Pak Yŏn (1378-1458) was an important figure in Korean music history whose effects on court music, ceremonies, instruments, and theory are still being felt after five and a half centuries. Together with his sovereign, the famous King Sejong (reigned 1418-1450), he was enormously influential in the development of court music, especially the ritual music aak which derived ultimately from twelfth-century Chinese court ritual music and which was always considered to reflect Chinese musical style. Aak and its specialized musical instruments were used, largely at the instigation of Pak Yŏn, for a variety of court events, including the state sacrificial rites (chesa or killye) which were also based on Chinese models. Pak is the single most prominent and widely documented figure in pre-modern Korean music history.

I live in the heart of Seoul, Korea. I am riding across town in a taxi listening to the music that the driver is playing too loudly. I hear a man's voice, it is harsh and certain tones are punctuated, as if his heart is broken and he is crying out in anguish. Perhaps he is merely untrained and has just been smoking too much. But by now I know there is more to it than that; he must have developed that sound over years of intense training. The driver turns the volume down slightly and asks me why I am living in Korea. I explain that I am here to study traditional Korean folk music. The driver immediately begins a rather typical commentary on Korean music and its relation to history. He explains that the Korean people, throughout their long and glorious 5000 year history have had to endure many hardships, some at the hands of others, and as such a great deal of Korean music is filled with han – the music itself acting as a catharsis. Little did this man know that that is exactly what I came to Korea to investigate. Unfortunately, we reach my destination before I could ask him the crucial question — What does han sound like?

In a small wooden house at a government resettlement project built for peninsular Malaysia's aboriginal Temiars, a sick man lay wheezing. The illness pacog, harbored by rotting logs in the damp tropical forest, had invaded his body; western cosmopolitan medicine might have diagnosed him with tuberculosis. His breath came in gasps, but no one heard him. Members of his extended family, who might once have shared a roof with him, now lived in single-family households sponsored by Malaysian government “resettlement” projects initiated during the 1970s. Such projects, extensions of the British colonial “jungle forts” and “patterned settlements” established during the 1950s-1960s, also extended European Enlightenment, colonial, and capitalist social and economic ideals about “modernity” and “progress” into the jungle. These included ideas about the “individuated self” and the socioeconomic unit of the nuclear household, reflected in a government-sponsored architecture of single-family dwellings. The reconfigured space of such “modern” Temiar resettlement projects isolates nuclear families from one another, reconfiguring Temiar subjectivities and collectivities.

The two musical cultures of Thailand and Java, especially as conveyed by the leading percussion ensembles (the Thai pi-phat and the Javanese gamelan), share several important concepts, as well as obvious physical similarities between the instruments themselves. Studies by Becker (1968, 1980) draw attention to the “musical family” of Southeast Asia, especially to similarities within “bronze gong cultures” in that region (Becker 1980: 453). One of her papers is a comparison of Thai and Javanese music (Becker 1980). Another feature that paper shares with the present one is that the stimulus for it came from working with a graduate student whose research lay in Thai music, in the latter case an expert Thai performing artist. The present paper investigates what is perhaps the most striking, and paradoxical, similarity between Thai and Javanese music: the processes of improvisation and elaboration turn out to be governed by a melody which is not actually performed. In both traditions the art of playing individual instruments is, broadly, the art of realising this elusive melody according to the idiomatic patterns associated with a particular instrument. How it is done varies greatly from one tradition to the other, and within each ensemble. Theoretical constraints must also be considered. In both traditions rules must be observed, the purpose of which is to create structures which are shaped and balanced in ways not only conveying aesthetic appeal but also suggesting more universal ideas about melodic organisation and logic. Thai musicians tend to talk about what they do in ways which relate to improvisation (kan phrae tamnong, literally “changing the melody”). A similar process may be observed in Javanese music, even if the notion of improvisation is not as prevalent. The comparable term here is gam-pan (literally “working on”). There is no need to give detailed examples of how kan phrae tamnong and garapan work in specific pieces, as this aspect has been thoroughly documented in the literature of the two traditions—for example Brinner (1995), Martopangrawit (1984), Ketukaenchan (1989), Sorrell (2000), Sumrongthong (1997), and Sutton (1979). The main purpose here is to compare Thai and Javanese concepts of unheard melody and their musical realizations.

In this article, I pursue a line of inquiry that contends with music and the emotions: how and in what circumstances does music represent or generate the often subtle range of emotions characteristic of mourning rituals for participants in those rituals? My preliminary insights draw on two-and-a-half years' fieldwork with ritual drummers, during which I lived in Lahore, Pakistan and Lucknow, India and traveled extensively in the subcontinent. Using the practice of drumming during the Shī'ī observance of mourning, Muharram, as a case study, I wish to illustrate how localized interpretations of drumming contexts tend to bleed into interpretations of drumming content, and suggest that the study of musical culture may provide a unique perspective on the emotional multivalence or ambivalence that diverse participants experience in Muharram more generally. In Section I, I begin with a brief theoretical review of two themes, “embodiment” and the “complexity of emotions.” In Section II, I proceed to provide further background on Shī'ism, Muharram, and the status of music. The body of the paper examines three ways in which drumming signifies in a general sense: Enduring contextual associations (Section III); assignments of meaning (Section IV); and aesthetics of drumming (Section V). Before laying the theoretical backbone of this exploration, however, it will be necessary to know a bit about Muharram as an occasion and why a person might feel ambivalent about it in the first place.

Music education in Turkey was the subject of intense public debate during the 1920's. After the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, some music educators altered the established music curriculum to suit the political sensibilities of the new republican élite: an élite that viewed Ottoman music (alaturka) as the symbolic capital of a benighted imperial past, considered western music (alafranga) as the appropriate musical expression of a modern nation state, and sought, accordingly, to revolutionize Turkish musical instruction within the context of a Fine Arts Academy. While alaturka was not completely expunged from the canonic realm, it was classicized and classified to suit the modernist predilections of republican orthodoxy. In this paper, I will examine the debate that surrounded the establishment of a new musical institution in İstanbul. I will show how different conceptions of musical instruction disclosed competing cultural perspectives which had existed in the nineteenth century but which were now expressed within the unifying parameters of republican discourse. Further, I will demonstrate the ways in which this discourse was manipulated by contemporary commentators to validate individual aesthetic preferences and to denigrate aberrant musical practices with taxonomic rigor. In short, I contend that the polemics surrounding the establishment of a Fine Arts Academy reveal the discursive character of taste and the economic constitution of fine music.

Reports on the state of ethnomusicological research on Korean music have appeared since the 1980s. Both Bang Song Song's article titled “Korean Musicology: Its Historical Development and Problems” and the present author's article, “Perspectives on the Problems of the Ethnomusicological Research of Korean Music,” were published in the same issue of Korea Journal (1980). More recently, in his section on Korea in Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (1993), Robert Provine provided an up-to-date status report on research in Korean music.

The tradition of scholarly native music research in China is centuries old, particularly in the areas of tuning and temperament, historiography, music typology, music archeology and repertory study. In the twentieth century, native musicologists continue this long established tradition and its methodologies. At the same time, and particularly from the early 1980s on, ethnomusicology from the West influenced Chinese musicologists. Theories and methods of ethnomusicology and anthropology began to appear in the writings of native scholars in their study of Chinese music. This new “-ology” is viewed as an addition to the more “traditional” Chinese musicology. What most native musicologists seem to be interested in is what parts of this new “-ology” are useful to the “Chinese” situation. Using both the more “traditional” and the “newer” methodologies, native scholars have invested great efforts in recent decades in collecting, compiling, analyzing, and comparing regional musical styles and repertories. The sum of these scholarly activities forms the foundation of Chinese musicology. Because of language barriers, these research activities were not widely known outside the country. The following report outlines some of these research activities.

In order to take a general view of music research, particularly in traditional Japanese and Asian music today, it is appropriate to review the history of the Tôyô Ongaku Gakkai (The Society for Research in Asiatic Music), which is the ICTM National Committee of Japan and the host of the 35th World Conference of the ICTM. Concerning the Tôyô Ongaku Gakkai, virtually no introduction has been so far made in Western languages, except for a very brief description by Kishibe Shigeo.

On January 10-13, 1999, an ICTM Colloquium was held in Visby, Sweden, sponsored by the Swedish committee of the ICTM as part of the long-term research project “Musik-Medier-Mangkultur” (Music, Media, Multiculturalism), directed by Krister Malm and Dan Lundberg. I was one of the participants, along with the following cast of characters: John Baily, Dieter Christensen, Beverly Diamond, Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco, Eva Fock, Josep Marti i Perez, Pirkko Moisala, Pieter Remes, and from Sweden, Hans Huss, Henrik Karlsson, Dan Lundberg, Krister Malm, and Owe Ronström. Presenters were asked not to give formal presentations, but rather thematic introductions to extensive discussions, which were taped and transcribed. Malm and Lundberg later created diagrams and tabulations of the terminology introduced and the concepts raised by the sessions, and asked me to use the conference papers and discussion as a springboard for addressing the issues raised at Visby.

Due to the Israeli-Arab conflict that spans the twentieth century, Jewish and Arabic cultures are generally perceived as being in collision. However, since the inception of Islam in the sixth century and at least until the fifteenth century, the vast majority of the Jewish people dwelled in the Arab—and later on Ottoman—Empires. This close physical contact led, in spite of religious differences, to diverse types of cultural syntheses, such as the various Judeo-Arabic languages and literatures. It appears that music is one of the fields in which Jews and Arabs achieved their closest exchanges. The book by Kaufman Shelemay is a glaring document of this symbiosis.