The term “history” frequently brings to mind the notion of dates — dates of events, dates of lives, dates of the creation of notable cultural objects. Lists of dates concerning presumably related objects yield chronicles. The term “chronological,” according to my computer's thesaurus, includes the notions of sequential, progressive, and successive among the synonyms. Thus a chronicle is fundamentally a list of datable entities arranged in some kind of progressive or successive sequence. While chronicling is an essential exercise in historical research, the concept of “history” extends beyond mere chronology. In a nutshell, histories seek not only to document what changes and when, but to explain processes of why things change.

In his recent book, Music in Human Life: Anthropological Perspectives on Music (1993), John Kaemmer stated:

Methodist and Catholic missionaries brought Christianity to the Fijian islands in the nineteenth century. They taught the islanders Western hymns and translated the Bible into the vernacular for Fijians to read. Fijians responded musically to these developments in two ways. For some church music they adopted Western styles and forms, and began composing these religious songs themselves in their own language. In certain cases, however, they continued to use a style of chanting derived from older, pre-European-contact forms for their Christian worship. This latter response resulted in same, a type of sacred music involving the unaccompanied chanting of Biblical texts.

On 28 September 1990, the city of Qufu, Confucius' home town in northeastern China, celebrated the philosopher's 2541st birthday with the performance of a reconstructed ceremony of ritual offerings, music, and dance. Presented on the terrace of the Hall of Great Achievements (Dacheng dian) of the Confucian Temple in Qufu, the performance was propitious but controversial. While most of the participants and audience appeared to have approved the ceremony as efficacious, some critics contested that it was inappropriately ‘touristy’ and included many inauthentic details. A few even condemned the performance as a misrepresentation of historical sacrifices to Confucius. As a music scholar invited to attend the performance, I found the contrasting reactions and criticisms enlightening because they represent a characteristically vigorous Chinese tradition of pursuing historical truth with its proliferation of written documents about the Chinese past. Above all, the reactions and criticisms highlighted, for me, the roles music performances played in historical understanding of the musical past.

The aim of this paper is to establish a frame of reference for a comprehensive study of the Hindustāni śahnāī during the twentieth century. The Hindustāni śahnāī, a type of double-reed aerophone, consists of a relatively small double reed of cane, as distinct from other double reeds in India made from palm leaf (Flora 1986), attached by a small conical metal tube to a wooden pipe of conical bore with seven fingerholes, no thumbhole, and an attached metal bell (Flora 1992). The author's instrument, from the tip of the reed to the end of the metal bell, varies from approximately 50 cm to 51 cm, depending on the particular reed and metal tube used. Playing in tune with a good reed is more important than maintaining a consistent length for the instrument.

Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country as general descriptions of the nation that celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1995 often state. Yet scholarship, including that on music, has often drawn attention away from the prominence of Islam in Indonesia to such things as spirit cults of the abangan culture of the countryside or the traces of Hindu-Buddhist influence in court-derived priyayi culture. Of course Islam in Indonesia, particularly in Java, is comparatively reticent when compared to its more assertive expression in neighboring countries, but this should not obscure its fundamental presence and importance. In this paper, I will report on my ongoing exploration of gambus, an Indonesian performance complex of Yemeni derivation with a prominent place in Indonesian Islamic culture.

There is a long history of association between music, ethnic identity, and emotion in Greek culture, but it seems that representations of these associations are made from non-performative, non-participant and other-defined perspectives. This paper discusses the cultural constructions of passion and expression which are constituted within Greek music-making and dancing in Adelaide, South Australia. The perspective presented here is one largely informed by the experiences of the writer as musician, dancer, ethnomusicologist, and participant in many discussions on this personal and emotional issue.

Today Italian ethnomusicologists participate in international meetings and contribute to the main journals of the field. Personal experience leads me to believe, however, that the peculiar history of ethnomusicological studies in Italy as well as the extremely rich and diverse repertories of Italian folk music are little known outside Italy. This is due to a number of reasons. The first one is language. Italian ethnomusicologists have written — and mostly write — in Italian, an international language of musicology, albeit not widely spoken in the ethnomusicological milieu. But the main reason, I believe, lies in the peculiarity of Italian research, focused on the musical traditions of its own country. The history of Italy and the cultural developments of the last century have prompted this situation of self-reflection in a spcific way that I will make an attempt to describe presently.