The Indian sarangi is uniquely endowed with meaning. Beloved for its evocatively vocal sound and its vivid associations, it also conveys disrepute as part of a highly charged, ambivalent musical identity. Studying, and living with, the Indian sarangi taught me such meanings through participating in the musical experience and memories of cultural insiders*

During their migration from West to East, the Baluchis absorbed numerous ethnic groups. The most exogenous elements in this assimilation process were the Africans who live today in large numbers notably in Karachi. These Africans are so well integrated that the Baluchis often deny their foreign origins. They say that Baluchis had settled in Zanzibar and in Tanzania since an unknown time, and that their descendants had come back to their country of origin physically and culturally affected by this sojourn. They brought back with them customs, chants and exotic dances, and spoke only Tanzanian. Such explications speak to the ability of the Baluchis to integrate ethnic groups of all origins (Brahu'is, Sindi, Makrâni, Jatt, etc.) regardless of race, while adopting elements of their culture. They prefer to forget sometimes that there are descendants of slaves among them, but they do remain aware of the African origin of certain traditions, notably evident in the zâr and lewâ musical rites.

The forked shawm is a type of instrument which is in common use around the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, from Morocco (Cherki 1981:38), across to Egypt (Collaer & Elsner 1983:48), in Turkey (Picken 1975:485ff), in parts of the Balkans, and certainly as far east as Azerbaijan (Vertkov et al. 1975:fig. 415), probably Georgia (ibid.: fig. 456), and perhaps Uzbekistan (ibid.: fig. 582). What is important is that this particular variety of shawm, with the simple and ingenious device of the fork, is the most important development in the history of the shawm in two and a half thousand years.

The people of Bali undertake an unusually large number of vibrant and frequent festivals and religious rites. Hindu Balinese culture is particularly famous for its numerous temples (approximately 25,000) and the Odalan festivals held at them each year. The Sasak people on the neighboring island of Lombok had at one time a large number of shrines with a similar schedule of annual or seasonal Gawe or Alip festivals. As Sasak society gradually transformed from a polytheistic culture to one which follows a reformed version of Islam, most of these pre-Islamic shrines were dismantled or abandoned. Only a few polytheistic shrines remain active in the latter twentieth century, and these have assumed Islamic associations.

In Spain, the establishment of ethnomusicology as a discipline fully conscious of its methods and objectives is relatively recent. Procursors can be seen in early studies of folk song which were catalyzed in European society by Herder and other scholars. It is obvious that 19th century research into Spanish folk song has little to do with current ethnomusicology, although there exists a common denominator: in both cases, scholars center their attention on those musics which are on the margin of “great musical art.” However, we could hardly understand the development and current state of the discipline in Spain if we did not take its beginnings in folk music studies into account. Comparative musicology of old, which concentrated on music of non-occidental origins and which laid the foundations of current ethnomusicology, was practically absent in the Spanish state. We do not find in Spain at that time a consolidated method or a satisfactory concretization of goals, but we can already encounter an object of study — denominated “folk music” — and social attitudes toward this object which allow us to consider those early collectors the predecessors of Spanish ethnomusicology.