In placing European music within the wider frame of global music, we have lately begun to revise our views on certain processes of composition which have until now appeared axiomatic and unchangeable. One of these views was that early polyphony underwent a slow and toilsome evolution, emerging from the preceding monophony which was considered the more primary utterance of man. But the history of medieval music has taught us repeatedly how artful a monodic song can be and how artless, indeed primitive, the first attempts at polyphony had been, that is, if we would rely on written sources only. History does not proceed stepwise, and musical artifacts do not indicate a tidy rational progression from monophony to part-singing in two, three, or four voices. Co-existent, and presumably even older than monophony, are certain basic forms of polyphony, such as the bourdon.

The following remarks are intended as a very partial reply to Professor Norman Cazden's attack on the employment of conventional modal terminology in the analysis of British-American traditional song-tunes. [Refs. here to IFMC Yearbook III (1971), 45–78, and to his “Notes on the Analysis of Traditional Song Tunes” in Edith Fowke, Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods. American Folklore Society, Memoir Series Publications, Vol. 55, 1970, pp. 11–22].

The traditional Eskimo music of Greenland has long since disappeared on the greater part of the west coast, but it still survives — though in an agonizing state — in East Greenland and North Greenland. These last named places of the Arctic island have been difficult of access and have consequently been submitted to a colonial or quasi-colonial status only at a late date.

Dance in Hawaii, before the coming of the Europeans, was an extension of poetry that honored the gods and chiefs, in the form of stylized visual accompaniment. Trained under the religious restrictions imposed by Laka, patron goddess of the hula, dancers were often part of the retinue of chiefly households. Hula schools (halau hula) were under the tutelage of a kumu hula (hula teacher) who was a kahuna (priest). Schools and hula troupes were subsidized by chiefs who maintained them for their own entertainment and the enhancement of their prestige. The main function of the hula was to honor the gods and to praise the chiefs and their ancestors in this highly stratified society.

Musical scholars often have great difficulty in studying acculturated music. It is somehow easier to deal with an older tradition which has been purified from spurious external influences over a period of years and can now be studied as a product of a particular culture. When we encounter acculturation, and there are few areas of the world where strong acculturative influences are not at work, we tend to ignore it, and retreat, instead into an ethnocentric idealism which will allow us to retain our image of what a music should be.

This paper concerns the music of wedding ceremonies that I recorded and filmed in four communities in the vicinity of Delhi: the town of Gurgaon and the villages of Jharsa and Jhanjholi in the state of Haryana, and Singola village in the Delhi Government District. It concentrates primarily on songs for two ceremonies in the Hindu cycle of wedding rituals — the lagan and the ban, and also includes songs for the other rituals that took place on the day of a phera (‘the marriage itself') in the villages of a groom (Singola) and of his bride (Jhanjholi). The music for such ceremonies is always provided by women, members of the families of the bride and groom and other appropriate female members of the community. Before presenting and discussing these ceremonies and the music for them, I want to describe the socio-cultural context of marriage in India.

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.

The increasing encroachment of technology and industrialization on folk traditions of the world has given great impact to the struggle for their preservation and continuity. Scholars in such fields as anthropology, folklore, enthnomusicology, to mention a few, continue in their search for the best solution to this problem. An approach in years past, and to a great extent recently, has been ironically by documentation on tapes, on phonographs, on paper and even in motion and still pictures, all of which are products of technology.

Numerous theories of the sound producing mechanism of the jaw's harp have been put forward, none of which appears quite convincing or appropriate. The main reason for this seems to be that certain essentials of the making of and playing on this instrument have been neglected, underestimated or simply overlooked by the investigators. This paper represents an attempt to show some weak points of the existing theories, to describe an empiric investigation by means of electronic sound spectrographs, and finally, to establish a new general outlook on the acoustical and musical properties of the jaw's harp.

There have been many new developments in the production of moving film with synchronous sound track. In this all too familiar medium, developments are usually taken for granted and are not generally noticed. Areas of technology which have combined to produce ‘sync-sound’ have at the same time offered to a field of study, which some may prefer to call ethnochoreology, others ethnomusicology, a research facility the efficacy of which has not yet, in this writer's opinion, been fully explored. Because of this, the full impact of this facility on the practice and study of folk music and dance can not yet be properly gauged.

In his study on Serbo-Croatian folk songs Béla Bartók makes the statement that our current musical notation has intrinsic limitations and that “the only true notation of folk melodies are the sound tracks on the record itself.” While “these could be magnified, photographed and printed, instead of, or with, the usual notation, in view of the too complicated nature of the curves, [their use] would not be of much help; the human mind would not be able to translate the visual signs into tones.”