Ethnomusicology as an academic discipline was introduced to the Portuguese university system for the first time in 1981 with the founding of the musicology department at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. However, local interest in the documentation and study of Traditional Portuguese Music (TPM) goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the 1870s, several aspects of TPM from rural areas have been documented and investigated by Portuguese musicologists, composers, music teachers, anthropologists, folklorists, folk music enthusiasts and “local erudites”.3 In addition, a handfull of foreign researchers have published on TPM, both in Portugal and abroad.

‘Musical discourse’ can be discourse about music, or the discourse of music. My argument belongs to the first, but is chiefly about the second. It is musical discourse about the discourse of music. It uses the language of words to discuss the language of music. Musical grammars can organize words as well as verbalize music; and so its introduction, this prelude, these opening words, use some common structures of the discourse of music to discourse about music.

1. A PERSONAL NOTE. While, during the last fifty years, the relation between music and the visual arts has become a not uncommon subject of scholarship, the same cannot be said of dance and the visual arts. A glance through the many volumes of Dance Chronicle yields almost no articles on the subject, and a publication like Dance history research: perspective from related arts and disciplines (1970)—surely a title which leads one to expect a discussion of dance iconography—does not contain anything related to the subject, not even in the contribution by the art historian: he does not mention dance with a word!

This article considers the role of lute culture (specifically, the lyra) in a Mediterranean society. Cretan lute cultures have historical roots imagined and otherwise which entangle them completely in a local musical and social world. My research into Cretan musical instrument cultures among others have demanded not only a scholarly response to new questions but also the construction and application of a broad theoretical and analytical framework with which to try and understand lute worlds. It is within this cultural and academic context, therefore, that I probe the relationship of music, technology, and the body and how these connections are configured in a Cretan-Mediterranean context, in symbol and metaphor, and as engendered and socially active, existing where musical and social practices coalesce. Therefore broader and theoretically demanding questions must form the basis of an opening discussion as defining of an approach and preparing the ground for a focussed study of the Cretan context.

Folk musicians are generally assumed to make music but not to think very much about it. Yet recent studies by Zemp (1978, 1979) and others demonstrate the existence of elaborate conceptual systems related to music in cultures without a written tradition. If the comparison between Western and a particular non-Western music theory seems invidious, it is partly because the West has a tradition of discourse about music (musica theoretica) that has existed for over 2000 years quite apart from practical music making (musica practica).

It is certainly nothing new to point out that Pygmies, hunter-gatherers of the African equatorial rainforest, are known as a people who sing and dance—in other words, who “music“†—a lot. Their music, for the most part vocal polyphony, has been abundantly recorded and reproduced on 78-rpm records and on CDs. Many

On my first research trip to Bali, Indonesia, I brought along a reasonably expensive digital metronome with the wrongheaded idea that it would somehow aid my learning gamelan music. In a completely uncharacteristic mistake, Singapore Airlines lost my luggage containing the metronome. More than once, my Balinese teachers suggested (only half-kiddingly) that the goddess of music, Saraswati, had probably had a hand in this. Many Balinese teachers have commented that their greatest pedagogical challenge is in helping their foreign students develop a sense of the fluid, flexible nature of Balinese musical time. The differences between Balinese and Euro-American musical time and their representations have partially blinded theorists to its shape, function, and significance. In his magnum opus Music in Bali (1966), Colin McPhee describes a performance that particularly delighted him:

Six years ago I reported upon an attempt to graph instantaneously a single melodic line in such a manner as to permit ready correlation with the auditory sense, without employment of costly and time-consuming photographic apparatus, film development and printmaking, their mathematical interpretation and hand-written graph. The trial was conducted in my son's radar-telescopic laboratory at Cornell University in 1949, where an assembly of separate units, currently used in his observations that happened to be available for a scant two hours one Sunday morning, was wired together. Of the three sources of input—voice, guitar and whistling—the limited filter and smoothing systems at hand gave a readable graph of the last mentioned only.

In northwest England, during the early nineteenth century, morris dancing was performed annually by young adult men in the context of a procession which called attention to the health, wealth, number, and strength of a community's menfolk. After the First World War, morris dancing could still be seen as a form of public display in the region, but it had also become the province of children of both sexes. This age and gender revision coincided with an apparent spread of morris dances within the area.

Music archaeology is an inherently collaborative endeavour, bringing together experts from an array of fields to draw inferences about the physical and social aspects of music in ancient societies. As several authors have noted (Hickmann 2002; D. Olsen 2007), music archaeology requires both data and expertise from scholars in fields as disparate as musicology, ethnography, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, and history. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of an interdisciplinary approach to music archaeology by presenting the case study of a bone flute from Oaxaca, Mexico. Employing perspectives from anthropological archaeology, iconography, ethnomusicology, and materials conservation, we describe the entire research process: from the discovery of an ancient musical instrument to interpretations about the social context of ancient music itself.

Even though poverty is most often examined in terms of a lack of material wealth and health, a growing number of studies focus on its social and cultural aspects. Nyiwul Mabughi and Tarek Selim (2006) conclude their review of approaches to poverty by listing its multiple dimensions:

Musical symbols exist. They are one of several types of a semiotic class called musical signs. Musical symbols exist for those who perceive them. Inversely, for people who do not perceive musical symbols, they do not exist. Musical phenomena are not in themselves symbols, for they only become symbols when they are interpreted as such by a mentality that has physiological contact with them. (A mentality may be biological, mechanical, or electro-mechanical.) Some human beings have acquired the habit of interpreting musical phenomena as symbols, and they are capable of recognizing this fact or of describing their habit in general ways. This essay will discuss the behaviour of those people who interpret certain musical phenomena as symbol or sign, and it will disregard all others: in conversation with people who cannot perceive the existence of musical symbols, there is neither communication nor basis for discussion.

The recent rapid development of the means of communication and the concomitant pervading influence of Western technology upon non-Western cultures has produced musical as well as economic and social change. The world's societies are now in flux and their musical traditions cannot but be affected.

In this paper no attempt will be made to discuss in any depth the acculturative process as exhibited by any one culture. It is rather my purpose to survey the scope of the changes occurring and to suggest a loose classification of the forms the changes are assuming.

The expressive culture, including the music, of the ethnic groups of the United States has not been given much scholarly attention. What little has been done has often relied on models like decline and loss of Old World traits. If revivalism is mentioned, it seems to allude to what is sometimes called “retribalization”. Few researchers have followed up on the fascination of what the Canadian folklorist Robert Klymasz called the “immigrant folklore complex.” In a 1973 article, he wrote of a “dynamic state of flux replete with the various tensions, seeming contradictions, and ambivalence that reflect the conditioning impact of the acculturative process in the New World” (Klymasz 1973:135).

Numerous theories of the sound producing mechanism of the jaw's harp have been put forward, none of which appears quite convincing or appropriate. The main reason for this seems to be that certain essentials of the making of and playing on this instrument have been neglected, underestimated or simply overlooked by the investigators. This paper represents an attempt to show some weak points of the existing theories, to describe an empiric investigation by means of electronic sound spectrographs, and finally, to establish a new general outlook on the acoustical and musical properties of the jaw's harp.

Ruslana's winning performance of “Dyki Tantsi” (Wild Dances) at the Eurovision Song Contest 2004 opened with trembity (plural; sing. trembita), alpine horns linked to, inter alia, the Hutsuls (a Ukrainian ethnic minority). However, trembity are not only used by Ruslana, but also incorporated into songs by other Ukrainian groups like Mad Heads XL's “Smereka” (2005) and Haydamaky's “Tini zabutykh predkiv” (2002). The use of local instruments and melodies in the music which Ruslana in the opening quote labels “drive-ethno-dance” is a way in which some groups from Ukraine anchor themselves. According to Armin Siebert, one of the directors of the Berlin Label Eastblok Music, which specializes in music from Eastern Europe, it is also an exciting element of Russian and Ukrainian popular music: