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.

Carnival in the Federal State of Pernambuco in north-eastern Brazil is, from a musical point of view, one of the most varied and interesting traditional festivals in the whole of Latin America. Unlike the famous carnivals of Rio de Janeiro and Salvador (Bahia) with their own repertoires of, respectively, sambas and blocos afro, the carnival of Pernambuco presents in addition to these repertoires almost the whole of the musical and dance spectrum of the North-east. Because numerous segments of the local communities are dramatised in the specific performance styles, the Pernambucan carnival opens up to the scholar an overview of contemporary culture in that region. On the other hand the historic is also highlighted in the performances of the carnival groups (agremiaçdões carnavalescas) through original dramatic reconstructions of, for example, the uprising against Dutch occupation in the eighteenth century, the flourishing sugar industry that was based on slavery during the colonial era, the folk reinterpretation of the Congo empire on Brazilian soil and the “belle époque” of Recife.

In this article I intend to describe some of the social processes that have led to the development of the sardana, a Catalan dance, to its present form. This is not meant to be a thorough description of the dance itself but rather a treatment of it as an expression of certain social and cultural processes which, although not of a strictly musical nature, have strongly influenced, and even determined, this dance and its music. My objective here is first to review the differentiated social perceptions of sardana in the course of its history and then to clarify the relationship between that dance and the phenomenon of folklorism. As a result, the interdependence of musical morphology, social customs, function and ideology in relation to the sardana should become apparent. Through this example, we can observe the function of music and dance as socially articulated elements within society.

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.

Research carried out by Ernesto De Martino (1908-65) in the field of the anthropology of music in the 1950s is of outstanding importance in Italian scholarship and deserves attention both from an historical perspective and for the particular approach his work proposes to the study of the human dimension in music. De Martino made the most original contributions to the progress of anthropological studies in Italy in the post-war period and worked out some of his more interesting theoretical proposals through the study of musical phenomena of southern Italy. Two volumes are particularly representative of his output: Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Mourning), published in 1958, and La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse), a book devoted to the phenomenon of tarantism, which appeared in 1961. The publication dates of these works are important because they belong to that crucial period in the history of musical studies when the discipline established in the first half of the century under the name of “comparative musicology” changed its name to ethnomusicology. At the same time, a new trend in scholarly research was established with the primary goal of assimilating the study of music within the larger framework of the study of culture. De Martino's volumes were published during the ten-year period that separates David McAllester's Enemy Way Music (1954) and Alan P. Merriam's The Anthropology of Music (1964). This synchronism becomes especially interesting when one considers that no direct relationship existed between the trends that were developing in American ethnomusicology and the works of De Martino, who was educated in philosophical studies and whose main field of research was the history of religions. From this perspective, the consideration of De Martino's work can broaden our view of an important period in the history of musical studies. For although the point of departure of his work was different from those adopted by Anglo-American scholars, De Martino's results were also a clear endorsement of the anthropological approach to the study of musical phenomena, and they were proposed at a time when the same interests began flourishing in the scholarly world at large.

How does the enmeshment of a performance tradition within a broader matrix of societal concerns operate in an era of rapid change? What are the implications of this enmeshment for the viability of a tradition? This essay offers a few thoughts on these questions and on the subject of change in general, using the gong tradition of the Uma' Jalan subgroup of the Kenyan people of East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) as a case in point. As cogently stated in the introductory comments to Judith Becker's 1988 article, “Earth, Fire, Sakti, and the Javanese Gamelan”: “Outside of ritual, instruments nearly always have associations of class, of hierarchy, thus reinforcing the rankings of men and women within a society. Everywhere, musical instruments are embedded within the systems of thought that organize and give coherence to a particular world view” (Becker 1988: 385). Becker subsequently illustrated this phenomenon through an analysis of the making and the maker of the Javanese gamelan. The analysis I present here is in the same vein as Becker's in that it also concerns Indonesia, gongs, and the significance of sound instruments and instrumental expression beyond the performance event itself. However, in contrast to Becker's piece, I examine a gong tradition that has been cultivated by a different people in quite a different environment, and I use this tradition specifically to address the issue of musical change.

People of north-western China sing what they call hua'er or shaonian songs, hua'er meaning “flower” (suggesting “beautiful female”) and shaonian “youth”. (For convenience, I shall refer here to all these songs by the former name.) This article first introduces the hua'er phenomenon and surveys the current state of relevant research. It then raises and discusses two issues linked to the hua'er that have been largely ignored to the present: (1) local sexual customs and (2) economic, technological and political influences on the hua'er song culture and its research. I wish to show how shifting scholarly interests, economical and technological changes and political pressures have shaped the largely Chinese scholarship into an important folk song genre over seven decades. The present discussion is based on my own research since 1978, including field work undertaken in the region in 1982, and the results of other researchers' work to date, including published articles and reports and unpublished conference papers.