In nanguan, a Chinese art music tradition, musicians compose songs by setting new texts to existing tunes (known as qupai); songs that are composed based on the same tune display the relevant features of that tune but vary in its non-relevant features.2 Tunes are further grouped by musicians into tune families3(gunmen); songs that are composed based on tunes of the same tune family display the distinctive features of respective tunes but share the features of that tune family.

Ethnologists now generally accept the idea that all cultures are dynamic and ever changing (Berreman, 1968:338). It is clear, however, that the rate of change varies not only from one culture to the next, but also with respect to the different elements within that culture. In some ways, a society is rather like an octopus with its tentacles periodically stretching in different directions—each motion causing at least a slight change in the alignment of forces within it. For analytical purposes, this continuous juggling of forces and pressures can often be comprehended more readily in a series of stop-action vignettes, exactly comparable to the individual frames of a motion picture film. With this technique, it becomes possible to predict that, for instance, a jumper in mid-air will return to earth and, if one knew his velocity and trajectory, just where he would land. However, the forces operating on and within a society are not nearly as well understood as is the force of gravity and thus predictions of change in society are generally much less reliable. Nevertheless, such an examination of the operative forces and their alignments in this kind of stop-action view will undoubtedly add to our understanding of the processes of change in society.

The dance is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and beautiful expressions of the Rumanian people. Its present-day forms are the product of an evolution during which it was subject to diverse influences (both internal and external) and shaped by the spiritual needs of its creators. While part of the whole realm of folk creation, the dance is in itself a most complex phenomenon. Consequently, it has for quite some time been regarded as an independent genre, and little study has been devoted to its relationship with other folkloristic elements.

This paper concerns the music of wedding ceremonies that I recorded and filmed in four communities in the vicinity of Delhi: the town of Gurgaon and the villages of Jharsa and Jhanjholi in the state of Haryana, and Singola village in the Delhi Government District. It concentrates primarily on songs for two ceremonies in the Hindu cycle of wedding rituals — the lagan and the ban, and also includes songs for the other rituals that took place on the day of a phera (‘the marriage itself') in the villages of a groom (Singola) and of his bride (Jhanjholi). The music for such ceremonies is always provided by women, members of the families of the bride and groom and other appropriate female members of the community. Before presenting and discussing these ceremonies and the music for them, I want to describe the socio-cultural context of marriage in India.

I walked into the Round-Up Saloon and stood transfixed by the scene out on the dance floor. Surrounded by a wooden corral, the sleek and shining floor was filled with couples taking wide, gracefully fluid steps. Clad in immaculate cowboy hats, crisp work shirts tucked into jeans, and of course boots, the men spinning together around the floor were to me an entirely new form of queer dance. The comfortable intimacy of their bodies was unlike the bump and grind of the dance I was used to encountering at urban American gay bars, and the DJ's musical selections kept well away from pop divas and electronic dance music. At urban gay bars like Dallas' Round-Up Saloon and at other non-bar venues, queer two-step and line dancing, and country music itself, offers space for a performative queerness that counterbalances not only mainstream perceptions of country music and dance as heterosexualized and antagonistic towards other sexualities, but expands understandings of queer dance practice as well. In this article, I draw on my fieldwork in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I spent six months in 2016 and 2017 learning to two-step and line dancing with an LGBT country dance organization.

In this article we examine the way local, national, and regional politics affect the policies and practices of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH)—a notion derived from the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage—in two detailed case studies from the Republic of Macedonia. While our conclusions are particular to our case studies, we hope that researchers in other national settings will find them useful for describing and analysing their own situations. We begin with a discussion of heritagization and recontextualization, which are inherent in ICH safeguarding processes. Next, we provide background on the external contestation of a distinct Macedonian ethnic and national identity, and the ways that UNESCO ICH safeguarding processes have been perceived and applied in Macedonia. Against that backdrop, we then describe and analyse two contrasting cases of ICH—the social dance “Kopackata” and the Galicnik Wedding—both of which illustrate how the cultural heritage concept itself can sometimes be used for national, commercial, and political ends.

For most people carrying out research in ritual and traditional dance forms, ‘modernisation’, usually understood as ‘Westernisation’, is seen as something destructive. Often rituals are studied as fairly static phenomena. Even though in our fieldwork we never see a ritual repeated in precisely the same manner, because our informants often insist on standardisation and on the possibility of exact ritual replication, we tend to look for a “proper”, archetypal form from which all other forms have deviated. As Gerd Baumann has argued (1992), from Durkheim onward much of the anthropological discourse about ritual has been based on a number of closely related assumptions:

1. 1. Rituals are seen to be symbolic performances at the core of the social identity of communities;

2. 2. They create and maintain (or transform) a society's cultural identity and social relations;

3. 3. The existence of a ritual community or congregation is assumed, whose members share a relationship to the performance, its symbols and their meanings;

4. 4. Thus, rituals are seen to be best understood as acts internal to the category or group that celebrates them or celebrates itself through them, the group being essentially concerned with itself rather than with the outside world.

The nature of a keynote address is to reflect upon issues of concern to the gathered assembly—to kickstart and enrich debates and to stimulate new ideas and perspectives. This address, presented at the beginning of the 44th World Conference of the International Council of Traditional Music, held in Limerick, Ireland, 12–14 July 2017, is very much grounded in my own experiences across a number of domains. I offer it as a subjective view of the potential of music and dance to act as powerful forces of cultural mediation, redressing social—and musical—inequalities.

In the past three decades, the study of music in ancient China has expanded significantly with the discovery of numerous tombs containing musical instruments. These finds have revealed substantial information about ancient music theory and organology. One issue that has remained on the periphery, however, is the study of the musicians themselves. From the Eastern Zhou (770–221 BCE) to Tang (618–907 CE) periods, musicians fell broadly into three groups: (1) formal musicians who performed for important ritual occasions and state sacrifices; (2) informal musicians who provided entertainment for banquets and other less formal occasions; and (3) military musicians who performed in processions. Formal musicians generally specialized in yayue (refined music), the official music of the royal Zhou court. Yayue continued to be played in formal ritual settings at court long after the Zhou period. Informal and military musicians specialized in less traditional forms of music, such as suyue (“popular” or “folk” music) and foreign music. Formal and informal musicians appear in the archaeological record as early as Eastern Zhou, while military musicians appear slightly later in the Han. Of these three groups, informal musicians appear to have been most popular among elite audiences, especially between the Han (206 BCE–229 CE) and Tang periods. These musicians were often paired with lively dancers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, and jesters, indicating the entertainment—rather than formal—nature of the music they performed. As demonstrated by sculptural works and mural paintings excavated from Han through Tang tombs, the most common types of musicians outside the more formal music sectors at court were foreigners, dwarfs, idealized women, and scholarly recluses. This paper will focus on archaeological and textual evidence for the existence of these informal musicians as early as Shang (c. 1570–1070 BCE) and Eastern Zhou, and the rising popularity of such performers in the period from Han to Tang. I hope to show that the very social marginality of informal musicians is exactly what enhanced their exoticism and popular appeal among their elite audiences.

In various studies scholars have asserted that two or more melodies are similar. In many cases the scholar does not offer a method by which the reader can determine that the melodies offered are indeed alike; He merely places the melodies in juxtaposition and assumes that the reader will perceive, as the author apparently does, that they are similar. This is the procedure followed by George Pullen Jackson in his attempt to prove that Black spirituals derive from white hymn tunes (Jackson 1933:242–261). On examining the melodies presented by Jackson, I find them similar in some respects and dissimilar in many other respects. I am by no means certain that they are versions of the same melody. In other cases the scholar does not offer full melodies or even full first sections of melodies. This occurs, for example, when Peter Gradenwitz offers melodic analogues of the Zionist and Israeli anthem, “Hatiqvah” (Gradenwitz 1949:302–303).

On 23 June 2011, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe of Korean Traditional Performing Arts (hereafter, Seongnam Municipal Troupe) presented its twenty-eighth concert, entitled Hana toenŭn kyŭre ŭi ŭmak (Unifying Korean national music). The South Korean government has designated June as a month of commemoration for the nation's patriots and veterans. As many government troupes in South Korea would do in June, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe dedicated its regular concert series to the remembrance of national heroes, cherishing their patriotism and sacrifice. As stated in the concert programme, “this performance is put together to bless the people who died protecting their nation and to express compassion for the 10 million families separated between the two Koreas … wishing for the nation's reunion and unification in the near future” (Han 2011:2). In order to memorialize war victims and the tragedy of partition, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe was to showcase musical works selected from both North and South Korea. In the programme, Ch'oe Sang-hwa, guest director of the Troupe, remarked:

The subject of this paper, “European Folk Polyphony,” is one to be approached only with the most painful scruples and not a little hesitation, and this for the following reasons:

1. (1) It seems as though, even by hearsay, nothing like all the phenomena of European folk polyphony are known. Every year brings fresh surprises to light.

2. (2) The material basis is as yet extremely narrow. Far too few transcriptions have up to now been published.

3. (3) Even when comprehensive and reliable transcriptions have been published, we still lack exact studies that penetrate the material and isolate its typical characteristics or features. As is the case with all folk music, the polyphonic variety is, as we know, dependent on oral tradition, that is to say, the folk singers follow with fine instinct definite rules. But of these rules they are “theoretically,” as we understand this term, not conscious. It is thus only possible to deduce these rules in a “mediate” way, viz. through the careful analysis of transcriptions. But for this we need suitable methods of investigation and a terminology making it possible to give an unambiguous account of the phenomena with which the researcher may find himself confronted. And despite meritorious attempts, we have as yet no such methods and terminology at our disposition.

The various notational means of signifying and conveying the composer's decisions and specifications to the various media for the electronic production of musical sound are probably temporary both in their exact nature and variety. But this should not be construed as a basis for concluding that these notational practices are, therefore, of consequence only to the historian of the ephemeral, or to the operators and designers of such media. The characteristics of these notations and, indeed, the very fact of their probable ephemerality embody implications of far more than mere “historical” interest, implications which extend significantly beyond the nature of the current means and even the structures of the particular media.

This paper has two parts. The first is a brief and incomplete survey of Soviet advances in the study of traditional music over the last twenty years, paying particular attention to collection, research and teaching, and dissemination of information. The second part is a discussion of some widely used Russian terms in the field of ethnomusicology. Here an attempt is made to clarify certain concepts and theories which are central to recent developments in music research in the USSR.

If the music of Mauritania has inspired only limited study till now it is because of its elusiveness. We know it to be governed by strict rules, though uncodified. The existence of parallel yet diverse traditions complicates detailed analysis. It should be remembered that Mauritania covers an area almost twice that of France. Long distances and poor communications—further aggravated by the rigours of the climate—have encouraged the growth of local artistic peculiarities.

Nevertheless, and in spite of this regional diversity, it is possible to perceive a certain basic national music. This derives from obedience to the same fundamental rules, and the use of a common fund of melodic patterns, carried down through the ages and recognizable beneath their sundry local modifications. The imperviousness of Mauritanian music to neighbouring influence adds further justification to a study of it as a single art-source.

Qingming—literally pure and brightness—is an annual Chinese ritual during which families honour their ancestors by visiting their graves. This practice was observed in China as well as in overseas Chinese communities. Described by a local writer as one of the important “family traditions” in Hawai'i, this annual ritual has been observed by local Chinese since their arrival in the nineteenth century (Clarke 1994). Every year during Qingming, all Chinese associations on the islands will sponsor ceremonies either at the Chinese cemetery or the association clubhouse to pay respect to their ancestors. This traditional ceremony, similar to other kinds of annual ethnic celebrations in Hawai'i, such as the Korean chusok harvest festival, Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn festivals, Portuguese Holy Ghost festival, and the Japanese and Okinawan obon festival, has been regarded as a high profile event of the Chinese community by local residents. Despite their origin as traditions brought to Hawai'i by immigrants, this type of ethnic family traditions has emerged as an integral part of the local culturescape, reflecting the multiethnic make-up of Hawaiian society since the plantation days at the turn of the twentieth century (ibid.).

Prior to World War II, Hawaiian music claimed enthusiastic audiences throughout the world. In some countries there were local performers of Hawaiian music who had never even visited the Islands. Although that popularity has greatly diminished, it is still surprisingly alive in such places as Japan, Indonesia, Canada, England, Holland, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.1 Without exception, the most famous performers in these countries are masters of the Hawaiian steel guitar.2 In fact, the sound of the steel guitar is considered the hallmark of Hawaiian music.

Musical perception is based on many complex psychic processes, of which, up to now, we have very little knowledge. We do not know as much as we should about the various roles of music in different cultures nor about the universal principles by which musical units are built into the human brain—stored, remembered, identified, recognized, handed down within traditions, etc.