This article examines the study of folk music traditions in Denmark, with an emphasis on collection, research and scholarly publication. Popular writings, use in education and the practice of folk music have been incorporated only sporadically. Geographically, the article covers what is now Denmark as well as the Faroe Islands. Greenland, which like the Faroe Islands has a commonwealth relationship with Denmark, is treated in a separate article.

In 1999 archaeologists excavated a section of the Hellweg, a medieval road near the present city of Paderborn in northern Germany. In the rubble of the road, which was an important east–west trade route, the excavators found a Jew's harp, deposited in an archaeological context dating it to the late thirteenth century. The iron instrument was well preserved, except for the broken and partly missing lamella (figure 1). It had a distinct mark punched into its forged frame. Where did this musical instrument originate and how did it arrive at this site? Was it brought here by someone who played the Jew's harp or by a pedlar carrying this instrument among other goods for sale? Who had made it and where?

Structuralist methods have been successfully used for some time in such diverse fields as linguistics, ethnology, psychoanalysis, history of religion, literature, and literary criticism. But at least one domain in which the science of signs could be of optimal use, communication by motion, has been unaccountably neglected. This paper represents a first attempt to deal with gestural movement as a system based on a code comparable to spoken language.

This description of the possession dance of the goddess Ame no Uzume no Mikoto in the eighth century Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) A.D. 712, to entice the sun goddess from her place of hiding, is held as the origins of kagura—a ritual dance performed by miko—female shrine attendants. The connection between myth and ritual is made early in Japanese history with the early ninth century Kogo shûi—a record of court rites stating that the successors of Ame no Uzume no Mikoto were an already extinct female priestly group, Sarume Kimi no Uji, and they in turn passed their skill on to the miko.

The Batak live in the countryside around Lake Toba in Northern Sumatra. According to linguistic and some other cultural differences they are divided into the subgroups Toba, Karo, Simalungun, Pakpak and Angkola/Mandailing. All Batak are obliged to the same adat, the traditional code of social behaviour which governs the relations among the three kinship groups (Simon 1982, 1984, 1987). The old-religious beliefs and customs of the Batak, upon which Christianity and Islam have been superimposed, are still an important part of adat ceremonies. I will confine myself here to certain old-religious implications of the ceremonial gondang music as found among the Toba and Karo.

The Carpathian basin is well suited to the investigation of performing styles in folk dance, because its dance culture is relatively homogeneous despite the variety of peoples, languages and ways of life encountered in this region. This fact invites an investigation of performing styles on a comparative basis. Moreover, the performing styles of one of the most characteristic dance dialects in Central Europe deserve close attention from the viewpoint of the cultural history of Europe as a whole.

The general structure and characteristic features of the dance stock of the Carpathian basin will be here outlined, and comparative references to the neighbouring Balkan dance dialects will help to emphasize the main characteristics of and features peculiar to the area in question.

Music plays a central role in the ceremonies of many native-American groups. Ritual practitioners are often called Singers, and the most important words of the ceremonies are uttered musically. While the music is used in obvious ways—accompanying dance, for instance, or making text audible—a less obvious but much more important function is that of structuring the time-frame of the ritual. This is a particularly necessary function in those ceremonies which last over a period of several days and must therefore sustain over time the experience of transcendence. The purpose of such a ceremony is to effect ritual transformation within a socially regulated framework. In this paper, we will be describing the role of music in the Mescalero Apache girls' rite of passage, an eight-day ritual in which a young pubescent girl is transformed into the female deity of the Apache, Isdzαnadl'esh, and is literally “sung” into womanhood.

The enigmatic union of a lyrical text with an improvisatory melody has earned for the hora lunga (or long song) a special place in the history of Rumanian folksong research. Béla Bartók first discovered this exceptional genre in the northern counties of Maramureş and Satu-Mare in the years 1912-13, and later remarked that this discovery had been the highlight of his career in Rumanian ethnomusicology (1967:24 and 1923:ii). Constantin Brailoiu (1970:405) noted the occurrence of similar improvisatory genres in other regions of Rumania, and suggested that the broader term doina be used for all such vocal improvisations, irrespective of region. In the last two decades, systematic investigations of this larger category, the doina, have been carried out by such scholars as Emilia Comişel (1959:147-74) and Mariana Kahane (1963:99-116). To facilitate a comparative study of the doina as a whole, Comişel proposed a broad classificatory scheme based on text content and social use. She also proposed an analytical framework for the study of those musical aspects which she felt were common to all doine. Kahane investigated the tonal aspects of the regional subtype found in Oltenia, and compared this specific genre with examples from Moldavia and Maramureş.

Jinghu is the lead accompaniment instrument in the Peking opera ensemble. Qinshi are the accompanists who play jinghu. Traditionally, jinghu was regarded as a male instrument; female qinshi first appeared in educational institutions subsidised by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s. Nevertheless, till now, the-all-male jinghu performance history and standards influenced by the virile ethos have deeply influenced contemporary female qinshi’s performances and recognition of their musicality and contributions to jinghu performance. In this article, I explore the rise of female qinshi, their challenges to jinghu performance conventions, and their contributions to contemporary jinghu performance.