In many parts of Polynesia dance is well known as a highly structured activity with precise choreography and meticulous movements, performed by large (or small) groups with precision timing—characterized by Captain Cook in Tonga as follows: “All their motions were performed with such justness that the whole party moved and acted as one man” (Beaglehole 1967: 109). On the other hand, Polynesian dancers are also well known for their ability to perform spontaneously in dances “improvised” for the occasion, such as at a Hawaiian lū'au or in a Samoan siva. This paper will attempt to separate these two activities by cultural categories in order to understand more fully the cultural implications of improvisation in Polynesian dance. Dance in Hawai'i and Tonga will be emphasized; they constitute the geographical focusses of the author's research.2 However, at least some of the concepts developed should have general applicability throughout Polynesia.

The occurrence of polyphony in Yoruba choral music is significant for many reasons. First, it is almost entirely absent in traditional folk songs and is probably restricted to a small section of the Yoruba community. Secondly, in recent years polyphonic singing has become one of the essential features of a type of popular music, known among the Yoruba as juju. Although this form of music is fairly well distributed geographically, it is perhaps unique in popular folksong in its use of polyphony. It also differs from traditional polyphonic song in that it can be more easily identified with Western influences.

Of seven distinct bodies of vocal music and one body of instrumental music recognized and separately classified by the Tsonga of Mozambique and the Northern Transvaal, beer-drink music is the most often performed and comprises about 40% of the total folksong repertoire of about five hundred items (Figure 1). The other musical styles are exorcism music, girls’ initiation music, children's songs, solo instrumental music, boys’ drumming school music, and circumcision school music (Figure 2). The order given reflects the estimated man-hours of performance (the circumcision school is organized only every four or five years), and it coincides roughly with sample rankings obtained from informants during the period 1968–70. Variations of the ranking were some women's claim that girls’ initiation music is more important than exorcism music, and some men's claim that muchongolo (the national dance performed at beer-drinks) is more important than beer-songs or any other single category.

Design in Acehnese dance, music, and visual arts is guided by four general concepts of space. The upstream-downstream concept, governed by the centuries-old tendency to travel to the forests upstream and the coastal towns downstream, is associated with Animist-Hindu-Buddhist mysticism and commercial success respectively, resulting in methods of creating arts and crafts that belong either to upstream or downstream areas or both (in the latter case, for example, in the making of the great frame drums). Traces of the cardinal directional concept of space, with a similar Animist-Hindu-Buddhist background, link the directions to dominant colours used in artists' costumes, performance arena backdrops, embroideries, paintings, and other arts and crafts. The geometric concept governs formations of dancer-musicians and musician-dancers in a performance arena, as well as some traditional visual art designs and some modern paintings. Probably dating back to the pre-Dông-son era (before c. 300 B.C.E.), this concept is expressed in various linear, circular, square, and concentric designs. Finally, the central-point-in-a-circle concept of space is believed to have its parallels in Perso-Arabic thinking and points to Aceh's links with Persian, Moghul, Turkish, and Arabic cultures over the past millennium. It governs mosque-centred town planning, some visual art designs and some formations of dancers and musicians who circle around their leader at the centre point. Parallels between the Acehnese performing and visual arts lie in their application of the principle of freedom versus form. The creative invention and free ornamentation of leading singers and dancers contrast with the melodic and textual symmetry, disciplined compactness, and cyclic redundancy of their group followers, just as the artistic creator of a visual artwork invents an original design within stylistic limits while also using some cyclically repetitive border designs.

This paper documents the changes throughout the twentieth century in the processes of transmission of musical compositions from composers to performers in the Cairene musical category of al-mūsīḳa al-‘arabiyyah.2 It also examines the impact of these changes on music sound.

People of north-western China sing what they call hua'er or shaonian songs, hua'er meaning “flower” (suggesting “beautiful female”) and shaonian “youth”. (For convenience, I shall refer here to all these songs by the former name.) This article first introduces the hua'er phenomenon and surveys the current state of relevant research. It then raises and discusses two issues linked to the hua'er that have been largely ignored to the present: (1) local sexual customs and (2) economic, technological and political influences on the hua'er song culture and its research. I wish to show how shifting scholarly interests, economical and technological changes and political pressures have shaped the largely Chinese scholarship into an important folk song genre over seven decades. The present discussion is based on my own research since 1978, including field work undertaken in the region in 1982, and the results of other researchers' work to date, including published articles and reports and unpublished conference papers.

In the last two decades, the Nicaraguan experience demonstrated the proposition that periods of dramatic political and economic changes are also times when symbols of national unity, social identity and ethnic solidarity become questioned, their meaning(s) recast and their import heightened. The mobilizing potential of expressive forms encoded with notions of tradition can make such forms especially important when these periods involve an accelerated negotiation of what constitutes national identity. Such was the case in Nicaragua, where the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty and beginning of the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979 ushered in an era of intense and unprecedented engagement with cultura popular (popular, or people's culture), forms of expressive culture identified with the clases populares (the popular classes.) Performances that could be classified as folkloric, or típicos (typical or native to the area) became the focus of attention by those geographically removed as well as socially distanced from the traditional performers of these expressive forms. Father Ernesto Cardenal (1982:252), one of the revolution's principal cultural visionaries, described the early results of this process: “Our patrimony, which before was unseen, has been made manifest” (“Nuestro patrimonio, que antes no se veía, se hizo presente”).

The maqamat of Arab music are generally understood as melody types, similar to the Hindu ragas and the Greek nomoi. Yet, modern theory tends to treat them quite abstractly as scales in the Western sense. Even learned Arab musicians, when asked about the interrelationships of different songs in a given maqam, will point to a scale comprised of fixed interval relationships as the only binding factor, seemingly undisturbed by the fact that the improvisatory sections of songs—for instance, their openings or interludes like the ya-leil or the maual—are clearly based on specific melody types.

The basic studies of Idelsohn, Farmer and others, though discussing various aspects of the maqamat, say little about the nature of the living music. Hampered by the lack of precise tools of measurement, these pioneers failed to answer a number of pertinent questions. For example, do all songs written in a particular maqam share common melodic elements, and, if so, to what extent are these fixed for a particular social group ? Such patterns might be of many different types, possessing the most varied tonal and rhythmic characteristics.

This article documents relationships, strategies, and activities involved in developing and carrying out collaborative community-engaged research for reconciliation, based on Indigenous methodologies and research-creation. It documents an example of Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration in Unama’ki (also known as Cape Breton, Canada), providing data towards the refinement of models of research designed to foster reconciliation, and contributing to a literature on Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaborations in ethnomusicology and related fields. While revealing some challenges in the process with respect to addressing local needs, it also describes transformations that can be achieved through effective collaboration, including ways in which universities can be involved.

Musicologists are beginning to be disturbed by cases of Western artists using music from other parts of the world for profit. For example, in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Hugo Zemp (1996) critically elaborates the recent case of sampling by two French musicians of a Solomon Islands lullaby that resulted in millions of dollars in profit through CD sales; Timothy Taylor, in his “When We Think about Music and Politics: The Case of Kevin Volans,” accuses South African composer Kevin Volans of “appropriating” various “indigenous” African elements in his music without authority (1995:514). Much of the debate about how such cases should be arbitrated has focused on the culturally specific lineaments of the current copyright law — its origins in European book publishing, the signing of the Berne Convention of 1886, and so on — and is thus taken to be inherently ethnocentric. In his article, “The Problem of Oral Copyright: The Case of Ghana” (Frith 1993:146-158), John Collins raises the problem of global copyright protection in the context of “Eurocentric assumptions that a specific art-work or intellectual idea is created by a single or restricted number of individuals who are therefore easily identifiable” (1993:146). Similarly, Simon Frith, in his introduction to Music and Copyright, voices a suspicion about the role that copyright law plays in ostensibly protecting artists and publishers from exploitation and shows instead how the law is implicated in economic exploitation on a global scale: “[F]rom an international perspective, copyright can be seen as a key plank in Western cultural and commercial imperialism” (1993:xiii). Thus, according to Frith, the copyright law “is increasingly seen as a weapon used by the multinationals against small nations” (ibid.).

The subject of this article is the history of a single song, Bengawan Solo ('River Solo'), written by the Javanese composer Gesang Martohartono (see illustration 1) in September 1940, just before the Japanese occupation of Java from early 1942 to 1945.

During the last decades, rapidly growing interest in folk song styles has manifested itself in a number of fruitful investigations representing many different approaches. The Cantometrics project, for instance, starts from the premise that “song style symbolizes and reinforces certain important aspects of social structure in all cultures” (Lomax 1968:vii). Using recordings of music as primary source of data, Alan Lomax and his co-workers have developed a method for “systematically and holistically describing the general features of accompanied or unaccompanied song performances” (op.cit.:34). Thus, the Cantometrics project focuses on the song performance in its cultural and social context. mance in its cultural and social context.

What can one “know” about any sort of music by means of musical analysis? What relationship can that “knowledge” bear to the knowledge of performers? These questions, pertinent perhaps to all musicologists, arise particularly strongly for me because for the past three years my work on Central Australian music has involved analysing documents of fieldwork carried out by other researchers (mainly Catherine Ellis) during the 1960s and early 70s, despite the fact that I have neither field experience in Central Australia nor extensive performance experience with performers of Central Australian traditional music. What follows is not intended as an apologia for “armchair” ethnomusicology, but rather as an attempt to open up, through discussion of the problematics of historical ethnomusicology, philosophical questions I believe to be central to the ethnomusicological enterprise.

Over a decade ago, UNESCO's Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage professed that “the processes of globalization and social transformation” along with “the phenomenon of intolerance” were giving rise to “grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage” of the world (2003a). The Convention represented an international acknowledgement of the precarious predicament of many cultural expressions across the world, from languages, music, and dance traditions to worldviews and traditional environmental knowledge. While ethnomusicologists have been engaging for many decades with preservation and protection mechanisms for musical traditions, particularly those of ethnic and minority peoples, the 2003 Convention (and the suite of subsequent UNESCO and UN treaties around culture and heritage) provided further impetus for ethnomusicological engagement in safeguarding and sustainability work. Theoretical and applied research in this area has grown significantly in the last ten to fifteen years on topics ranging from music and tourism (e.g., Connell and Gibson 2005), music as heritage (e.g., Howard 2006), music and cultural rights (e.g., Weintraub and Yung 2009), and music revivals (e.g., Bithell and Hill 2014), to activist or community-oriented approaches to music sustainability (e.g., Pettan and Titon 2015; Schippers and Grant 2016).

In the twenty-first century, the term “kuchipudi” refers to a style of dance, a South Indian classical genre which, to the untrained eye, is indistinguishable from its better-known cousin, bharatanatyam. After India achieved Independence from the British in 1947, kuchipudi came to be known as a dance style synonymous with the Telugu-speaking state of Andhra Pradesh. Kuchipudi's metonymic status reveals a broader logic of linguistic, geographically grounded identitarianism; indeed, the dance known today as kuchipudi is said to hail from a physical place called Kuchipudi, an otherwise nondescript fanning village located about fifty kilometres southeast of Vijayawadain central Andhra Pradesh (see figure 1).

Histories of colonial cultural erasure, unsuccessful decolonisation or postcolonialism and rapid modernisation are typically seen as the challenges to sustaining Indigenous traditional musics (Harrison, in press). The Indigenous peoples of Canada have experienced colonial assimilationist policies of government and church, including residential schools that took children away from their families and forbade song, dance and language. These policies resulted in musics and even entire cultures being erased. Although there have been recent improvements in Scandinavia, similar kinds of discrimination happened where the traditional Sámi vocal form, joik (in pan-Sámi juoiggas) was long (and in some cases, still is) regarded as sinful, and Sámi children were forbidden to use their mother tongues at school (for example, from about 1850 to 1980 during Norway’s Fornorskning or Norwegianisation policy). In recent years, the Indigenous musics of Canada and the Nordic countries, among others, have reflected, articulated and interpellated sociocultural interrelations and politics (Diamond 2002; Diamond et al. 2018; Harrison 2009; Hilder 2012, 2015; Moisala 2007; Ramnarine 2009, 2017), and Indigenous artists have taken action on politicised issues through a range of contemporary and flourishing artistic expressions (Robinson and Martin 2016).

In the ongoing anthropological conversation concerning the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, perplexing issues of social identity 100m large. Beginning with the so-called “Murngin controversy” from the 1930s to the 1950s, some of anthropology's leading lights have attempted to sort out the complexities of Yolngu marriage, the subsection system, the kinship system and local organisation, including W. Lloyd Warner, Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edmund Leach. The debates have undergone considerable changes since those days, but the continual analysis and re-assessment of Yolngu sociality continues to the present day in the work of Nancy Williams, Howard Morphy and Ian Keen.

In present times, it may be surprising to see the word “origins” in the title of an ethnomusicological article. Reviewing historical and current hypotheses on the origins of song, or music more generally, it becomes apparent that most authors interpret a possible bifurcation between (spoken) language and (sung) music as the most plausible point from which “music” evolved. Curt Sachs states polemically, “Music began with singing” (1943:21). Such statements beg questions about the definition of music, not just origins. I will, however, forgo such questions in this article, concentrating instead on the prehistoric and contemporary fluidity between speech and song. I understand these terms as poles on a continuum, ranging from everyday fugitive speech to formalized speech (such as invocations, recitations, chanting) and, finally, to song. In this article, I suggest that seeking to understand the moment in which this bifurcation, or rather spreading out, of utterances occurred is a productive task. Understanding the differences between speech and song is a starting point for unpacking how these distinct phenomena emerged. Alternatively, thinking about those prehistoric times when speech and song emerged may support insights about modern meaning and the function of utterances that occupy a liminal space between speech and song.

In 1963 the Institute for Scientific Cinematography received the financial means to carry out its first expeditions to make documentary films, and the first comprehensive plans were made for the visual and aural recording of the music of various ethnic groups and of entire populations. Since then, four expeditions have taken us to Thailand, Chad, Hadramout, and the Ivory Coast.