To this day Liszt's Des Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie first published in 1859 remains the only attempt to deal with the music of the Hungarian gypsies in a comprehensive manner. Despite its factual errors and romantic exaggeration, this enthusiastically and powerfully written study created a tradition that continues to exert a strong influence both in Hungary and abroad, often obscuring the results of a century of research in Hungarian music generally and that of the gypsies in particular. Only a few of the many papers written since Liszt's are thorough in their treatment of details. Hungarian musicohistorical works and publications on peasant music, especially those of Bartók, Kodály, Ervin Major, and B. Szabolcsi, however, provide some additional information. The modern point of view has been stated most clearly and categorically by Bartók, who in 1931 examined the question: Gypsy Music? Hungarian Music?

Few pioneering works on American culture are as significant as George Pullen Jackson's White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands: The Story of the Fasola Folk, Their Songs, Singings, and “Buckwheat Notes” (1933). To this seminal book Jackson added four others, which fixed his name as the key interpreter of the Anglo-American religious folksong tradition within the United States. In White Spirituals Jackson set for himself a large and ambitious goal: to define and study a corpus not previously recognized as folksong by orthodox ballad scholars. In the process, he added to our understanding of the tune-family concept and helped to establish a multi-faceted model of folk society identified by geography, institutional structure, and philosophic belief.

Dans la musique moderne, de Debussy à Boulez et Stockhausen, le “mythe du primitif,” en touchant l'oeuvre de Strawinski, Bartók, Milhaud, Vogel, Varèse, Chavez, Messiaen, et beaucoup d'autres, a fonctionné comme stimulant de l'imagination musicale non seulement sub specie mythica mais aussi par l'approche philologique du matériau historique. Certes, l'orientalisme et le pentatonisme de Debussy se sont produits à un moment “centrifuge” de l'imagination européenne; mais il est également vrai que Debussy a eu une connaissance historique et philologique de la musique orientale, du pentatonisme, et des gammes à tons entiers. Strawinski a toujours recusé l'étiquette de “folkloriste” dont certains ont voulu l'affubler, mais il n'y a pas de doute qu'on trouve dans la technique du Sacre et des Noces des concordances qu'il est possible de relever au niveau de documents ethno-musicaux. Nous savons par ailleurs a quel point Strawinski se montre réticent et réservé quand il s'agit de citer ses sources, y compris celles de sa période “russe.” D'autre part son fauvisme est inconcevable sans le Musée de l'Homme et la culture parisienne au début de notre siècle. Milhaud parle plus librement de ses sources “ethniques,” qu'il s'agisse de la musique sarde, brésilienne, provençale, ou afro-américaine.

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.

In serbian folklore, poetry and music are inseparable. The very term poem refers in popular speech to the combination of text and melody. There is no recitative “as if from the book.” Vuk Karadžić, in the preface to his first publication of songs, remarked on the difficulties he experienced in his attempts to write down spoken texts: “for many singers sing without thought; they can only sing the text but cannot recite it.”

Except for a few casual remarks in the specialized works of historians, linguists, travelers, and ethnographers, the musical folklore of Kirghizia received virtually no attention in pre-Revolutionary publications. But, even though the scattered observations of pre-Revolutionary nonmusician scholars failed to convey a comprehensive idea of this folklore, they continue to provide valuable source material in terms of vivid first impressions of the people's musical life. All of the reports refer to improvisational song-creation as the most typical characteristic. And all remark upon its popular nature, traditionalism, and ties with the soil.

Traditional music in Yoruba society may to a considerable degree be regarded as music-drama. The dramatic element of this music is given its highest expression in situations of a ceremonial nature in which music, dance, speech, physical movement, costume, and art objects all combine to constitute the complete performance. Music in the context of traditional dance, even when the dance is not connected with ceremonial functions, illustrates another aspect of the dramatic use of music; for Yoruba dance, like much African dance, is akin to dance-drama.

Investigations made in the Soli area of Zambia during 1968 yielded songs in a number of different languages. There were songs in Soli, songs in Lenje, songs in a mixture of these two languages, songs in Karanga (one of the Shona group of languages of Rhodesia), and songs in Ndebele (one of the Zulu group of languages found in Rhodesia and South Africa).

The concept of syncretism in music has gained fairly wide acceptance. Even so, due to the lack of sufficient empirical data, there have been very few relevant theoretical studies. We do have some pertinent overall ideas, however, and it should be possible to build a tentative model of syncretism on the basis of what we do know about the process. This paper makes such an attempt.

One of the most striking and distinctive phenomena in folk singing is the neutral tone, that note which cannot be rendered on a fretted or keyboard instrument, a note that is most at home not in art song but on the lips of an untrained traditional singer. Samuel P. Bayard gave it the place of honor on his list of six “mannerisms of performance that are profoundly instructive as to the past of the folksong art,” especially as regards “the presence of neutral and variable intervals and of quarter-tones in the folk scales.”

Structuralist methods have been successfully used for some time in such diverse fields as linguistics, ethnology, psychoanalysis, history of religion, literature, and literary criticism. But at least one domain in which the science of signs could be of optimal use, communication by motion, has been unaccountably neglected. This paper represents a first attempt to deal with gestural movement as a system based on a code comparable to spoken language.

Twelve years ago during the IFMC conference at Copenhagen, Arnold Bake gave an excellent paper on Nepalese folk music, which unfortunately appeared in the Journal of the IFMC only as a short summary. But even this brief summary shows the very complicated situation arising from the fact that in Nepal two communities, the Nevari and the Nepali, have lived together for two hundred years, each preserving more or less intact its own language and separate musical tradition as well as its own hierarchy of castes. These castes, because of their social separation, continue to keep pure their separate traditions. Hence, one cannot understand the different styles of Nepalese music in their cultural context without taking into account the caste system and its effect on the music.

In recent years, some very interesting octavo volumes of Russian regional folk-song repertoires have been published, containing melodies and texts unarranged and without artificial accompaniment, with introductions giving relevant dates and data and something of the state of preservation of folk tradition in the given area. The following comments emphasize these aspects rather than the nature of the musical material.