Over a span of twenty-five years, I had the privilege of an extraordinary association with Charles Seeger. It began with an introduction by Jaap Kunst, in 1954, and ended with a letter dictated by Seeger and typed by his secretary (but still unsigned), a few days before his death in February, 1979. In our first meeting he was a teacher. In his last letter he was a warm concerned friend, and still a teacher. To say he is missed would be as redundant as saying one misses a brother, a father, a comrade-in-arms, a colleague, a best friend.

Die Umsiedlungen im Gefolge des Zweiten Weltkrieges haben die wichtigste Quelle für die Kenntnis des älteren deutschen Volksliedes fast zur Gänze verschüttet. Ich meine jene Melodien, die seit den achtziger Jahren des vorigen Jahrhunderts in deutschen Sprachinseln Süd- und Osteuropas aufgezeichnet werden konnten (Suppan, 1962-63). Heute sind nur noch wenige ergänzende Einzelstücke von ähnlichem Wert und Alter aufzulesen. Von einem solchen Relikt, das die beiden Freiburger Volkskundler J. Künzig und W. Werner 1961 in Süddeutschland auf Tonband festhalten konnten und in dankenswerter Weise dem Referenten zur Verfügung stellten, soll hier die Rede sein: es handelt sich um das Fragment einer siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Totenklage, die der ältesten Schicht zugehört, die bisher in diesem Raum erfasst werden konnte.

In general, it can be said the Oriental has a deeper sensitivity to delicate timbres than has the Occidental. In the folk and traditional music of Japan there are innumerable exquisite combinations of timbre which make it possible to achieve delicate forms of musical expression without the help of other musical elements such as melody, rhythm, harmony and counterpoint.

In Japan's primitive conception of aesthetics, music was closely related to nature. We can find many examples wherein the actual sounds of nature have been sublimated to musical expression. This is especially true in the field of theatrical music.

Among the vast and varied song repertories of North American Indians, there is a category of songs that has received little attention from ethnomusicologists and anthropologists: the native melodies with English words. A number of these songs have been heard with amusement by workers in the field, and a few have been recorded, but to my knowledge no one has attempted to study the significance of this material and its relation to the societies that have produced it. Despite the paucity of recordings and information that precludes a comprehensive study of these interesting songs, this paper is offered as an initial and tentative effort to give form and interpretation to this material, with the hope that others may be stimulated to carry out further investigations and research.

The enigmatic union of a lyrical text with an improvisatory melody has earned for the hora lunga (or long song) a special place in the history of Rumanian folksong research. Béla Bartók first discovered this exceptional genre in the northern counties of Maramureş and Satu-Mare in the years 1912-13, and later remarked that this discovery had been the highlight of his career in Rumanian ethnomusicology (1967:24 and 1923:ii). Constantin Brailoiu (1970:405) noted the occurrence of similar improvisatory genres in other regions of Rumania, and suggested that the broader term doina be used for all such vocal improvisations, irrespective of region. In the last two decades, systematic investigations of this larger category, the doina, have been carried out by such scholars as Emilia Comişel (1959:147-74) and Mariana Kahane (1963:99-116). To facilitate a comparative study of the doina as a whole, Comişel proposed a broad classificatory scheme based on text content and social use. She also proposed an analytical framework for the study of those musical aspects which she felt were common to all doine. Kahane investigated the tonal aspects of the regional subtype found in Oltenia, and compared this specific genre with examples from Moldavia and Maramureş.

During recent years there have been two major attempts to take stock of folk music research in Austria. Walther Wünsch, former head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Theatre Arts in Graz, has reported on the history of ethnomusicology in Austria, and Walter Graf, who once held the chair of comparative musicology at Vienna University, has published an essay on comparative musicology in Austria since 1896. Neither of them, it seems to me, does complete justice to his subject, in that he limits himself to the work of those Austrian collectors, editors, and researchers who have dealt with fields other than Austria itself. Of course, there is as little agreement on the question of what really constitutes comparative musicology as there is on the definition of ethnomusicology. But for that very reason we should be careful not to ignore either the new field of “European ethnomusicology” or, in particular, those comparative studies that have dealt with the researches of Béla Bartók, Werner Danckert, Constantin Brâiloiu, Walter Wiora, and with the results of their collecting activities.

The Carpathian basin is well suited to the investigation of performing styles in folk dance, because its dance culture is relatively homogeneous despite the variety of peoples, languages and ways of life encountered in this region. This fact invites an investigation of performing styles on a comparative basis. Moreover, the performing styles of one of the most characteristic dance dialects in Central Europe deserve close attention from the viewpoint of the cultural history of Europe as a whole.

The general structure and characteristic features of the dance stock of the Carpathian basin will be here outlined, and comparative references to the neighbouring Balkan dance dialects will help to emphasize the main characteristics of and features peculiar to the area in question.