In nanguan, a Chinese art music tradition, musicians compose songs by setting new texts to existing tunes (known as qupai); songs that are composed based on the same tune display the relevant features of that tune but vary in its non-relevant features.2 Tunes are further grouped by musicians into tune families3(gunmen); songs that are composed based on tunes of the same tune family display the distinctive features of respective tunes but share the features of that tune family.

The dance is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and beautiful expressions of the Rumanian people. Its present-day forms are the product of an evolution during which it was subject to diverse influences (both internal and external) and shaped by the spiritual needs of its creators. While part of the whole realm of folk creation, the dance is in itself a most complex phenomenon. Consequently, it has for quite some time been regarded as an independent genre, and little study has been devoted to its relationship with other folkloristic elements.

This paper concerns the music of wedding ceremonies that I recorded and filmed in four communities in the vicinity of Delhi: the town of Gurgaon and the villages of Jharsa and Jhanjholi in the state of Haryana, and Singola village in the Delhi Government District. It concentrates primarily on songs for two ceremonies in the Hindu cycle of wedding rituals — the lagan and the ban, and also includes songs for the other rituals that took place on the day of a phera (‘the marriage itself') in the villages of a groom (Singola) and of his bride (Jhanjholi). The music for such ceremonies is always provided by women, members of the families of the bride and groom and other appropriate female members of the community. Before presenting and discussing these ceremonies and the music for them, I want to describe the socio-cultural context of marriage in India.

In 2002, less than a year after releasing her first album, Afrikaans rocker Karen Zoid gained a level of notoriety then unheard of among Afrikaans female musicians. She achieved this when she enacted the overtly masculine rock ritual that Aerosmith's Joe Perry has labelled “the ultimate statement of anarchy” (Perry, quoted in Christensen 2004): she smashed her guitar. While frequently interpreted as an attention-getting strategy (which it undeniably was), Karen Zoid's performance was also an act of political positioning, locating her within the already passé tropes of international rock, but also on the margins of the Afrikaans music industry. It also, ironically, allowed her to appropriate some of the rock “authenticity” connected with this display of overt masculinity, despite the fact that her performance can be read as a deliberate (perhaps even camp) parody of this masculinity. This is because, as I will argue in this article, Zoid's legitimacy as the “voice of her generation” and a vocalizing representative of New South African identity has hung precariously off her performed masculinity, despite her destabilization of this image through a variety of queer performances. In this article, I will examine the interlinked history of South African music (with a focus on Afrikaans rock) and national identification that has created a normative masculinity in post-apartheid South Africa (1994-present). I will present Karen Zoid's performance style as an example of resistance to this norm, paying particular attention to the vocal characteristics of gendered South African sound as a site of normativity and resistance. Finally, I will consider the extent to which, in order to enact this resistance, Zoid has been obliged to perform the gendered national norm or has been interpreted in normative terms in order that audiences are able to comprehend her national identifications. By these means I aim to make visible the normally hidden gender bias that undermines South Africa's apparently representative post-apartheid nationalism.

For most people carrying out research in ritual and traditional dance forms, ‘modernisation’, usually understood as ‘Westernisation’, is seen as something destructive. Often rituals are studied as fairly static phenomena. Even though in our fieldwork we never see a ritual repeated in precisely the same manner, because our informants often insist on standardisation and on the possibility of exact ritual replication, we tend to look for a “proper”, archetypal form from which all other forms have deviated. As Gerd Baumann has argued (1992), from Durkheim onward much of the anthropological discourse about ritual has been based on a number of closely related assumptions:

1. 1. Rituals are seen to be symbolic performances at the core of the social identity of communities;

2. 2. They create and maintain (or transform) a society's cultural identity and social relations;

3. 3. The existence of a ritual community or congregation is assumed, whose members share a relationship to the performance, its symbols and their meanings;

4. 4. Thus, rituals are seen to be best understood as acts internal to the category or group that celebrates them or celebrates itself through them, the group being essentially concerned with itself rather than with the outside world.

In this article we examine the way local, national, and regional politics affect the policies and practices of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH)—a notion derived from the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage—in two detailed case studies from the Republic of Macedonia. While our conclusions are particular to our case studies, we hope that researchers in other national settings will find them useful for describing and analysing their own situations. We begin with a discussion of heritagization and recontextualization, which are inherent in ICH safeguarding processes. Next, we provide background on the external contestation of a distinct Macedonian ethnic and national identity, and the ways that UNESCO ICH safeguarding processes have been perceived and applied in Macedonia. Against that backdrop, we then describe and analyse two contrasting cases of ICH—the social dance “Kopackata” and the Galicnik Wedding—both of which illustrate how the cultural heritage concept itself can sometimes be used for national, commercial, and political ends.

Forjando el Aztecanismo: Nacionalismo Musical Mexicano del Siglo XX en el siglo XXI en Los Ángeles

Hoy en día, un creciente número de músicos mexico-americanos en los Estados Unidos tocan instrumentos indígenas mesoamericanos y réplicas arqueológicas, lo que se conoce como “Música Azteca.” En este artículo, doy a conocer cómo los músicos contemporáneos de Los Ángeles, California, recurren a los legados de la investigación musical nacionalista mexicana e integran modelos antropológicos y arqueológicos aplicados. Al combinar el trabajo de campo etnográfico con el análisis histórico, sugiero que los marcos musicales y culturales que alguna vez sirvieron para unir al México pos-revolucionario han adquirido una nuevo significado para contrarrestar la desaparición del legado indígena mexicano en los Estados Unidos.

Today a growing number of Mexican-American musicians in the United States perform on Indigenous Mesoamerican instruments and archaeological replicas in what is widely referred to as “Aztec music.” In this article, I explore how contemporary musicians in Los Angeles, California, draw on legacies of Mexican nationalist music research and integrate applied anthropological and archeological models. Pairing ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I suggest that musical and cultural frameworks that once served to unite post-revolutionary Mexico have gained new significance in countering Mexican Indigenous erasure in the United States.

The nature of a keynote address is to reflect upon issues of concern to the gathered assembly—to kickstart and enrich debates and to stimulate new ideas and perspectives. This address, presented at the beginning of the 44th World Conference of the International Council of Traditional Music, held in Limerick, Ireland, 12–14 July 2017, is very much grounded in my own experiences across a number of domains. I offer it as a subjective view of the potential of music and dance to act as powerful forces of cultural mediation, redressing social—and musical—inequalities.

In the past three decades, the study of music in ancient China has expanded significantly with the discovery of numerous tombs containing musical instruments. These finds have revealed substantial information about ancient music theory and organology. One issue that has remained on the periphery, however, is the study of the musicians themselves. From the Eastern Zhou (770–221 BCE) to Tang (618–907 CE) periods, musicians fell broadly into three groups: (1) formal musicians who performed for important ritual occasions and state sacrifices; (2) informal musicians who provided entertainment for banquets and other less formal occasions; and (3) military musicians who performed in processions. Formal musicians generally specialized in yayue (refined music), the official music of the royal Zhou court. Yayue continued to be played in formal ritual settings at court long after the Zhou period. Informal and military musicians specialized in less traditional forms of music, such as suyue (“popular” or “folk” music) and foreign music. Formal and informal musicians appear in the archaeological record as early as Eastern Zhou, while military musicians appear slightly later in the Han. Of these three groups, informal musicians appear to have been most popular among elite audiences, especially between the Han (206 BCE–229 CE) and Tang periods. These musicians were often paired with lively dancers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, and jesters, indicating the entertainment—rather than formal—nature of the music they performed. As demonstrated by sculptural works and mural paintings excavated from Han through Tang tombs, the most common types of musicians outside the more formal music sectors at court were foreigners, dwarfs, idealized women, and scholarly recluses. This paper will focus on archaeological and textual evidence for the existence of these informal musicians as early as Shang (c. 1570–1070 BCE) and Eastern Zhou, and the rising popularity of such performers in the period from Han to Tang. I hope to show that the very social marginality of informal musicians is exactly what enhanced their exoticism and popular appeal among their elite audiences.

In various studies scholars have asserted that two or more melodies are similar. In many cases the scholar does not offer a method by which the reader can determine that the melodies offered are indeed alike; He merely places the melodies in juxtaposition and assumes that the reader will perceive, as the author apparently does, that they are similar. This is the procedure followed by George Pullen Jackson in his attempt to prove that Black spirituals derive from white hymn tunes (Jackson 1933:242–261). On examining the melodies presented by Jackson, I find them similar in some respects and dissimilar in many other respects. I am by no means certain that they are versions of the same melody. In other cases the scholar does not offer full melodies or even full first sections of melodies. This occurs, for example, when Peter Gradenwitz offers melodic analogues of the Zionist and Israeli anthem, “Hatiqvah” (Gradenwitz 1949:302–303).

On 23 June 2011, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe of Korean Traditional Performing Arts (hereafter, Seongnam Municipal Troupe) presented its twenty-eighth concert, entitled Hana toenŭn kyŭre ŭi ŭmak (Unifying Korean national music). The South Korean government has designated June as a month of commemoration for the nation's patriots and veterans. As many government troupes in South Korea would do in June, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe dedicated its regular concert series to the remembrance of national heroes, cherishing their patriotism and sacrifice. As stated in the concert programme, “this performance is put together to bless the people who died protecting their nation and to express compassion for the 10 million families separated between the two Koreas … wishing for the nation's reunion and unification in the near future” (Han 2011:2). In order to memorialize war victims and the tragedy of partition, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe was to showcase musical works selected from both North and South Korea. In the programme, Ch'oe Sang-hwa, guest director of the Troupe, remarked:

Traditional musical instruments make useful symbols of identity because they are often unique to a particular social group and therefore serve as markers of distinction from other groups. This is true of the ekonting (see figure 1), a three-stringed plucked lute that is played almost exclusively by people of the Jola ethnic group in Senegal, The Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. One player of the ekonting (pl. sikonting) describes the instrument much like an identification badge: “No matter where you go, if you see someone playing the ekonting, you will know that person is a Jola.” Ethnomusicological literature abounds with similar cases, where there is said to be a one-to-one relationship between a musical instrument and the social identity of the performer. However, constructivist models of social identity, emphasizing multiplicity, changeability, and relationality, complicate this apparently straightforward relationship, even if ethnomusicologists too often treat the subject of identity in contradictory ways (Rice 2007). In this paper, I approach the ekonting through sociologist Margaret Somers's (1994, 1992) paradigm of narrative identity, which emphasizes the relational and ontological qualities of narrative production. I argue that the ekonting serves not as a signifier of an a priori social identity, but instead as a site for the narrative production of Jola ethnicity. This narrative production both differentiates Jolas from—and associates them with—other regional, national, and transnational identity narratives. After an explanation of this paradigm and a contextualization of the cultural stakes, I demonstrate this argument through two vignettes describing different directions of narrative production around the ekonting.

This year musicology should remember the two men who have given a greater part of their creative life to the folk song: Béla Bartók, who died a quarter-century ago on September 26, 1945, and Werner Danckert, who passed away on March 5, 1970.

Prior to World War II, Hawaiian music claimed enthusiastic audiences throughout the world. In some countries there were local performers of Hawaiian music who had never even visited the Islands. Although that popularity has greatly diminished, it is still surprisingly alive in such places as Japan, Indonesia, Canada, England, Holland, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.1 Without exception, the most famous performers in these countries are masters of the Hawaiian steel guitar.2 In fact, the sound of the steel guitar is considered the hallmark of Hawaiian music.

Despite the fact that, in most parts of the world, music and dance are closely linked and are an integral part of the broad anthropological concept of culture, it is surprising to note that many accounts by ethnomusicologists and dance anthropologists are limited to describing either music or dance.1 As long ago as 1937, Curt Sachs wrote about universal interrelationships between the performing arts, and yet as recently as 1982 Peter Brinson noted that “There is a barrier between music and dance studies which needs urgently to be overcome” (Brinson, 1982:4).

Within recent years much aboriginal song material has been gathered, mainly in Central and Northern Australia. The scientific value of this material can be readily understood; but its artistic merit has been the subject of much controversy. The present article has been written with a view to pointing out certain features of the Australian songs—features whose appreciation may enable listeners to obtain more enjoyment from aboriginal recordings. My remarks are based on my own collection, which was gathered in Central Australia; but they are true in a general sense of most Australian songs as far as we know at present.

The different aspects of the subject and the corresponding methods.

The life-history of melodies is the subject of comparative melodic research. It offers various aspects and forms of approach, and research has consequently developed in different directions and has employed a variety of methods. These are differentiated not only by nomenclature but by the emphasis laid upon special aspects of the subject-matter.

If the music of Mauritania has inspired only limited study till now it is because of its elusiveness. We know it to be governed by strict rules, though uncodified. The existence of parallel yet diverse traditions complicates detailed analysis. It should be remembered that Mauritania covers an area almost twice that of France. Long distances and poor communications—further aggravated by the rigours of the climate—have encouraged the growth of local artistic peculiarities.

Nevertheless, and in spite of this regional diversity, it is possible to perceive a certain basic national music. This derives from obedience to the same fundamental rules, and the use of a common fund of melodic patterns, carried down through the ages and recognizable beneath their sundry local modifications. The imperviousness of Mauritanian music to neighbouring influence adds further justification to a study of it as a single art-source.