As far back as the incorporation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662, it has been understood that association, discussion, exchange of information, and debate among scholars and scientists are essential to the development of scholarship and research. The very existence of the Royal Society contributed to the strong development of science, particularly in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and much was accomplished as a result of the associations therein formed. Similarly, the establishment of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft in 1899 provided for musicology an international forum and fostered the development of general European rather than simply national approaches. In the United States, the establishment of the American Folklore Society, just a hundred years ago, brought together literary artists and scholars, musicians, and anthropologists in a way that made possible the peculiarly interdisciplinary configuration of American folkloristics.

Musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto usually been treated as separate fields. One of the reasons for this is doubtless the search for a way in which the material to be dealt with should be presented. Historical research has, as we know, to do with a body of musical fact which has been handed down through the medium of notation and therefore exists in a more or less concrete form. Non-European music and European folk music, on the other hand, are exclusively dependent upon oral tradition. To begin with, the latter does not, as Robert Lachmann once very aptly expressed it, exist for us at all. Materials must first be made indirectly tangible for us through special means, that is to say, they must be translated through recording and transcription out of the sphere of oral tradition into that of written notation. This is certainly one of the chief reasons why musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto gone different ways, each with its own independent aims, complexes of problems and methods.

The tradition of scholarly native music research in China is centuries old, particularly in the areas of tuning and temperament, historiography, music typology, music archeology and repertory study. In the twentieth century, native musicologists continue this long established tradition and its methodologies. At the same time, and particularly from the early 1980s on, ethnomusicology from the West influenced Chinese musicologists. Theories and methods of ethnomusicology and anthropology began to appear in the writings of native scholars in their study of Chinese music. This new “-ology” is viewed as an addition to the more “traditional” Chinese musicology. What most native musicologists seem to be interested in is what parts of this new “-ology” are useful to the “Chinese” situation. Using both the more “traditional” and the “newer” methodologies, native scholars have invested great efforts in recent decades in collecting, compiling, analyzing, and comparing regional musical styles and repertories. The sum of these scholarly activities forms the foundation of Chinese musicology. Because of language barriers, these research activities were not widely known outside the country. The following report outlines some of these research activities.

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.

For two years, throughout 1983 and 1984, a sudden change in the attitude towards dancing was shown among pre-teen and teen-age boys in Denmark. This change has also been witnessed in other West European countries within the last few years.

The Yezidis are a Kurmanji-speaking (northern Kurdish) religious minority living scattered across northern Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus (Armenia and Georgia), and western Europe. Among the Yezidis of Armenia, “speech” (axavtin), “song” (stran; pl. stranen), and “words about” (kilamě ser, pl. kilamen ser) constitute the three main categories of vocal production. This article is a detailed exploration of the acoustic characteristics of these categories of vocal production with a special focus on “words about.” At first sight, one may question whether “words about” (kilamě ser) actually amounts to a separate vocal category. These words lack any name that would set them clearly apart from axavtin (speech), which is clearly also made up of “words” (kilamen). Furthermore, the Yezidis never refer to an abstract category of “words about” but only to “words about” something: “words about the dead” (kilamen ser mirya), “words about exile” (kilamen ser xerîbîě), “words about the hero” (kilamen ser měranîě), and so forth. What these topics share in common is their association with tragic events and/or feelings of sadness and nostalgia; “words about” are thus lamenting utterances. When Yezidi people (especially women) say “words about” such things, they often resort to a special tone of voice. This tone may be described as a kind of chanting that combines characteristics of axavtin and stran. As with axavtin, there is neither metre, rhyme, nor steady beat. And as with stran, there are sustained pitches and an interactional salience. These differences are all addressed in more detail below.