In 1914, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs created a hierarchic ordering (macrotaxonomy) of all musical instruments, even though they (and many others after them, see Kartomi 1990 and 2001) pointed out the difficulty of developing a systematic classification of all musical instruments (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961:5). This conceptual framework implies that the classifier has to walk one and only one route in the process of classifying objects. This cut-off “tracing” cannot possibly encompass all the possible features that make an instrument what it is and inevitably eliminates several other essential qualities of the object.

In this article, I am concerned with the ways in which engagement with performance has shaped—and continues to shape—the ideas and theoretical perspectives of ethnomusicologists. In many ethnomusicology programmes (including several I have been in as a student or teacher), graduate students are required to participate in performing ensembles, take lessons both at home and in the field, and participate in performance as part of their thesis or dissertation research, yet the rationale for these widespread practices is not easy to decipher from contemporary definitions or overviews of the field. While my formal studies of ethnomusicology took place in the United States, and much of the literature discussed here is an outgrowth of North American practices, my perspectives are also shaped by more than two decades of teaching, research, and interaction with scholars and performers in East Asia. Although I will make reference to researchers and developments in Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, and Korea, the stories of ethnomusicology and performance in those locales deserve articles of their own, and I do not even pretend to speak for practices and issues elsewhere in Asia or in Europe, Latin American, Africa, or Oceania. Nevertheless, I believe that the issues raised here are of at least potential interest to all those involved in the intersection of music and ethnography, and I hope that these preliminary ideas will inspire comparative perspectives from scholars elsewhere.

In the ongoing anthropological conversation concerning the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory of Australia, perplexing issues of social identity 100m large. Beginning with the so-called “Murngin controversy” from the 1930s to the 1950s, some of anthropology's leading lights have attempted to sort out the complexities of Yolngu marriage, the subsection system, the kinship system and local organisation, including W. Lloyd Warner, Claude Lévi-Strauss, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edmund Leach. The debates have undergone considerable changes since those days, but the continual analysis and re-assessment of Yolngu sociality continues to the present day in the work of Nancy Williams, Howard Morphy and Ian Keen.

To the constituent elements of every scientific discipline belongs the elaboration of a system of documentation (as a method of gathering data) and of sorting and classifying these data so as to elaborate the essential methodical and theoretical postulates for marking the history, genesis and evolution of specific phenomena on which research is undertaken. The problem of documentation (recording, collecting, transcribing, measuring) has since the beginning of this century become for ethnomusicology a constant methodological question. Parallel with this emerge the first attempts to elaborate systems of the musical classification of melodies, the problem initiated by the editors of Sammelbände der internationalen Musikgesellschaft in 1902, which was directed not only to the classification of folk music material. The problem of classification was partly connected with the documentary work of cataloguing, and partly with the theoretical scientific area, coming before the need to penetrate into the inner organism of the melodies to be classified.

In present times, it may be surprising to see the word “origins” in the title of an ethnomusicological article. Reviewing historical and current hypotheses on the origins of song, or music more generally, it becomes apparent that most authors interpret a possible bifurcation between (spoken) language and (sung) music as the most plausible point from which “music” evolved. Curt Sachs states polemically, “Music began with singing” (1943:21). Such statements beg questions about the definition of music, not just origins. I will, however, forgo such questions in this article, concentrating instead on the prehistoric and contemporary fluidity between speech and song. I understand these terms as poles on a continuum, ranging from everyday fugitive speech to formalized speech (such as invocations, recitations, chanting) and, finally, to song. In this article, I suggest that seeking to understand the moment in which this bifurcation, or rather spreading out, of utterances occurred is a productive task. Understanding the differences between speech and song is a starting point for unpacking how these distinct phenomena emerged. Alternatively, thinking about those prehistoric times when speech and song emerged may support insights about modern meaning and the function of utterances that occupy a liminal space between speech and song.

The Kallawaya belong to the Quechua-speaking population of Bolivia and live on the eastern slope of the Andes in the Charazani valley system, north of Lake Titicaca, near the Peruvian border. Located in the Bautista Saavedra province of the Department of La Paz, the Valley and Rio Charazani cut across the Cordilleras and thus serve as a gateway to the lower-lying Yungas to the east. The Incas in their heyday prized this valley highly, for it lay at the outermost limits of their empire's expansion and opened into areas where the coca plant and tropical fruits and herbs were grown. Because of the alkaloids it contains, the coca plant (Eritroxilon Coca L.) has played an important role in rituals and cult practices since pre-Spanish times (M. Wendorf de Sejas 1982:223; J.W. Bastien 1978:19). The Kallawaya people have been known since antiquity as herbalists and healers, and the Incas are said to have accorded them special privileges on this account: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala tells in his “Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno” from about 1600 of “Callauayas” carrying Inca Tupac Yupanqui (1471-1493) and his wife Mama Occlo-Coya in a sedan chair at the Cuzcan court (F. Guaman Poma, ed. 1936: fol. 331).

Despite the importance of the scripture to any study of Islamic beliefs, customs or creations, little attention has been paid by musicologists and ethnomusicologists to the chanted recitation of the Holy Qur'ān. Muslim scholars of literature, of etymology, of grammar and syntax, of phonetics and vocal production have developed exhaustive studies based on the Qur'ān, but they have neither analyzed nor explained the musical aspects of the chanted recitations of the one hundred and fourteen sūrahs ('chapters') revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century.

During the month of June, 1966, I undertook a folksong collecting trip among the nomadic Lapps, visiting among others the village Nunnanen in northern Finland situated more than two hundred kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle. The well-to-do Lapps of the village, all of whom have completed four to six forms of Finnish primary school, own three thousand reindeer. Throughout the summer they live with their families in tents and follow the herd, whereas in the winter they live in villages in log houses, which were rebuilt after the Second World War. Thanks to the Finnish Ministry of Culture, I was provided with an interpreter and a battery-operated tape recorder, with which we were able to collect two-hundred-and-fifty Lapp folksongs, the so-called yoiks, among reindeer farmers and shepherds. An additional twenty-six folksongs were collected orally.

In the last decade, the emergence and rapid growth of ethnomusicological interest in urban phenomena has stirred up a fresh sense of methodological and conceptual inadequacy in the face of current needs. Confronted repeatedly by the complexities of the urban situation, we are pressed to reassess the resources with which to meet new problems and new demands. New questions are being asked; old ones are being reformulated.

In a nation on the periphery of Europe, in a region most distant from the capital, the country's indigenous musical traditions are undergoing a process of institutionalization. A large proportion of the nation's population fears the loss of their ancient customs and national identity to the ever rising tide of foreign cultural influences. The locality itself, however, enjoys both a strong regional identity and a unique musical repertory, a repertory that plays a central role in both the text and context of the institutionalization in question. The resultant institution is multifaceted—its activities include: the collation and publication of music recordings and transcriptions; the promotion of performances by locally and nationally revered folk musicians; the creation and direction of a folk orchestra; and, most importantly, an extensive folk music education programme, culminating in a nationally recognized qualification. The organization has been quietly accused by other folk musicians of standardizing and formalizing the music it professes to support. Nonetheless, it receives financial support from the state departments for education and culture.

Ladakh is located in the northwestern part of India between the Himalayan and the Karakoram Ranges. The traditional culture of Tibetan Buddhism has been conserved in Ladakh since Rin-chen bzan-po (985–1055) introduced Buddhism in the Early 11th-century. In the 19th-century, several studies of Ladakh were reported by European scholars and missionaries. Because foreigners were banned from the region from 1947 to 1974, due to the boundary dispute between India and Pakistan, cultural studies of Ladakh were scarce and research has progressed slowly. Since the ban was lifted, cultural research, particularly in Buddhism, iconography and ethnology, have made systematic progress. However, concerning Buddhist chant in Ladakh, we have nothing more than a few descriptions in reports by ethnologists and Buddhist scholars. Buddhist chant in Ladakh is important for research in Tibetan Buddhist chant because of its preservation of traditional culture when the region was isolated in the postwar period.

In Spain, the establishment of ethnomusicology as a discipline fully conscious of its methods and objectives is relatively recent. Procursors can be seen in early studies of folk song which were catalyzed in European society by Herder and other scholars. It is obvious that 19th century research into Spanish folk song has little to do with current ethnomusicology, although there exists a common denominator: in both cases, scholars center their attention on those musics which are on the margin of “great musical art.” However, we could hardly understand the development and current state of the discipline in Spain if we did not take its beginnings in folk music studies into account. Comparative musicology of old, which concentrated on music of non-occidental origins and which laid the foundations of current ethnomusicology, was practically absent in the Spanish state. We do not find in Spain at that time a consolidated method or a satisfactory concretization of goals, but we can already encounter an object of study — denominated “folk music” — and social attitudes toward this object which allow us to consider those early collectors the predecessors of Spanish ethnomusicology.

During the 20th century, the Tahitian drum dance ('ōte'a) has become a symbol of Polynesia representing, for Westerners, the myth of the “Pacific islands paradise”. It has been assumed that the popularity of this dance genre led to its introduction into other areas of the Pacific. But is this dance Tahitian in origin?

In Greece, text, melody and movement have had a long creative history and a close relationship with the people. This trilogy has often been used as an important element in the struggle for freedom, or resistance, whether in the songs of the Klepfts, or in the various step combinations of the refugees from Asia Minor. The Metaxas dictatorship, for instance, in the late 1930s, banned many singers and texts of songs of the so-called rebétika, yet also reinforced the idea of folk tradition. From April 1967 until November 1974, the colonels' junta also banned performances of certain ancient and other plays because of their political content. The songs of Theodorakis, of Loizos landed the composers in exile, which was also the fate of other artists who opposed the regime, such as the famous actresses Melina Merkouri and Irene Pappas. Tradition flourished after a period of silence that began in the movement for a popular music of protest against the junta. Under the dictatorship, this trilogy of text, melody, and movement became a medium of resistance.

For many people today, the Internet has become a major source of information. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that it is rapidly becoming a primary medium of communication (Bell 2001), and that it may even replace the print mode in many areas. This, in itself, is a strong argument for us, as ethnomusicologists, to take note of this resource and its potential for the discipline; we must reflect seriously and critically on how it might be used as a research tool, as a sphere for the dissemination of research findings and as an aid in the teaching and learning of ethnomusicology. Initial steps in this direction are already being taken by a number of ethnomusicologists; indeed, during the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Detroit in 2001, the panel, “Technology in the classroom and beyond: Hypermedia, Internet and other electronic resources”, chaired by Randal Baier, took up this debate. In an effort to further the discussion, and to raise awareness of existing Internet sites produced by ethnomusicologists, forthcoming issues of the Yearbook for Traditional Music will include a special section for website reviews.

Until at least the 1980s, scholarship on Caribbean carnivals tended to overemphasize European roots because of the celebration's ties to the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, scholarship on Caribbean music has long been embroiled in nationalistic paradigms that have hindered a view of the Caribbean as a cultural region with more commonalities than differences among the music cultures of the various nations (see Bilby 1985). In this paper, I combat these paradigms with the concept of convergence, an alternative to the problematic “syncretism.” It is complementary to current notions of creolization and hybridity, but unlike those concepts, it serves to emphasize the construction of cultural meaning over biological notions of race or ethnicity.

In the musical traditions of the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, in northern Australia, the evocation of ancestrally-significant places is of primary ideological and aesthetic importance. This is primarily done through song texts, when a singer “paints a picture” of a place in the mind's eye of the audience; when done with great skill, such evocation can produce strong feelings of nostalgia as listeners recall those places and the personal and ancestral events which took place there. Musical instruments can also be used in this way, either through tropes in the song texts, which make reference to the instrument and its ancestral significance, or through the actual sound of the instrument as an enacted trope during the musical performance itself. In either case, the mention or use of musical instruments can resonate powerfully with ideas about ancestors, people and places, making musical instruments important symbols in Yolngu culture.

Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose called these commandments “the Jante’ Law,” so-named for his protagonist's fictional Danish home-town in the semi-autobiographical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (orig. pub. 1933; English trans., 1936:77-78). Over the years this ironic credo of elder-dominated communal living has expanded and acquired a special resonance with respect to Swedish cultural self-image. Today in Sweden, the Jante Law occupies a place in the popular imagination as a descriptor of a specifically Scandinavian attitude, a subtly enforced culture of moderation and humility.

When looking at dance and its aesthetics, I start with the view offered by Ellen Dissayanake that “art” is about “making special” (1988, 1992). Like her, I am unhappy with an elitist notion of art and aesthetics supported by modernism and want to look at aesthetics as being part of a sensitivity that underlies all cultural systems. For me to study aesthetics is a way of entry into different conceptualisations, different ways of making sense of the world, therefore it does not necessarily solely deal with the “arts”. This is why the very broad notion of “making special” is useful as it allows the examination of the connections between the activities that are generally considered “art” and other exploratory, imaginatively structured systems of actions, thus moving away from potential ethnocentrism. In this approach, I am following the footsteps of anthropologist and Tiwi expert Jane Goodale who, in a paper about Tiwi creativity, argued: