The problem to be attacked in this paper concerns the social status, role, and behavior of male musicians in the village of Lupupa Ngye, one of four villages in the Bapupa cluster of the Bala subdivision of the Basongye people of the Republic of Zaïre. More specifically, the questions posed are why life should be organized in the particular pattern described below, and why that pattern should apply specifically to musicians and not, for example, to bicycle repairmen or to horticulturalists. Further, since the pattern involves three quite distinguishable facets, the further question is whether the problem is best approached in terms of each of the aspects taken separately, or whether it is more easily explicable when taken as a whole.

If memory serves, the title started as a cliché in undergraduate days. The immediate occasion is of no account: the phrase was likely to spring out when a group of friends met on a date set beforehand, and found the event so enjoyable that they wished to repeat it periodically. Repetition was the essence of what the term meant. Tradition, so conceived, is purposive, the result of an act of will. It is a question, whether a tradition can be willfully created, enacted—whether it issues by deliberate fiat, or whether some involuntary process is involved in producing it.

The attention of modern research is drawn to a number of performance devices retained in present-day Roumanian folk music which are derived from earlier stages of their development. Specifically, the tradition of antiphony possesses very interesting aspects for examination that are of special importance to ethnomusicological research.

In 1930, Miss Zarita Nahón recorded for the Departments of Anthropology and Spanish at Columbia University, at the suggestion of Prof. Franz Boas, nineteen examples of Judeo-Spanish traditional songs from Tangier (Morocco). The informant was her sister, Suzanne (Simy) Toledano. During the previous year, Miss Nahón brought together an extensive collection of Sephardic folk literature in her native Tangier as part of a graduate studies project under the direction of Prof. Boas (see Armistead/Silverman 1977). The examples, which were beautifully sung at Columbia University and recorded on aluminum discs, significantly supplement, both musically and textually, the corpus gathered in Tangier. The original recordings were subsequently deposited at the Indiana University Archives of Folk and Primitive Music under the direction of Prof. George Herzog.

Over a span of twenty-five years, I had the privilege of an extraordinary association with Charles Seeger. It began with an introduction by Jaap Kunst, in 1954, and ended with a letter dictated by Seeger and typed by his secretary (but still unsigned), a few days before his death in February, 1979. In our first meeting he was a teacher. In his last letter he was a warm concerned friend, and still a teacher. To say he is missed would be as redundant as saying one misses a brother, a father, a comrade-in-arms, a colleague, a best friend.

Of Seeger's eighty-three published papers listed in the bibliography that he himself prepared for his 1977 volume of collected essays (Seeger 1977:345–49), three seminal monographs written over a period of fifteen years (1946–61) condense his views on Latin America. These are “Music and Musicology in the New World 1946” (1977:211–21), “Music and Society: Some New-World Evidence of Their Relationship” (1951, revised 1952; [1977]:182–94), and “The Cultivation of Various European Traditions of Music in the New World” (1961; [1977]: 195–210). They will be referred to hereinafter by year of first publication (i.e., 1946,1952, and 1961, resp.) with page number references cited from the 1977 source which is more readily available.

For more than two decades, since we built the Jerusalem Melograph in 1957, we had been in touch, in one way or another, with Charles Seeger, the scholar and researcher. Above all, he was a unique and marvelous human being. A desire to understand an unveil basic laws which govern musical expression in its multiple manifestations was central to his work and it dictated his choice of areas of investigation. For example: the factors which shape the writing down of oral traditions; the musical parameters of speech; the bridge between language and music; the factors which determine the meaning of modal frameworks; the significance of musical components in performance compared to written realizations—these were but a few of the areas with which he dealt. The informant, whether composer, performer, or auditor, constituted an important variable in all of his investigations. On the whole, Seeger never lost sight of the human being.

In his essay, “The Cultivation of Various European Traditions in the Americas”, Charles Seeger stated that:

Seeger, Charles. Studies in Musicology: 1935–1975. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977. vii, 357 pp.

Everything that Charles Seeger did could be characterized as “work in progress,” for he was never satisfied with leaving well enough alone. This collection of selected essays was in preparation for many, many years. I recall that in the 1940s I was prodding Charles to get on with it—and even offered my editorial assistance. But he was determined to go his own way, at his own pace. In a letter dated August 19, 1970, he wrote: “The editing of my Systematic Musicology: Selected Papers 1940 – 1970 (about 24 in all) proceeds at a snail's pace because I can't keep my mind off new stuff.”