Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the “hope,” as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape.

There are now over 14 million refugees worldwide,1 “a staggering mass larger than the population of most of the countries of the world” (Smyser 1987: 3). Assuming that music is part of the cultural life of these populations, do they—as refugees and as a group distinct from other migrants—qualify for ethnomusicological attention? This is the question that this paper intends to address.

The fixed pitch instruments of Java are justly famous for the flexibility of their tuning. The absolute pitches of various ensembles differ substantially, and within an ensemble, tones of a given name vary greatly in pitch when produced on different instruments. Causes for these differences include the gradual changes which occur in the metals used in the instruments’ manufacture, and the high value placed on the production of acoustical beats among the instruments of a single ensemble (Kunst 1973:251; Hood 1966:31–33). Concordant with this diversity is the practice of assigning proper names, such as “Venerable Dark Cloud”, to individual gamelans.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam has, according to various estimates, between 900 million and 1.4 billion adherents in more than fifty countries, making it the second-largest religion in the world. Rap music and hip-hop youth culture have also, in their brief history, achieved global status, as the essays in Tony Mitchell's edited volume Global Noise (2001b) illustrate. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-standing world religion Islam and the more recently global musical genre of rap have intersected in various ways. Both the religion and the musical genre have spread over the globe as people and ideas move around, and people use the material and expressive resources at their disposal in practices of identity construction. It is not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical that some people may find it useful and compelling to imagine their identities using both Islam and rap music.

The term “traditional music” is widely used in musicological discourse as well as in everyday conversations, and is, indeed, in the name of our organisation: the International Council for Traditional Music.1 It was also used in the titles of classic studies of Asian music by our elders, such as Yi Hye-gu (1981), Kishibe Shigeo (1969), William Malm (1959), A. C. Scott (1967, 1969, 1975), David Morton (1976), Judith Becker (1980), Terry Miller (1985), and others, and in the titles of many journal articles. In short, the term is at the core of the discipline of ethnomusicology and for this organisation.

“Ethnomusicological theory,” despite its name and despite the fact that it in some ways permeates our field, has yet to take firm root in our disciplinary imagination. Indeed, the phrase appears to be used rarely, in comparison to references to an unmodified “theory” in or for ethnomusicology. Minimally, ethnomusicology today engages with three types of theory: social theory, music theory, and discipline-specific ethnomusicological theory. Unmodified references to theory have tended to obfuscate the nature of ethnomusicological theory and have left ethnomusicologists a bit unsure, and perhaps even insecure, about the relevance and place of theory, however understood, in their work.

Music education in Turkey was the subject of intense public debate during the 1920's. After the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, some music educators altered the established music curriculum to suit the political sensibilities of the new republican élite: an élite that viewed Ottoman music (alaturka) as the symbolic capital of a benighted imperial past, considered western music (alafranga) as the appropriate musical expression of a modern nation state, and sought, accordingly, to revolutionize Turkish musical instruction within the context of a Fine Arts Academy. While alaturka was not completely expunged from the canonic realm, it was classicized and classified to suit the modernist predilections of republican orthodoxy. In this paper, I will examine the debate that surrounded the establishment of a new musical institution in İstanbul. I will show how different conceptions of musical instruction disclosed competing cultural perspectives which had existed in the nineteenth century but which were now expressed within the unifying parameters of republican discourse. Further, I will demonstrate the ways in which this discourse was manipulated by contemporary commentators to validate individual aesthetic preferences and to denigrate aberrant musical practices with taxonomic rigor. In short, I contend that the polemics surrounding the establishment of a Fine Arts Academy reveal the discursive character of taste and the economic constitution of fine music.

Applied ethnomusicology has a special relevance for studies on music and minorities. What constitutes this relevance in particular cases was the focus of a plenary panel discussion at the 38th World Conference of the ICTM in Sheffield in 2005, which explored cultural, social, political, and economic issues pertinent to the musical life of minority groups within the context of a larger (majority) society. Panel participants addressed the topic from the perspective of their individual research fields and the different minority groups they have worked with: Adelaida Reyes provided the example of refugee camps, Stephen Wild of the Rom ceremony of Australian Aborigines, and John O'Connell of a Song for Peace by a Kurdish singer. The aim was to contribute to discourses on applied ethnomusicology in the light of theoretical and methodological insights gained through studies of music and minorities.

Turkish political influence in Romania from the 16th Century until 1881 is well documented. Historical records also provide numerous references to Turkish music in Romania, which together with certain survivals in the form of instruments and musical forms serve to delineate the broader outlines of the potential area of influence of Turkish music on certain Romanian musical practices. In this presentation I shall attempt to gather together some of the surviving historical evidence for Turkish influence in Romania and subsequently to describe some previously undocumented surviving musical practices.

This article sketches the history of Hong Kong Cantopop songs, which directly address topics such as Hong Kong's political future and the ongoing emigration wave.2 The term “Cantorock” was first used by Billboard correspondent Hans Ebert in 1974, who noted the emergence of Hong Kong's own locally produced rock music. The “Cantorock” style was related to American and British rock of that period and characterized by electric guitars and heavy percussion. By 1978, the style of locally produced popular music in Hong Kong had become one similar to British-American soft-rock, as had Japanese pop music earlier, prompting Ebert to revise his description of such music to “Cantopop.” Cantopop subsequently evolved on its own in the 1980s, although it still borrowed musical elements and instrumentation from Western and Japanese popular music. The distinct Japanese influence on Cantopop is exemplified by quasi-pentatonic melodies and almost exclusively amorous lyrics. Some Cantopop songs are pop or rock versions of traditional Chinese folk tunes. Others are borrowed Western pop tunes set to new Cantonese lyrics.3 The market for Cantopop is not limited only to Hong Kong: it extends into Southeast Asian countries and Chinese urban areas in Europe and America (i.e., London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, etc.). The business of Cantopop has been lucrative since the late 1970s, when popular culture became subsumed under large-scale commercial enterprises in Hong Kong. During the 1980s, local television stations, film production companies, and the popular music industry flourished as Hong Kong became increasingly prosperous.

The breakdance data in this article is based on dance anthropological fieldwork I carried out in 1984 among a group of breakdancers in Palmerston North, New Zealand. The understanding of identity is drawn primarily from their experiences, which may differ in degree from those of breakdancers elsewhere in New Zealand.

Deriving from the Greek word aisthetikos, which deals with “sense perception”, the term aesthetics is now used in a variety of ways. When brought into English and other European languages in the nineteenth century, “aesthetic” was used to indicate the response to art and was especially concerned with beauty. Although still used in that way, the term “aesthetics” has also taken on the trappings of a philosophical system, often stated as the philosophy of beauty and good taste. A philosophical system is derived from a set of principles, thus a philosophy of aesthetics must be based on aesthetic principles.

This study is an attempt to gain insight into an aspect of the process of improvisation in Middle Eastern music. In contrast to a number of studies which generalize about this topic, the purpose here is to provide concentrated documentation on the way in which a single Arabic performer improvises in one maqam, using one form or genre. In this respect, our study is somewhat similar to Nettl and Foltin, which attempts to show the range of improvisatory techniques and of performance types used by Persian musicians when performing one portion of a dastgāh or mode, the darāmad of chahārgāh. It is also related to a study by Ruth Katz which compares two generations of singers from a limited population group, performing one genre in an Arabic-Jewish musical tradition.

This essay is presented as a token of gratitude to my father, Paul Nettl (1889-1972) author of Mozart und die königliche Kunst (Berlin: F. Wunder, 1932), Mozart in Böhmen (Prague: Neumann, 1938), and Mozart and Masonry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957); and as homage to Anthony Burgess, author of Napoleon Symphony (1974), and to Claude Lévi-Strauss, author of “The ‘Good Manners’ Sonata” “Fugue of the Five Senses” and “The Opossum's Cantata” in his famous book, The Raw and the Cooked (English translation New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

In the last decade some of the most significant research in ethnomusicology has resulted from anthropologically orientated inquiries into the nature of musical cognition. We have witnessed the development of a “cognitive ethnomusicology”; based on the exploration of emic notions about music. Some studies have been directed specifically to explore these cognitive representations, for example: Zemp (1979) on the panpipe ensembles of the ‘Are’ are; Feld (1981) on descriptions of melodic contour amongst the Kaluli of New Guinea, and Sakata (1983) on musical ethnosemantics amongst Persian speakers in Afghanistan. Others have tackled these issues as part of wider ranging studies, such as Blacking (1967:20-1) on the naming of pipes in the end-blown reed-pipe ensembles of the Venda, and Berliner (1978:2-7, 54-9) on the system of note names for the keys on the Shona mbira.

Flows of money and resources receive increasing treatment in music; however, lack of money and resources is rarely discussed comprehensively. This special half-issue of the Yearbook for Traditional Music titled “Music and Poverty” aims towards formulating a nuanced understanding of music and poverty relationships. This collection of articles considers what the complex theoretical issue of poverty can add to understandings of music and musical cultures, and vice versa. To this end, “Music and Poverty” builds on music-research publications that mention poverty and a growing number of scholarly studies of music that provide valuable information about music-of-poverty contexts. Although poverty has long formed a comprehensive focus of cognate disciplines of ethnomusicology, especially anthropology and sociology, and of studies in policy, economics, human rights, and health, most of ethnomusicology has yet to consider poverty explicitly or in detail, to open up multiple issues involved in it, and to draw on an extensive poverty literature relevant to culture.

Studies of the musical instruments of Africa by Kirby, Wachsmann, Maquet, Solderberg and others, have demonstrated that, in addition to drums, examples of all the main classes of musical instruments are to be found in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to drums, there is a wide variety of idiophones (including xylophones), as well as various types of lutes, zithers, flutes, etc.

In spite of this variety, there appears to be a widespread tendency to use these instruments not in large heterogeneous ensembles, but in homogeneous ensembles, or in limited combinations in which one type of instrument predominates. There are, for example, ensembles of drums or xylophones, ensembles of flutes or trumpets, or ensembles in which these are combined with “secondary” instruments—usually of a percussive nature. Here and there a flute, a fiddle or a lute may be found in a secondary role in an ensemble, with the function of providing particular effects or enriching the texture of the music.