Colin Turnbull's death, on July 28, 1994 (Pace 1994) hurdled me back into lengthy daydreams about the classes in anthropology I took with him from 1969-71 as a college junior and senior, classes that featured patiently detailed story after story drawn from his years of living with the Mbuti pygmies in the Ituri forest of Zaire. Colin was a humanist who came into anthropology from studies in philosophy and religion, and from a substantial background as a skilled keyboardist as well. He was my first model of an anthropologist whose understanding of sociability was nurtured by a deep musical engagement.

$30,000 to license one minute of Rajasthani music for an American insurance company's television commercial. Sampling by two French musicians of a Solomon Islands lullaby, which, mixed with pop rhythms and computerized chords, results in an international success with millions of dollars in profit through CD sales and income from television commercials in France and the U.S.A. (and perhaps other countries). Note by note borrowing of another Solomon Islands lullaby (these lullabies seem to be a hit!) by a well-known French composer, jazz musician and interpreter of classical and contemporary music who declared the composition as his own. $8,000 (only!) proposed by a Rumanian pop musician living in Germany, for sampling an Albanian song …

Western music is regarded as a piece of individual property, performed to entertain and appeal to the listener's emotions. With this conception of music, it is understandable when Westerners fail to comprehend, or even openly ridicule, the regulation of music's “power.” Traditional communities, however, frequently ascribe vast powers to their music: the power to heal sickness, create bountiful game, cause lightning to strike, kill, and, in one case, free a man from prison (Von Sturmer 1987). With such immense powers, it is logical to carefully restrict and regulate the use, rather than financial profits, of music. Western law, however, has evolved in tandem with Western music, focusing primarily on the protection of individual property rights and financial profits. Thus, traditional music and Western law clash at the most fundamental level.

We are living in an age of transnational development and major changes in transportation, communication, leisure activities, and work environments. For centuries, and in some places still, the accumulation of land and the enslavement or employment of farm laborers has ensured wealth. In many places this was supplanted by the ownership of factories and the employment of manual labor, or the ownership and exploitation of non-renewable raw materials such as oil, coal, and precious metals. But today the richest man in the United States is not the owner of a large ranch or a railroad, or of vast reserves of petroleum. He is Bill Gates, the owner of a computer software company called Microsoft. One of the United States’ largest exports is entertainment “software” — films, television, recordings, and computer software. Ideas are big, big business, and even U.S. foreign policy is influenced by considerations of intellectual property.

In this paper I wish to outline, very provisionally, a proposition for understanding more clearly the nature and operation of (mainly musical) tradition. It is, in essence, an argument concerning a fundamental social entity rather than an instrumental concept, the sort of discussion which Immanuel Wallerstein considers “always diffïcult“:

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

One of the crucial lessons that anthropology has taught ethnomusicology is the importance of trying to understand things from the inside, to explore the emic view, the folk view, actor's view, evaluation, explanation, model, representation; there are lots of terms for it. The point was made clearly many years ago by Alan Merriam in The Anthropology of Music, in the contrast between what he termed the folk evaluation and the analytical evaluation (Merriam 1964:31-32). Like other authors, Merriam emphasised the need for the researcher to find out how people define music and distinguish music from non-music:

This listing presents selected sound recordings of traditional music from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, organised by geographical region and musical style: 1) Northern Australia, subdivided into l.i) Central-Eastern Arnhem Land and l.ii) Western Arnhem Land including Bathurst and Melville Islands; 2) Kimberleys district; 3) Central Australia; 4) Southeastern Australia; 5) North Queensland; 6) Torres Strait; 7) Anthologies. In order to highlight significant stylistic continuities, the order of these categories corresponds roughly to anticlockwise geographical order around the continent starting from Northern Australia. Ordering of items within categories is alphabetical by title unless otherwise indicated. This listing does not include the considerable quantity of commercial recordings of music by Aboriginal performers in non-indigenous idioms (country, rock, reggae, etc. — for these, see Dunbar-Hall 1996). Nor does it include unpublished or privately published recordings (for listings of early recordings of this type see A.M. Moyle 1966, Stubington 1979).