Girls’ carnival morris dancing holds a curious status in the canon of English folk performance. On the one hand, this highly competitive team-formation dance operates at a fundamental remove from the conventional spaces and narratives of the two English folk revivals with which most morris dancing is associated (Wright 2017). More closely linked to the popular “town carnival movement” of the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries than to the contemporary folk scene, girls’ morris dancing is practised in sports halls and community centres, predominantly in the northwest of England and parts of North Wales, and is rarely seen in public. The dancers—almost exclusively girls and young women from working-class communities—compete as members of morris dancing troupes within regional and cross-regional carnival organizations. They do not straightforwardly identify as “folk” dancers.

A faint early morning glow lit the horizon across the sea. Poised on the calm ocean waters, a dozen sails began their approach to shore (see Figure 1). It was just before dawn on Sunday, 22 May 2016, at Paseo de Susana Park in Hagåtña, the capital of the island of Guam (Guåhån). That morning I joined thousands of residents and international visitors for the dawn arrival of the canoes, an event that began the 12th Festival of Pacific Arts, held on the island. Some of the sea vessels were from Guam, while others had travelled north across the familiar ocean routes of the Caroline Islands from as far west as the islands of Palau and from the atoll islands of Lamotrek and Polowat (see Figure 2). The dawn event emphasized Indigenous movement, knowledge, and skill on the sea, but it also projected a means of belonging in and reconnecting to the maritime world, embodied through sounding voices and moving bodies. Cultural leader Leonard Iriarte, who holds the title of Master of Chamorro Chant, recited a welcome that was played over loudspeakers and emanated from the shore out across the incoming waves. As each sailing canoe approached the land, crewmembers sounded shell trumpets and broke out into spontaneous song and dance on the decks—rhythms that combined with those of the incoming swell below.

“Vajtim,” mourning, is an expression of women’s grief and cannot be counted in months or years: it is a continued expression of the inner world that for many women can take decades. In this paper, I examine how women have carried and preserved the lament songs of the Southern Albania region from generation to generation. Field research in my hometown, Gjirokastër, reveals how the laments songs are connected from mother to daughter within the families. Using descriptions of lamenting rituals, personal interviews with mourners, and analysis of lyrics and field recordings, I demonstrate how women continue this tradition through generations.

In discussing gong ensemble music through the gaze of movement, gaze can be conceptualized at two interrelated levels: firstly, at the general contextual level of the audience (who are the spectators?), and secondly, at the deeper semantic level of auditory-kinaesthetic relationships that manifest social meanings.

In his article “The Ethnomusicology of Music Learning and Teaching,” Timothy Rice argues that the practices of teaching and learning music are fundamental to the ways in which music is conceptualised, transmitted, and invested with symbolic meanings (2003). Ethnomusicologists studying music and diaspora have also drawn attention to the significance of music education as a key medium for the construction and maintenance of diasporic identities.1 In diasporic communities, music education can be a principal means for transmitting perspectives on the historical and political forces that have shaped the diaspora and for developing the linguistic and cultural competency of younger generations. Music schools and other institutions of musical learning can also play important roles in the public representation of diasporic communities and in articulating the relationship of the diaspora to the linguistic, musical, religious, and national heritage of its perceived homeland.

During the latter part of the 19th century, many different dances such as schottis, rheinldnder and pas de quatre were commonly performed both in the cities and in the countryside in Sweden. The ways of dancing varied slightly, but the music was very similar for each dance. Some decades later, in the 1920s, people danced all over Sweden to a type of music that sounded bewilderingly similar to late 19th-century dance music. This style was in everyday speech called bonnjazz, i.e. “rustic jazz,” or to use a less pejorative term, “farmer jazz.” In this article I will give a survey of how this change came about, discuss the Swedishness of bonnjazz, and consider how this style was related to jazz and other types of foxtrot.

Twice a year, in the spring and autumn, a Sacrifice to Confucius called Sôkchôn is carried out in a small shrine compound (Munmyo) in the northeast part of Seoul, Korea. The ritual music, aak, performed during the ceremony is stately and imposing, perfectly suited to its purpose. Many Korean scholars and musicians consider it to be ancient and authentically Chinese, and even a cursory comparison with other musical genres found in Korea shows this ritual music to be strikingly unique in performing style.

Since the turn of the century, Peruvian traditional and popular music has been intensively investigated by local and foreign scholars, even though there was no institutional base which could effectively support musical research. These efforts, isolated as they were, nevertheless, followed definite theoretical and methodological trends which this article will undertake to synthesize.

Folklore, that “good anglo-saxon compound” invented by William Thoms, has taken on many meanings since it first appeared in “The Atheneum” in 1846. In many countries throughout the world it is still used as a broad label for all those “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc. of the olden time”, as originally suggested by Thoms (Dundes 1965). However, folklore is also used in another and more specific sense, namely for a certain kind of staged performance of folk music and folk dance, by people dressed in special types of folk costumes, accompanied by a selected number of tunes performed on a limited number of instruments. To such ‘folklore’ performances also belong symbols such as herding rods, spinning tools, old-style pottery, flags; as well as verbal statements about special features or the origin of the dances, the costumes and the music; and sometimes elaborated stories that place the whole activity in a historical and social framework.

Le chant lapon, ou juoigos, a donné lieu à un grand nombre de travaux, presque exclusivement scandinaves. Ces travaux portent surtout sur l'aspect musicologique, et sur le recensement des thèmes traités. Sans être entièrement absents de la littérature spécialisée, les aspects psychologiques et sociologiques du juoigos sont beaucoup moins connus. Les meilleurs observateurs nous ont laissé nombre de notations intéressantes sur ce sujet, mais elles restent très disparates. Le chercheur qui tenterait de rassembler ces observations pour en tirer un tableau général de la sociologie du juoigos risquerait fort d'aboutir à des conclusions erronées: en effet, il semble bien que cet aspect du juoigos soit soumis à des variations importantes, d'une communauté à l'autre. D'où le danger des généralisations, que l'on rencontre chez les auteurs les plus qualifiés. Widstrand, travaillant en collaboration avec Ruong, lui-même d'origine lapone, est par exemple dans l'erreur lorsqu'il écrit que chez les Lapons du nord, le juoigos est presque exclusivement réservé aux hommes (Widstrand 1961:74).

Thanks to several recent publications by Indian scholars, we are now much better informed about the life and the human-religious ideas of the Baul singers of Bengal. These descriptions are based on observations as well as on the statements that the Bauls themselves make in the texts of their songs. To shed some light upon the peculiarity of these “cultural and religious nomads,” a few remarks from the above-mentioned sources are repeated here as background.

The Year 1968 marked the coming of age of the International Folk Music Council. As I was in some measure responsible for its birth twenty-one years earlier, the Executive Board invited me to give an account of its activities during that time.

The sacred chant of Rome, apart from its liturgical value, is of importance to musicology. In it there lives on as a substratum the remembrance of popular traditional songs. Also from Roman Chant there came the development of polyphonic music and the art of instrumental variation in Europe. In addition, it was the origin of a great number of vernacular religious chants associated with the different Christian creeds. I consider, therefore, that I am justified in claiming that the liturgical chant of the Roman Church represents a musical repertory of the highest order which can be regarded as an artistic patrimony not only of the Christian Church but of all mankind

The central corpus of the Roman Chant—known since the ninth century as “Gregorian Chant”—was already in existence during the eighth and ninth centuries. In it there are to be found reminiscences of eastern and western song of the most remote epochs: musical elements of the most ancient cultures which would have been lost for ever, had not Pontifical Rome recollected them and conserved them in its liturgy.

Artists, scholars and audiences in Aceh, the northernmost province of Sumatra, conceive of their percussive, wind and string instruments as symbolising Aceh's “glorious past” and attach a variety of metaphorical and analogous meanings to them. Implicit in the culture, and formulated explicitly by Acehnese scholars, is a classification that divides the instruments at the most general level into three main categories, or metaphorical socio-historical streams: those associated primarily with (i) the pre-Islamic ancestral and nature venerating (animist-Hindu) stream, practices, or presumed origins (ii) the Sunni and/or Syiah Islamic stream (including borderline cases of instruments that straddle both Islamic and animist practices), and (iii) the European or Western socio-historical stream. Organological sub-categories at the second level of categorical thinking are based on an instrument's manner of exciting sound, while the third level comprises the instrumental types with their local names. The instruments are also attributed with broader, changing sociocultural meanings, including gender and class divisions.