It is now almost forty years since Laurence Picken first suggested that present-day performances of tωgaku—the repertory of Japanese court music (gagaku) that was originally imported from Tang China to Japan during the seventh to the ninth centuries—bear little or no resemblance to Chinese music of the Tang period (618-907 CE), or indeed any subsequent period. This was the first time that any scholar had challenged the ideology that modern tωgaku perfectly preserves the inheritance from Tang China, an ideology that had been developed in the nineteenth century during the official standardization of gagaku. Picken based his views on preliminary study of tωgaku tablature notations—which he saw as containing important clues about the relationship of the modern inheritance to the original Chinese forms of the repertory—and on study of surviving Chinese notations (Picken 1967, 1969; see also Marett 1986 for a more detailed summary of this research).

There is a long history of association between music, ethnic identity, and emotion in Greek culture, but it seems that representations of these associations are made from non-performative, non-participant and other-defined perspectives. This paper discusses the cultural constructions of passion and expression which are constituted within Greek music-making and dancing in Adelaide, South Australia. The perspective presented here is one largely informed by the experiences of the writer as musician, dancer, ethnomusicologist, and participant in many discussions on this personal and emotional issue.

Northern Ireland experiences a large and often politically sensitive parading tradition annually between March and September. Music takes a prominent position in these parades, with flutes, accordions, bagpipes, snare drums, and bass drums being the most popular instruments on display. Percussion instruments are often the only instruments that are found in the vast majority of parading bands throughout Northern Ireland (figure 1). A particular drumming style, known locally as blood and thunder, has evolved as a result of working-class bands attempting both to imitate military styles and to adapt them to changing working-class tastes. Through a combination of ethnographic material and technical analysis, this paper enables an in-depth understanding of the way a unique tradition has developed as a result of working-class attempts to mimic the musical practices of the dominant military power without access to the tuition techniques and facilities on which that dominant style depended.

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.

In this article I intend to describe some of the social processes that have led to the development of the sardana, a Catalan dance, to its present form. This is not meant to be a thorough description of the dance itself but rather a treatment of it as an expression of certain social and cultural processes which, although not of a strictly musical nature, have strongly influenced, and even determined, this dance and its music. My objective here is first to review the differentiated social perceptions of sardana in the course of its history and then to clarify the relationship between that dance and the phenomenon of folklorism. As a result, the interdependence of musical morphology, social customs, function and ideology in relation to the sardana should become apparent. Through this example, we can observe the function of music and dance as socially articulated elements within society.

The origin of the Bon-Odori, or Bon Dance, is described in the Ullambana Sutra of Buddhist scripture. It tells how Mauggallana (sometimes spelled Maudgalyana, and in the Japanese language called Mokuren), one of the ten disciples of Buddha, became aware of his mother's suffering in the inferno of the dead. He tried to relieve her hunger by offering her rice, but when she brought it to her lips it turned to fire. Mauggallana went to the Buddha for help and was advised for his mother's sake to give food-offerings to the bhikus (priests), on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when they returned from the mountains after their long meditation during the rainy season. The spontaneous dance of joy following his mother's release from the torment of hell was the first Bon Dance. This ritual offering and festive celebration became an annual event.

Continuity and revival have been subjects of scholarly discussion for quite some time (for example, see Bausinger and Brückner 1969), frequently in connection with phenomena such as tradition and innovation, identification and change, authenticity, and festivals.

This article explores three fundamental aspects of text in the performance of Lao vocal music in the southern Lao province of Champasak:

1. (1) the relationships between poetic structures and creativity;

2. (2) extemporaneous composition of texts; and

3. (3) repertory and its relationship to performance context.

I aim to provide an overall insight into the creativity and repertory of Lao khaplam texts with an emphasis upon indigenous concepts of textual structures, compositional methods, and thematic conventions and their associated terminology. Before exploring textual aspects it is necessary to provide the reader with some contextual information. Firstly, a general overview of Lao vocal music in Laos today is provided, locating this study within a broader tradition of Lao vocal music, and secondly, musicological information pertinent to the performance of Lao vocal music to remind the reader that the central topic of textual composition takes place within a musical framework.

Modes and modal systems (groups of related modes) are none other than generalized types of melodic movement occurring in folk music, both vocal and instrumental. Arising first in folk song, they become fixed in the scaling of folk musical instruments, in the linear measurements that determine the structure of intervals. The chief types of instruments with fixed scaling are wind instruments with finger-holes, and fretted stringed instruments of the lute family. Whereas the human voice and lutes-without-frets belong (potentially at least) to the realm of free melodic creativity, musical instruments with fixed scales preserve historical stages in the development of melody, of individual modes and of entire modal systems. The scaling of an instrument is indeed a kind of notation; its symbols are not written on paper but exist as linear proportions on the instrument itself.

Conventional definitions of music usually deal with notions related to sound. Ethnomusicological definitions generally add notions related to context. But even when both sound and context are considered, a restricted view of music may result.

As an aspect of my research in Colombian folksong I examined a number of published Spanish sources in an attempt to find analogues for the texts and melodies of songs I had recorded in Colombia. By this means I hoped to determine that a particular text or melody had been diffused from Spain to Latin America. This proved feasible in the case of a small number of song texts but very difficult in the case of the melodies associated with these song texts.

Traditional music in Yoruba society may to a considerable degree be regarded as music-drama. The dramatic element of this music is given its highest expression in situations of a ceremonial nature in which music, dance, speech, physical movement, costume, and art objects all combine to constitute the complete performance. Music in the context of traditional dance, even when the dance is not connected with ceremonial functions, illustrates another aspect of the dramatic use of music; for Yoruba dance, like much African dance, is akin to dance-drama.

Africa constituted a vivid part of the popular European imagination as early as the nineteenth century. Fascinated by travel accounts and adventure novels and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by ethnographic shows and colonial exhibitions, audiences in Europe followed with great interest the “scramble for Africa,” with its spectacular discoveries on the periphery of the expanding colonial empires, just as people marvelled at the images of the first landing on the moon a century later (Lindfors 1999; Rotberg 1970). Towards the turn of the nineteenth century, new media technologies and forms of representation emerged such as the panorama or the cinematograph, conveying ever new images of seemingly exotic worlds. Thus, at Berlin's Kolonialpanorama which opened its doors for the public in 1885, a 115-metre long cyclorama, showing scenes of Germany's colonial occupation of Africa, awaited visitors. In exhibition rooms, ethnographic objects from the colonies were on display. Palm trees, a special lighting system, and artificial fog were installed to create a “tropical atmosphere” (Zeller 2002). The holistic, three-dimensional experience panoramas so created led Erlmann to speak of the “first mass medium to set up a perfect enclosure, a proto-cyberspace that enabled the viewer to become an inhabitant of image-space, someone who enters an image rather than someone who contemplates it from the outside” (1999:5–6). Other technologies such as phonography imparted not only a sonic but, as it were, a new “psychophysical” reality to the myth of Africa as a continent persisting in a seemingly timeless past (Carl 2004:126–31; see also Kittler 1986).

The panel, “Negotiating the Personal and Professional: Ethnomusicologists and Uncomfortable Truths,” presented at the Forty-third ICTM World Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, grew out of informal conversations common among ethnomusicologists. As practitioners in our discipline, we are involved in complex webs of experience, relationships, and representations focused around music, broadly defined. Our work is inherently social and, when in the field, we develop close relationships with our teachers and consultants as we become comfortable in our sites of research. We are grateful for priceless access to communities and individuals. The intensity and combination of certain relationships and circumstances, however, can lead to conflicting expectations, unanticipated misunderstanding, and situations of personal and professional conflict.

In a small wooden house at a government resettlement project built for peninsular Malaysia's aboriginal Temiars, a sick man lay wheezing. The illness pacog, harbored by rotting logs in the damp tropical forest, had invaded his body; western cosmopolitan medicine might have diagnosed him with tuberculosis. His breath came in gasps, but no one heard him. Members of his extended family, who might once have shared a roof with him, now lived in single-family households sponsored by Malaysian government “resettlement” projects initiated during the 1970s. Such projects, extensions of the British colonial “jungle forts” and “patterned settlements” established during the 1950s-1960s, also extended European Enlightenment, colonial, and capitalist social and economic ideals about “modernity” and “progress” into the jungle. These included ideas about the “individuated self” and the socioeconomic unit of the nuclear household, reflected in a government-sponsored architecture of single-family dwellings. The reconfigured space of such “modern” Temiar resettlement projects isolates nuclear families from one another, reconfiguring Temiar subjectivities and collectivities.