Uzbekistan is a Central Asian country with a population of 27 million. It is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Turkmenistan to the west, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to the north, and Tajikistan to the east. There is also a large Uzbek population living in the north of Afghanistan (figure 1).

Insights into the knowledge, performance, and transmission of songs are pivotal in ensuring the survival of traditional Aboriginal songs. We present the first in-depth musical analysis of a Wapurtarli yawulyu song set sung by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu, Central Australia, recorded in December 2006 with a solo lead singer accompanied by a small group. Our musical analysis reveals that there are various interlocking parts of a song, and this can make it difficult for current generations to learn songs. The context of musical endangerment and the musical analyses presented in our study show that contemporary spaces for learning yawulyu must consider the complex components that come together for a song set to be properly performed.

From the 1950s through 1990s, ethnomusicology in Yugoslavia represented the sum of several distinct research traditions that, by and large, overlapped with the borders of six constituent republics: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia. Although the overarching national framework quickly disintegrated with the onset of the Yugoslav wars of succession in the early 1990s, localized research within particular borders was largely unaffected. The triumph of militant nationalism, the sweeping social changes, and the attendant musical transformations across the region raised issues of researchers’ accountability. Faced with unimaginable violence in the name of national identity and cultural difference, what should, or can, an ethnomusicologist do?

The sounds of percussion, guitar, singing, and clapping guide us from the heat of the summer pavement of the parking lot to the cool shade of the trees in the garden. Parents, staff, children, youth—we all gather here first thing in the morning. Some children immediately sit on the ground in front of the musicians, others navigate their canes or walkers to find a seat on a chair or bench or find a good spot for their wheelchairs. Some parents linger. The singing continues as everyone gathers and joins in with voices, clapping, and percussion to participate in the familiar “The boat goes down to the river, it takes me to my home …” This was our place of arrival at Spiral Garden.

The saman song-dance of the Aceh Gayo Lues people, who inhabit the central mountainous areas of the province of Aceh, is one of the most dramatic and famous of Indonesia's performing arts and a key symbol of Gayo cultural identity, yet it has not to date been a subject of ethnomusicological research.

Engaged with a discipline built on music, participant-observation, and fieldwork, ethnomusicologists position the experience of music and culture as a lens for studying the social creation of meaning. Ethnomusicologists' methodologies (e.g., approaches to fieldwork, analysis, and ethnography) are collaborative social acts and defining elements of the discipline. Yet in the second edition of Shadows in the Field, a foundational reader on ethnomusicological field research, Bruno Nettl laments that “most of our literature treats these matters at best as an essential step toward whatwe are trying to find out and not as a central activity” (2008:viii). While increasing numbers of ethnomusicologists are engaging fieldwork and its theories as objects of inquiry, this area would benefit from still greater scholarly attention. In this article, we explore the methodological implications of collaborative fieldwork by analysing what happens when ethnomusicologists deliberately go into the field together.

To this day Liszt's Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie first published in 1859 remains the only attempt to deal with the music of the Hungarian gypsies in a comprehensive manner. Despite its factual errors and romantic exaggeration, this enthusiastically and powerfully written study created a tradition that continues to exert a strong influence both in Hungary and abroad, often obscuring the results of a century of research in Hungarian music generally and that of the gypsies in particular. Only a few of the many papers written since Liszt's are thorough in their treatment of details. Hungarian musicohistorical works and publications on peasant music, especially those of Bartók, Kodály, Ervin Major, and B. Szabolcsi, however, provide some additional information. The modern point of view has been stated most clearly and categorically by Bartók, who in 1931 examined the question: Gypsy Music? Hungarian Music?

It is generally thought that Chinese music is homophonic. In instrumental music, the players tend to play in unison, and in vocal music, the instrumental accompaniment closely follows the pattern of the singing. The science of harmony, or the system that governs the combining of the intervals as applied in European music, was not known to China in the past. In fact, very little was said in the long history of Chinese music about the theory of combining the intervals.

However, unison is not to be regarded as the sine qua non in Chinese instrumental and vocal music. In many types of Chinese folk music, one finds that the players or singers do not adhere strictly to unison but vary their parts in juxtaposition and in relay. Frequently, the players resort to embellishing the melody and the more skilful ones will embark on extemporization, giving rise to heterophonic effects. The practice of embellishment and extemporization is intended to avoid monotony in ensemble playing and to show off the skill of the player. But in specific cases, different parts are planned for the singers and players to perform.