In Eastern Moravia and districts still further east, we find a special type of rhythmical accompaniment in folk dance-music, performed by second fiddle and bass in a string ensemble. Each bow-stroke (both down and up) regularly combines two rhythmic values with the accent on the second element. Two bow-strokes, first down, then up, correspond to a single two-four bar. Variant types of this accompaniment are also found in Hungarian and Rumanian folk music. In some districts in Slovakia, it is referred to as duvaj, perhaps an attempt to express its character onomatopoeically.

The duvaj-accompaniment has distinctive characteristics in each district. This is clearly shown by the optical recordings of changes in sound intensity (Fig. 1). The first example (upper tracing of five bars) comes from Eastern Slovakia (Vyšné Raslavice); the second (lower tracing of eight bars), is from Central Slovakia (Hrochot pod Polanou). In the second example, irregular sub-division within the bar is shown.

As in all the countries of West Africa where Islam has left its mark, and where powerful chiefs held—or still hold—authority, many griots are to be found in Senegal. Whether they be historians, genealogists or musicians, they are in most cases professionals who together form a well-defined caste. The roles they play are manifold: as historians and genealogists they are the storehouses of the records of a country that has disdained the written language; as musicians, they are present at festive and solemn occasions alike. A griot may be attached to a prince's court, and be a member of his household; or he may be independent and able to charge for his services as he chooses.

Caught up in the life of African society, where intense rivalries excite tribes, clans and families, the griots have always aroused feelings of fear or contempt. More than one enmity, more than one dispute, has originated in the indiscretion of a griot. Their caste, like those of the blacksmiths, the ropemakers, the weavers, etc., is one of the lowest in the hierarchy.

Jesus reportedly said that “the poor will be always with us” (Matthew 26:11) but, brimming with confidence after the Second World War, sociologists and economic policymakers in the United States dared to think otherwise. In a modern, affluent society, poverty was embarrassing. Social critics used to believe individuals were poor because they were unlucky or lazy or stupid, but mid-twentieth century sociologists saw the causes as cultural: if society could but change those cultures, then poverty would disappear (Galbraith 1998; Harrington 1963). The editor of this volume invited me to reflect on music and poverty in relation to my scholarly research over the past forty-five years. It so happens that the musical communities in the United States where I've done most of my field research were characterized as cultures of poverty and targeted in President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 State of the Union address in which he declared a War on Poverty. Daniel Moynihan, one of the architects of the War on Poverty in the US, put the then culture-of-poverty theory into bureaucratese: “Poverty leads to cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation which lead to poor health, inadequate education, and low mobility limiting earning potential which leads to limited income opportunities which lead to Poverty” (1966:4, my italics). While I did find material poverty in the musical communities that I participated in and studied since the 1960s, I found the people in those communities to be rich in music and expressive culture. I never found a cyclic culture of poverty in the Moynihan sense, either. Instead, I came to understand that poverty was imposed from without by discrimination, exploitation, and corruption.

During two recent field expeditions to the Atlantic coast region of Colombia (October 28th-November 14th, 1964, and March 5th-21st, 1965) only one active player of the musical bow came to my attention. This player, Rafael Terán Valdés, is a native and resident of Palenque de San Basilio, Departamento de Bolívar, a village known in the region as the primary centre of African influence. Palenque was settled in the first decade of the seventeenth century by fugitive Negro slaves from the coastal capital, Cartagena de Indias, at that time a principal dispersion point for slaves brought from Africa. Negroes from many African tribes formed the population of Palenque which maintained its independence throughout the period of Spanish rule. Its isolation for a long period resulted in the formation of a mixed pan-African and Spanish culture. Study of the Spanish dialect spoken in Palenque has indicated the existence of words of possible African origin. Many such words are found in the song texts of the lumbalú, a funeral ceremony. However, the singers no longer know the meaning of these words.

When you realize her [Athens'] greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. From Pericles’ Funeral Oration of 431/0 BC

This paper examines the dances of the Jewish people in Eastern and Central Europe, from medieval times to the present. Included in its scope are: dances developed in the community Tanzhaus—an institution found in every ghetto in Europe, a place for weddings and major festivities and for recreational activities on the Sabbath; dances characteristic of the Jewish craft guilds, with occupational earmarks; dances of the Hassidim, a sect (originating in the Carpathian Mountains) the members of which made melody and dance a form of worship. These dances, performed by men only, were varied for special occasions and marked by a definite style. With the development of the Hassidic Movement, the dances spread rapidly, crossing numerous geographic boundaries. It will be shown how dances changed in form and adapted themselves to new localities, as communities of Jews migrated to the Western Hemisphere and to Israel.

It may appear strange that the two brothers Djordević, who were in their lives and work quite separate, are taken together in this article. Professor and academician Dr. Tihomir R. Djordjević (4 March 1868 - 28 May 1944), the great Serbian ethnologist, folklorist, cultural historian, sociologist, museologist, and Balkanologist (as such, a specialist on Gypsies above all) worked in the realm of the social sciences. Vladimir R. Djordjev̌ić (2 December 1869 - 22 June 1938), composer, melographer, organologist, biographer of Serbian musicians, bibliographer of Serbian music, conductor, theoretician, and music pedagogue was active in the field of music.

Anyone who wonders about the aesthetic process behind convincing artificiality—its methods, functions and status—would scarcely find a more topical example than musical regionalism and, in French Switzerland in particular, representations linked to a domain of vocal music commonly described as “popular”, “folk”, “traditional” or even by the name of the region to which it refers. This music, which is performed by a large number of lay and religious choirs, is, as we shall see, one of synthesis. It lies on the border of verisimilitude because it is cast in a poetic and fictional vein, yet is evocative of past aspects of peasant song at the same time, through the incorporation of religious (Roman Catholic) and classical musical elements in simplified form. It has generally been accepted as revelatory of a specific culture, though in actual fact it derives from a patchwork of images of rurality (flashes), fractured in time and space, which court the brief impulse for escapism, for exotic sensations, to the point where its adepts become less mindful of how difficult it is to think out musical culture today.

The process and act of artistic creation has engaged psychologists and philosophers in an attempt to explain its mystery in rational terms. If the meaning of art is to be found in significant form as maintained by aestheticians, Clive Bell (1914) and Roger Fry (1925), the investigator's approach must be made in terms of the media in which the artist is working. Painting, sculpture, architecture, and the plastic arts may be regarded as static, spatial arts. Even poetry, though written to be read aloud, exists in printed media, and it is generally communicated in that form. Music, on the other hand, is a temporal art and exists only in time. Music is what we hear. The music score is nothing more than a prescriptive record of the composer's intentions directed to the musicians who will realize the work in living form. Unlike the spatial arts which are composed of familiar symbols that have meaning within the culture which produces them, music exists in abstraction and is composed of tones that have no symbolic meaning or significance until they are organized horizontally or vertically into patterns in which time plays an important role.

A few years ago I published a short article on a strange phenomenon, which I dared to call “polyphony.” In the meanwhile, Curt Sachs treated a very similar phenomenon in his last book and I felt encouraged to take up this problem once more. I mentioned two examples.

In a village in southern Rumania, I observed some thirty or forty women going to the churchyard; there, each woman stood in front of a tomb and sang a song. Each woman sang a different melody and there was no musical relation between one song and the other. And yet the whole formed a uniform expression in a higher, let us say, extra-musical sense.