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).

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.

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 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).

A faint early morning glow lit the horizon across the sea. Poised on the calm ocean waters, a dozen sails began their approach to shore (see Figure 1). It was just before dawn on Sunday, 22 May 2016, at Paseo de Susana Park in Hagåtña, the capital of the island of Guam (Guåhån). That morning I joined thousands of residents and international visitors for the dawn arrival of the canoes, an event that began the 12th Festival of Pacific Arts, held on the island. Some of the sea vessels were from Guam, while others had travelled north across the familiar ocean routes of the Caroline Islands from as far west as the islands of Palau and from the atoll islands of Lamotrek and Polowat (see Figure 2). The dawn event emphasized Indigenous movement, knowledge, and skill on the sea, but it also projected a means of belonging in and reconnecting to the maritime world, embodied through sounding voices and moving bodies. Cultural leader Leonard Iriarte, who holds the title of Master of Chamorro Chant, recited a welcome that was played over loudspeakers and emanated from the shore out across the incoming waves. As each sailing canoe approached the land, crewmembers sounded shell trumpets and broke out into spontaneous song and dance on the decks—rhythms that combined with those of the incoming swell below.

In discussing gong ensemble music through the gaze of movement, gaze can be conceptualized at two interrelated levels: firstly, at the general contextual level of the audience (who are the spectators?), and secondly, at the deeper semantic level of auditory-kinaesthetic relationships that manifest social meanings.

In his article “The Ethnomusicology of Music Learning and Teaching,” Timothy Rice argues that the practices of teaching and learning music are fundamental to the ways in which music is conceptualised, transmitted, and invested with symbolic meanings (2003). Ethnomusicologists studying music and diaspora have also drawn attention to the significance of music education as a key medium for the construction and maintenance of diasporic identities.1 In diasporic communities, music education can be a principal means for transmitting perspectives on the historical and political forces that have shaped the diaspora and for developing the linguistic and cultural competency of younger generations. Music schools and other institutions of musical learning can also play important roles in the public representation of diasporic communities and in articulating the relationship of the diaspora to the linguistic, musical, religious, and national heritage of its perceived homeland.

Folklore, that “good anglo-saxon compound” invented by William Thoms, has taken on many meanings since it first appeared in “The Atheneum” in 1846. In many countries throughout the world it is still used as a broad label for all those “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc. of the olden time”, as originally suggested by Thoms (Dundes 1965). However, folklore is also used in another and more specific sense, namely for a certain kind of staged performance of folk music and folk dance, by people dressed in special types of folk costumes, accompanied by a selected number of tunes performed on a limited number of instruments. To such ‘folklore’ performances also belong symbols such as herding rods, spinning tools, old-style pottery, flags; as well as verbal statements about special features or the origin of the dances, the costumes and the music; and sometimes elaborated stories that place the whole activity in a historical and social framework.

Since the turn of the century, Peruvian traditional and popular music has been intensively investigated by local and foreign scholars, even though there was no institutional base which could effectively support musical research. These efforts, isolated as they were, nevertheless, followed definite theoretical and methodological trends which this article will undertake to synthesize.

During the latter part of the 19th century, many different dances such as schottis, rheinldnder and pas de quatre were commonly performed both in the cities and in the countryside in Sweden. The ways of dancing varied slightly, but the music was very similar for each dance. Some decades later, in the 1920s, people danced all over Sweden to a type of music that sounded bewilderingly similar to late 19th-century dance music. This style was in everyday speech called bonnjazz, i.e. “rustic jazz,” or to use a less pejorative term, “farmer jazz.” In this article I will give a survey of how this change came about, discuss the Swedishness of bonnjazz, and consider how this style was related to jazz and other types of foxtrot.

Thanks to several recent publications by Indian scholars, we are now much better informed about the life and the human-religious ideas of the Baul singers of Bengal. These descriptions are based on observations as well as on the statements that the Bauls themselves make in the texts of their songs. To shed some light upon the peculiarity of these “cultural and religious nomads,” a few remarks from the above-mentioned sources are repeated here as background.

The sacred chant of Rome, apart from its liturgical value, is of importance to musicology. In it there lives on as a substratum the remembrance of popular traditional songs. Also from Roman Chant there came the development of polyphonic music and the art of instrumental variation in Europe. In addition, it was the origin of a great number of vernacular religious chants associated with the different Christian creeds. I consider, therefore, that I am justified in claiming that the liturgical chant of the Roman Church represents a musical repertory of the highest order which can be regarded as an artistic patrimony not only of the Christian Church but of all mankind

The central corpus of the Roman Chant—known since the ninth century as “Gregorian Chant”—was already in existence during the eighth and ninth centuries. In it there are to be found reminiscences of eastern and western song of the most remote epochs: musical elements of the most ancient cultures which would have been lost for ever, had not Pontifical Rome recollected them and conserved them in its liturgy.

This performance study is situated within the twentieth century and into the present, a period characterized by a number of sociohistorical developments. This epoch, as noted by Oyewumi (2004:1), “witnessed a host of social and cultural transformations.” During this period, gender appeared as one of the determining factors for categorizing and analysing societies. Given that gender is fundamentally a sociocultural construct, its discursive formations through the performance of égwú àmàlà are peculiar to the Ogbaru people. Égwú àmàlà is a women's dance genre that employs music, dance, and drama as media for enacting the culture of the Ogbaru community. Because it vivifies and mirrors Ogbaru traditions in music and dance, égwú àmàlà occupies a prime place in the social life of the Ogbaru people. In performance, the genre exhibits some gender issues that I will expatiate on in the course of this article.

Twice a year, in the spring and autumn, a Sacrifice to Confucius called Sôkchôn is carried out in a small shrine compound (Munmyo) in the northeast part of Seoul, Korea. The ritual music, aak, performed during the ceremony is stately and imposing, perfectly suited to its purpose. Many Korean scholars and musicians consider it to be ancient and authentically Chinese, and even a cursory comparison with other musical genres found in Korea shows this ritual music to be strikingly unique in performing style.

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.