In general, it can be said the Oriental has a deeper sensitivity to delicate timbres than has the Occidental. In the folk and traditional music of Japan there are innumerable exquisite combinations of timbre which make it possible to achieve delicate forms of musical expression without the help of other musical elements such as melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint.

In Japan's primitive conception of aesthetics, music was closely related to nature. We can find many examples wherein the actual sounds of nature have been sublimated to musical expression. This is especially true in the field of theatrical music.

Die ungarische Volkstanzforschung unserer Tage ist die organische Fortsetzung jener am Anfang des Jahrhunderts begonnenen Forschungsarbeit, deren erste bedeutende Zusammenfassung das Werk Marian Réthei Prikkels: A magyarság táncai (Die Tänze des Ungartums), Budapest, 1924, ist. Sein unvergängliches Verdienst ist die Erschliessung des äusserst bedeutsamen historischen Quellenmaterials und der Entwurf der Konturen eines umfassenden Bildes. Seine Mängel zeigen sich in erster Linie darin, dass das neuere Tanz- und Tanzmusikmaterial unerschlossen blieb. Um die Beseitigung dieser Mangelhaftigkeit machte sich Sándor Gönyey als erster verdient; er machte die ersten Schritte zur zeitgemässen Fixierung des lebendigen Volkstanzes, als er sich in seiner Sammelarbeit ab 1926 eines Kinoapparates bediente. Die Ergebnisse der Sammlungen Sándor Gönyey und die Tanz- und Tanzmusikforschungen von László Lajtha werden in ihrem gemeinsamen Aufsatz, im Tanzkapitel des IV. Bandes A magyarság Néprajza (Ungarische Ethnographie), 1937, zusammengefasst.

I feel privileged to have been invited to open this session here in Jerusalem this afternoon. You, my friends and colleagues gathered from many parts of the world, may at this moment be feeling as I do, that we live in a very remarkable time: remarkable especially for the opportunities it gives us of meeting people from different civilizations. Today, indeed, our musical traditions, so different in their origins, form and content, are in growing communication; and, on the face of it, there would seem to be unprecedented opportunities for preserving and renewing regional music in its traditional forms. These traditional forms are those of folk music, liturgical music and learned music, but exclude the popular and individualistic repertoire. Before speaking of preservation and renewal, however, we must first recognize the existence of powerful forces which are working only for music's confusion and destruction. For the advances in technology and communications made by Western industrial society have been used for very different ends.

In an earlier paper (McLean 1961)—presented at the IFMC Vienna Conference in 1960—I emphasized what seemed to me to be an extreme conservatism associated with the transmission of traditional Maori singing—or waiata—style. I outlined some of the evidence for this, and indicated ways in which accuracy of transmission was attained in practice. As a sequel, I should like now to examine Maori concepts of accuracy more closely, and go on to consider anomalies presented by such phenomena as traditionally approved reworkings of waiata texts, the undoubted existence of melodic variants of particular songs, and an evident current trend towards accelerated change in waiata singing style itself.

Structuralist methods have been successfully used for some time in such diverse fields as linguistics, ethnology, psychoanalysis, history of religion, literature, and literary criticism. But at least one domain in which the science of signs could be of optimal use, communication by motion, has been unaccountably neglected. This paper represents a first attempt to deal with gestural movement as a system based on a code comparable to spoken language.