The study of song texts by scholars in various fields has taken many directions. Some of those directions have been the result of particular disciplinary methodology such as literary history and criticism, history, folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and musicology. Others have been the result of peculiarities of a language, such as the problems of song in tone languages. This article is an introduction to and analysis and reinterpretation of some of the approaches to the study of song texts which seem at this time to present fruitful avenues for future research.

The popular music landscape of Romania today is dominated by the manea. It appeared in the late 1960s as a form of symbolic opposition by the Romani communities from the slums of the big cities on the Danube to their exclusion from Romanian society. In time manea became an expression of implicit protest by ordinary people from any ethnic background. In the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually penetrated into cities and villages. After 1990, the manea spread throughout the entire country and is now the favourite music of many teenagers, young people, and the nouveaux riches of the transition period, comprising together about one third of the population. The power of the manea arises from the dominant role it plays in public and private events, such as weddings, baptisms, funerals, anniversaries, and all kinds of parties organized in restaurants and clubs, as well as from the high visibility it receives on private TV channels, the Internet, commercial CDs and DVDs, concerts, and shows.

Javanese compositional process can be seen essentially as an act of creative recombination—of variation on extant musical pieces. At an extremely general level one could say this of any musical tradition around the world. In Java this description holds true to a rather specific level, as shall be demonstrated below with specific examples. The nature of Javanese compositional process may be brought into clear relief by considering first some of the musical conventions of Western tradition. Awareness of our own musical assumptions will sharpen our perception of features of another musical tradition.

Communication essentially involves a language or a symbolism whether this be a spoken dialect, a morse code signal or a chain of musical sounds. When we are expressing ourselves in language and other signs, our words, phrases and utterances may be said to form a pattern—a pattern of relationships. Much of this patterning does not rest in the definition and choice of units alone, but in its whole syntax. Defined by Carnap (1929), syntactics aims at all the purely formal aspects of language; that is, anything concerning signs and their orderings, but having no reference to designate real or imagined.

During a mission sponsored by Unesco, I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with some traditional types and styles of singing in Mongolia. The Mongols have an extraordinarily complex and developed musical tradition, and some of its types are of great interest for ethnomusicologists. I want to present to you two styles of singing which are closely associated with certain types of songs.

The first is called “long chant” and ranks with the most archaic and most developed types of the Mongols. It is a song in stanza form with a free, rubato performance having long sustained notes: just like repercussions, ornamented by fiorituri, and giving the impression of an instrumental style. They are produced by a particular setting of the larynx. But its most impressive feature is its wide range. Some singers extend the compass of songs by using the falsetto extremely vigorously. Thus a voice can range over as many as three octaves.

In October 2009, the genre ca trù of the Việt people was listed as a part of the World's Intangible Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding due to its uniqueness, its importance to the cultural identity of its bearers, and its alarming degree of disappearance. In the relevant proposal submitted to the UNESCO Secretariat, the genre was officially called “ca trù singing,” due to the proposer's emphasis on its vocal qualities. Since the syllable ca already means “singing” or “chanting,” I forgo “singing” as being redundant. Furthermore, it is a complex genre that includes interaction with a lutenist and with a drummer, not to mention that the singer herself plays a compulsory bamboo slab. Thus, “ca trù singing” does not reflect the intended content. It is not the “singing” alone that is highly endangered. And it is not the singing alone that needs to be safeguarded for its uniqueness. Playing the đàn đáy lute is not only an essential constituent but an indivisible part of ca trù, and it is indeed forced to experience the same fate as the singing due to the fact that this long-necked lute is almost exclusively used for only one traditionally distinct genre. Whenever ca trù is mentioned, the đàn đáy as an object will become a symbol for this cultural treasure of the Việt people as depicted in journals and newspapers. The automatic association of the đàn đáy with ca trù indicates an ambiguity in the Vietnamese public's assumptions about ca trù: on the one hand, it is taken to be a traditional vocal practice; on the other, it is acknowledged to be an ensemble of which the đàn đáy is an essential component.

This work is an attempt to find relations between ecological conditions, adaptive systems and musical practices. I examine the hypothesis that the Wichi aborigines of the centre of the Province of Formosa, Argentina, have adopted a common policy to handle their survival resources, their symbolic resources and their musical resources. The aim is to gather evidence to support the notion that policies applying to several aspects of Wichi life, such as everyday subsistence chores, mobility, religious activities, and so on, also apply to their musical practices. They use an active strategy to approach and solve situations on the spot, a predisposition to base their behaviour on an open agenda. At the level of their musical practices, such strategy becomes evident both in the succession of actions conforming the events, and in the structuring of their songs. This open agenda strategy became, while I stayed in the Wichi settlements, one of the clearest conditionings of the ethnographic experience. On one hand, my anxiety to minimise uncertainty and “maximise” the field work yield led me to seek, with little success, a predictable working context in terms of planned actions and temporal organisation. This clashed head on with the attitude of my Wichi collaborators. On the other hand, though the levels of anxiety decreased after a year's experience, the problem persisted now in the form of a number of questions that became more and more important as my research progressed. Gradually, the upset caused by the impossibility to control the time of the appointed interviews, and of knowing whether next morning the person I was to see to, for instance, tape the songs he/she remembered from youth, was still in the settlement or had ‘up and gone’ several miles away to visit some relative, gave way to a series of questions. How pervasive was this open agenda strategy in the Wichi world? Were musical practices also imprinted by this strategy? Could this explain the cultural coherence of the Wichi society? Finally, was it possible to imagine and/or understand human groups in terms of cultural coherence? In an attempt to answer these questions, I examine the concept of cultural coherence, provide a brief description of the Wichi ecological conditions and adaptive system, and then explain their open agenda strategy and how it also applies to some musical practices.

How does the enmeshment of a performance tradition within a broader matrix of societal concerns operate in an era of rapid change? What are the implications of this enmeshment for the viability of a tradition? This essay offers a few thoughts on these questions and on the subject of change in general, using the gong tradition of the Uma' Jalan subgroup of the Kenyan people of East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case in point. As cogently stated in the introductory comments to Judith Becker's 1988 article, “Earth, Fire, Sakti, and the Javanese Gamelan”: “Outside of ritual, instruments nearly always have associations of class, of hierarchy, thus reinforcing the rankings of men and women within a society. Everywhere, musical instruments are embedded within the systems of thought that organize and give coherence to a particular world view” (Becker 1988: 385). Becker subsequently illustrated this phenomenon through an analysis of the making and the maker of the Javanese gamelan. The analysis I present here is in the same vein as Becker's in that it also concerns Indonesia, gongs, and the significance of sound instruments and instrumental expression beyond the performance event itself. However, in contrast to Becker's piece, I examine a gong tradition that has been cultivated by a different people in quite a different environment, and I use this tradition specifically to address the issue of musical change.

Investigations made in the Soli area of Zambia during 1968 yielded songs in a number of different languages. There were songs in Soli, songs in Lenje, songs in a mixture of these two languages, songs in Karanga (one of the Shona group of languages of Rhodesia), and songs in Ndebele (one of the Zulu group of languages found in Rhodesia and South Africa).

The idea of comparing Indian songs with those of Siberia and China as a means of discovering the origin of the former occurred to me only recently, that is since 1920, though abundance of materials has been at hand for years. Nearly 1,000 native songs of British Columbia and Alaska have been recorded for the National Museum of Canada since 1912, and many others are preserved in the collections of the United States and Germany. Many ancient Chinese and Japanese songs have been marketed by the phonograph companies. In addition, over 100 Siberian songs were collected by the Russian exile, Jochelson, for the Jesup Expedition more than sixty years ago and the records were stored at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I had duplicates made of these for our National Museum, and I understand that the original Edison phonograph records are now preserved at Indiana University.

In Eastern Moravia and districts still further east, we find a special type of rhythmical accompaniment in folk dance-music, performed by second fiddle and bass in a string ensemble. Each bow-stroke (both down and up) regularly combines two rhythmic values with the accent on the second element. Two bow-strokes, first down, then up, correspond to a single two-four bar. Variant types of this accompaniment are also found in Hungarian and Rumanian folk music. In some districts in Slovakia, it is referred to as duvaj, perhaps an attempt to express its character onomatopoeically.

The duvaj-accompaniment has distinctive characteristics in each district. This is clearly shown by the optical recordings of changes in sound intensity (Fig. 1). The first example (upper tracing of five bars) comes from Eastern Slovakia (Vyšné Raslavice); the second (lower tracing of eight bars), is from Central Slovakia (Hrochot pod Polanou). In the second example, irregular sub-division within the bar is shown.

The process called by Karaite Jews from Cairo “Our twentieth century exodus” (El-Kodsi 1987: 294) was an extreme case of a refugee movement which culminated in the near-total displacement of an entire ethnic-religious community from its most important center. Throughout the ensuing process of individual resettlement and communal reorganization traditional music has played a significant role. This essay will consider the specific conditions both affecting music and affected by music throughout a generation of refugee movement.

The Central Australian aborigines make remarkable use of slight pitch alterations in their singing. It was this feature of their music which prompted me to make a more accurate and detailed study of the scales used in the songs I have already transcribed from T. G. H. Strehlow's collection of recordings.

The method used to determine the accurate frequency of all notes was as follows. An audio oscillator type A57321 was warmed, then plugged through a speaker alongside which another speaker reproduced the required notes from the recording. (The speed of the turntable was checked before use.) Each note of the chosen verse was taken separately and repeated until the note produced by the oscillator corresponded to it. Here some error could occur, as it was impossible to have the two notes sounding together for any length of time. It was therefore necessary to sound one and immediately follow it by the other.