In the summer of 1986 I made a trip to Lotus Mountain of Gansu Province in China. The occasion was the Festival of Flower Song Singing, which takes place once a year there. This was the first time that outside visitors were allowed to come to this region and witness the activities. Our party consisted of half a dozen Chinese scholars, two visitors from Japan, an American graduate student, and myself, whom the Chinese authorities regarded as a visitor from abroad.

In recent years, I have been concentrating on the identification and verification of ancient tunes and ancient music theories of China. These studies are involved and difficult tasks, but still their research procedures are known and clearly defined. However, on first encounter, people often react to these studies with skepticism.

This article sketches the history of Hong Kong Cantopop songs, which directly address topics such as Hong Kong's political future and the ongoing emigration wave.2 The term “Cantorock” was first used by Billboard correspondent Hans Ebert in 1974, who noted the emergence of Hong Kong's own locally produced rock music. The “Cantorock” style was related to American and British rock of that period and characterized by electric guitars and heavy percussion. By 1978, the style of locally produced popular music in Hong Kong had become one similar to British-American soft-rock, as had Japanese pop music earlier, prompting Ebert to revise his description of such music to “Cantopop.” Cantopop subsequently evolved on its own in the 1980s, although it still borrowed musical elements and instrumentation from Western and Japanese popular music. The distinct Japanese influence on Cantopop is exemplified by quasi-pentatonic melodies and almost exclusively amorous lyrics. Some Cantopop songs are pop or rock versions of traditional Chinese folk tunes. Others are borrowed Western pop tunes set to new Cantonese lyrics.3 The market for Cantopop is not limited only to Hong Kong: it extends into Southeast Asian countries and Chinese urban areas in Europe and America (i.e., London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, etc.). The business of Cantopop has been lucrative since the late 1970s, when popular culture became subsumed under large-scale commercial enterprises in Hong Kong. During the 1980s, local television stations, film production companies, and the popular music industry flourished as Hong Kong became increasingly prosperous.

In nanguan, a Chinese art music tradition, musicians compose songs by setting new texts to existing tunes (known as qupai); songs that are composed based on the same tune display the relevant features of that tune but vary in its non-relevant features.2 Tunes are further grouped by musicians into tune families3(gunmen); songs that are composed based on tunes of the same tune family display the distinctive features of respective tunes but share the features of that tune family.

Shamanism in North Asia has been widely investigated by anthropologists since the last century. The symbolism of shamanic drums, in particular, has been treated by many authors from various points of view as summarized in, for example, Eliade (1964), Nowak & Durrant (1977) and Grim (1983). However, there are still many questions undiscussed or less recognized in the literature.

In Chinese Buddhist music studies, an investigation of the meaning and concept of music should involve not only a study of the codified doctrine but also a study of the Buddhist practice and its sound products. The aim of this paper is to examine the meanings of music in Chinese Buddhist doctrinal and practical contexts, and to demonstrate how the codified norms of music have significantly been reinterpreted in the contemporary Buddhist practice. I shall first discuss the notions of music in Chinese Buddhist discourse, under an analytical framework based on a Buddhist-oriented classification. I shall then examine the practice of these different categories of music from a historical perspective. This will be followed by a brief survey of Chinese Buddhist musical practice in the present-day, which is based on field work in the United States and China, showing the changes and adaptations in Chinese Buddhist music-making under the process of global modernization.

Twice a year, in the spring and autumn, a Sacrifice to Confucius called Sôkchôn is carried out in a small shrine compound (Munmyo) in the northeast part of Seoul, Korea. The ritual music, aak, performed during the ceremony is stately and imposing, perfectly suited to its purpose. Many Korean scholars and musicians consider it to be ancient and authentically Chinese, and even a cursory comparison with other musical genres found in Korea shows this ritual music to be strikingly unique in performing style.

As a major indigenous religio-philosophical tradition of China, Taoism has played an important role in the life of the people of China for well over eighteen hundred years. The outward expressions of Taoism are its rituals, passed on from generation to generation by Taoist ritual specialists throughout the centuries. Music (recitations, chants, and instrumental playing) is an integral part of these rituals. Early study of religious Taoism had been limited to the collecting of written sources and the compilation of these sources into the multi-volumed Daozang (Taoist canon), a massive work compiled over a period of fifteen centuries.2 The Taoist canon contains two collections of notated chants: the Yuyin fashi (Jade sounds of [Taoist] rituals) and Darning yuzhi xuanjiao yuezhang (The great Ming imperial Taoist ritual music), respectively contained in Volumes 333 and 616 in the Taoist canon.

During the 20th century, the Tahitian drum dance ('ōte'a) has become a symbol of Polynesia representing, for Westerners, the myth of the “Pacific islands paradise”. It has been assumed that the popularity of this dance genre led to its introduction into other areas of the Pacific. But is this dance Tahitian in origin?

Among the earlier views and assumptions about non-Western music that have come to be reconsidered in the present period of musicological self-reflection are those concerning issues of conservatism (or stability) and innovation (or change). In a number of cultural areas, a bias among researchers towards perceived conservatism was influenced by both indigenous and Western beliefs. Clunies-Ross has aptly summarized the bi-cultural impact upon the perception of conservatism in the case of Australian Aboriginal song: “… it is only relatively recently that scholars have begun to question the ideology of stability of songs and their meanings that has been espoused by Aborigines and researchers alike. Two converging ideologies have ensured that the matter remained beyond question. For their part, Aborigines have tended to communicate an ideology of stability to enquiries, and the enquirers have tended to accept this ideology at face value because they have themselves brought to their task prior assumptions about the stability of oral traditions. These assumptions derive from our own culture's emphasis on the unchanging nature of artistic forms, especially of those that have the authority of antiquity” (Clunies-Ross 1987: 4).