The scientific exploration of musical instruments of non-European peoples and of European folk music instruments began in the second half of the nineteenth century and was intensified in this century. The purpose of its initial phase was to make some kind of inventory in order to have the necessary scientific sources at hand, which would serve as a basis for further investigations of musical instruments. Field research among the world's most varied peoples has yielded even more data concerning a substantial number of new instruments, which hitherto have remained unknown.

How does the enmeshment of a performance tradition within a broader matrix of societal concerns operate in an era of rapid change? What are the implications of this enmeshment for the viability of a tradition? This essay offers a few thoughts on these questions and on the subject of change in general, using the gong tradition of the Uma' Jalan subgroup of the Kenyan people of East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case in point. As cogently stated in the introductory comments to Judith Becker's 1988 article, “Earth, Fire, Sakti, and the Javanese Gamelan”: “Outside of ritual, instruments nearly always have associations of class, of hierarchy, thus reinforcing the rankings of men and women within a society. Everywhere, musical instruments are embedded within the systems of thought that organize and give coherence to a particular world view” (Becker 1988: 385). Becker subsequently illustrated this phenomenon through an analysis of the making and the maker of the Javanese gamelan. The analysis I present here is in the same vein as Becker's in that it also concerns Indonesia, gongs, and the significance of sound instruments and instrumental expression beyond the performance event itself. However, in contrast to Becker's piece, I examine a gong tradition that has been cultivated by a different people in quite a different environment, and I use this tradition specifically to address the issue of musical change.

Javanese compositional process can be seen essentially as an act of creative recombination—of variation on extant musical pieces. At an extremely general level one could say this of any musical tradition around the world. In Java this description holds true to a rather specific level, as shall be demonstrated below with specific examples. The nature of Javanese compositional process may be brought into clear relief by considering first some of the musical conventions of Western tradition. Awareness of our own musical assumptions will sharpen our perception of features of another musical tradition.

This work is an attempt to find relations between ecological conditions, adaptive systems and musical practices. I examine the hypothesis that the Wichi aborigines of the centre of the Province of Formosa, Argentina, have adopted a common policy to handle their survival resources, their symbolic resources and their musical resources. The aim is to gather evidence to support the notion that policies applying to several aspects of Wichi life, such as everyday subsistence chores, mobility, religious activities, and so on, also apply to their musical practices. They use an active strategy to approach and solve situations on the spot, a predisposition to base their behaviour on an open agenda. At the level of their musical practices, such strategy becomes evident both in the succession of actions conforming the events, and in the structuring of their songs. This open agenda strategy became, while I stayed in the Wichi settlements, one of the clearest conditionings of the ethnographic experience. On one hand, my anxiety to minimise uncertainty and “maximise” the field work yield led me to seek, with little success, a predictable working context in terms of planned actions and temporal organisation. This clashed head on with the attitude of my Wichi collaborators. On the other hand, though the levels of anxiety decreased after a year's experience, the problem persisted now in the form of a number of questions that became more and more important as my research progressed. Gradually, the upset caused by the impossibility to control the time of the appointed interviews, and of knowing whether next morning the person I was to see to, for instance, tape the songs he/she remembered from youth, was still in the settlement or had ‘up and gone’ several miles away to visit some relative, gave way to a series of questions. How pervasive was this open agenda strategy in the Wichi world? Were musical practices also imprinted by this strategy? Could this explain the cultural coherence of the Wichi society? Finally, was it possible to imagine and/or understand human groups in terms of cultural coherence? In an attempt to answer these questions, I examine the concept of cultural coherence, provide a brief description of the Wichi ecological conditions and adaptive system, and then explain their open agenda strategy and how it also applies to some musical practices.

Communication essentially involves a language or a symbolism whether this be a spoken dialect, a morse code signal or a chain of musical sounds. When we are expressing ourselves in language and other signs, our words, phrases and utterances may be said to form a pattern—a pattern of relationships. Much of this patterning does not rest in the definition and choice of units alone, but in its whole syntax. Defined by Carnap (1929), syntactics aims at all the purely formal aspects of language; that is, anything concerning signs and their orderings, but having no reference to designate real or imagined.

The popular music landscape of Romania today is dominated by the manea. It appeared in the late 1960s as a form of symbolic opposition by the Romani communities from the slums of the big cities on the Danube to their exclusion from Romanian society. In time manea became an expression of implicit protest by ordinary people from any ethnic background. In the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually penetrated into cities and villages. After 1990, the manea spread throughout the entire country and is now the favourite music of many teenagers, young people, and the nouveaux riches of the transition period, comprising together about one third of the population. The power of the manea arises from the dominant role it plays in public and private events, such as weddings, baptisms, funerals, anniversaries, and all kinds of parties organized in restaurants and clubs, as well as from the high visibility it receives on private TV channels, the Internet, commercial CDs and DVDs, concerts, and shows.

Zambia is, for administrative purposes, divided into eight provinces: the Northern, the Luapula, the Western, the Northwestern, the Eastern, the Central, the Southern, and the Barotse. Linguistically, it is divided into four main language groups: the Bemba, the Nyanja, the Tonga, and the Lozi. The language groupings coincide to a great extent with the provinces, with the Bemba-speaking people spread over the Northern, Luapula, Western, and parts of the Central provinces. The Nyanja speakers are in the Eastern Province, the Tonga speakers in the Southern and parts of the Central provinces, and the Lozi speakers in Barotse Province. The Northwestern Province is occupied by a group of tribes whose lingua franca is usually regarded as Luvale-Mbunda.

Les relations commerciales entre les habitants du Golfe Persique et ceux de Zanj ou Afrique orientale sont très anciennes: n'oublions pas non plus que Mascat et Zanzibar étaient liés par une union politique de 1690 environ jusqu'à 1861. On a souvent parlé de l'influence arabe sur les peuplades de la côte est d'Afrique; on a beaucoup moins parlé des conséquences de la présence de minorités importantes d'Africains dans les principautés arabes du Golfe.

La musique arabe de Kuwait, de Bahrain et de la Côte des Pirates n'est pas sensiblement influencée par les musiques africaines: la seule exception notable concerne les danses de guerres normalement appelées ardha à Bahrain, ayala sur la Côte des Pirates; les mélodies, les textes et les danses sont indiscutablement d'origine béouine mais l'influence africaine est sensible dans les rhythmes produits par le groupe de joueurs de tambour qui danse entre les deux rangs de chanteurs arabes.

During a mission sponsored by Unesco, I had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with some traditional types and styles of singing in Mongolia. The Mongols have an extraordinarily complex and developed musical tradition, and some of its types are of great interest for ethnomusicologists. I want to present to you two styles of singing which are closely associated with certain types of songs.

The first is called “long chant” and ranks with the most archaic and most developed types of the Mongols. It is a song in stanza form with a free, rubato performance having long sustained notes: just like repercussions, ornamented by fiorituri, and giving the impression of an instrumental style. They are produced by a particular setting of the larynx. But its most impressive feature is its wide range. Some singers extend the compass of songs by using the falsetto extremely vigorously. Thus a voice can range over as many as three octaves.

Asked to comment on several excellent papers in a session at the 2001 ICTM World Conference, I was inspired by a Brazilian metaphor and a breakfast banana to develop a description of the challenges of analysis and comparison in ethnomusicology. While what follows is a short meditation on an overextended metaphor, I hope it makes some more profound points in a way that can be reproduced at breakfast tables or classrooms anywhere in the world. Since the conference, I have found it useful in courses at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In October 2009, the genre ca trù of the Việt people was listed as a part of the World's Intangible Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding due to its uniqueness, its importance to the cultural identity of its bearers, and its alarming degree of disappearance. In the relevant proposal submitted to the UNESCO Secretariat, the genre was officially called “ca trù singing,” due to the proposer's emphasis on its vocal qualities. Since the syllable ca already means “singing” or “chanting,” I forgo “singing” as being redundant. Furthermore, it is a complex genre that includes interaction with a lutenist and with a drummer, not to mention that the singer herself plays a compulsory bamboo slab. Thus, “ca trù singing” does not reflect the intended content. It is not the “singing” alone that is highly endangered. And it is not the singing alone that needs to be safeguarded for its uniqueness. Playing the đàn đáy lute is not only an essential constituent but an indivisible part of ca trù, and it is indeed forced to experience the same fate as the singing due to the fact that this long-necked lute is almost exclusively used for only one traditionally distinct genre. Whenever ca trù is mentioned, the đàn đáy as an object will become a symbol for this cultural treasure of the Việt people as depicted in journals and newspapers. The automatic association of the đàn đáy with ca trù indicates an ambiguity in the Vietnamese public's assumptions about ca trù: on the one hand, it is taken to be a traditional vocal practice; on the other, it is acknowledged to be an ensemble of which the đàn đáy is an essential component.