If “ordinary people [in Africa] tend to be invisible and inaudible” (Barber 1987), African youth initially appear to be the silent majority. Yet youth are becoming increasingly audible. In Tanzania (and elsewhere in Africa) urban youth and young adults have absorbed global popular musics like rap and reggae and have created local, loud varieties, and are thus making sure their experience is no longer invisible. Access to, and incorporation of, global popular musics — and other elements of globalized popular culture like fashion, food, dance, and sports — have intensified with the rapid mediatization of Tanzanian society in the 1990s. In this article I will focus on the relationship between global popular musics and the experiences of Tanzanian urban youth in the 1990s.

African dance has, in the past, sent some admiring Western poets and artists into ecstasy and many Christian missionaries and other colonialists into a state of horror. “The quintessential aesthetic form” or “the expression of moral turpitude,” respectively, were common verdicts. And frequently, early European observers of African behavior did not consider African dance to be dance, for it was not the familiar classical ballet or foot-tapping folk dance of their home countries. Perceptions and evaluations are now more balanced. We have first-hand reports about African dance by African and other scholars, an extensive survey of old and new literature relevant to African dance, an increasing number of African dance films, and African dance companies that have performed around the world.

Many early western dance historians, influenced by romanticism, never really thought about “folk” dance changing as a historical entity. Since they imagined it connected to the original and pure national spirit of a people, they often assumed that such a dance appeared right from the birth of that people itself, and that it is (or should be) changeless. Dance traditions generally continue on among the peasants as archaic remnants of the olden days (or in some cases, perhaps, they simply become extinct). One could represent this history on a two-dimensional timeline (Figure 1), drawing an arrow to symbolize the dance tradition as it progresses from left to right across time. A ball or node in the line could indicate a specific moment in the dance tradition's history, a documented performance for example.

As many of the articles in this volume of the Yearbook for Traditional Music celebrate the first forty years of the ICTM and the concerted, if indeed polyphonic, voice that that organization has provided the study of traditional music throughout the world, they evoke a mood of reflection and reexamination of the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Reflection was abundantly evident as the ICTM paused in 1987 to call attention to its achievements with a grand commemoration in Berlin, itself taking stock of a 750-year history. But the reflective mood of the ICTM's fortieth year was not simply a matter of panegyrizing the past; rather, it seemed equally concerned with reexamining the present and future in light of that past, with contrasting the old and the new, with juxtaposing them and encouraging ethnomusicologists to welcome that which has more recently come to shape our understanding of music throughout the world.

Os que věem a música em compartimentos fechados, sob a forma de castas aristocráticas, não entenderão o que está se passando, mas também nao verão nada além de seus compartimentos. [Those who see music in closed compartments, under the form of aristocratic castes, will not understand that which is going on, and further, will not see anything outside of their compartments] (de Campos 1993:345).

In socio-economically depressed urban areas, many musical programmes and projects are offered to the poor for free by community organizations, non-governmental and governmental organizations, and arts businesses, with funding from corporations, private foundations, churches, donations, governments, and concert tickets. In poor urban areas in Canada and other nation states with decaying systems of social welfare, or in non-welfare states, music making, music classes, music therapy, and musical performances including theatre, dance, and multimedia are activities within a larger series of services and goods offered by the organizations and institutions, and directed towards the well-being and survival of the poor. There are also musical rehearsals and performances that pay the poor. Such music projects’ day-to-day functionings, which are still in the early stages of being documented (Araújo 2008; Harrison 2008; Tan 2008), variously address the social deprivations that have come to define poverty, such as lack of health, livelihood sustainability, or social inclusion.

This essay explores music/dance as a cultural export and import, and how it may be changed and interpreted/reinterpreted by the exporter and importer, using Japan as a case study. Although I am a Pacific anthropologist, I have studied a variety of Asian musics and dances, as well as Pacific ones. I started my studies of Japanese music and dance forms in Hawai'i and extended them in Japan, especially my studies of gagaku, bugaku, and kagura. I also studied Hawaiian music and dance with some of the most knowledgeable and venerated Hawaiian teachers. But along the way, I stopped my earlier studies of violin, piano, voice, and ballet/modern dance to concentrate on what might be considered “exotic.” In this essay, I combine my interest in Japanese and Hawaiian musics/dances with my interest in concepts of “the exotic.”

Christian hymn-singing plays a prominent role in the daily life of many Pacific Island societies, and hymnody is acknowledged as a major historical influence on present-day Westernized music traditions. However, both contemporary performance practices and the historical foundations of Christian hymnody in the Pacific Islands1 remain little-documented, and, for the most part, neglected by ethnomusicologists. Contemporary traditions of hymnody in the Pacific Islands can be characterized as being diverse. The diversity is striking, considering the homogeneity of Western hymnody initially introduced by British and American missionaries throughout the region over a century ago. However, over time, different musical practices were used by missionaries and islanders in different locales. Therefore, any understanding of contemporary hymn-singing traditions must be placed in historical, as well as ethnographic, contexts.

GI songs or shinchū-gun songu in Japanese are legacies of the U.S. occupation of Japan, which started in 1945 with Japan's defeat in the Pacific War. Although the occupation officially ended in 1952, many American soldiers continued to arrive and remained in Japan even after 1952. This was due to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53), which made Japan America's advance base. GI songs generally refer to compositions addressed to American soldiers stationed in Japan during this occupation period and through the 1950s.

The integration of music and dance among African people is a well-articulated phenomenon both within and outside of ethnomusicology (e.g., Blacking 1973; Hanna 1973; Nketia 1974; Stone 1998; Mans 2002; Gilman 2009; Mason 2012:5). As Ruth Stone reports, “African performance is a highly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes difficult to separate, even for analysis. Singing, playing instruments, dancing, masquerading and dramatizing are part of a conceptual package that many Africans think of as one and the same” (1998:7). Despite the ubiquity of this conceptual packaging, African performance arts are realized in very particularized ways and contexts throughout the continent. In his study of the vimbuza healing ritual among the Tumbuka of Malawi, for example, Steven Friedson concludes that music and dance in vimbuza are not independent, but “multilayered and complexly interrelated” (1996: 131). In fact, “without drumming there would be no dancing, and without the dancing, the vimbuza [ancestral spirits] would be unable to ‘play with their children‘” (ibid.: 129). Friedson's observation goes beyond the basic acknowledgement that people who create and view dance experience it as sound too; as a practitioner, he found the very act of drumming to be “dancelike” (ibid.: 131–32). Similarly, in the specific cases of Ugandan kizino, kimandwa, maggunju, and gaze. Alfdaniels Mabingo argues that “to embody these dances is to personify the music that accompanies them. Music represents, frames and influences the corporeal bases, capabilities, performance and choreographic sensibilities of the dances” (2015: 13; see also Makubuya 1995). In both of these cases, music not only helps to define the choreographic movements, but also determines the speed and vigour of the dancers.

In 1962, on the occasion of the IFMC conference, a choreology study group was formed for the purpose of developing the foundation for a complex treatment of the problems of folk dance beyond the limits of individual countries.

The first task was to assemble an international committee of experts for intensive joint work to form the basis for a modern science of dance. The latest knowledge and methods of other sciences (for example, linguistics, comparative philology, musicology, and cybernetics) were the starting point for such work.

During my youth, the fact that I am of Karanga descent gave me exposure to mhande dance performances for clan rituals (mapira) that venerate the family or clan ancestral spirits. These ritual ceremonies were held regularly in my rural home community in Bikita district in Masvingo province, Zimbabwe. Mhande dance performance involves singing, drumming, and dancing. The hallmark of my lived experience of mhande was double-edged: fascination and bewilderment. On the one hand, the interlocking drum patterns produced by two drummers in each performance fascinated me most; on the other hand, the dance features left me wondering what they were meant to achieve because I did not enjoy watching them, yet they appeared to be the hub of each ceremony.

Among all cultures, perhaps none were more promoted as artistic and natural paradise than Bali. Fusing the mysticism of the East with the physical splendor of the South Seas, this former “isle of bare breasts” received layers of romantic accolades over the last eighty years, not only from the tourist industry but also from such respected figures as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Walter Spies, Miguel Covarrubias, and Colin McPhee. These scholars spoke of Bali as a “special paradise”, how all Balinese are musicians and dancers, and how they are in perfect harmony with their environment and so graceful that every movement is like a dance (see DeZoete and Spies 1973 [1938] and McPhee 1970 [1938]). Such statements typified the romantic orientalism of the time. Mead (1970 [1940]: 340) later reflected upon Bali's allure:

The fête was announced. For three days in June 1989 there would be music making, dancing, and feasting to bring together the people of the six Marquesas Islands in celebration of their shared heritage. There would be no prizes — the firm belief of the festival's organizing committee was that participation was an honor, not something motivated by anticipated monetary reward. Marquesans were sure that this celebration would be a grand event of such importance that the rest of French Polynesia would be forced to acknowledge the presence and abilities of these far-distant neighbors and to stand in awe of the innate beauty of their culture. Marquesans could no longer be ignored.

This article examines, in a cursory form, the standardized ways of harmonizing predominantly modal melodies in the contexts of a set of interrelated urban folk and popular musics of the Mediterranean area. Insofar as these musics employ a harmonic-melodic system qualitatively distinct from that of Western common practice, they are worthy of scholarly attention in themselves. This article further seeks to revive the spirit of “Comparative Musicology” and to suggest ways in which cross-cultural comparison of selected musical parameters may reveal new sorts of pan-regional music areas.

If there were something like ethnomusicological laws for the thermodynamics of musical change, one would surely state that when cultural, social, political or economic systems change, then some aspects of musical practice and style will change as a consequence. Our ethnomusicological theories of change do not predict, however, whether in a particular instance old musical forms will diminish in importance, continue but with new cultural meanings assigned to them, change to meet new demands, or be abandoned altogether. Similarly they do not predict when none of the old forms will be adequate and new forms of music will be required to meet new needs. The postcommunist transition in Eastern Europe (after 1989) and the former Soviet Union (after 1991) provides an ideal natural laboratory for studying particular instances of the application of this law (see, for examples, Slobin 1996). This article, a case study of that hypothesis and its ramifications in Bulgaria, a country effectively under Communist-Party control from 1944 to 1989, also is concerned with the role of music in constructing notions of national identity.

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.

The Nguni Group comprises principally the Zulu, Xhosa and Swazi-speaking peoples of South Eastern Africa whose languages and cultures are closely related. Through European contact and conquest during the past century and a half, their way of life has been considerably affected. Musically, many non-indigenous forms and features have been adopted by certain sections of each community, but we shall here be concerned only with what still survives of their truly indigenous music.

For individual music-making, instruments of several varieties—particularly musical bows—were formerly used by all Nguni peoples. But their communal music seems always to have been exclusively vocal, apart from the occasional use of ankle-rattles in dance-songs.