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.

Girls’ carnival morris dancing holds a curious status in the canon of English folk performance. On the one hand, this highly competitive team-formation dance operates at a fundamental remove from the conventional spaces and narratives of the two English folk revivals with which most morris dancing is associated (Wright 2017). More closely linked to the popular “town carnival movement” of the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries than to the contemporary folk scene, girls’ morris dancing is practised in sports halls and community centres, predominantly in the northwest of England and parts of North Wales, and is rarely seen in public. The dancers—almost exclusively girls and young women from working-class communities—compete as members of morris dancing troupes within regional and cross-regional carnival organizations. They do not straightforwardly identify as “folk” dancers.

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.

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.

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.

Le chant lapon, ou juoigos, a donné lieu à un grand nombre de travaux, presque exclusivement scandinaves. Ces travaux portent surtout sur l'aspect musicologique, et sur le recensement des thèmes traités. Sans être entièrement absents de la littérature spécialisée, les aspects psychologiques et sociologiques du juoigos sont beaucoup moins connus. Les meilleurs observateurs nous ont laissé nombre de notations intéressantes sur ce sujet, mais elles restent très disparates. Le chercheur qui tenterait de rassembler ces observations pour en tirer un tableau général de la sociologie du juoigos risquerait fort d'aboutir à des conclusions erronées: en effet, il semble bien que cet aspect du juoigos soit soumis à des variations importantes, d'une communauté à l'autre. D'où le danger des généralisations, que l'on rencontre chez les auteurs les plus qualifiés. Widstrand, travaillant en collaboration avec Ruong, lui-même d'origine lapone, est par exemple dans l'erreur lorsqu'il écrit que chez les Lapons du nord, le juoigos est presque exclusivement réservé aux hommes (Widstrand 1961:74).

General studies on the evolution of mankind normally discuss the rise of subhuman primates and hominids within their geographical-physical environments, including climate, flora, and fauna; bioanthropological problems of the species homo such as tools and their use, working activities, development of language and cognitive abilities; and the so-called Ice Age arts. But, as a rule, the beginnings of music and dance behavior are totally neglected.

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.

The Year 1968 marked the coming of age of the International Folk Music Council. As I was in some measure responsible for its birth twenty-one years earlier, the Executive Board invited me to give an account of its activities during that time.

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.

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.

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.