In the musical traditions of the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, the evocation of ancestrally-significant places is of primary ideological and aesthetic importance. This is primarily done through song texts, when a singer “paints a picture” of a place in the mind's eye of the audience; when done with great skill, such evocation can produce strong feelings of nostalgia as listeners recall those places and the personal and ancestral events which took place there. Musical instruments can also be used in this way, either through tropes in the song texts, which make reference to the instrument and its ancestral significance, or through the actual sound of the instrument as an enacted trope during the musical performance itself. In either case, the mention or use of musical instruments can resonate powerfully with ideas about ancestors, people and places, making musical instruments important symbols in Yolngu culture.

Artists, scholars and audiences in Aceh, the northernmost province of Sumatra, conceive of their percussive, wind and string instruments as symbolising Aceh's “glorious past” and attach a variety of metaphorical and analogous meanings to them. Implicit in the culture, and formulated explicitly by Acehnese scholars, is a classification that divides the instruments at the most general level into three main categories, or metaphorical socio-historical streams: those associated primarily with (i) the pre-Islamic ancestral and nature venerating (animist-Hindu) stream, practices, or presumed origins (ii) the Sunni and/or Syiah Islamic stream (including borderline cases of instruments that straddle both Islamic and animist practices), and (iii) the European or Western socio-historical stream. Organological sub-categories at the second level of categorical thinking are based on an instrument's manner of exciting sound, while the third level comprises the instrumental types with their local names. The instruments are also attributed with broader, changing sociocultural meanings, including gender and class divisions.

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.

The noted New Zealand Maori authority Te Rangi Hiroa declared that the rich heritage of traditional instruments was now silent, they were no longer played, they would be ‘forever mute'(Buck 1949:270). Among the predominant flutes and trumpets of this instrumentarium were voice modifiers (jews harp, mouth bow), whizzers and whirlers, and percussion (rattlers, castanets, gong, and other ‘found’ instruments). Most enigmatic of all was the pūtωrino, the so-called bugle-flute, perhaps unique in the world's instruments, a combination of three instruments—flute, trumpet and voice modifier. A description of the sound of this instrument 'Me te wai e utuutu ana' (like water ‘bubbling into a calabash held under the surface of the water’ Anderson 1934: 275) provides our title, and one of the signposts in the revival of the pūtωrino.

The didjeridu has accumulated considerable symbolic capital in recent years. Its status as an icon of Aboriginality, musical tradition and ritual significance has embedded it firmly within the Australian national imagination. However, the didjeridu did not hold centre stage as a symbol of Indigeneity until fairly recently, when it moved from the periphery of the Australian continent to come to stand for Australianness at its centre. The didjeridu has crossed internal boundaries altering perceptions of music and music making in different parts of Aboriginal Australia. It has crossed national and international boundaries through adaptations of its shape, tone and rhythmic contours, and it has taken on new cultural histories as a result of its global appropriation by non-Indigenous peoples. Globalisation presents both a threat and an opportunity for the recontextualisation of Indigenous meanings around the didjeridu.

Among all cultures, perhaps none were more promoted as artistic and natural paradise than Bali. Fusing the mysticism of the East with the physical splendor of the South Seas, this former “isle of bare breasts” received layers of romantic accolades over the last eighty years, not only from the tourist industry but also from such respected figures as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Walter Spies, Miguel Covarrubias, and Colin McPhee. These scholars spoke of Bali as a “special paradise”, how all Balinese are musicians and dancers, and how they are in perfect harmony with their environment and so graceful that every movement is like a dance (see DeZoete and Spies 1973 [1938] and McPhee 1970 [1938]). Such statements typified the romantic orientalism of the time. Mead (1970 [1940]: 340) later reflected upon Bali's allure: