Zambia is, for administrative purposes, divided into eight provinces: the Northern, the Luapula, the Western, the Northwestern, the Eastern, the Central, the Southern, and the Barotse. Linguistically, it is divided into four main language groups: the Bemba, the Nyanja, the Tonga, and the Lozi. The language groupings coincide to a great extent with the provinces, with the Bemba-speaking people spread over the Northern, Luapula, Western, and parts of the Central provinces. The Nyanja speakers are in the Eastern Province, the Tonga speakers in the Southern and parts of the Central provinces, and the Lozi speakers in Barotse Province. The Northwestern Province is occupied by a group of tribes whose lingua franca is usually regarded as Luvale-Mbunda.

Les relations commerciales entre les habitants du Golfe Persique et ceux de Zanj ou Afrique orientale sont très anciennes: n'oublions pas non plus que Mascat et Zanzibar étaient liés par une union politique de 1690 environ jusqu'à 1861. On a souvent parlé de l'influence arabe sur les peuplades de la côte est d'Afrique; on a beaucoup moins parlé des conséquences de la présence de minorités importantes d'Africains dans les principautés arabes du Golfe.

La musique arabe de Kuwait, de Bahrain et de la Côte des Pirates n'est pas sensiblement influencée par les musiques africaines: la seule exception notable concerne les danses de guerres normalement appelées ardha à Bahrain, ayala sur la Côte des Pirates; les mélodies, les textes et les danses sont indiscutablement d'origine béouine mais l'influence africaine est sensible dans les rhythmes produits par le groupe de joueurs de tambour qui danse entre les deux rangs de chanteurs arabes.

The study of song texts by scholars in various fields has taken many directions. Some of those directions have been the result of particular disciplinary methodology such as literary history and criticism, history, folklore, anthropology, linguistics, and musicology. Others have been the result of peculiarities of a language, such as the problems of song in tone languages. This article is an introduction to and analysis and reinterpretation of some of the approaches to the study of song texts which seem at this time to present fruitful avenues for future research.

Oral tradition is the theme for the event that we are initiating now. We will attempt to present a synthesis of the emergence and development of popular music and its importance in Brazilian culture. It is our intention to present a brief summary of all this trajectory throughout the national territory, particularly focusing, though, on popular music in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Jesus reportedly said that “the poor will be always with us” (Matthew 26:11) but, brimming with confidence after the Second World War, sociologists and economic policymakers in the United States dared to think otherwise. In a modern, affluent society, poverty was embarrassing. Social critics used to believe individuals were poor because they were unlucky or lazy or stupid, but mid-twentieth century sociologists saw the causes as cultural: if society could but change those cultures, then poverty would disappear (Galbraith 1998; Harrington 1963). The editor of this volume invited me to reflect on music and poverty in relation to my scholarly research over the past forty-five years. It so happens that the musical communities in the United States where I've done most of my field research were characterized as cultures of poverty and targeted in President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 State of the Union address in which he declared a War on Poverty. Daniel Moynihan, one of the architects of the War on Poverty in the US, put the then culture-of-poverty theory into bureaucratese: “Poverty leads to cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation which lead to poor health, inadequate education, and low mobility limiting earning potential which leads to limited income opportunities which lead to Poverty” (1966:4, my italics). While I did find material poverty in the musical communities that I participated in and studied since the 1960s, I found the people in those communities to be rich in music and expressive culture. I never found a cyclic culture of poverty in the Moynihan sense, either. Instead, I came to understand that poverty was imposed from without by discrimination, exploitation, and corruption.

This article assesses how translocal Irish folk-music practices and their consumption in Austria elide the traumatic legacy of extreme nationalism in modern European history. Furthermore, it teases out the degree to which the affinity of Austrian performers and audiences with Irish folk music might provide an alternative sphere of cultural identification to indigenous Austrian folk-music practices. Combining ethnographic and historical inquiry, the article unravels how various nostalgically sustained imaginaries of Irishness find complex refractions in the Austrian present, while also interrogating the stakes of an emerging insistence upon the primacy of “the music itself” in ethnographic voices.

When you realize her [Athens'] greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard. From Pericles’ Funeral Oration of 431/0 BC

A few years ago I published a short article on a strange phenomenon, which I dared to call “polyphony.” In the meanwhile, Curt Sachs treated a very similar phenomenon in his last book and I felt encouraged to take up this problem once more. I mentioned two examples.

In a village in southern Rumania, I observed some thirty or forty women going to the churchyard; there, each woman stood in front of a tomb and sang a song. Each woman sang a different melody and there was no musical relation between one song and the other. And yet the whole formed a uniform expression in a higher, let us say, extra-musical sense.

It seems strange that a contribution on the subject of stick dances should be offered at a symposium that concerns itself with music and history. This strangeness persists, however, only so long as one contemplates modern developments in art music. During earlier periods, even in Europe, the term music referred to dance as well, and in the context of folk music the two aspects are largely inseparable even now. In its constitution the International Folk Music Council stresses the fact that folk music includes dance. From what could be called the “ethnomusicological” point of view, there would consequently be no surprise at all at the choice of this subject. As far as India is concerned, a paper on dance is even less surprising, as the word for music in India, Sangita, designates vocal and instrumental music, as well as dance, by definition. While it is true that in India the historical development of vocal and instrumental music as autonomous forms of art has removed them just as far from dance as has been the case in the West, the definition of Sangita stands and, what is more, is not considered irrelevant.