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.

In March 1987, during the course of extensive interviewing among members of the Cantonese opera community in the southern Chinese city of Guăngzhoū,2 I listened with considerable amazement while Chàhn Keìhyàhn, the director of the Guăngdōng Cantonese Opera Institute, recounted an experience he had while staging a local Cantonese opera version of one of the “model operas” of the Cultural Revolution period. My fascination was only secondarily with the details of the story itself; of greater significance was what transpired on a linguistic, and even physical, level as this man related his story.

This paper discusses an interrelationship of linđo dancing that occurs in both social and ritual contexts within Croatian Dubrovnik-area villages. In February 1977 during poklada (carnival), I video-recorded maškare (masqueraders), with their house-to-house visitations, a noisy procession, boisterous and outrageous antics, heavy wine drinking and the clowning of linđo dancing. During the 1976-1977 winter season I also recorded a series of social dance events in the same villages during holidays and Sunday evening dance events when only linđo was actively danced for hours. Now that several years have passed, and a theme of this symposium (held in Skierniewice, Poland, July 1994) is ritual and ritual dancing in contemporary society, I am led to analyse the process of continuities and changes related to this winter carnival (poklada) event. This paper suggests that the continuities and changes of dancing in a “ritual” event are in correlation to the changes in the music and dancing at “social” dance events, which were in turn influenced by major socio-economic changes during the 1970s and 1980s.

On 19-21 February 1998, the Chinese Opera Society (Singapore), an amateur opera society that promotes Chinese opera in Singapore, organised an event called “Street Wayang Revisited” as part of the annual Chinese Cultural Festival, which featured a three-night performance of the popular Chaozhou opera, Liu Ming Zhu, by the Sing Yong Hoe Heng Teochew Wayang, a professional Chaozhou opera group in Singapore. The ticketed performance, presented in what was called “street wayang-style” (Straits Times, 4 February 1998), took place in the Bras Basah Park within the shopping and business district of Singapore. Accompanying the performance was a month-long exhibition (13 February - 15 March 1998) at the Singapore History Museum, displaying old costumes, props, scripts and other Chinese opera paraphernalia, many of which belonged to Sing Yong Hoe Heng. Organised at a cost of approximately S$15 000 (US$ 8800), the event was widely publicised and well attended, and was partially sponsored by the Singapore Press Holdings and National Arts Council, amongst other national institutions. Aimed specifically at younger-generation Singaporeans, the English-speaking communities, expatriates and tourists, “Street Wayang Revisited” used slide projections of the Chinese script and corresponding English translations during the performance. The stage was double the size of the usual makeshift stages used daily by professional opera groups, the performance area was sheltered and well-ventilated with mobile fan units, and hawkers were specially engaged to serve food at this three-day event. Approximately 500 people watched the final performance on 21 February (Straits Times, 21 February 1998). On 23 February 1998, Sing Yong Hoe Heng resumed its normal practice and staged performances for a ritual celebration in an open space next to Newton Circus, another area that is popular with tourists, expatriates and younger Singaporeans. This time, however, a photograph published in the Chinese newspaper shows only a scatter of twelve people or so in the audience. The same newspaper article aptly questions this phenomenon with a metaphorical title: “Shuguang Zhaxian Haishi Xiyang Yuhui? [Emerging Sunshine or Lingering Sunset?]” (Lianhe Zaobao, 7 March 1998a).

Rāgī faqīrs are devotees who perform Shah Jo Rāg, a musical tradition for singing Sufi poetry at the shrine of poet-mystic Shāh ‘Abdul Latīf Bhiṭṭāī (1689–1752) in Sindh, Pakistan. Focusing on the life experiences of my teacher Manthār Faqīr, I historicise various subject positions that contemporary rāgī faqīrs refer to as faqīr (devotee), fankār (performing artist), kārīgar (skilled artisan), and artist. Through Manthār Faqīr’s performances, I analyse sonic manifestations of his complex subjectivities that at times shift, at times coexist, to demonstrate how he deploys sounded strategies emerging from different subject positions to balance devotion, artistry, legitimacy, and livelihood.

In 2022, Prime Minister of Portugal António Costa of the Socialist Party held a celebration of Brazilian music at his residence in Lisbon for the Bicentennial of Brazilian Independence a month before the presidential elections between Bolsonaro and Lula. In contrast to Bolsonaro’s right-wing rallies, Costa featured acts that were feminist, antiracist, and leftist. In this diplomatic event, musical performances criticised Bolsonaro’s Brazil and supported Lula’s campaign, imaginatively aspiring for an alternative Brazil despite the organizers’ directive not to protest. I show how the performers strategically and affectively advanced a comprehensible political critique in this crucial moment of Brazilian political history.

There have been many new developments in the production of moving film with synchronous sound track. In this all too familiar medium, developments are usually taken for granted and are not generally noticed. Areas of technology which have combined to produce ‘sync-sound’ have at the same time offered to a field of study, which some may prefer to call ethnochoreology, others ethnomusicology, a research facility the efficacy of which has not yet, in this writer's opinion, been fully explored. Because of this, the full impact of this facility on the practice and study of folk music and dance can not yet be properly gauged.

Like all exceptionally creative people, Zoltán Kodály was an untiring and strongly focused worker. Music education, folk music research and composition are considered his most important fields. Regardless of certain preferences at one time or another, he always understood his work in these diverse areas as mutually supporting an integral whole.

As far back as the incorporation of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge in 1662, it has been understood that association, discussion, exchange of information, and debate among scholars and scientists are essential to the development of scholarship and research. The very existence of the Royal Society contributed to the strong development of science, particularly in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and much was accomplished as a result of the associations therein formed. Similarly, the establishment of the Internationale Musikgesellschaft in 1899 provided for musicology an international forum and fostered the development of general European rather than simply national approaches. In the United States, the establishment of the American Folklore Society, just a hundred years ago, brought together literary artists and scholars, musicians, and anthropologists in a way that made possible the peculiarly interdisciplinary configuration of American folkloristics.