The plucked selo, a three-stringed variation of the cello, in langgam Jawa kroncong music was originally inspired by Javanese gamelan kendhang drumming. By the 1960s, however, Ki Nartosabdho had developed a style of kendhang playing that imitates the selo, often called kendhang gaya selo (selo-style drumming), bringing this musical exchange full circle. Not every piece, however, is considered suitable for this rhythmic treatment. In this article, we examine musical exchanges in a song form known as langgam Jawa between the selo and the Javanese kendhang, and investigate when drummers decide to use kendhang gaya selo in gamelan settings.

Trommeslåtter (drum tunes) have played a vital role in Norwegian traditional music for several hundred years. This article examines the development and performance of drum tunes in Norway, with a special focus on the work of Johannes Sundvor in transcribing drum music. We present several examples and analyse tunes from Sundvor’s collection. We also demonstrate how this Norwegian drum tradition is related to a tradition of European military drumming. The article concludes with a discussion of aspects of interpretation and an outline of the status of drum tunes today.

This article sets out the results of research into effort in Dhrupad, a genre of Hindustani music. I examine gestural interactions with imaginary objects that vocalists outline when engaging with melodies. The study takes an embodied cognition stance and applies thematic analysis and inductive coding to original interviews with Dhrupad musicians in India, the UK, and the Netherlands. My findings demonstrate that from the singers’ cognitive perspectives, their hand movements are deeply connected to their voices. I also offer insights on the relationships between bodily movement, sound, and imagery that are used to inform the development of effort inference models.

This article revisits the concepts of makam modality and chordal harmony, and argues for viewing interwar rebetiko as a musico-cultural amalgamation. I explore the transcendence of the theoretical incompatibility beyond the East–West dichotomy by employing the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia as a de-ideologised analytical tool. I conduct a case study of makam Sabâ and pertinent harmonisation on the guitar, by analysing two representative historical recordings from the 1930s and interpreting them within the contemporaneous musico-cultural context. As a result, I contend that the terms “equal-tempered makam” and “idiosyncratic harmonisation” mirror expressions of modal heterotopia within interwar rebetiko.

In the spirit of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály’s work, Miklós Both has been collecting folk songs in Ukraine since 2013 with the help of an international research group. The results of the collecting trips are available in the form of a modern, user-friendly online database that supports both scientific use and public education. The collection received a lot of publicity in 2017 when the Polyphony Project website was launched. The 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War also put the enterprise in the spotlight. This review highlights the scientific and pedagogical usability and importance of the Polyphony Project.