On 23 June 2011, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe of Korean Traditional Performing Arts (hereafter, Seongnam Municipal Troupe) presented its twenty-eighth concert, entitled Hana toenŭn kyŭre ŭi ŭmak (Unifying Korean national music). The South Korean government has designated June as a month of commemoration for the nation's patriots and veterans. As many government troupes in South Korea would do in June, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe dedicated its regular concert series to the remembrance of national heroes, cherishing their patriotism and sacrifice. As stated in the concert programme, “this performance is put together to bless the people who died protecting their nation and to express compassion for the 10 million families separated between the two Koreas … wishing for the nation's reunion and unification in the near future” (Han 2011:2). In order to memorialize war victims and the tragedy of partition, the Seongnam Municipal Troupe was to showcase musical works selected from both North and South Korea. In the programme, Ch'oe Sang-hwa, guest director of the Troupe, remarked:

Over more than one hundred years, in the tide of “global westernization,” most of the Chinese words that were once used to describe musical sound have already been displaced by terminology based on that used in western music, especially western musical terminology of the Classical period. The words that were originally used in Chinese discourse—either within the history of literature or spread orally amongst folk musicians—have been lost or forgotten, and the system itself has already disintegrated and been pushed to the edge of today's mainstream discourse.

In 1991 the government of Kazakhstan began an effort to repatriate Kazakh peoples living outside of Kazakhstan in order to manage the significant cultural loss that had occurred during the Soviet period and to address national identity after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Kazakh residents of China, Mongolia, Turkey, Iran, and other locations were invited to return to their “historic homeland” where they were promised financial support, medical services, social assistance, housing, and land (UNDP 2006; Diener 2009). Many of the Kazakh families living outside of Kazakhstan are descendants of people who had been forced out or fled the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of particular interest to the programme were the Kazakh people of Mongolia, whom organizers in Kazakhstan believed to have retained older cultural practices longer than Kazakhs in other locations due to the unique geo-cultural circumstances they shared with other mobile pastoralists (Diener 2007). Over 70,000 Kazakhs (more than 50 per cent of their population) moved from Mongolia to Kazakhstan during the two decades that followed. Despite this statistic, the programme has not been entirely successful, due partly to difficulties in its administration in Kazakhstan and partly to the reception of oralmandar (returnees) by permanent residents of the country. Mongolian Kazakh repatriates have also suffered due to a sense of loss and attachment to place, and some have subsequently decided to return to their home country—to Mongolia (Diener 2005, 2009; Barcus and Werner 2010).

The Chinese are acknowledged to be one of the four basic ethnic groups that made up Cuba as a nation. Many Chinese joined in the nineteenth-century independence wars against Spanish colonial rule, and several Cubans of Chinese ancestry (hereafter, “Chinese descendants”) turned out to be renowned artists and writers, including, among others, poet Regino Pedroso, painter Flora Fong, and Wifredo Lam, the most universal of all Cuban painters. Chinese influence has been felt in diverse fields of Cuban culture, from culinary art to religion, and from martial arts to music. Specifically, the introduction of a musical instrument, a sort of oboe or shawm called a corneta china, derived from the Han Chinese suona, is one of the most significant Chinese cultural contributions to this island country. Nevertheless, the original instrument is no longer played by Chinese natives, and the corneta china has been appropriated by non-Chinese Cubans since 1915, particularly in the eastern region of the island, where it is played in carnival street bands almost exclusively by performers of African descent. Thus, except for a short-lived attempt to come together in the lion dance during the 1980s and early 1990s, the development of the Chinese community and that of the corneta china have followed divergent paths in Cuba, both of which are succinctly traced in this article.

On a typically humid afternoon in Beijing, China, my young Mongol friend brought me to his basement studio where his ensemble, Ih Tsetsn, was preparing to rehearse for an upcoming show. The group of young urban Mongols included six players of the morin huur (horse-head fiddle, matouqin in Mandarin), an upright bassist, and a drum kit player. The group played a collection of upbeat compositions and ended its rehearsal session with the rousing morin huur classic, “Ten Thousand Horses Galloping,” by the Inner Mongol composer-performer, Chi Bulag (b. 1944; see figure 4). Playing from memory, the fiddle players grinned at one another, drew their bows energetically across their nylon-stringed instruments, and rocked their heads vigorously to the beat of the drummer.

In 1960–61, the Northern Kunqu Opera Troupe of China (Beifang Kunqu Juyuan; hereafter, Beikun) created Escorting Lady Jing Home (Qianli Song Jingniang; hereafter, Escorting), a masterpiece of kunqu theatre that is still regularly performed and enthusiastically embraced by twenty-first-century audiences (Chen 2010). Dramatizing a journey that Zhao Kuangyin (926–976), the founder of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1125), allegedly took with Lady Jing, Escorting tells a substantive story that has deeply touched Chinese hearts and minds, and triggered numerous discussions, both causal and serious. The story has not only appeared on kunqu stages, but has also been performed as cartoons, TV shows, movies, and regional Chinese operas. There is even a Jingnianghu (Lake Lady Jing)—a tourist theme park built at a scenic site outside Handan in Hebei Province, China—celebrating Jing's historical/fictional trip home.

This article is an ethnomusicological inquiry into music in Chinese martial arts film. Film is a form of cultural performance in modern society. It conveys codified cultural messages, transforms social values, dramatizes myths, and comments on social conflicts. Film also engenders discourse that facilitates the building or rebuilding of personal and collective identities. As an ethnomusicologist, I am interested in the ways in which film music, like music in cultural performance, reflects the modern needs and desires of people crossing geographical and cultural boundaries. To study music in global cinema is to study how a modern form of performance interacts with its cultural heritages and contemporary sociocultural changes. Furthermore, the study of Chinese martial arts film music is an attractive topic in that it allows interdisciplinary dialogues among scholars in ethnomusicology, film studies, cultural studies, and Asian studies.

At the eighth conference of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research (CHIME), the topic of my presentation was funeral ritual music in southern Anhui province, located just to the west of Shanghai. I played a video clip showing the sights and sounds of a typical funeral. After my presentation, Frank Kouwenhoven, the Dutch co-founder of CHIME, asked: “Why are there so many kinds of music at Chinese funerals?” It would be inconceivable, he pointed out, to have what in Chinese we term “hot and noisy” (renao—see list of Chinese characters) sounds of this type at a western funeral. Kouwenhoven did a lot of fieldwork in China and knew Chinese traditional music well. So his question not only commented on the multiformity of sounds in Chinese funerals, but also helped me to rethink the capacity of rituals for including so many sounds, and the difference between eastern and western cultures.

Ritual, according to Victor Turner, embodies symbolic action and has a processual flow (1967:149–50). Some ethnomusicologists have utilized Turner's ideas about symbolic action to examine the symbolism of music and dance in ritual. Marina Roseman, in her study of Senoi Temiar healing ceremonies, for example, observed that music and dance in Temiar ceremonies embody “meaningfully patterned sounds and movements” and “symbol-laden sounds and body movements” to awaken the cosmos and attract spirits to interact with humans (1991:15–16). Although Borneo cultures are very different from those of the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia, this description may also be generally applied to the practice of music and dance in traditional ritual contexts among Dusunic societies of Sabah, the east Malaysian state of northern Borneo.

I am not quite sure when the world fell apart. When I began my study of ethnomusicology in 1968, there was a great deal of excitement and optimism about this relatively new field of study, even though the United States was in the middle of a horrible war in Vietnam. It seemed that, as we say in English, “the world was our oyster.” We could apparently go anywhere (with the possible exception of Vietnam) and study any music that struck our fancy. Since then, however, not only has this naïve optimism and energy been subjected to a withering postcolonial critique but, especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the situation for many people in the world seems only to be getting worse and worse, making the prospect of doing fieldwork in a growing number of places in the world nearly unimaginable. For a few people, including most readers of this journal, our personal worlds have probably improved during this period, but what of the rest of the world, including the poor and unfortunate in our own countries? The United Nations today lists more than sixty countries in which there is open, armed conflict between groups or between resistance groups and the government. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has wracked some parts of the world, most notably Africa. All reports indicate that the gap between rich and poor is growing, both in developed, capitalist countries, and between rich and poor regions of the world. Climate change seems to be posing an ever-more-obvious threat to life on our planet, and rising ocean water levels are causing some people in the Pacific to plan for a future far from their native atolls. Where can we go to work ethnomusicologically today, and what kind of work should we be doing there?