This essay is presented as a token of gratitude to my father, Paul Nettl (1889-1972) author of Mozart und die königliche Kunst (Berlin: F. Wunder, 1932), Mozart in Böhmen (Prague: Neumann, 1938), and Mozart and Masonry (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957); and as homage to Anthony Burgess, author of Napoleon Symphony (1974), and to Claude Lévi-Strauss, author of “The ‘Good Manners’ Sonata” “Fugue of the Five Senses” and “The Opossum's Cantata” in his famous book, The Raw and the Cooked (English translation New York: Harper and Row, 1969).

Although ethnomusicologists have reported evidence of individual composition in orally transmitted musical traditions (e.g. Rycroft 1961/62, Kubik 1974), the idea still persists that in the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, music was and is composed by some kind of ‘folk collective’. This myth is enshrined in the obnoxious and derogatory term ‘ethnic music’, by which people often categorize music that was apparently not created by great or known composers. The rhetoric surrounding the term suggests that there is a belief that social groups can capture and understand the ‘spirit’ of their collective life through quasi-mystical acts of communal creativity.

There are now over 14 million refugees worldwide,1 “a staggering mass larger than the population of most of the countries of the world” (Smyser 1987: 3). Assuming that music is part of the cultural life of these populations, do they—as refugees and as a group distinct from other migrants—qualify for ethnomusicological attention? This is the question that this paper intends to address.

The process called by Karaite Jews from Cairo “Our twentieth century exodus” (El-Kodsi 1987: 294) was an extreme case of a refugee movement which culminated in the near-total displacement of an entire ethnic-religious community from its most important center. Throughout the ensuing process of individual resettlement and communal reorganization traditional music has played a significant role. This essay will consider the specific conditions both affecting music and affected by music throughout a generation of refugee movement.

Despite the fact that, in most parts of the world, music and dance are closely linked and are an integral part of the broad anthropological concept of culture, it is surprising to note that many accounts by ethnomusicologists and dance anthropologists are limited to describing either music or dance.1 As long ago as 1937, Curt Sachs wrote about universal interrelationships between the performing arts, and yet as recently as 1982 Peter Brinson noted that “There is a barrier between music and dance studies which needs urgently to be overcome” (Brinson, 1982:4).

This article examines, in a cursory form, the standardized ways of harmonizing predominantly modal melodies in the contexts of a set of interrelated urban folk and popular musics of the Mediterranean area. Insofar as these musics employ a harmonic-melodic system qualitatively distinct from that of Western common practice, they are worthy of scholarly attention in themselves. This article further seeks to revive the spirit of “Comparative Musicology” and to suggest ways in which cross-cultural comparison of selected musical parameters may reveal new sorts of pan-regional music areas.

In the 1980s a type of bagpipe, formerly used in parts of Dalarna (Dalecarlia), Sweden, was brought out of the museums, spread all over the country and played again as never before. The very few known traditional bagpipers were rediscovered and their music and life-histories reconstructed to suit new purposes. The subject of this paper is to describe and analyze this process, when parts of a common historical and cultural heritage were transformed and used in contemporary society as objects of identification.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s many Pacific nations became independent or self-governing. In seeking an expression for their new nationalism, Pacific peoples began to re-examine their cultural and historical heritage. Since that time, we have seen what is now referred to as a 'cultural revival' in the Pacific and this has emerged gradually alongside developments in national politics and government. Following this, the resurgence of research interest in Pacific cultures has led, in turn, to the formulation of policies by Pacific governments in order to regulate research undertaken in Pacific countries by outsiders.