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.

Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) schreibt zu Beginn seines Buches Musicologica:

“To the question what is the study-object of comparative musicology, the answer must be: mainly the music and the musical instruments of all non-European peoples, including both the so-called primitive peoples and the civilized Eastern nations. Although this science naturally makes repeated excursions into the field of European music, the latter is, in itself, only an indirect object of its study. The name of our science is, in fact, not quite characteristic; it does not ‘compare’ any more than any other science. A better name, therefore, is that appearing on the title page of this book: ethnomusicology.”

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.

The growth and expansion of maritime trade in the first millennium CE altered the musical landscape of Asia, from earlier Austronesian and Austroasiatic migrations, to the early contacts with India, China, Arabia, and the continuing navigation towards the Pacific and Oceania. Much later in the tenth century, Chinese chronicles describe that peoples from the south called Luzoes (Luzon, Philippines) had invaded its southern shores, while Indian histories record the voyages of sailors from western Indonesia. By the eighth century, Austronesian languages from Borneo had spread towards Madagascar. A trade centred on beads, tin, copper, pottery, ceramics, natural products, and food also carried musical instruments and musicians bearing new ideas in music making and ritual life.

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.

This paper offers a brief survey of important genres of folksong in the Persian language, as presently cultivated in Khorasan (the large province in northeastern Iran). The ten transcriptions discussed in the body of the paper represent portions of a large collection of Khorasani folksong made in 1969 in and around Meshhed, a city of over 400,000 persons, and Bojnurd, a smaller town with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. As indicated in the annotations following each transcription, several of the singers recorded and interviewed in Meshhed and Bojnurd had come to these communities from other towns and villages in Khorasan and Sistan (the province immediately south of Khorasan). The repertoire of Persian folksong performed in a single community generally encompasses a variety of genres, some of which carry specific regional associations, easily (though sometimes differently) identified by singers and listeners.

As some readers may know, I have recently published a book entitled Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. In it I try to answer the questions

Today in China, “ethnomusicology” has commonly been considered in a broad sense as a discipline covering all studies of music except Western classical music. The current article also deals with ethnomusicology in China in this broad sense.

Research carried out by Ernesto De Martino (1908-65) in the field of the anthropology of music in the 1950s is of outstanding importance in Italian scholarship and deserves attention both from an historical perspective and for the particular approach his work proposes to the study of the human dimension in music. De Martino made the most original contributions to the progress of anthropological studies in Italy in the post-war period and worked out some of his more interesting theoretical proposals through the study of musical phenomena of southern Italy. Two volumes are particularly representative of his output: Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Mourning), published in 1958, and La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), a book devoted to the phenomenon of tarantism, which appeared in 1961. The publication dates of these works are important because they belong to that crucial period in the history of musical studies when the discipline established in the first half of the century under the name of “comparative musicology” changed its name to ethnomusicology. At the same time, a new trend in scholarly research was established with the primary goal of assimilating the study of music within the larger framework of the study of culture. De Martino's volumes were published during the ten-year period that separates David McAllester's Enemy Way Music (1954) and Alan P. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964). This synchronism becomes especially interesting when one considers that no direct relationship existed between the trends that were developing in American ethnomusicology and the works of De Martino, who was educated in philosophical studies and whose main field of research was the history of religions. From this perspective, the consideration of De Martino's work can broaden our view of an important period in the history of musical studies. For although the point of departure of his work was different from those adopted by Anglo-American scholars, De Martino's results were also a clear endorsement of the anthropological approach to the study of musical phenomena, and they were proposed at a time when the same interests began flourishing in the scholarly world at large.

This article examines historical associations between music and war on the Polynesian island of Rapanui (Easter Island; figure 1). Throughout Polynesia, bellicose themes appear in the lyrics of songs commemorating legendary battles and warriors, as well as in depictions of combat in staged and un-staged performances appealing to tourist and indigenous audiences alike. On Rapanui, spears, clubs and other artefacts of war embellish performances by contemporary music and dance ensembles, together with dance moves that imitate martial activity. One recently successful ensemble has even taken the name Matato'a (an ancient term meaning ‘warrior’ or ‘guardian') as a means of symbolizing their cultural guardianship. While these performances are aimed at the tourist market, they are not devoid of local significance. Indeed, the recent push to generate a diverse repertoire of Rapanui music for cultural performances has arguably assisted in the revitalization and preservation of precontact songs, chants, and dances that would otherwise be consigned only to the memories of Rapanui elders and the dusty pages of obscure ethnographic works.

In his recent book, Music in Human Life: Anthropological Perspectives on Music (1993), John Kaemmer stated:

Over a large area of south-western Bulgaria, songs are mostly two-part. The first voice sings the melody; the second voice is smooth or slightly more florid, mostly on the tonic and adjacent degrees of the scale. This area can be divided into four regions, differentiated by the styles of singing in two-part songs: Pirina region, the region to the centre of western Bulgaria, and the Velingrad and Ihktiman Pazardjik regions. Each of these regions shows a different structure of two-part songs. The differences lie in harmonic and rhythmic structure, and in the range of the second voice.

The most widespread style is that of the Pirina region, characterized by the comparative restriction of the second voice.

Typical of the Velingrad region are the songs with a vigorously moving second part, ranging mainly between the first, third and fourth degrees of the scale and the leading note. Typical of the Ikhtiman region (the smallest of the four) are two-part songs with an elaborately ornamented second part woven round the melody and reaching the tonic a little before the first voice.

A musical competition is a social event as well as a musical one, raising great interest in the community. Its particularly exciting atmosphere, the enthusiasm of both participants and observers, and the social honour bestowed upon the winners encourage the musicians to polish and elaborate their competence and performance styles, and sometimes to create new performance tactics. Previous studies of musical competitions suggest that rivalry and competition in the performing arts—which are deeply rooted in their social settings and carry the creative impulse to transform performing styles—can be found around the world, although their cultural, social, and historical contexts, as well as the changes that result from the competitions, are widely divergent (see Gunderson and Barz 2000; Gunderson 2003). Competitions have also had a significant impact on the development of music in Indonesia, especially in conjunction with official cultural policy. In President Suharto's New Order (Orde Baru) Indonesia, various levels of government held competitions to preserve (melestarikan) and develop (perkembangkan) the traditional performing arts, in accordance with the national cultural policy (Sutton 1991, 1995; Lindsay 1995; Yampolsky 1995; Bakan 1999; Tenzer 2000; Williams 1999,2003; Harnish 2007). This focus on the arts has continued into the period of political reformation (reformasi) since 1998. Competition has been an effective vehicle of cultural ideology through its potential to transform performing style and to change aesthetic value. However, the results of the competition do not always conform to the intentions of the government. A competition involves people with a wide range of purposes and viewpoints, who interpret the event and react to it differently according to their positions, whether as participants, teachers, judges, organizers, or audience members. As R. Anderson Sutton reported regarding the Pekan Kebudayaan Sulawesi Selatan (South Sulawesi Cultural Week) in 1993, festivals or competitions “have contrasting, even conflicting meanings for the different people involved” (Sutton 1995:687). In reality, these various interpretations of the event intertwine to create a tense but influential context for the performing arts.

On the morning of 10 January 2005, a group of people boarded an open dinghy at Namatanai, located about halfway down the east coast of mainland New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. On board were the young brothers Tony and Paul Wol, musicians of the newly formed band Twinhox of Kavieng. Buoyant with the recent recording of their debut album Sorpendeng in the nation's capital, Port Moresby, the brothers had been visiting their mother's relatives in New Hanover for Christmas and New Year celebrations and were now bound for Lihir Island, returning to the home of their parents. The boat never arrived, and the travellers were never found.