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.

In his study on Serbo-Croatian folk songs Béla Bartók makes the statement that our current musical notation has intrinsic limitations and that “the only true notation of folk melodies are the sound tracks on the record itself.” While “these could be magnified, photographed and printed, instead of, or with, the usual notation, in view of the too complicated nature of the curves, [their use] would not be of much help; the human mind would not be able to translate the visual signs into tones.”

The Carpathian basin is well suited to the investigation of performing styles in folk dance, because its dance culture is relatively homogeneous despite the variety of peoples, languages and ways of life encountered in this region. This fact invites an investigation of performing styles on a comparative basis. Moreover, the performing styles of one of the most characteristic dance dialects in Central Europe deserve close attention from the viewpoint of the cultural history of Europe as a whole.

The general structure and characteristic features of the dance stock of the Carpathian basin will be here outlined, and comparative references to the neighbouring Balkan dance dialects will help to emphasize the main characteristics of and features peculiar to the area in question.

During recent years there have been two major attempts to take stock of folk music research in Austria. Walther Wünsch, former head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Theatre Arts in Graz, has reported on the history of ethnomusicology in Austria, and Walter Graf, who once held the chair of comparative musicology at Vienna University, has published an essay on comparative musicology in Austria since 1896. Neither of them, it seems to me, does complete justice to his subject, in that he limits himself to the work of those Austrian collectors, editors, and researchers who have dealt with fields other than Austria itself. Of course, there is as little agreement on the question of what really constitutes comparative musicology as there is on the definition of ethnomusicology. But for that very reason we should be careful not to ignore either the new field of “European ethnomusicology” or, in particular, those comparative studies that have dealt with the researches of Béla Bartók, Werner Danckert, Constantin Brâiloiu, Walter Wiora, and with the results of their collecting activities.

The enigmatic union of a lyrical text with an improvisatory melody has earned for the hora lunga (or long song) a special place in the history of Rumanian folksong research. Béla Bartók first discovered this exceptional genre in the northern counties of Maramureş and Satu-Mare in the years 1912-13, and later remarked that this discovery had been the highlight of his career in Rumanian ethnomusicology (1967:24 and 1923:ii). Constantin Brailoiu (1970:405) noted the occurrence of similar improvisatory genres in other regions of Rumania, and suggested that the broader term doina be used for all such vocal improvisations, irrespective of region. In the last two decades, systematic investigations of this larger category, the doina, have been carried out by such scholars as Emilia Comişel (1959:147-74) and Mariana Kahane (1963:99-116). To facilitate a comparative study of the doina as a whole, Comişel proposed a broad classificatory scheme based on text content and social use. She also proposed an analytical framework for the study of those musical aspects which she felt were common to all doine. Kahane investigated the tonal aspects of the regional subtype found in Oltenia, and compared this specific genre with examples from Moldavia and Maramureş.

It is generally thought that Chinese music is homophonic. In instrumental music, the players tend to play in unison, and in vocal music, the instrumental accompaniment closely follows the pattern of the singing. The science of harmony, or the system that governs the combining of the intervals as applied in European music, was not known to China in the past. In fact, very little was said in the long history of Chinese music about the theory of combining the intervals.

However, unison is not to be regarded as the sine qua non in Chinese instrumental and vocal music. In many types of Chinese folk music, one finds that the players or singers do not adhere strictly to unison but vary their parts in juxtaposition and in relay. Frequently, the players resort to embellishing the melody and the more skilful ones will embark on extemporization, giving rise to heterophonic effects. The practice of embellishment and extemporization is intended to avoid monotony in ensemble playing and to show off the skill of the player. But in specific cases, different parts are planned for the singers and players to perform.