On 19-21 February 1998, the Chinese Opera Society (Singapore), an amateur opera society that promotes Chinese opera in Singapore, organised an event called “Street Wayang Revisited” as part of the annual Chinese Cultural Festival, which featured a three-night performance of the popular Chaozhou opera, Liu Ming Zhu, by the Sing Yong Hoe Heng Teochew Wayang, a professional Chaozhou opera group in Singapore. The ticketed performance, presented in what was called “street wayang-style” (Straits Times, 4 February 1998), took place in the Bras Basah Park within the shopping and business district of Singapore. Accompanying the performance was a month-long exhibition (13 February - 15 March 1998) at the Singapore History Museum, displaying old costumes, props, scripts and other Chinese opera paraphernalia, many of which belonged to Sing Yong Hoe Heng. Organised at a cost of approximately S$15 000 (US$ 8800), the event was widely publicised and well attended, and was partially sponsored by the Singapore Press Holdings and National Arts Council, amongst other national institutions. Aimed specifically at younger-generation Singaporeans, the English-speaking communities, expatriates and tourists, “Street Wayang Revisited” used slide projections of the Chinese script and corresponding English translations during the performance. The stage was double the size of the usual makeshift stages used daily by professional opera groups, the performance area was sheltered and well-ventilated with mobile fan units, and hawkers were specially engaged to serve food at this three-day event. Approximately 500 people watched the final performance on 21 February (Straits Times, 21 February 1998). On 23 February 1998, Sing Yong Hoe Heng resumed its normal practice and staged performances for a ritual celebration in an open space next to Newton Circus, another area that is popular with tourists, expatriates and younger Singaporeans. This time, however, a photograph published in the Chinese newspaper shows only a scatter of twelve people or so in the audience. The same newspaper article aptly questions this phenomenon with a metaphorical title: “Shuguang Zhaxian Haishi Xiyang Yuhui? [Emerging Sunshine or Lingering Sunset?]” (Lianhe Zaobao, 7 March 1998a).

There have been many new developments in the production of moving film with synchronous sound track. In this all too familiar medium, developments are usually taken for granted and are not generally noticed. Areas of technology which have combined to produce ‘sync-sound’ have at the same time offered to a field of study, which some may prefer to call ethnochoreology, others ethnomusicology, a research facility the efficacy of which has not yet, in this writer's opinion, been fully explored. Because of this, the full impact of this facility on the practice and study of folk music and dance can not yet be properly gauged.

Biwa narrative music continues to be practised in the major cities of modern Japan, but its rural counterpart in Kyushu (southwestern Japan), a tradition known as zatô biwa, has all but ceased. Zatô biwa practice is unlike the styles that have developed in urban contexts in both its musical and literary aspects. Heike biwa, the tradition of chanting episodes of the medieval Tale of the Heike with biwa accompaniment, and the Chikuzen biwa and Satsuma biwa traditions that are today the most frequently heard styles of biwa narrative, are text-based practices in which items of repertory have fixed verbal content and stable performative schemes inscribed in texts. In rural Kyushu, however, zatô biwa was until the 1980s a primarily blind tradition in which written text sources were thought to have been of little or no consequence for performance practice.

Tonangebende Richtungen der Avantgarde haben aus der seit langem tiefgreifend schwelenden gesellschaftlichen Krise der Musik in diesem Jahrhundert die Konsequenz gezogen, musikalische Kunstwerke setzen zu können, die aller Konvention entrückt sind und keinen außermusikalischen Zwecken zu genügen haben. Aus frei mit dem Material umgehender Subjektivität heraus, die bereit ist — ohne das Engagement einer sozialen Selbstverpflichtung — ganz auf sich verwiesen und unter Erleiden einer zuweilen bitter quälenden Einsamkeit zu existieren, entstanden mithin Kompositionen, die ohne Rücksicht auf die nahe Mitwelt und die Realitäten ausschließlich an künstlerischen Notwendigkeiten orientiert waren. Neben der Anbiederung an die gemeine Menge mittels verbindlichen, gefälligen, von Trivialitäten und Klischees durchwirkten Werken der großen Zahl, rangen um keinen Konsensus nachsuchende, gänzlich frei sich wähnende “Schöpfer neuer Musik” um die Realisation von Tonstücken, die die Allgemeinheit brüskiert ablehnte. Paul Hindemith ist als “Bürger-schreck,” als aufrührerisches enfant terrible sowie als rücksichtslos empfundener “Neutöner” der letzt genannten Tendenz während einiger junger Jahre nachgefolgt. Mit dreistem Gestus schrieb und interpretierte er eine antiromantisch gemeinte Musik ohne Weihe, Pathos und konventionelle Schönheit. Diese frech wirkende Demonstration des Unbehagens am Etablierten wurde ihm zeitlebens nicht vergessen und mancherseits auch nicht verziehen, obwohl Hindemith sehr bald in einem Prozess von “Selbstbescheidung” (Winfried Zillig) davon abließ und gesellschaftlich wie auch künstlerisch um ein erneuertes Verhältnis des Einverständnisses bemüht war. Er ging einen Weg des “Hin und Zurück,” der ihm wieder eine Heimstatt eröffnen sollte und somit eine lebhafte Resonanz im Hier und Jetzt.

Like all exceptionally creative people, Zoltán Kodály was an untiring and strongly focused worker. Music education, folk music research and composition are considered his most important fields. Regardless of certain preferences at one time or another, he always understood his work in these diverse areas as mutually supporting an integral whole.

The survival of any type of music in Ghana is dependent upon the extent to which the music is able to satisfy the values the people look for in such music. The values, which may be aesthetic or structural, social or religious, may operate individually or in a simultaneous complexity. In other words the factors that shape and maintain the folk music in Ghana may be found in the music per se, in the artist or in the context of performance.

There are musical norms which the community expect in a musical performance. One such norm is the sound quality. The Ghanaian concept of music (and this may go for other African peoples too) does not unduly discriminate between sounds of definite pitches and sounds of indefinite pitches. It is true that in some situations the emphasis may be on one or the other. However, examples abound in which musical ensembles employ both pitched and unpitched instruments. And both categories of sound are given relatively equal roles in a performance.

Since the 1980s, I have been observing members of the Polish Górale community teaching their music and dance in Canada. Over these years I have witnessed several generations continuing or being initiated into a “so-called traditional music of a particular place” (Wolf 2009b:5), that is, the mountains of southern Poland, while otherwise participating in a local culture quite different from that being taught in Canada and the US. Both women and men have been devoting their valuable time to teaching children how to sing, dance, and play in the Górale style (po góralsku) in preparation for a variety of ensemble-based performances. Being variously involved in these activities over the years has led me to consider this transmission process. This paper builds from this experience to reflect more generally on music and dance learning in contemporary contexts and deliberately focuses on the ongoing human component in a process now greatly facilitated by new technologies. In particular, it considers music learning as it relates to paradigmatic gendered performance styles that have been recontextualized within evolving intercultural settings.

Sangyŏ sori are Korean folk songs sung by pallbearers during a funeral procession.

This paper discusses an interrelationship of linđo dancing that occurs in both social and ritual contexts within Croatian Dubrovnik-area villages. In February 1977 during poklada (carnival), I video-recorded maškare (masqueraders), with their house-to-house visitations, a noisy procession, boisterous and outrageous antics, heavy wine drinking and the clowning of linđo dancing. During the 1976-1977 winter season I also recorded a series of social dance events in the same villages during holidays and Sunday evening dance events when only linđo was actively danced for hours. Now that several years have passed, and a theme of this symposium (held in Skierniewice, Poland, July 1994) is ritual and ritual dancing in contemporary society, I am led to analyse the process of continuities and changes related to this winter carnival (poklada) event. This paper suggests that the continuities and changes of dancing in a “ritual” event are in correlation to the changes in the music and dancing at “social” dance events, which were in turn influenced by major socio-economic changes during the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2022, Prime Minister of Portugal António Costa of the Socialist Party held a celebration of Brazilian music at his residence in Lisbon for the Bicentennial of Brazilian Independence a month before the presidential elections between Bolsonaro and Lula. In contrast to Bolsonaro’s right-wing rallies, Costa featured acts that were feminist, antiracist, and leftist. In this diplomatic event, musical performances criticised Bolsonaro’s Brazil and supported Lula’s campaign, imaginatively aspiring for an alternative Brazil despite the organizers’ directive not to protest. I show how the performers strategically and affectively advanced a comprehensible political critique in this crucial moment of Brazilian political history.

At the heart of the resurgence and popularity of traditional music in South Korea during the closing decades of the twentieth century lie the concerted efforts of an intimate group of friends and musical colleagues who came of age in the late 1970s. Inspired by their mentors and artistic forbearers borne of itinerant troupe performance traditions and bound together by the common goal of saving Korean music from obscurity in a nation that was catapulting itself toward Western cultural hegemony, the percussion quartet known as SamulNori emerged from its humble beginnings to become an internationally acknowledged phenomenon.

In general, it can be said the Oriental has a deeper sensitivity to delicate timbres than has the Occidental. In the folk and traditional music of Japan there are innumerable exquisite combinations of timbre which make it possible to achieve delicate forms of musical expression without the help of other musical elements such as melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint.

In Japan's primitive conception of aesthetics, music was closely related to nature. We can find many examples wherein the actual sounds of nature have been sublimated to musical expression. This is especially true in the field of theatrical music.