The conspicuous failure of folklife studies to progress far beyond the collection and classification of materials has been accompanied by a pervasive vagueness in terminology. A. L. Lloyd decries the imprecision of “folk” — “a gawky term suggesting English condescension or German soulfulness” — and Wiora suggests abandoning “ambiguous terms such as ‘folk’ and ‘folk song’ “ altogether. Maud Karpeles - a veteran of many terminological debates — concludes gloomily that “it is in the nature of the subject that we cannot draw up a precise scientific definition of folk song which will serve to differentiate it entirely from all other forms of music.” Scientific or not, this paper seeks to explore existing definitions and suggest alternatives.

When I first began to investigate the music and musical practices in the Sultanate of Oman, my attention was drawn to the use of different names for the same instrument. It became soon apparent that this was not a philological problem, but rather a question of the instrument's function in a given context. For example, a cylindrical, double-headed drum is called kāsir only when it appears in conjunction with a larger, lower sounding cylindrical double-headed drum, a ra&māni. A drum is called ra&māni only when it fulfills the function of providing the rhythmical framework. Then, the kāsir takes on the function of “filling-in” or embellishing. However, the same kāsir can function as a ra&māni. In this case, it appears in combination with an even smaller kāsir. Thus, function correlates with relative size, and determines the nomenclature.

This year musicology should remember the two men who have given a greater part of their creative life to the folk song: Béla Bartók, who died a quarter-century ago on September 26, 1945, and Werner Danckert, who passed away on March 5, 1970.

Despite the fact that, in most parts of the world, music and dance are closely linked and are an integral part of the broad anthropological concept of culture, it is surprising to note that many accounts by ethnomusicologists and dance anthropologists are limited to describing either music or dance.1 As long ago as 1937, Curt Sachs wrote about universal interrelationships between the performing arts, and yet as recently as 1982 Peter Brinson noted that “There is a barrier between music and dance studies which needs urgently to be overcome” (Brinson, 1982:4).

Les réflexions qui suivent résultent de deux types d'interrogations. Tout d'abord, problème familier aux ethnomusicologues, comment faut-il et comment peut-on utiliser les propos de l'autochtone parlant de musique lorsqu'on se propose de faire l'analyse d'un corpus? Et par analyse, nous n'entendons pas un vague discours impressionniste sur la musique, mais, comme nous y reviendrons à la fin, à la fois l'utilisation de traits définissant les unités découpées selon des méthodes rigoureuses et reproductibles, et l'établissement de règles qui en décrivent le fonctionnement. Dans le même esprit, quel statut devons-nous accorder, dans la musique occidentale, aux propos du compositeur, de l'interprète ou de l'auditeur lorsque le musicologue se propose de rendre compte du processus créateur, de la conception d'une interprétation ou de la perception d'une oeuvre?1 A notre sens, il n'y a aucune raison d'opérer ici, quant au status du discours sur la musique, une distinction entre musique de tradition orale et musique “savante”, même si nos réflexions à propos de ce problème dans la musique occidentale ont été inspirées par l'expérience des ethnomusicologues (Merriam, Blacking, Zemp, Feld). En d'autres termes, que se passe-t-il lorsqu'on s'avise de considérer les propos de Wagner ou de Boulez comme ceux d'un Inuk ou d'un Pygmée?

Congo, Moçambique and Candombe are Afro-Brazilian religious groups that take part in brotherhoods of Our Lady of the Rosary and in their festivals—Congado—in Minas Gerais, Brazil. These rituals are accomplished through music. Thus singing, playing and dancing are a unique mode of praying. Focusing on the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary of Contagem and that of Jatobá—both situated in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, capital of Minas Gerais—the rhythmic behaviour of these groups is discussed, for the instruments and their rhythmic language are sacred. The variation procedures in the rhythmic patterns are related to the function of each group, to the time/space of performances and to the hierarchy holding of them by force of the legend behind the rituals.

Congo, Moçambique e Candombe são grupos religiosos afro-brasileiros que participam de irmandades de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e de suas festas—o Congado—em Minas Gerais, Brasil. Esses rituais são cumpridos através da música, do canto e da dança. Considerando o caráter sagrado dos instrumentos e de seus ritmos, é abordado o comportamento rítmico dos grupos que integram as Irmandades de Contagem e do Jatobá, ambas situadas na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte, capital de Minas Gerais. Os procedimentos de variação nos padrões rítmicos estão relacionados ao espaço/tempo das performances e às funções dos grupos, conforme a hierarquia entre eles, estabelecida na lenda que fundamenta os rituais.

For more than two decades, since we built the Jerusalem Melograph in 1957, we had been in touch, in one way or another, with Charles Seeger, the scholar and researcher. Above all, he was a unique and marvelous human being. A desire to understand an unveil basic laws which govern musical expression in its multiple manifestations was central to his work and it dictated his choice of areas of investigation. For example: the factors which shape the writing down of oral traditions; the musical parameters of speech; the bridge between language and music; the factors which determine the meaning of modal frameworks; the significance of musical components in performance compared to written realizations—these were but a few of the areas with which he dealt. The informant, whether composer, performer, or auditor, constituted an important variable in all of his investigations. On the whole, Seeger never lost sight of the human being.

This paper discusses the role of techniques and concepts roughly corresponding to the Western notion of “improvisation” in the cognitive domain of sung mantoore (praise), i.e., praise-songs, among the Ful'be (engl. Fulani, fr. peul) of Diamaré in North Cameroon. Fieldwork in Diamaré was carried out between June 1975 and October 1976 in thirty-two towns and villages of the region of Maroua, the administrative and commercial centre of the Département du Diamaré with 70,000 inhabitants. Fourteen examples, drawn from approximately 400 praise-songs recorded during the course of the study, have been selected for analysis.

The different aspects of the subject and the corresponding methods.

The life-history of melodies is the subject of comparative melodic research. It offers various aspects and forms of approach, and research has consequently developed in different directions and has employed a variety of methods. These are differentiated not only by nomenclature but by the emphasis laid upon special aspects of the subject-matter.

Within recent years much aboriginal song material has been gathered, mainly in Central and Northern Australia. The scientific value of this material can be readily understood; but its artistic merit has been the subject of much controversy. The present article has been written with a view to pointing out certain features of the Australian songs—features whose appreciation may enable listeners to obtain more enjoyment from aboriginal recordings. My remarks are based on my own collection, which was gathered in Central Australia; but they are true in a general sense of most Australian songs as far as we know at present.

The Chinese are acknowledged to be one of the four basic ethnic groups that made up Cuba as a nation. Many Chinese joined in the nineteenth-century independence wars against Spanish colonial rule, and several Cubans of Chinese ancestry (hereafter, “Chinese descendants”) turned out to be renowned artists and writers, including, among others, poet Regino Pedroso, painter Flora Fong, and Wifredo Lam, the most universal of all Cuban painters. Chinese influence has been felt in diverse fields of Cuban culture, from culinary art to religion, and from martial arts to music. Specifically, the introduction of a musical instrument, a sort of oboe or shawm called a corneta china, derived from the Han Chinese suona, is one of the most significant Chinese cultural contributions to this island country. Nevertheless, the original instrument is no longer played by Chinese natives, and the corneta china has been appropriated by non-Chinese Cubans since 1915, particularly in the eastern region of the island, where it is played in carnival street bands almost exclusively by performers of African descent. Thus, except for a short-lived attempt to come together in the lion dance during the 1980s and early 1990s, the development of the Chinese community and that of the corneta china have followed divergent paths in Cuba, both of which are succinctly traced in this article.

A myriad of ethnomusicological studies have explored change and modernization in musical cultures across the world. However, few have explored transformational changes with capitalism as the main analytical frame. This is despite the fact that capitalism, in its various forms and phases, has arguably been the key driving force of the modem world for centuries, underpinning or shaping industrialization, nation-state formation, colonialism, rapid or intensive economic growth/crises/disparity, technological innovation, the advent of wage labour, urbanization, and global connectivity. In this article I explore capitalist transformation as a seismic shift in people's relations to and identifications with land, nature, and place, as manifest in song lyrics and videos created/performed in contemporary Tibet.

Traditional musical instruments make useful symbols of identity because they are often unique to a particular social group and therefore serve as markers of distinction from other groups. This is true of the ekonting (see figure 1), a three-stringed plucked lute that is played almost exclusively by people of the Jola ethnic group in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. One player of the ekonting (pl. sikonting) describes the instrument much like an identification badge: “No matter where you go, if you see someone playing the ekonting, you will know that person is a Jola.” Ethnomusicological literature abounds with similar cases, where there is said to be a one-to-one relationship between a musical instrument and the social identity of the performer. However, constructivist models of social identity, emphasizing multiplicity, changeability, and relationality, complicate this apparently straightforward relationship, even if ethnomusicologists too often treat the subject of identity in contradictory ways (Rice 2007). In this paper, I approach the ekonting through sociologist Margaret Somers's (1994, 1992) paradigm of narrative identity, which emphasizes the relational and ontological qualities of narrative production. I argue that the ekonting serves not as a signifier of an a priori social identity, but instead as a site for the narrative production of Jola ethnicity. This narrative production both differentiates Jolas from—and associates them with—other regional, national, and transnational identity narratives. After an explanation of this paradigm and a contextualization of the cultural stakes, I demonstrate this argument through two vignettes describing different directions of narrative production around the ekonting.

Two-part singing, based predominantly on the drone type of polyphony, is a phenomenon which is still common in the Razlog district of Bulgaria. Ritual songs such as those for St. Lazarus’ Day, St. George's Day, and Easter, rain-begging, dance songs, and harvest songs are all well preserved though rarely performed, and are representative of what is known as the “old style” of singing. This type of singing is performed mainly by older women, recreating from the past songs which they once sang as young women and girls. Characteristic are narrow-range melodies commonly based on the following scale formations: ABC, ABCD, ABCDE, with or without the subtonic G, a major second below the tonic A, which ends all melodies in the collection (the melodies have been transposed for comparative purposes). Also characteristic are the traditional, harsh-sounding parallel majoren oinor seconds. Alongside this older style exists a “new style” of part singing which to a certain extent is limited to younger women. Melodies in the “new style” have a larger ambitus, with the range formulas 1-6, VII-6, 1-7, and VII-7. Although the younger women are relatively familiar with the older style and sometimes condescend to use it, they seem to prefer the modern style, in which the melodic range is less restricted and more consonant-sounding intervals are used.