During the last decades, rapidly growing interest in folk song styles has manifested itself in a number of fruitful investigations representing many different approaches. The Cantometrics project, for instance, starts from the premise that “song style symbolizes and reinforces certain important aspects of social structure in all cultures” (Lomax 1968:vii). Using recordings of music as primary source of data, Alan Lomax and his co-workers have developed a method for “systematically and holistically describing the general features of accompanied or unaccompanied song performances” (op.cit.:34). Thus, the Cantometrics project focuses on the song performance in its cultural and social context. mance in its cultural and social context.

What can one “know” about any sort of music by means of musical analysis? What relationship can that “knowledge” bear to the knowledge of performers? These questions, pertinent perhaps to all musicologists, arise particularly strongly for me because for the past three years my work on Central Australian music has involved analysing documents of fieldwork carried out by other researchers (mainly Catherine Ellis) during the 1960s and early 70s, despite the fact that I have neither field experience in Central Australia nor extensive performance experience with performers of Central Australian traditional music. What follows is not intended as an apologia for “armchair” ethnomusicology, but rather as an attempt to open up, through discussion of the problematics of historical ethnomusicology, philosophical questions I believe to be central to the ethnomusicological enterprise.

The didjeridu has accumulated considerable symbolic capital in recent years. Its status as an icon of Aboriginality, musical tradition and ritual significance has embedded it firmly within the Australian national imagination. However, the didjeridu did not hold centre stage as a symbol of Indigeneity until fairly recently, when it moved from the periphery of the Australian continent to come to stand for Australianness at its centre. The didjeridu has crossed internal boundaries altering perceptions of music and music making in different parts of Aboriginal Australia. It has crossed national and international boundaries through adaptations of its shape, tone and rhythmic contours, and it has taken on new cultural histories as a result of its global appropriation by non-Indigenous peoples. Globalisation presents both a threat and an opportunity for the recontextualisation of Indigenous meanings around the didjeridu.

The taksîm (Arabic taqsim) is often referred to in the musicological literature of the Middle East as an instrumental “improvisation” (Nettl 1973: 11).2 The taksîm has been known as a major musical genre during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most of the countries of the Middle East which had been incorporated within the Ottoman Empire, especially Turkey, Syria/Palestine and Egypt. It is also significant in Tunisia, but less so in the rest of North Africa. In Iraq it became prominent only after the end of the Second World War. Earlier the taksîm had probably been known only to and practiced by a small Ottomanized Iraqi elite. In other Arab countries, such as Morocco and Yemen, the taksîm is largely a post World War II adaptation of Egyptian musical practice.3 In the European part of the Ottoman Empire, the taksîm has also left important vestiges in the musics of Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, and to a lesser extent Romania (Garfias 1981). Its name, and a few of its musical characteristics were known even within the instrumental klezmer repertoire of East European Jews (Beregovski/Slobin 1982: 539; Feldman 1993a). The fact that current Arabian and Turkish performance practices are not identical, and were even more differentiated early in the twentieth century when the first sound recordings of taksîms were made in Turkey, Syria and Egypt, has not prevented Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian musicians from employing the word taksîm to refer to all the local sub-styles of the broader taksîm genre.

To the constituent elements of every scientific discipline belongs the elaboration of a system of documentation (as a method of gathering data) and of sorting and classifying these data so as to elaborate the essential methodical and theoretical postulates for marking the history, genesis and evolution of specific phenomena on which research is undertaken. The problem of documentation (recording, collecting, transcribing, measuring) has since the beginning of this century become for ethnomusicology a constant methodological question. Parallel with this emerge the first attempts to elaborate systems of the musical classification of melodies, the problem initiated by the editors of Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft in 1902, which was directed not only to the classification of folk music material. The problem of classification was partly connected with the documentary work of cataloguing, and partly with the theoretical scientific area, coming before the need to penetrate into the inner organism of the melodies to be classified.

In 1963 the Institute for Scientific Cinematography received the financial means to carry out its first expeditions to make documentary films, and the first comprehensive plans were made for the visual and aural recording of the music of various ethnic groups and of entire populations. Since then, four expeditions have taken us to Thailand, Chad, Hadramout, and the Ivory Coast.

In present times, it may be surprising to see the word “origins” in the title of an ethnomusicological article. Reviewing historical and current hypotheses on the origins of song, or music more generally, it becomes apparent that most authors interpret a possible bifurcation between (spoken) language and (sung) music as the most plausible point from which “music” evolved. Curt Sachs states polemically, “Music began with singing” (1943:21). Such statements beg questions about the definition of music, not just origins. I will, however, forgo such questions in this article, concentrating instead on the prehistoric and contemporary fluidity between speech and song. I understand these terms as poles on a continuum, ranging from everyday fugitive speech to formalized speech (such as invocations, recitations, chanting) and, finally, to song. In this article, I suggest that seeking to understand the moment in which this bifurcation, or rather spreading out, of utterances occurred is a productive task. Understanding the differences between speech and song is a starting point for unpacking how these distinct phenomena emerged. Alternatively, thinking about those prehistoric times when speech and song emerged may support insights about modern meaning and the function of utterances that occupy a liminal space between speech and song.

The Kallawaya belong to the Quechua-speaking population of Bolivia and live on the eastern slope of the Andes in the Charazani valley system, north of Lake Titicaca, near the Peruvian border. Located in the Bautista Saavedra province of the Department of La Paz, the Valley and Rio Charazani cut across the Cordilleras and thus serve as a gateway to the lower-lying Yungas to the east. The Incas in their heyday prized this valley highly, for it lay at the outermost limits of their empire's expansion and opened into areas where the coca plant and tropical fruits and herbs were grown. Because of the alkaloids it contains, the coca plant (Eritroxilon Coca L.) has played an important role in rituals and cult practices since pre-Spanish times (M. Wendorf de Sejas 1982:223; J.W. Bastien 1978:19). The Kallawaya people have been known since antiquity as herbalists and healers, and the Incas are said to have accorded them special privileges on this account: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala tells in his “Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno” from about 1600 of “Callauayas” carrying Inca Tupac Yupanqui (1471-1493) and his wife Mama Occlo-Coya in a sedan chair at the Cuzcan court (F. Guaman Poma, ed. 1936: fol. 331).

Despite the importance of the scripture to any study of Islamic beliefs, customs or creations, little attention has been paid by musicologists and ethnomusicologists to the chanted recitation of the Holy Qur'ān. Muslim scholars of literature, of etymology, of grammar and syntax, of phonetics and vocal production have developed exhaustive studies based on the Qur'ān, but they have neither analyzed nor explained the musical aspects of the chanted recitations of the one hundred and fourteen sūrahs ('chapters') revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.

In the last decade, the emergence and rapid growth of ethnomusicological interest in urban phenomena has stirred up a fresh sense of methodological and conceptual inadequacy in the face of current needs. Confronted repeatedly by the complexities of the urban situation, we are pressed to reassess the resources with which to meet new problems and new demands. New questions are being asked; old ones are being reformulated.

In a nation on the periphery of Europe, in a region most distant from the capital, the country's indigenous musical traditions are undergoing a process of institutionalization. A large proportion of the nation's population fears the loss of their ancient customs and national identity to the ever rising tide of foreign cultural influences. The locality itself, however, enjoys both a strong regional identity and a unique musical repertory, a repertory that plays a central role in both the text and context of the institutionalization in question. The resultant institution is multifaceted—its activities include: the collation and publication of music recordings and transcriptions; the promotion of performances by locally and nationally revered folk musicians; the creation and direction of a folk orchestra; and, most importantly, an extensive folk music education programme, culminating in a nationally recognized qualification. The organization has been quietly accused by other folk musicians of standardizing and formalizing the music it professes to support. Nonetheless, it receives financial support from the state departments for education and culture.

Ladakh is located in the northwestern part of India between the Himalayan and the Karakoram Ranges. The traditional culture of Tibetan Buddhism has been conserved in Ladakh since Rin-chen bzan-po (985–1055) introduced Buddhism in the Early 11th-century. In the 19th-century, several studies of Ladakh were reported by European scholars and missionaries. Because foreigners were banned from the region from 1947 to 1974, due to the boundary dispute between India and Pakistan, cultural studies of Ladakh were scarce and research has progressed slowly. Since the ban was lifted, cultural research, particularly in Buddhism, iconography and ethnology, have made systematic progress. However, concerning Buddhist chant in Ladakh, we have nothing more than a few descriptions in reports by ethnologists and Buddhist scholars. Buddhist chant in Ladakh is important for research in Tibetan Buddhist chant because of its preservation of traditional culture when the region was isolated in the postwar period.

During the month of June, 1966, I undertook a folksong collecting trip among the nomadic Lapps, visiting among others the village Nunnanen in northern Finland situated more than two hundred kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle. The well-to-do Lapps of the village, all of whom have completed four to six forms of Finnish primary school, own three thousand reindeer. Throughout the summer they live with their families in tents and follow the herd, whereas in the winter they live in villages in log houses, which were rebuilt after the Second World War. Thanks to the Finnish Ministry of Culture, I was provided with an interpreter and a battery-operated tape recorder, with which we were able to collect two-hundred-and-fifty Lapp folksongs, the so-called yoiks, among reindeer farmers and shepherds. An additional twenty-six folksongs were collected orally.

Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose called these commandments “the Jante’ Law,” so-named for his protagonist's fictional Danish home-town in the semi-autobiographical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (orig. pub. 1933; English trans., 1936:77-78). Over the years this ironic credo of elder-dominated communal living has expanded and acquired a special resonance with respect to Swedish cultural self-image. Today in Sweden, the Jante Law occupies a place in the popular imagination as a descriptor of a specifically Scandinavian attitude, a subtly enforced culture of moderation and humility.

Dans la perspective des processus évolutifs qui boulversent actuellement les modèles traditionnels de la culture folklorique, dans la perspective des interférences et du transfert intense de produits culturels opéré entre le plan de la culture de type urbain et celle de type folklorique-traditionnel, la choréologie devrait élargir l'angle de ses investigations vers une recherche sémiotique de la danse, qui seule pourrait rendre compte au-delà des niveaux de surface, des significations profondes qui justifient l'existence de la danse dans une communauté donnée, aussi bien que de toutes les transformations qu'elle subit.

For many people today, the Internet has become a major source of information. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that it is rapidly becoming a primary medium of communication (Bell 2001), and that it may even replace the print mode in many areas. This, in itself, is a strong argument for us, as ethnomusicologists, to take note of this resource and its potential for the discipline; we must reflect seriously and critically on how it might be used as a research tool, as a sphere for the dissemination of research findings and as an aid in the teaching and learning of ethnomusicology. Initial steps in this direction are already being taken by a number of ethnomusicologists; indeed, during the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Detroit in 2001, the panel, “Technology in the classroom and beyond: Hypermedia, Internet and other electronic resources”, chaired by Randal Baier, took up this debate. In an effort to further the discussion, and to raise awareness of existing Internet sites produced by ethnomusicologists, forthcoming issues of the Yearbook for Traditional Music will include a special section for website reviews.

In Spain, the establishment of ethnomusicology as a discipline fully conscious of its methods and objectives is relatively recent. Procursors can be seen in early studies of folk song which were catalyzed in European society by Herder and other scholars. It is obvious that 19th century research into Spanish folk song has little to do with current ethnomusicology, although there exists a common denominator: in both cases, scholars center their attention on those musics which are on the margin of “great musical art.” However, we could hardly understand the development and current state of the discipline in Spain if we did not take its beginnings in folk music studies into account. Comparative musicology of old, which concentrated on music of non-occidental origins and which laid the foundations of current ethnomusicology, was practically absent in the Spanish state. We do not find in Spain at that time a consolidated method or a satisfactory concretization of goals, but we can already encounter an object of study — denominated “folk music” — and social attitudes toward this object which allow us to consider those early collectors the predecessors of Spanish ethnomusicology.

In the musical traditions of the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, the evocation of ancestrally-significant places is of primary ideological and aesthetic importance. This is primarily done through song texts, when a singer “paints a picture” of a place in the mind's eye of the audience; when done with great skill, such evocation can produce strong feelings of nostalgia as listeners recall those places and the personal and ancestral events which took place there. Musical instruments can also be used in this way, either through tropes in the song texts, which make reference to the instrument and its ancestral significance, or through the actual sound of the instrument as an enacted trope during the musical performance itself. In either case, the mention or use of musical instruments can resonate powerfully with ideas about ancestors, people and places, making musical instruments important symbols in Yolngu culture.

In Greece, text, melody and movement have had a long creative history and a close relationship with the people. This trilogy has often been used as an important element in the struggle for freedom, or resistance, whether in the songs of the Klepfts, or in the various step combinations of the refugees from Asia Minor. The Metaxas dictatorship, for instance, in the late 1930s, banned many singers and texts of songs of the so-called rebétika, yet also reinforced the idea of folk tradition. From April 1967 until November 1974, the colonels' junta also banned performances of certain ancient and other plays because of their political content. The songs of Theodorakis, of Loizos landed the composers in exile, which was also the fate of other artists who opposed the regime, such as the famous actresses Melina Merkouri and Irene Pappas. Tradition flourished after a period of silence that began in the movement for a popular music of protest against the junta. Under the dictatorship, this trilogy of text, melody, and movement became a medium of resistance.