I am doing so with no real hope of bringing the matter to a conclusion, or even of being understood by everyone. My purpose is rather once more to bring the problem home to you and to stimulate thinking about the nature of this problem.

The word son is a venerable one in the history of Mexican song and dance. The use of the term dates at least from the sixteenth century — in the Spanish-speaking world as a whole, although ample evidence of its currency is not to be found until the second half of the seventeenth. Gaspar Sanz, in his work commonly called Guitarra española, first published in Zaragosa in 1674, uses the term interchangeably with danza and sonada, the latter term also being found in Sebastian de Covarrubias Horozco's Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) in absence of the term son.

African dance has, in the past, sent some admiring Western poets and artists into ecstasy and many Christian missionaries and other colonialists into a state of horror. “The quintessential aesthetic form” or “the expression of moral turpitude,” respectively, were common verdicts. And frequently, early European observers of African behavior did not consider African dance to be dance, for it was not the familiar classical ballet or foot-tapping folk dance of their home countries. Perceptions and evaluations are now more balanced. We have first-hand reports about African dance by African and other scholars, an extensive survey of old and new literature relevant to African dance, an increasing number of African dance films, and African dance companies that have performed around the world.

In 1962, on the occasion of the IFMC conference, a choreology study group was formed for the purpose of developing the foundation for a complex treatment of the problems of folk dance beyond the limits of individual countries.

The first task was to assemble an international committee of experts for intensive joint work to form the basis for a modern science of dance. The latest knowledge and methods of other sciences (for example, linguistics, comparative philology, musicology, and cybernetics) were the starting point for such work.

The Nguni Group comprises principally the Zulu, Xhosa and Swazi-speaking peoples of South Eastern Africa whose languages and cultures are closely related. Through European contact and conquest during the past century and a half, their way of life has been considerably affected. Musically, many non-indigenous forms and features have been adopted by certain sections of each community, but we shall here be concerned only with what still survives of their truly indigenous music.

For individual music-making, instruments of several varieties—particularly musical bows—were formerly used by all Nguni peoples. But their communal music seems always to have been exclusively vocal, apart from the occasional use of ankle-rattles in dance-songs.

The fixed pitch instruments of Java are justly famous for the flexibility of their tuning. The absolute pitches of various ensembles differ substantially, and within an ensemble, tones of a given name vary greatly in pitch when produced on different instruments. Causes for these differences include the gradual changes which occur in the metals used in the instruments’ manufacture, and the high value placed on the production of acoustical beats among the instruments of a single ensemble (Kunst 1973:251; Hood 1966:31–33). Concordant with this diversity is the practice of assigning proper names, such as “Venerable Dark Cloud”, to individual gamelans.

This study is an attempt to gain insight into an aspect of the process of improvisation in Middle Eastern music. In contrast to a number of studies which generalize about this topic, the purpose here is to provide concentrated documentation on the way in which a single Arabic performer improvises in one maqam, using one form or genre. In this respect, our study is somewhat similar to Nettl and Foltin, which attempts to show the range of improvisatory techniques and of performance types used by Persian musicians when performing one portion of a dastgāh or mode, the darāmad of chahārgāh. It is also related to a study by Ruth Katz which compares two generations of singers from a limited population group, performing one genre in an Arabic-Jewish musical tradition.

Studies of the musical instruments of Africa by Kirby, Wachsmann, Maquet, Solderberg and others, have demonstrated that, in addition to drums, examples of all the main classes of musical instruments are to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to drums, there is a wide variety of idiophones (including xylophones), as well as various types of lutes, zithers, flutes, etc.

In spite of this variety, there appears to be a widespread tendency to use these instruments not in large heterogeneous ensembles, but in homogeneous ensembles, or in limited combinations in which one type of instrument predominates. There are, for example, ensembles of drums or xylophones, ensembles of flutes or trumpets, or ensembles in which these are combined with “secondary” instruments—usually of a percussive nature. Here and there a flute, a fiddle or a lute may be found in a secondary role in an ensemble, with the function of providing particular effects or enriching the texture of the music.

Although contrapuntal practices of the type to be described below will be encountered in most Bushman communities within the Northern Language Group (as well as in several communities of the Central and Southern Language Groups), the Bushmen to whom I refer specifically in the title of this paper are the of South West Africa and Bechuanaland. The speak a dialect of !Kxõ (traditionally, !Kung, in the literature of ethnology), the principal Northern Bushman language. There are approximately 1500 in all, and roughly 1000 of them live within the area called Nyae Nyae over the past decade by members of the Peabody-Harvard Kalahari Expeditions. Nyae Nyae is a corruption (a convenient simplification) of the Bushman name, , which means Great Flat Place and refers to a large water pan prominent among a group of such pans in the northeastern portion of South West Africa.

According to a widely used definition a harp is “an instrument in which the plane of the strings lies at right angles to the sound-table, and a line joining the lower ends of the strings would point towards the neck.” In Africa this definition embraces many varieties of harps, and the variations in form may indicate different human migrations.

Perhaps the most important structural feature by which the various types are differentiated is the assembly of neck, resonator, and string holder. In the manufacture of harps many practical problems centre on this point and this is the basis of my classification of African material. At the same time I shall in this paper disregard many other criteria, such as the shapes and proportions of components, and the tuning pegs, etc. The net result is that it is possible to group present-day harps in Africa into three types.