Dealing with the issue of identity—irrespective of any theoretical orientation—means dealing with the issue of difference in relation to the “other” and the social boundaries that define the “cultural stuff” within and between communities (Barth 1969:13; Gefou-Madianou 1999:192). “Cultural stuff can be described as referring, inter alia, to the collective memory, history, and origin of cultural groups (Smith 1991:32). However, social boundaries tend not to be hard and fast or specifically delineated idioms of identity, but flexible and negotiable, according to different socio-political environments and personal interests (Barth 1969; Jenkins 2002:122). Thus, identity is perceived as an open-ended and never-finalized process, always constituted within cultural representations and not irrespective of them (Avdikos 2003:333). Moreover, taking into consideration that

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.

Of the various kinds of singing games played by children, the handclapping game is practised with great vigor by young girls on the schoolyards of Los Angeles, California. This paper looks at five handclapping games representative of a collection made at three locations in the city, from three predominant ethnocultural groups: Afro-American, Euro-American and Latino. The five examples were chosen to illustrate what seem to me to be broader trends in tradition and innovation. The repertoire consists of both old and new games, with the old often modified in some way and the new invented out of a contemporary urban musical environment. For sources, children may turn to television, particularly musical commercials, which they then adapt to the requirements of a handclapping game. In my observation of children's games over a ten year period, I have been intrigued by the relationship between games and sex roles, and what is called “role-modeling,” which appear in the text and the structure of a game.

Le gandi auquel font référence aussi bien les récits relatifs aux vies antérieures du Buddha que les textes les plus anciens du bouddhisme apparaît comme un instrument destiné à transmettre des messages aux moines ou aux reclus. Ces textes ne fournissent pas, à ma connaissance, de description précise du gandi, si bien que, au cours des âges et quelle que soit la langue considérée, les traductions ont hésité entre diverses catégories d'instruments: cloches, gongs, tambours.

The points raised herein address the methodologies and assumptions which undergird the theory-building process in ethnomusicology and ethnology. Hypotheses and conclusions are derived from field research among the Mapuche-speaking peoples of Andean Argentina (1971-72) and have been further tested in cooperative research with Edward A. DeCarbo, Jr., among Kasem-speakers in Northern Ghana. The discussion concerns the description and explanation of tayil, a form of musical communication among the Argentine Mapuche, as well as the utility of the Western musicological category “music” as a point of entry to the explication of a social system.

On a typically humid afternoon in Beijing, China, my young Mongol friend brought me to his basement studio where his ensemble, Ih Tsetsn, was preparing to rehearse for an upcoming show. The group of young urban Mongols included six players of the morin huur (horse-head fiddle, matouqin in Mandarin), an upright bassist, and a drum kit player. The group played a collection of upbeat compositions and ended its rehearsal session with the rousing morin huur classic, “Ten Thousand Horses Galloping,” by the Inner Mongol composer-performer, Chi Bulag (b. 1944; see figure 4). Playing from memory, the fiddle players grinned at one another, drew their bows energetically across their nylon-stringed instruments, and rocked their heads vigorously to the beat of the drummer.

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.

Researchers have increasingly begun to critically assess local engagements with globalizing notions of civil society that have been introduced via Western-based supranational political, economic, financial, and cultural programmes (Fischer 1997; Okongwu and Mencher 2000; Yúdice 2003). Following the notion of thinking globally and acting locally, such programmes are usually set up by transnational structures such as the World Bank, UNESCO, the European Union, or global foundations such as the Open Society Institute, and put into practice by local actors, among them non-governmental organizations. This article positions music within intra-national discourses that work hand-in-hand with the political and cultural economics of Western cultural initiatives and aim to promote an understanding of pluralism in countries throughout Eastern and South Eastern Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Nino Tsitsishvili, Erica Haskell, and myself in Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine, respectively, this study juxtaposes the perspectives of policy makers and grant givers in Western Europe and the United States with the views of people in post-socialist conflict zones for whom such initiatives are intended. It analyses the political and cultural implications of UNESCO's declaration of Georgian polyphony as a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage of humanity, the local effects of internationally sponsored music projects in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the role of national minority music festivals sponsored by Western philanthropic organizations in nation-building processes in Ukraine.

The two musical cultures of Thailand and Java, especially as conveyed by the leading percussion ensembles (the Thai pi-phat and the Javanese gamelan), share several important concepts, as well as obvious physical similarities between the instruments themselves. Studies by Becker (1968, 1980) draw attention to the “musical family” of Southeast Asia, especially to similarities within “bronze gong cultures” in that region (Becker 1980: 453). One of her papers is a comparison of Thai and Javanese music (Becker 1980). Another feature that paper shares with the present one is that the stimulus for it came from working with a graduate student whose research lay in Thai music, in the latter case an expert Thai performing artist. The present paper investigates what is perhaps the most striking, and paradoxical, similarity between Thai and Javanese music: the processes of improvisation and elaboration turn out to be governed by a melody which is not actually performed. In both traditions the art of playing individual instruments is, broadly, the art of realising this elusive melody according to the idiomatic patterns associated with a particular instrument. How it is done varies greatly from one tradition to the other, and within each ensemble. Theoretical constraints must also be considered. In both traditions rules must be observed, the purpose of which is to create structures which are shaped and balanced in ways not only conveying aesthetic appeal but also suggesting more universal ideas about melodic organisation and logic. Thai musicians tend to talk about what they do in ways which relate to improvisation (kan phrae tamnong, literally “changing the melody”). A similar process may be observed in Javanese music, even if the notion of improvisation is not as prevalent. The comparable term here is gam-pan (literally “working on”). There is no need to give detailed examples of how kan phrae tamnong and garapan work in specific pieces, as this aspect has been thoroughly documented in the literature of the two traditions—for example Brinner (1995), Martopangrawit (1984), Ketukaenchan (1989), Sorrell (2000), Sumrongthong (1997), and Sutton (1979). The main purpose here is to compare Thai and Javanese concepts of unheard melody and their musical realizations.

It is generally accepted that the Western (classical) concept of aesthetics in its common acceptance as a philosophical reflection and valuation of an art product made by the creator himself and the onlookers, cannot be used in the field of traditional dance, or traditional culture in general.

In the 1920's, approximately half a century after the Meiji Restoration,1 some genres of traditional Japanese art music,2 under the strong influence of western music,3 underwent a series of changes that in retrospect can be seen to mark an epoch-making stage in the history of Japanese traditional music. Developments within the scope of the newly born movement known as “Shin nihon ongaku” (“New Japanese music”)4 or “Shin nihon ongaku undo” (“A movement of new Japanese music”), which was led by the jiuta-sōkyoku player/composer Miyagi Michio (1894/Meiji 27—1956/Shōwa 31), can be considered as the most outstanding of these changes. It is unncessary to restate here in detail that a series of novel and somewhat daring Western-oriented attempts undertaken during the years from the 1920's to the pre-war years under the banner of Shin nihon ongaku contributed to a remarkable development of musical styles, most particularly in the genre of sōkyoku. However, in genres other than sōkyoku, it is also possible to identify a number of musicians deeply concerned with the new Western-oriented trends of Shin nihon ongaku, as well as corresponding attempts at introducing new ideas into the musical style and instruments of their own genres.5 The present paper will focus on the activities of Kineya Sakichi IV (1884/Meiji 17—1945/Shōwa 20), a nagauta shamisen player, making occasional references to Miyagi Michio. The reasons for this are: 1) although Kineya Sakichi's innovations in the genre of nagauta imply that he was a “counterpart” of Miyagi, the differences between these two figures and their achievements have not been sufficiently dealt with from a comparative viewpoint; and 2) a comparison of these musicians and their works will not only enable us to identify differences between the two personalities, but, more importantly, will also lead us to an understanding of the fundamental differences between the two genres of nagauta and sōkyoku, in terms of how these differences were reflected in the outcome of the “Westernization” of the two genres. Investigation of these differences will be made from several perspectives, such as musical styles and organological aspects, and examination will also be made of some social or paramusical conventions peculiar to each genre.

Ritual, according to Victor Turner, embodies symbolic action and has a processual flow (1967:149–50). Some ethnomusicologists have utilized Turner's ideas about symbolic action to examine the symbolism of music and dance in ritual. Marina Roseman, in her study of Senoi Temiar healing ceremonies, for example, observed that music and dance in Temiar ceremonies embody “meaningfully patterned sounds and movements” and “symbol-laden sounds and body movements” to awaken the cosmos and attract spirits to interact with humans (1991:15–16). Although Borneo cultures are very different from those of the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia, this description may also be generally applied to the practice of music and dance in traditional ritual contexts among Dusunic societies of Sabah, the east Malaysian state of northern Borneo.

This paper discusses how the activities during which people gather to create, perform, and transmit imbalu circumcision music and dance at Namasho Cultural Site (NCS) become a platform for the Bagisu of the Balutseshe clan to tutor boys about society’s gender ideology, social histories, and rituals of the sacred swamp, thus turning the place into a communal classroom for imparting this knowledge. Due to the changing context of contemporary Bagisu, I argue for efforts to archive these events to make them accessible by future generations in order to uphold imbalu performances as a mechanism of knowledge production and dissemination.

The genre commonly labelled “gospel” is probably the most lucrative music business in Kenya. Its popularity is facilitated in part by the propensity of musicians to draw on diverse resources for Christian religious songs. Musicians further invoke indigenous Kenyan and contemporary popular music genres in local and international languages for national distinctiveness and global inclusiveness. Top-of-the-line recording facilities in Kenya enable artists to produce a broad spectrum of music at a pace comparable to anywhere in the world. The diversity of repertoire and a ready access to studios have spurred some individuals to venture into the gospel music industry for fame and fortune. This complex, ambiguous position is articulated in an interview with three Kenyan female gospel artists who “are well aware that secular music makes for better business and exposure but the trio is not doing it for either.” They stay with gospel because “gospel music made us” (Kageni 2009).

Since the end of the eighteenth century we in Sweden have been taught by collectors, and later even by scholars, that folk music is a dying species, threatened by urban culture, schools, communication, or other “bad” gifts from civilization (Dal 1956; Malberg 1971). Levi-Strauss' famous warnings against pseudo-archaism have rung unheard by many collectors whose only interest has been to save music from the “good old times.” But, as Levi-Strauss put it, “A cracked bell, alone surviving the work of time, will never give forth the ring of bygone harmonies” (19:144). Today, in spite of—or perhaps owing to—mass communication, music education, synthesizers, etc., we have a very rich folk music culture in Sweden (Anonymous 1984). There have probably never been so many folk musicians in Sweden as at present, and it is likely that in the future we will hear more and more singing of folk songs and even herding calls!

Improvisation is an essential aspect of Indian music and Indian culture. It is evident not only in music but in the other arts, literature, and in the folk tradition. Improvisation is a continuous process that has flourished from the past to the present in India.

In recent years, I have been concentrating on the identification and verification of ancient tunes and ancient music theories of China. These studies are involved and difficult tasks, but still their research procedures are known and clearly defined. However, on first encounter, people often react to these studies with skepticism.