The earliest musical documentary sources of Bohemian folk music date from the fourteenth century; but up to the end of the eighteenth century the volume of such sources is small. Despite insufficient historical evidence, however, it has been possible to determine the main developmental trends of earlier times from studies of literary and iconographic evidence and, in particular, from the wealth of church hymns for congregational use.

From the beginning, folk music did not pursue a course separate from that of professional performance. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular, the inter-relationship between these two was highly beneficial to both. The range of folk-musical instruments was roughly the same as that required for professional performance. Only a few instruments—bagpipes and other rural types—were not used by both cultures. The gradual switch from the bagpipes and whistle-flutes, so popular in the Middle Ages, to the stringed instruments of subsequent centuries, affected folk and professional performance equally. Only the wind instruments of the gothic and renaissance periods failed to find their way into Bohemian folk music on a large scale.

From the 1950s through 1990s, ethnomusicology in Yugoslavia represented the sum of several distinct research traditions that, by and large, overlapped with the borders of six constituent republics: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Although the overarching national framework quickly disintegrated with the onset of the Yugoslav wars of succession in the early 1990s, localized research within particular borders was largely unaffected. The triumph of militant nationalism, the sweeping social changes, and the attendant musical transformations across the region raised issues of researchers’ accountability. Faced with unimaginable violence in the name of national identity and cultural difference, what should, or can, an ethnomusicologist do?

浪花節は19世紀末から20世紀半ばに大衆的な人気を誇った日本の音楽的な語りのジャンルである。日本人労働移民によってハワイにもたらされ、後には日本の浪曲師がハワイ巡業を行うようになり、ハワイの日系社会でも人気を確立した。本論はハワイにおける浪花節の盛衰をたどり、移植された音楽ジャンルが日本と日系ディアスポラの文化的架け橋として機能し、いかにハワイ日系人のアイデンティティの支えとなっていたか、また国境を超えた人々と文化の往来を促していたかを明らかにする。また戦争という不可抗力によって、いかに音楽文化の運命が翻弄されうるかを描き出す。

Naniwa-bushi is a genre of Japanese musical storytelling which enjoyed its greatest popularity from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Brought to Hawai‘i by Japanese immigrants and later by itinerant Japanese performers, it soon found popularity in the diaspora community. This paper traces the rise and fall of naniwa-bushi in Hawai‘i and demonstrates how a transplanted musical genre functioned as a cultural bridge between Japan and its diaspora, helping immigrants sustain their identity and motivating trans-border flows of performers and culture. It also highlights the powerful impact of war that changed the destiny of a musical culture.

Uzbekistan is a Central Asian country with a population of 27 million. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Turkmenistan to the west, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to the north, and Tajikistan to the east. There is also a large Uzbek population living in the north of Afghanistan (figure 1).

Engaged with a discipline built on music, participant-observation, and fieldwork, ethnomusicologists position the experience of music and culture as a lens for studying the social creation of meaning. Ethnomusicologists' methodologies (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and ethnography) are collaborative social acts and defining elements of the discipline. Yet in the second edition of Shadows in the Field, a foundational reader on ethnomusicological field research, Bruno Nettl laments that “most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward whatwe are trying to find out and not as a central activity” (2008:viii). While increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists are engaging fieldwork and its theories as objects of inquiry, this area would benefit from still greater scholarly attention. In this article, we explore the methodological implications of collaborative fieldwork by analysing what happens when ethnomusicologists deliberately go into the field together.

A proliferation of popular music genres flourished in post-independence Nigeria: highlife, jùjú, Afrobeat, and fújì. Originating within Yorùbá Muslim communities, the genres of fújì and Islamic are Islamised dance music genres characterised by their Arabic-influenced vocal style, Yorùbá praise poetry, driving percussion, and aesthetics of incorporation, flexibility, and cultural fusion. Based on analysis of interviews and performances in Ìlọrin in the 2010s, this article argues that the genres of fújì and Islamic allegorise Nigerian unity—an ideology of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and equity—while exposing the gap between the aspiration for unity and everyday inequities shaped by gender and morality.

That folk song found its way into Mahler's music is often stated but never demonstrated. The term 'folk song' must only be taken to cover the kind of song absorbed by him during his youth; later in life he did not concern himself with folk tunes. The songs of his homeland, on the border between Bohemia and Moravia, include (a) Moravian songs with archaic features, (b) Czech and German-Bohemian folk songs with clearly defined stylistic elements from the eighteenth century, and (c) songs of the bordering German lands of Bavaria and Silesia. Analysis has shown that Mahler used formulae from Moravian folk song, including the lydian fourth, and that there is a basic relationship between his music and the folk songs of his homeland. His melodies tend to be rhythmically free and to use repeated notes. Rhythmic features, such as short notes on strong beats, syncopation, and feminine endings, point to Czech folk song. Repetition of short formulae, and chain- or open forms occur, as in Czech and Moravian folk song. His writing for strings aims at producing the characteristic tone of folk fiddles in Iglau, and displays the heterophony between voice and accompaniment characteristic of that region.

To this day Liszt's Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie first published in 1859 remains the only attempt to deal with the music of the Hungarian gypsies in a comprehensive manner. Despite its factual errors and romantic exaggeration, this enthusiastically and powerfully written study created a tradition that continues to exert a strong influence both in Hungary and abroad, often obscuring the results of a century of research in Hungarian music generally and that of the gypsies in particular. Only a few of the many papers written since Liszt's are thorough in their treatment of details. Hungarian musicohistorical works and publications on peasant music, especially those of Bartók, Kodály, Ervin Major, and B. Szabolcsi, however, provide some additional information. The modern point of view has been stated most clearly and categorically by Bartók, who in 1931 examined the question: Gypsy Music? Hungarian Music?

Based on recent ethnographic work, we explore the ways in which transnational cosmopolitan music crosses, creates, and reinscribes borders as it is performed by Palestinian Arab wedding musicians in northern Israel. While Palestinian nationalism and the hard political borders between Israel and its neighbouring states frame immediate questions of identity and mobility, in describing their musical practices, musicians turn to a complex, interleaved series of geographies that highlight past and contemporary processes of musical flow. On one hand, they foreground the continuing relevance of the historic al-Sham region as an area of shared musical practice, identifying with the jabali (“mountain”) musical style of the elevated region that marks the borderlands between today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. On the other hand, they embed this regional style within a series of micro- and macro-geographies, from detailed knowledge of the subtle differences in tempo and style between neighbouring Galilee villages to connections with the wider Arabic-speaking world via old and new media. While recent research on music in the Middle East has often foregrounded the role of music in constructing and reinforcing national identities, this research illustrates how transnational flows continue to shape the experience and imagination of musical borderlands in the region.