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.

The connection between folk dance and folk music is a subject of investigation for researchers of both dance and music. Significant results have been achieved in both disciplines, but a comprehensive summary has not yet been made. This may be due to the lack of a unified point of view or to the isolation of the research fields.

“Dance in its sociopolitical aspects,” one theme of the ICTM Ethnochoreology Sub-Group Symposium at which this paper was presented, was a timely one immediately following, as it did, the Los Angeles riots of spring 1992. At that time, one could open the arts section of a newspaper or magazine to find debate raging over such concepts as multiculturalism and diversity. Such controversy within the arts community might have seemed merely a sideshow to the profound interracial, -ethnic, and -class conflicts that erupted then in Los Angles into some of the largest American civil unrest of the century, but the social and political struggle over diversity in our country is a dispute with serious implications for those engaged in arts research as well as for activists and advocates in the public sector.

This article surveys published recordings of Greek folk dance music and outlines their influence through time on musical and dance life. My aim is to present a brief historical review of such recordings and to discuss their relationship to dance music practice and to scholarly work. The various goals of separate consumer groups (such as scholars, musicians, teachers, pupils, ordinary listeners or villagers) and their corresponding criteria for selection will be further outlined. These conclusions stem from my longstanding and many-sided involvement with folk dance. My early experience was gained as a folk dance instructor (in a period when the gramophone record had just begun to replace the live ensemble) and in the kompania of folk musicians during lessons at the Lyceum Club of Greek Women (1967-1975). Later, I began my work as a field researcher for the preparation of folk music records for the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation (1974 to the present).

Performers of music practised and perpetuated by oral tradition are guided by their knowledge of repertoire, by awareness of usages, procedures and techniques, and above all by their musicianship. Among the Gogo of Tanzania, as indeed among other societies with oral music tradition, these enable performers not only to reproduce what they have learnt, but also to re-create it where tradition allows it; they enable them to make their own additions to existing repertoire or bring new musical types into being. Thus a traditional composer of a particular piece of music need not provide everything for those who learn his music from him. Only the essentials such as the basic text, the melody, type of accompaniment need be provided or suggested.

In Chinese Buddhist music studies, an investigation of the meaning and concept of music should involve not only a study of the codified doctrine but also a study of the Buddhist practice and its sound products. The aim of this paper is to examine the meanings of music in Chinese Buddhist doctrinal and practical contexts, and to demonstrate how the codified norms of music have significantly been reinterpreted in the contemporary Buddhist practice. I shall first discuss the notions of music in Chinese Buddhist discourse, under an analytical framework based on a Buddhist-oriented classification. I shall then examine the practice of these different categories of music from a historical perspective. This will be followed by a brief survey of Chinese Buddhist musical practice in the present-day, which is based on field work in the United States and China, showing the changes and adaptations in Chinese Buddhist music-making under the process of global modernization.

Scholars who study world musics as fields of meaning formation have been devoting a great deal of attention to a historical phenomenon that, although not exactly new, is exerting a relatively greater impact on world cultures at the end of the century. The term globalization has been used to express this unprecedented movement of capital concentration on a worldwide scale, diminishing or at least redefining the role of nation-states as traditional centers of power and decision-making. This phenomenon has conditioned the restructuring of economic, political, and cultural relations among human groups (nation-states, social classes, ethnic groups, urban sub-cultures, etc.) worldwide (Ianni 1992). Making it possible to think of space and time in new terms, globalization has immersed those groups in various types of virtual interaction, something that many of their own musical practices had experienced since the growth of mass reproduction technologies. In such context, several of the social sciences’ more influential concepts (culture, class, national state, etc.) have been challenged to reaffirm their relevance (Ianni 1992).

In the Lak region of southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, music and dance performance is not a discreet element of society; it is in performances that communities show others who they are, what they consist of and how powerful they can be. It is also in a performance that “individuals” (in the Lak sense of the term) display their identity and reveal their spiritual capacity. In addition it is in performance that the visible reality of humans meets the invisible realm of the spirits. The movement and costume elements of performance are the visual poetic representation of the spirit and human worlds as cast by the local imagination. Unlike many Highlands Papua New Guinea societies, where dance movements are kept to a minimum in order to accommodate elaborate costumes (Strathern 1979:244), among the Lak, dance movement is vigorous, powerful, and essential to a community's successful existence. Dance movements, which predominantly occur on the vertical plane (see Kaeppler and Niles 1998:482), differ significantly in style between the sexes; as Eves has recognized (1998:54), these movements are a definitive aspect of “gender conceptualisations” in the region. For male performers (and this article mainly focuses on men's dances), performance is a physical and spiritual display that transforms participants into something more than human. This article begins by introducing several key Lak notions. Local concepts concerning the individual, relationships, community, and male and female are explored. The mythical foundation of society is introduced as a basis for comprehending some of the aesthetics and emotions that underpin performance. And Lak notions surrounding the relationships between space, gender, and power are examined to reveal the invisible boundaries that divide the physical landscape.

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).

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 the winter of 1991, ballerinas of the State Ballet Ensemble of Turkey found a traditional davul (drum) player in their rehearsals. It was the idea of the Minister of Cultural Affairs that the state-sponsored ballet dancers should learn “our national rhythms”! The following day's newspapers gave a broad coverage to the event, displaying on their front page ballerinas crying in shock, despair and humiliation. This was a war of territory between tradition and modernity, a confrontation between different approaches to dance. It was about nationalism, and the definition of what was national, taking the art of dance at its centre.

This essay will attempt an interpretation of the symbolic phenomena of YaraƐƐmɔ which assume the form of sounds perceived as song (lala) and gestures, inextricably linked with the songs, that are considered to be part of the dance (dzoo). YaraƐƐmɔ, performed by the Ga of southeastern Ghana,1 is a ritual in that it is both a practice through which participants relate to the sacred (Durkheim 1968:52) and “a form of religious behavior associated with (the) social transitions” of humans (Turner 1964:4–6). As a transformative, contingent ritual, being occasioned by death, it belongs to a particular class of ritual; it is a rite of passage. Like other funerary rites, those of the Ga are characterized by preliminal, liminal and postliminal phases (van Gennep 1975:148). YaraƐƐmɔ falls within the liminal phase but makes reference to the separation and incorporation phases of the passage. The music and dance of YaraƐƐmɔ, called Adowa, do not merely articulate the defining features of the ritual, but, in fact, shape it; for, as I hope to demonstrate, they constitute ritual action that is both expressive—a communication system stating the relationships among humans and those among humans, their natural environment and the supernatural—and manipulative, an encoded moral system performed to achieve certain effects in these relationships (c.f. Geertz's models of and for reality 1966:7–9). Adowa is performed at the wake the night before the burial and on the day of the burial immediately before and during the processional to the site of interment.

Dance creation and processes of artistic aspirations by individual folk dancers and folk dance ensembles in Malaysia mirror the rich cultural heritage of the people. The past and the present are represented in living traditions of Malaysian dance culture. Motions and sounds are celebrated within specific spaces and times expressing influences of past and present civilisations. Young choreographers and dancers, while keen to pursue newer dance pieces, are always aware of the omnipresence of the past in the present. The evolution of Malaysia's folk dances is an ongoing process that is experiencing cross-border sharing of new dance motifs and musical arrangements between the Malays of Peninsular Malaysia, Singapore and the Indonesian Island of Sumatra. Conventions of movements and musical structures of Malay folk dance traditions are shared between these communities. Events that shaped the formation of new styles of Malay folk dances were also effective in spreading and affirming old and new dance styles. When Malay folk dances spread to movies and amusement parks in the 1950s, new interpretations of dances became fashionable. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s witnessed the enhancements of older dances and evolved them into contemporary forms. This essay traces the changes within the Zapin dance genre and delineates the three styles in which Zapin is now performed in contemporary Malaysia.

As a major indigenous religio-philosophical tradition of China, Taoism has played an important role in the life of the people of China for well over eighteen hundred years. The outward expressions of Taoism are its rituals, passed on from generation to generation by Taoist ritual specialists throughout the centuries. Music (recitations, chants, and instrumental playing) is an integral part of these rituals. Early study of religious Taoism had been limited to the collecting of written sources and the compilation of these sources into the multi-volumed Daozang (Taoist canon), a massive work compiled over a period of fifteen centuries.2 The Taoist canon contains two collections of notated chants: the Yuyin fashi (Jade sounds of [Taoist] rituals) and Darning yuzhi xuanjiao yuezhang (The great Ming imperial Taoist ritual music), respectively contained in Volumes 333 and 616 in the Taoist canon.

In the 1980s a type of bagpipe, formerly used in parts of Dalarna (Dalecarlia), Sweden, was brought out of the museums, spread all over the country and played again as never before. The very few known traditional bagpipers were rediscovered and their music and life-histories reconstructed to suit new purposes. The subject of this paper is to describe and analyze this process, when parts of a common historical and cultural heritage were transformed and used in contemporary society as objects of identification.

The 35 million Sundanese of West Java are known in Indonesia for their sense of humor, the conservatism of their Muslim religious practices, the sadness of their music, and their relatively relaxed codes of behavior that allow for raucous laughter, broad physicality in musical performance, and strong innuendo in song lyrics (Williams 1993). The Sundanese also have well-established performing arts specific to the area, as well as a specific set of gender-based conventions in organizing their living arrangements. Although the links between gender, spirituality, home life, humor, and music may not seem readily apparent, the bridges between them become clearly demarcated through an examination of the ways in which physical and musical domains are divided along gender boundaries. In this article I examine some of the multiple domains of Sundanese men and women, not only within the boundaries of their homes but also on performing stages and within musical repertoires, revealing the tensions between the sexes and highlighting the areas in which men and women can meet and communicate both socially and musically.

A Tanzanian Roman Catholic priest, the late Stephen B. G. Mbunga (1927–1982), has played a significant role in the history of church music in Tanzania through his compositions, involvement in music performance as a choral conductor, and scholarly writing on various aspects of church music. He is best known by scholars of the music of Tanzania through his work on the localization of church music there. In his 1963 book entitled Church Law and Bantu Music: Ecclesiastical Documents and Law on Sacred Music as Applied to Bantu Music, which was his doctoral dissertation (a work completed at and submitted to Propaganda University in Switzerland), he strongly defends the use of African music in Roman Catholic Church services in Africa. After interpreting Roman ecclesiastical laws and various directives given by top officials in the Roman Catholic Church, Mbunga argues that the use of African music in the Roman Catholic Church is consistent with and can be accomplished in accordance with these laws and directives concerning church music (see Sanga 2011:35–37). He also proposes practical ways through which musicians can undertake the task of composing African music that is appropriate for Roman Catholic Church services.