Today in China, “ethnomusicology” has commonly been considered in a broad sense as a discipline covering all studies of music except Western classical music. The current article also deals with ethnomusicology in China in this broad sense.

Not too long ago I sent my primary research associate in Kerala, a state in southwest coastal India, a copy of my article on improvisation in tayampaka (Groesbeck 1999), a drumming genre performed in this region. One of his comments surprised me; he implied that I had focused too exclusively on improvisation and not enough on what I would call “timbre”, that is, in this case the sound qualities produced by the various hand and stick strokes on the drum. This caused me to reread some of my field materials, and in doing so I recognised that timbre, in performers’ discourse and in performance, often seemed to help create a codified emotional state among spectators, define a theatrical character, contribute to the negotiation of authenticity, or index cultural/religious and regional identity (along with other parameters). Musical meaning and affect, I realised, were partially constituted through discourse on timbre and through the timbral aspects of performance itself. So how could I have initially overlooked it? Perhaps because this parameter, so affective yet difficult to discuss analytically, has often been short-changed in musical scholarship (on South Asia and other areas), although recently ethnomusicologists have begun to take it more seriously.

In the ongoing anthropological conversation concerning the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, perplexing issues of social identity 100m large. Beginning with the so-called “Murngin controversy” from the 1930s to the 1950s, some of anthropology's leading lights have attempted to sort out the complexities of Yolngu marriage, the subsection system, the kinship system and local organisation, including W. Lloyd Warner, Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edmund Leach. The debates have undergone considerable changes since those days, but the continual analysis and re-assessment of Yolngu sociality continues to the present day in the work of Nancy Williams, Howard Morphy and Ian Keen.

This article explores three fundamental aspects of text in the performance of Lao vocal music in the southern Lao province of Champasak:

1. (1) the relationships between poetic structures and creativity;

2. (2) extemporaneous composition of texts; and

3. (3) repertory and its relationship to performance context.

I aim to provide an overall insight into the creativity and repertory of Lao khaplam texts with an emphasis upon indigenous concepts of textual structures, compositional methods, and thematic conventions and their associated terminology. Before exploring textual aspects it is necessary to provide the reader with some contextual information. Firstly, a general overview of Lao vocal music in Laos today is provided, locating this study within a broader tradition of Lao vocal music, and secondly, musicological information pertinent to the performance of Lao vocal music to remind the reader that the central topic of textual composition takes place within a musical framework.

Biwa narrative music continues to be practised in the major cities of modern Japan, but its rural counterpart in Kyushu (southwestern Japan), a tradition known as zatô biwa, has all but ceased. Zatô biwa practice is unlike the styles that have developed in urban contexts in both its musical and literary aspects. Heike biwa, the tradition of chanting episodes of the medieval Tale of the Heike with biwa accompaniment, and the Chikuzen biwa and Satsuma biwa traditions that are today the most frequently heard styles of biwa narrative, are text-based practices in which items of repertory have fixed verbal content and stable performative schemes inscribed in texts. In rural Kyushu, however, zatô biwa was until the 1980s a primarily blind tradition in which written text sources were thought to have been of little or no consequence for performance practice.

Deriving from the Greek word aisthetikos, which deals with “sense perception”, the term aesthetics is now used in a variety of ways. When brought into English and other European languages in the nineteenth century, “aesthetic” was used to indicate the response to art and was especially concerned with beauty. Although still used in that way, the term “aesthetics” has also taken on the trappings of a philosophical system, often stated as the philosophy of beauty and good taste. A philosophical system is derived from a set of principles, thus a philosophy of aesthetics must be based on aesthetic principles.

It is generally accepted that the Western (classical) concept of aesthetics in its common acceptance as a philosophical reflection and valuation of an art product made by the creator himself and the onlookers, cannot be used in the field of traditional dance, or traditional culture in general.

When looking at dance and its aesthetics, I start with the view offered by Ellen Dissayanake that “art” is about “making special” (1988, 1992). Like her, I am unhappy with an elitist notion of art and aesthetics supported by modernism and want to look at aesthetics as being part of a sensitivity that underlies all cultural systems. For me to study aesthetics is a way of entry into different conceptualisations, different ways of making sense of the world, therefore it does not necessarily solely deal with the “arts”. This is why the very broad notion of “making special” is useful as it allows the examination of the connections between the activities that are generally considered “art” and other exploratory, imaginatively structured systems of actions, thus moving away from potential ethnocentrism. In this approach, I am following the footsteps of anthropologist and Tiwi expert Jane Goodale who, in a paper about Tiwi creativity, argued:

Arabesques and curvilinear designs woven on fabrics, painted on adornments and constructed in architectural monuments in the plastic arts of the maritime Malays in southeast Asia are important parameters for new studies in dance aesthetics. There lies the potential for in-depth studies of the synchronisation of borrowed (Islamic) and indigenous arts in the dance cultures of maritime Malays. Islamic arabesques and Malay curvilinear designs in the visual art echo similar virtues of infinite form that seemingly continues and multiplies in space and time from a single point such as a dot in space. The infinity of God underlines the artistic parameters of Malay-Islamic art while the lines, angles, squares, hexagons, foliages and twisting trunks are the means to quantify spatial horizons, vertical and horizontal spaces.

Fifteenth-century Italy produced the earliest known treatises on the art of the dance. These contained the choreographic descriptions and music of composed dances performed by the nobility and the bourgeoisie on public and private occasions. The treatises also provided the first known formulation of a theory of the dance, and set out its basic principles. The authors of the choreographies and their music, in particular two dancing-masters, were concerned that dance be recognised as both art and science. The liberal arts of the time included music and architecture, but not dance or painting. It is also quite possible that, by endeavouring to emulate the Medieval and Renaissance musicus (the philosopher of music who dealt only with the theory of his art), the dancing-masters were attempting to improve their own social and economic standing as well.

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.