The opposition of tradition to innovation is a commonplace in studies of culture. So too is the association of tradition with cultural forms in native environments and with forms that evolve so slowly that they are thought to be unchanging. Through contrast with seemingly unchanging or stable forms, innovation becomes identifiable.

In this article we analyse some developments in the popular music of Indonesia, especially those that have occurred during the last five years. The concept of “popular music” in present-day Indonesia is discussed briefly along with an analysis of how it is used in the negotiation of the identity of particular communities, playing a vital role in a dialogue of power at local, national and global levels. We ask how the different pop scenes comment on and act to change society in an age of shifting identities and sensibilities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, issues of copyright and intellectual property rights seem to have become even more important than they were in the 1990s.

Examples are taken from both the national and regional pop musics with attention being paid particularly to the emergence of “world music” or “fusion”, Islamic music and the Indie music scene. The question of how these different types of pop music are represented in and shaped by the new forms of mass mediation, in particular the video compact discs and the Internet, is raised and discussed. With the demand for political change (Reformasi) and fall of President Suharto, the figurehead of the “New Order” regime, in 1998, these developments seem to have accelerated more than ever before.

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.

A long-standing and pervading theme in fields of inquiry such as economics, sociology, health studies, human rights, or social policy, poverty has apparently not similarly impacted scholarship on music beyond the implicit recognition—more typically found in folklore, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies—that it may have conditioned to some degree music-making among given groups within a larger society or even among larger societal entities such as countries and continents. One problem likely hindering more theoretical approaches to music and poverty is the difficulty, so often expressed in the above-mentioned fields, of finding a universally acceptable definition of poverty (not forgetting that defining “music” is also far from unproblematic). A growing literature, mostly beyond music disciplines, accounts for the many possible determining factors behind such a definition—such as family or individual income, gross national product, formal employment rate, average cost of a minimal caloric diet, access to basic sewage, and adequate housing—which may be adopted either in combination or in isolation. At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, economists such as Amartya Sen, Mahbub Ul Haq, Deepa Narayan, Celso Furtado, and others went further in the pursuit of a multidimensional approach, considering factors such as education, availability of natural resources, and political participation in defining the boundaries indexing situations of poverty. Sen's (2010) definition of poverty as one's privation of developing individual capacities has since become an influential source of public debate (Crespo and Gurovitz 2002).

As everyday musical experience becomes increasingly mediated by radio, recordings, television, film, and computers, scholarly and popular discourses about music are periodically punctuated by concerns over consumer passivity and alienation. When we shift the focus to the musical practices of children and youth, these concerns are accompanied by age-old arguments over the intellectual, moral, and physical effects of music on developing young people. Charles Keil (1998:304) has recently suggested that humanity is in dire need of “restoration of grooving-capacity,” or else “boredom, anxiety, consumerism, and business as usual will kill us.” This is apparently a continuation of his earlier concern (1993:2) that mass mediation may be “enriching our private lives at the expense of a broader sociability.” Undoubtedly, thoughtful critiques of mass media constitute important work for musicologists; grass-roots projects for enlarging the musical materials to which children have access are equally valuable. Nevertheless, I think it's too early to condemn mass mediation as the pathway to human devolution.

Global flows of people, capital and ideas in the late 20th century have challenged scholars of culture to acknowledge that cultural practices do not remain anchored to either places or peoples of origin. Movements of groups of peoples away from homelands continue to provide one means by which cultural practices spread. The circulation of mass-mediated means of communication, especially television broadcasting, videotapes, and sound recordings, has not only facilitated the circulation of ideas, images and practices, but has made possible their separation from the bodily presence of cultural carriers.

The Indian sarangi is uniquely endowed with meaning. Beloved for its evocatively vocal sound and its vivid associations, it also conveys disrepute as part of a highly charged, ambivalent musical identity. Studying, and living with, the Indian sarangi taught me such meanings through participating in the musical experience and memories of cultural insiders*

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire — foreshadowed by the Singing Revolution of the Baltics — and Latvia's regaining independence on May 4th, 1990, no sphere of the public and intellectual lives of that country has been left unchanged. Ethnomusicology is no exception. At present this field is faced with rapidly changing circumstances and perspectives. This therefore seems to be a good time for retrospective reflection on the experience collected to the present and for an analysis of our current condition. Through such reflection and analysis we should be able to define our actual position, outline new orientations and recognize our limitations as well. This article contains an overview of the history of Latvian folk music research and some remarks on folk dance research in that country as well.

This paper explores the differences between two social organizations of the West Indian island of St. Lucia. The rivalry between the La Rose and La Marguerite societies, exemplified in the adoption of contrasting strategies in performance, forms of communication, and sets of values, is examined in relation to the profound influences of written and oral traditions on people's consciousness (see Finnegan 1977; Havelock 1963, 1982; McLuhan 1962, 1964; Ong 1976, 1977, 1982; and Tedlock 1983). This paradigm informs the meaning of the activities of the two organizations insofar as it brings forth other discrepancies which are related to but transcend the phenomena of orality and literacy: it leads to the discussion of social and economic classes, and what St. Lucians themselves conceive and perceive as their correlating behaviors and attitudes, mores and ideals. It serves as a vantage point from which to survey the network of associations formulated by St. Lucians to make sense of their world as they relate to the past and imagine the future.

Cases of trance, ecstasy, spirit possession, and other institutionalized states of altered consciousness have frequently been invoked is discussions of the effectiveness of musical symbols, often as if they were the most convincing proof of the extraordinary powers of music. They are, of course, more visibly dramatic than an individual's quiet and total absorption in the performance of a moving piece of music; but there is as yet no evidence that these two kinds of experience are essentially different or that the appropriately different styles of music are crucial factors in generating the different kinds of response.

In this article, I pursue a line of inquiry that contends with music and the emotions: how and in what circumstances does music represent or generate the often subtle range of emotions characteristic of mourning rituals for participants in those rituals? My preliminary insights draw on two-and-a-half years' fieldwork with ritual drummers, during which I lived in Lahore, Pakistan and Lucknow, India and traveled extensively in the subcontinent. Using the practice of drumming during the Shī'ī observance of mourning, Muharram, as a case study, I wish to illustrate how localized interpretations of drumming contexts tend to bleed into interpretations of drumming content, and suggest that the study of musical culture may provide a unique perspective on the emotional multivalence or ambivalence that diverse participants experience in Muharram more generally. In Section I, I begin with a brief theoretical review of two themes, “embodiment” and the “complexity of emotions.” In Section II, I proceed to provide further background on Shī'ism, Muharram, and the status of music. The body of the paper examines three ways in which drumming signifies in a general sense: Enduring contextual associations (Section III); assignments of meaning (Section IV); and aesthetics of drumming (Section V). Before laying the theoretical backbone of this exploration, however, it will be necessary to know a bit about Muharram as an occasion and why a person might feel ambivalent about it in the first place.

The word son is a venerable one in the history of Mexican song and dance. The use of the term dates at least from the sixteenth century — in the Spanish-speaking world as a whole, although ample evidence of its currency is not to be found until the second half of the seventeenth. Gaspar Sanz, in his work commonly called Guitarra española, first published in Zaragosa in 1674, uses the term interchangeably with danza and sonada, the latter term also being found in Sebastian de Covarrubias Horozco's Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611) in absence of the term son.

As a companion piece to the previous article by Giurchescu and Torp, my focus here is to attempt to illuminate trends and approaches in dance research by American scholars. It will be seen that although the current generation of American dance ethnologists/anthropologists have their theoretical roots in American and British anthropology, the most widely-known American dance ethnologist, Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, was more closely aligned with European dance scholars of the 1930s and 1940s. At the risk of overstatement for the sake of discussion, I would characterize the focus of European dance researchers to be on the dance product and its authenticity, while the focus of American researchers is on what dance can tell us about society—or to simplify even further, choreological approaches vs contextual approaches.

Among the earlier views and assumptions about non-Western music that have come to be reconsidered in the present period of musicological self-reflection are those concerning issues of conservatism (or stability) and innovation (or change). In a number of cultural areas, a bias among researchers towards perceived conservatism was influenced by both indigenous and Western beliefs. Clunies-Ross has aptly summarized the bi-cultural impact upon the perception of conservatism in the case of Australian Aboriginal song: “… it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to question the ideology of stability of songs and their meanings that has been espoused by Aborigines and researchers alike. Two converging ideologies have ensured that the matter remained beyond question. For their part, Aborigines have tended to communicate an ideology of stability to enquiries, and the enquirers have tended to accept this ideology at face value because they have themselves brought to their task prior assumptions about the stability of oral traditions. These assumptions derive from our own culture's emphasis on the unchanging nature of artistic forms, especially of those that have the authority of antiquity” (Clunies-Ross 1987: 4).

There is an extensive literature on “African scales”, but only rarely is it reported what the internal order of the tone material is in the minds of the musicians themselves. Only in a few works can one find direct quotations from the musicians in their own vocabulary. One famous example is Klaus Wachsmann's documentation of the tuning process of an amadinda xylophone in Uganda, and the critical remarks made in Luganda by the two royal musicians, Mr. Evaristo Muyinda and Mr. Baziwe, while they were tuning their instruments. Simultaneously, the process of tuning was measured “live” with a Stroboconn pitch-measuring machine. Wachsmann writes (1957:14-15): “Strictly speaking there is no scale which one could describe in unambiguous terms of physical definition, but there are tuning processes in the course of which corrections are made. Their trend can be described, and in favourable circumstances one can form a realistic picture of the pattern in the mind of the tuner.”

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.

Applied or advocacy ethnomusicology has yet to be developed as a formal sub-field in South Africa, yet researchers of music have the advantage of being at the forefront of a social reconstruction impetus that provides opportunities for relevant social engagement, the remodelling of research foci, the expansion of multidisciplinary applications, and the utilisation of participatory methodologies that have yet to be explored in research on performance. This paper is presented in the form of a report of my recent explorations into the operational interface between ethnomusicology, environmental conservation and sustainable development in the Dukuduku Forests of northern KwaZulu Natal. In so far as the study is situated in a community that resides within an environmentally protected area, it extends the notion that culture is as much a part of the treasure of the landscape as are its faunal, floral and marine resources. The premise herein, is that songs, dances and ritual processes present rich repositories of local knowledge about the environment, and are particularly relevant signifiers of local meaning systems in a context where these systems may no longer be learned through apprenticeships or oral tradition, due to geographic displacement and rapid socio-economic transformation. Broadly therefore, the project strives to examine the interdependencies between symbolic practices and natural resource use, and to explore ways in which deep-rooted cultural wisdoms can be recast to generate an organising paradigm for the sustainable custodianship of the environment, and herein empower the communities to participate more equitably in the development of the region.

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.

The use of the term “style” in relation to dance is a term we all use, but seldom explore its myriad meanings and implications. In this paper I will attempt to clarify my own usage of the term and how it relates to other terms, such as dance, form, and structure. These slippery terms are used by all of us, as if we agree on what they mean. Here, I want to explore what they might, or could, mean.