At the heart of the resurgence and popularity of traditional music in South Korea during the closing decades of the twentieth century lie the concerted efforts of an intimate group of friends and musical colleagues who came of age in the late 1970s. Inspired by their mentors and artistic forbearers borne of itinerant troupe performance traditions and bound together by the common goal of saving Korean music from obscurity in a nation that was catapulting itself toward Western cultural hegemony, the percussion quartet known as SamulNori emerged from its humble beginnings to become an internationally acknowledged phenomenon.

Musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto usually been treated as separate fields. One of the reasons for this is doubtless the search for a way in which the material to be dealt with should be presented. Historical research has, as we know, to do with a body of musical fact which has been handed down through the medium of notation and therefore exists in a more or less concrete form. Non-European music and European folk music, on the other hand, are exclusively dependent upon oral tradition. To begin with, the latter does not, as Robert Lachmann once very aptly expressed it, exist for us at all. Materials must first be made indirectly tangible for us through special means, that is to say, they must be translated through recording and transcription out of the sphere of oral tradition into that of written notation. This is certainly one of the chief reasons why musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto gone different ways, each with its own independent aims, complexes of problems and methods.

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.

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 this article, I show how the Dialita women’s choir uses music to contest the ongoing denial of state-sponsored violence that followed the Indonesian tragedy of 1965–66, particularly as it impacted women. More specifically, Dialita uses their experiences and positionalities as women to perform an alternative collective memory for younger generations of Indonesians. Composed in prison, Dialita’s musical repertoire memorialises the affects and effects of imprisonment, exile, trauma, and survival. Due to government censure and public condemnation, the songs had been silenced by the Indonesian state and hidden underground from the public since the Indonesian tragedy. In the early 2000s, the women of Dialita formed a musical group and courageously began performing in public, collaborating with young musicians and recording the songs. I contend that women’s collective singing is an act of critical remembrance, opening a new front in struggles for truth and reconciliation, especially when juridical appeals and strategies have been rebuffed.

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.

For two years, throughout 1983 and 1984, a sudden change in the attitude towards dancing was shown among pre-teen and teen-age boys in Denmark. This change has also been witnessed in other West European countries within the last few years.