Folk musicians are generally assumed to make music but not to think very much about it. Yet recent studies by Zemp (1978, 1979) and others demonstrate the existence of elaborate conceptual systems related to music in cultures without a written tradition. If the comparison between Western and a particular non-Western music theory seems invidious, it is partly because the West has a tradition of discourse about music (musica theoretica) that has existed for over 2000 years quite apart from practical music making (musica practica).

Six years ago I reported upon an attempt to graph instantaneously a single melodic line in such a manner as to permit ready correlation with the auditory sense, without employment of costly and time-consuming photographic apparatus, film development and printmaking, their mathematical interpretation and hand-written graph. The trial was conducted in my son's radar-telescopic laboratory at Cornell University in 1949, where an assembly of separate units, currently used in his observations that happened to be available for a scant two hours one Sunday morning, was wired together. Of the three sources of input—voice, guitar and whistling—the limited filter and smoothing systems at hand gave a readable graph of the last mentioned only.

The recent rapid development of the means of communication and the concomitant pervading influence of Western technology upon non-Western cultures has produced musical as well as economic and social change. The world's societies are now in flux and their musical traditions cannot but be affected.

In this paper no attempt will be made to discuss in any depth the acculturative process as exhibited by any one culture. It is rather my purpose to survey the scope of the changes occurring and to suggest a loose classification of the forms the changes are assuming.

Numerous theories of the sound producing mechanism of the jaw's harp have been put forward, none of which appears quite convincing or appropriate. The main reason for this seems to be that certain essentials of the making of and playing on this instrument have been neglected, underestimated or simply overlooked by the investigators. This paper represents an attempt to show some weak points of the existing theories, to describe an empiric investigation by means of electronic sound spectrographs, and finally, to establish a new general outlook on the acoustical and musical properties of the jaw's harp.

The occurrence of polyphony in Yoruba choral music is significant for many reasons. First, it is almost entirely absent in traditional folk songs and is probably restricted to a small section of the Yoruba community. Secondly, in recent years polyphonic singing has become one of the essential features of a type of popular music, known among the Yoruba as juju. Although this form of music is fairly well distributed geographically, it is perhaps unique in popular folksong in its use of polyphony. It also differs from traditional polyphonic song in that it can be more easily identified with Western influences.

Of seven distinct bodies of vocal music and one body of instrumental music recognized and separately classified by the Tsonga of Mozambique and the Northern Transvaal, beer-drink music is the most often performed and comprises about 40% of the total folksong repertoire of about five hundred items (Figure 1). The other musical styles are exorcism music, girls’ initiation music, children's songs, solo instrumental music, boys’ drumming school music, and circumcision school music (Figure 2). The order given reflects the estimated man-hours of performance (the circumcision school is organized only every four or five years), and it coincides roughly with sample rankings obtained from informants during the period 1968–70. Variations of the ranking were some women's claim that girls’ initiation music is more important than exorcism music, and some men's claim that muchongolo (the national dance performed at beer-drinks) is more important than beer-songs or any other single category.

The maqamat of Arab music are generally understood as melody types, similar to the Hindu ragas and the Greek nomoi. Yet, modern theory tends to treat them quite abstractly as scales in the Western sense. Even learned Arab musicians, when asked about the interrelationships of different songs in a given maqam, will point to a scale comprised of fixed interval relationships as the only binding factor, seemingly undisturbed by the fact that the improvisatory sections of songs—for instance, their openings or interludes like the ya-leil or the maual—are clearly based on specific melody types.

The basic studies of Idelsohn, Farmer and others, though discussing various aspects of the maqamat, say little about the nature of the living music. Hampered by the lack of precise tools of measurement, these pioneers failed to answer a number of pertinent questions. For example, do all songs written in a particular maqam share common melodic elements, and, if so, to what extent are these fixed for a particular social group ? Such patterns might be of many different types, possessing the most varied tonal and rhythmic characteristics.

In 1963 the Institute for Scientific Cinematography received the financial means to carry out its first expeditions to make documentary films, and the first comprehensive plans were made for the visual and aural recording of the music of various ethnic groups and of entire populations. Since then, four expeditions have taken us to Thailand, Chad, Hadramout, and the Ivory Coast.

To the constituent elements of every scientific discipline belongs the elaboration of a system of documentation (as a method of gathering data) and of sorting and classifying these data so as to elaborate the essential methodical and theoretical postulates for marking the history, genesis and evolution of specific phenomena on which research is undertaken. The problem of documentation (recording, collecting, transcribing, measuring) has since the beginning of this century become for ethnomusicology a constant methodological question. Parallel with this emerge the first attempts to elaborate systems of the musical classification of melodies, the problem initiated by the editors of Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft in 1902, which was directed not only to the classification of folk music material. The problem of classification was partly connected with the documentary work of cataloguing, and partly with the theoretical scientific area, coming before the need to penetrate into the inner organism of the melodies to be classified.

Despite the importance of the scripture to any study of Islamic beliefs, customs or creations, little attention has been paid by musicologists and ethnomusicologists to the chanted recitation of the Holy Qur'ān. Muslim scholars of literature, of etymology, of grammar and syntax, of phonetics and vocal production have developed exhaustive studies based on the Qur'ān, but they have neither analyzed nor explained the musical aspects of the chanted recitations of the one hundred and fourteen sūrahs ('chapters') revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.

During the month of June, 1966, I undertook a folksong collecting trip among the nomadic Lapps, visiting among others the village Nunnanen in northern Finland situated more than two hundred kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle. The well-to-do Lapps of the village, all of whom have completed four to six forms of Finnish primary school, own three thousand reindeer. Throughout the summer they live with their families in tents and follow the herd, whereas in the winter they live in villages in log houses, which were rebuilt after the Second World War. Thanks to the Finnish Ministry of Culture, I was provided with an interpreter and a battery-operated tape recorder, with which we were able to collect two-hundred-and-fifty Lapp folksongs, the so-called yoiks, among reindeer farmers and shepherds. An additional twenty-six folksongs were collected orally.

Dans la perspective des processus évolutifs qui boulversent actuellement les modèles traditionnels de la culture folklorique, dans la perspective des interférences et du transfert intense de produits culturels opéré entre le plan de la culture de type urbain et celle de type folklorique-traditionnel, la choréologie devrait élargir l'angle de ses investigations vers une recherche sémiotique de la danse, qui seule pourrait rendre compte au-delà des niveaux de surface, des significations profondes qui justifient l'existence de la danse dans une communauté donnée, aussi bien que de toutes les transformations qu'elle subit.

I have only twice before had the temerity to speak at a Conference of the IFMC. This will be my third and last time.

I feel I owe my audience an apology because my subject will be the same as on previous occasions and I have little to say that has not already been said many times. But the subject is such an important one that it is good to be constantly reminded of the problems.

For the last two hundred years, in fact ever since the awareness of folk song emerged during the Romantic period, scholars have argued over the definition of folk song. As Goethe said: “Man schreibt so oft den Namen Volkslieder aus und weiss nicht immer ganz deutlich was man sich dabei denken soil.” And if that were true in Goethe's time how much truer is it today when little distinction is drawn by the general public between folk and popular song.

Dance research is a rapidly expanding field. Because a detailed overview and categorization of dance studies has been published recently, I will not dwell on the historical background of dance research here. My aim rather is to emphasize some areas that have not been adequately discussed in other papers, and to offer some positive suggestions for future research.