Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) schreibt zu Beginn seines Buches Musicologica:

“To the question what is the study-object of comparative musicology, the answer must be: mainly the music and the musical instruments of all non-European peoples, including both the so-called primitive peoples and the civilized Eastern nations. Although this science naturally makes repeated excursions into the field of European music, the latter is, in itself, only an indirect object of its study. The name of our science is, in fact, not quite characteristic; it does not ‘compare’ any more than any other science. A better name, therefore, is that appearing on the title page of this book: ethnomusicology.”

This paper offers a brief survey of important genres of folksong in the Persian language, as presently cultivated in Khorasan (the large province in northeastern Iran). The ten transcriptions discussed in the body of the paper represent portions of a large collection of Khorasani folksong made in 1969 in and around Meshhed, a city of over 400,000 persons, and Bojnurd, a smaller town with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. As indicated in the annotations following each transcription, several of the singers recorded and interviewed in Meshhed and Bojnurd had come to these communities from other towns and villages in Khorasan and Sistan (the province immediately south of Khorasan). The repertoire of Persian folksong performed in a single community generally encompasses a variety of genres, some of which carry specific regional associations, easily (though sometimes differently) identified by singers and listeners.

Over a large area of south-western Bulgaria, songs are mostly two-part. The first voice sings the melody; the second voice is smooth or slightly more florid, mostly on the tonic and adjacent degrees of the scale. This area can be divided into four regions, differentiated by the styles of singing in two-part songs: Pirina region, the region to the centre of western Bulgaria, and the Velingrad and Ihktiman Pazardjik regions. Each of these regions shows a different structure of two-part songs. The differences lie in harmonic and rhythmic structure, and in the range of the second voice.

The most widespread style is that of the Pirina region, characterized by the comparative restriction of the second voice.

Typical of the Velingrad region are the songs with a vigorously moving second part, ranging mainly between the first, third and fourth degrees of the scale and the leading note. Typical of the Ikhtiman region (the smallest of the four) are two-part songs with an elaborately ornamented second part woven round the melody and reaching the tonic a little before the first voice.

The Dundo Museum, in the town of that name which is the administrative certtre of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, in Lunda (Portuguese West Africa), was founded by that Company in 1945, based on an ethnographic collection composed already at that time of several hundreds of objects representative of the native populations of that vast district situated in the very heart of Africa.

A summary will be given here of the results of folk dance research in Ethiopia, carried out during two months in the summer of 1965. In the course of the expedition, collections were made in seventeen settlements in eight different Ethiopian provinces. An outline cross-section of the fund of folk dances in Ethiopia is illustrated by approximately one hundred and fifty dance variants; these were recorded on 3,000 metres of motion pictures and several hundreds of photos, with the musical accompaniments on tape. The collection included dances of the Amhara, Tigrean, Agaw, Adare, Esa-Somalian, Kullo, and Kaficho peoples, as well as those of six different Galla tribes.

Au cours de l'été 1978, nous avons mené, pendant plusieurs semaines, des investigations en milieu rural portugais. C'est la province Nord-Est du Portugal, le Tras-os-Montes, que nous avons choisie comme aire de prospection. Notre mission avait pour but de rechercher le degré de survivance de très anciennes formes poétiques du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance que l'on appelle les romances. Certains auteurs situent la naissance de ces romances avant le 15ème siècle.

On connaît les plastiques et les figures célèbres gravées dans les parois de l'époque paléolithique, c'est-à-dire créées pendant le dernier stade de la période glaciaire environ vingt cinq à dix mille ans avant Jésus-Christ. Elles nous prouvent combien on se trompe en préjugeant que l'art des ces temps ne s'élève pas au-dessus d'un niveau tout à fait primitif. Les hommes qui nous ont laissé de telles oeuvres ont-ils developpé également la musique?

Les peintures en Espagne de Test et en Afrique du nord datent d'une époque plus récente que l'art francocantabrique, mais malgré de grandes différences quelques traits principaux du style leur sont communs. Les groupes dont il s'agit n'étaient plus des chasseurs de niveau assez bas tuant le gibier de tout près à l'aide de pierres, de massues ou de lances primitives mais des chasseurs plus évolués se servant des flèches et de javelots pour atteindre le bison, le renne et d'autres grosses bêtes. Ils chassaient dans les vastes steppes et tiraient à longue distance.

The sacred chant of Rome, apart from its liturgical value, is of importance to musicology. In it there lives on as a substratum the remembrance of popular traditional songs. Also from Roman Chant there came the development of polyphonic music and the art of instrumental variation in Europe. In addition, it was the origin of a great number of vernacular religious chants associated with the different Christian creeds. I consider, therefore, that I am justified in claiming that the liturgical chant of the Roman Church represents a musical repertory of the highest order which can be regarded as an artistic patrimony not only of the Christian Church but of all mankind

The central corpus of the Roman Chant—known since the ninth century as “Gregorian Chant”—was already in existence during the eighth and ninth centuries. In it there are to be found reminiscences of eastern and western song of the most remote epochs: musical elements of the most ancient cultures which would have been lost for ever, had not Pontifical Rome recollected them and conserved them in its liturgy.

Le chant lapon, ou juoigos, a donné lieu à un grand nombre de travaux, presque exclusivement scandinaves. Ces travaux portent surtout sur l'aspect musicologique, et sur le recensement des thèmes traités. Sans être entièrement absents de la littérature spécialisée, les aspects psychologiques et sociologiques du juoigos sont beaucoup moins connus. Les meilleurs observateurs nous ont laissé nombre de notations intéressantes sur ce sujet, mais elles restent très disparates. Le chercheur qui tenterait de rassembler ces observations pour en tirer un tableau général de la sociologie du juoigos risquerait fort d'aboutir à des conclusions erronées: en effet, il semble bien que cet aspect du juoigos soit soumis à des variations importantes, d'une communauté à l'autre. D'où le danger des généralisations, que l'on rencontre chez les auteurs les plus qualifiés. Widstrand, travaillant en collaboration avec Ruong, lui-même d'origine lapone, est par exemple dans l'erreur lorsqu'il écrit que chez les Lapons du nord, le juoigos est presque exclusivement réservé aux hommes (Widstrand 1961:74).

The Year 1968 marked the coming of age of the International Folk Music Council. As I was in some measure responsible for its birth twenty-one years earlier, the Executive Board invited me to give an account of its activities during that time.

Thanks to several recent publications by Indian scholars, we are now much better informed about the life and the human-religious ideas of the Baul singers of Bengal. These descriptions are based on observations as well as on the statements that the Bauls themselves make in the texts of their songs. To shed some light upon the peculiarity of these “cultural and religious nomads,” a few remarks from the above-mentioned sources are repeated here as background.