Over a large area of south-western Bulgaria, songs are mostly two-part. The first voice sings the melody; the second voice is smooth or slightly more florid, mostly on the tonic and adjacent degrees of the scale. This area can be divided into four regions, differentiated by the styles of singing in two-part songs: Pirina region, the region to the centre of western Bulgaria, and the Velingrad and Ihktiman Pazardjik regions. Each of these regions shows a different structure of two-part songs. The differences lie in harmonic and rhythmic structure, and in the range of the second voice.

The most widespread style is that of the Pirina region, characterized by the comparative restriction of the second voice.

Typical of the Velingrad region are the songs with a vigorously moving second part, ranging mainly between the first, third and fourth degrees of the scale and the leading note. Typical of the Ikhtiman region (the smallest of the four) are two-part songs with an elaborately ornamented second part woven round the melody and reaching the tonic a little before the first voice.

On the morning of 10 January 2005, a group of people boarded an open dinghy at Namatanai, located about halfway down the east coast of mainland New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. On board were the young brothers Tony and Paul Wol, musicians of the newly formed band Twinhox of Kavieng. Buoyant with the recent recording of their debut album Sorpendeng in the nation's capital, Port Moresby, the brothers had been visiting their mother's relatives in New Hanover for Christmas and New Year celebrations and were now bound for Lihir Island, returning to the home of their parents. The boat never arrived, and the travellers were never found.

Today in China, “ethnomusicology” has commonly been considered in a broad sense as a discipline covering all studies of music except Western classical music. The current article also deals with ethnomusicology in China in this broad sense.

This paper offers a brief survey of important genres of folksong in the Persian language, as presently cultivated in Khorasan (the large province in northeastern Iran). The ten transcriptions discussed in the body of the paper represent portions of a large collection of Khorasani folksong made in 1969 in and around Meshhed, a city of over 400,000 persons, and Bojnurd, a smaller town with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. As indicated in the annotations following each transcription, several of the singers recorded and interviewed in Meshhed and Bojnurd had come to these communities from other towns and villages in Khorasan and Sistan (the province immediately south of Khorasan). The repertoire of Persian folksong performed in a single community generally encompasses a variety of genres, some of which carry specific regional associations, easily (though sometimes differently) identified by singers and listeners.

Au cours de l'été 1978, nous avons mené, pendant plusieurs semaines, des investigations en milieu rural portugais. C'est la province Nord-Est du Portugal, le Tras-os-Montes, que nous avons choisie comme aire de prospection. Notre mission avait pour but de rechercher le degré de survivance de très anciennes formes poétiques du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance que l'on appelle les romances. Certains auteurs situent la naissance de ces romances avant le 15ème siècle.

Every now and then it becomes fashionable to study the processes involved in improvisation or extemporization. Any renewed interest in improvisation, for whatever reason, is usually accompanied by a renewed interest in jazz, for it is within the jazz tradition that improvisation is generally presumed to be most manifest in Western culture.

A summary will be given here of the results of folk dance research in Ethiopia, carried out during two months in the summer of 1965. In the course of the expedition, collections were made in seventeen settlements in eight different Ethiopian provinces. An outline cross-section of the fund of folk dances in Ethiopia is illustrated by approximately one hundred and fifty dance variants; these were recorded on 3,000 metres of motion pictures and several hundreds of photos, with the musical accompaniments on tape. The collection included dances of the Amhara, Tigrean, Agaw, Adare, Esa-Somalian, Kullo, and Kaficho peoples, as well as those of six different Galla tribes.

Within the varied repertoire of songs sung in the course of the traditional village wedding ceremony in Slovakia, specific songs were performed—usually by women without instrumental accompaniment—at particular, mostly ritual moments with context-appropriate texts to one or two recurring, locally identified wedding tunes called svadobné nôty. Today, these songs are still known by village people and are occasionally also performed within or outside the wedding context. Moreover, this phenomenon of a common local wedding melody seems to be spread among the wedding traditions of central, southern, and eastern Europe, sharing the name (svadobný hlas, svadbarski glas, svatovski glas) and similar features (Važanová 1999).

This paper studies the system and development of the yuebu, an official court music system during the Tang dynasty. Research on the music of the Tang dynasty has been quite abundant, mostly on the yanyue (court banquet music that was administered by the yuebu), with notable studies by scholars such as Ren Bantang (1982), Kishibe Shigeo (1973), Wang Xiaodun (1995), and Shen Dong (2000). However, previous research on music of the Tang dynasty emphasised acculturation and assimilation between China and cultures from bordering western countries; they did not look at music of the Tang court from the perspective of the yuebu as a complex bureaucratic system. Our interest focuses on yuebu as a functioning system that reflected a historically important route of transmission of traditional Chinese music. Through examining the cultural integration of several dynasties encompassing a period lasting more than three hundred years from the Han to the early Tang dynasties, as well as migration and training of the musicians of the yuebu and their method of musical transmission (particularly transmission within the family unit), this paper aims to gain an insight into the historical basis and cultural meaning of the yuebu. The discussion consists of two parts. Part one introduces the classification and the nature of the yuebu. On the one hand, as an official musical organisation in the court, the music repertory of the yuebu was the result of combinations of a variety of musical cultures from the Han to the Tang dynasties. On the other hand, as a bureaucratic organisation, yuebu represented a system consisting of “yue (music), qi (instruments), gong (musicians), and yi (uniform)”, legally sanctioned under the “yuelin (law on music)”. Part two concerns itself with the development of the yuebu in the Tang dynasty through scrutinizing the impact of migration and the training of musicians, and musical transmission during the pre-Tang era (namely, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern, and Sui dynasties). From this, the paper ventures to explore, with a musicological approach, the typical means of propagating music traditions in China via training and transmission within a relatively closed system that was self-protecting and maintained within the family unit.

The Iatmul, numbering about eight to ten thousand people, dwell in some twenty or more villages along the middle reaches of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Although comparatively little is known about so many of the hundreds of different cultural groups in Papua New Guinea today, the Iatmul have caught the attention of many ethnographers over the past fifty years. Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, for example, worked in Iatmul villages and in those of adjacent cultures in the early 1930s, and Gregory Bateson's Naven (1958) was written as a result of his observations of the Iatmul, also in the early 1930s.1 Even before the visits of Bateson and Mead, some German explorers and ethnologists had pointed out special characteristics of Middle Sepik culture (e.g., Reche 1913 and Roesicke 1914), and since the Second World War several German and Swiss anthropologists have concerned themselves with aspects of Iatmul life (Aufenanger 1960, Schuster 1965 and 1967, Hauser-Schäublin 1977, Stanek 1978, Wassmann 1978 and Weiss 1978). The main characteristics of the Iatmul language have been outlined by Laycock (1965).

On connaît les plastiques et les figures célèbres gravées dans les parois de l'époque paléolithique, c'est-à-dire créées pendant le dernier stade de la période glaciaire environ vingt cinq à dix mille ans avant Jésus-Christ. Elles nous prouvent combien on se trompe en préjugeant que l'art des ces temps ne s'élève pas au-dessus d'un niveau tout à fait primitif. Les hommes qui nous ont laissé de telles oeuvres ont-ils developpé également la musique?

Les peintures en Espagne de Test et en Afrique du nord datent d'une époque plus récente que l'art francocantabrique, mais malgré de grandes différences quelques traits principaux du style leur sont communs. Les groupes dont il s'agit n'étaient plus des chasseurs de niveau assez bas tuant le gibier de tout près à l'aide de pierres, de massues ou de lances primitives mais des chasseurs plus évolués se servant des flèches et de javelots pour atteindre le bison, le renne et d'autres grosses bêtes. Ils chassaient dans les vastes steppes et tiraient à longue distance.

Not too long ago I sent my primary research associate in Kerala, a state in southwest coastal India, a copy of my article on improvisation in tayampaka (Groesbeck 1999), a drumming genre performed in this region. One of his comments surprised me; he implied that I had focused too exclusively on improvisation and not enough on what I would call “timbre”, that is, in this case the sound qualities produced by the various hand and stick strokes on the drum. This caused me to reread some of my field materials, and in doing so I recognised that timbre, in performers’ discourse and in performance, often seemed to help create a codified emotional state among spectators, define a theatrical character, contribute to the negotiation of authenticity, or index cultural/religious and regional identity (along with other parameters). Musical meaning and affect, I realised, were partially constituted through discourse on timbre and through the timbral aspects of performance itself. So how could I have initially overlooked it? Perhaps because this parameter, so affective yet difficult to discuss analytically, has often been short-changed in musical scholarship (on South Asia and other areas), although recently ethnomusicologists have begun to take it more seriously.

The purpose of this article is to examine the study of traditional music in Greenland and thereby outline the history of traditional Greenlandic music and its present state. From the beginning of the century the study of traditional Greenlandic music has primarily taken place within the framework of the Danish Folklore Archives in Copenhagen. Many collectors were sent out by this institution, and nearly all of the sound recordings made in Greenland since 1905 have been deposited there.

The first anthropological inquiries into lament, led by pioneering anthropologists Émile Durkheim (1961:442–49), Marcel Mauss (1921), and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922:239–46), focused on its socially determined nature. Lament was seen as a social duty imposed on the afflicted persons that expressed the need for social cohesion rather than a sincere feeling of personal pain. Greg Urban (1988:393), in a comparative study of ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil, reopened the question of how lament produces sociability by highlighting the way it regiments the expression of a powerful emotion such as grief. In recent decades, the individual/society dichotomy, which underlies these views on lament, has been seriously questioned in anthropology (Ingold 1996). An understanding has been developed of persons “as simultaneously containing the potential for relationships and always embedded in a matrix of relations with others” (Strathern 1996:66). In this view, lament cannot be considered a way to transform an individual expression of authentic grief into a socially regimented one, which, by being regimented, conveys a desire for sociability. Rather, this desire is the very condition that allows pain to be voiced in a manner that enhances the self in relation to the group and thus reinforces the community. As Elizabeth Tolbert poignantly states with regard to Finnish–Karelian lament: “Poised at the nexus between voice and body, self and other, the lamenter creates an intersubjective understanding of emotional pain by expressing the inexpressible, by rendering the isolation of individual mourning into an intensely communal experience” (Tolbert 2007:148).

In ethnomusicology and related fields, an encounter in fieldwork with discourses of authenticity is an alert to issues of representation and the need to take the reach of one's conceptualization and analysis beyond the authorizing voices of a limited number of stakeholders. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for recent scholarship on the musical aspects of Sikh sabad kīrtan (sung sacred poetry). In this article I argue that bringing in multiple voices of listeners and musicians enables both a better understanding of this devotional practice as well as an expanded and dynamic conceptualization of authenticity.

Square dancing forms a vibrant part of the traditional music scene in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In addition to the weekly West Mabou square dance, monthly dances and occasional square dances can be found across the island year-round. The number of square dances balloons during the summer months. But quite unlike most other square dance traditions in North America, Cape Breton square dancing rarely features a caller, a person who calls out the movements so that dancers do not have to remember them and can focus instead on performing them, listening to the music, and socializing with other dancers. While callers are generally absent from Cape Breton's square dances today, they were once essential.

As we left Safi and began driving along a stretch of country road on our way to Rabat, one of my female traveling companions asked me if I had a cassette of 'aiṭa on me. “Why?” I replied with a certain curiosity. “Oh …,” she continued, “I just feel like listening to it. I want to smell the soil (bghit nshdm t-trab), taste the countryside (bghit nduq l-ərubiya). ”I was struck by her answer, by how she had articulated the desire to listen to this genre of sung poetry by analogy to other senses. For her, listening to aiṭa meant to experience the countryside and, at the same time, to celebrate a rurality that for many Moroccans is an essential component of their identity. That day I did not have a cassette on me. However, the silence was soon broken by the opening verses of “Mal l-hbibi malu ‘lih” (what's wrong with my beloved, what's wrong with him); she and the others had begun singing, clapping, and rhythmically swaying their upper bodies as we continued to drive on that country road.