The popular music landscape of Romania today is dominated by the manea. It appeared in the late 1960s as a form of symbolic opposition by the Romani communities from the slums of the big cities on the Danube to their exclusion from Romanian society. In time manea became an expression of implicit protest by ordinary people from any ethnic background. In the 1970s and 1980s, it gradually penetrated into cities and villages. After 1990, the manea spread throughout the entire country and is now the favourite music of many teenagers, young people, and the nouveaux riches of the transition period, comprising together about one third of the population. The power of the manea arises from the dominant role it plays in public and private events, such as weddings, baptisms, funerals, anniversaries, and all kinds of parties organized in restaurants and clubs, as well as from the high visibility it receives on private TV channels, the Internet, commercial CDs and DVDs, concerts, and shows.

Dengaku, literally “field music” or “field entertainment,” figures as one of the most important genres of traditional Japanese music, that is, music developed in Japan before the Meiji period (1868–1912). Dengaku has played a role in ceremonies at major religious institutions since at least the twelfth century and continues to be performed at many locations today, including the Kasuga Wakamiya shrine in Nara prefecture, the Nachi shrine in Wakayama prefecture, the Mikachi Hachiman shrine in Fukuchiyama (Kyōto-fu), the Yasaka shrine in Yasaka-chō (Kyōto-fu), the Hie shrine in Yashiro (Kyoto), the Ωji shrine in Tōkyō-to, the Kanasayama shrines in Ibaraki prefecture, Mōtsūji in Hiraizumi (Iwate prefecture), Sensōji in downtown Tokyo, and other religious institutions throughout the land.

One way to theorize a history of native articulations is to historicize the processes of conversions to Christianity in terms of Native agencies whose investments in Christianity tactically invert and then displace canonical narratives. (Vicente M. Diaz 2010)

It is certainly nothing new to point out that Pygmies, hunter-gatherers of the African equatorial rainforest, are known as a people who sing and dance—in other words, who “music“†—a lot. Their music, for the most part vocal polyphony, has been abundantly recorded and reproduced on 78-rpm records and on CDs. Many

In 1914, Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs created a hierarchic ordering (macrotaxonomy) of all musical instruments, even though they (and many others after them, see Kartomi 1990 and 2001) pointed out the difficulty of developing a systematic classification of all musical instruments (Hornbostel and Sachs 1961:5). This conceptual framework implies that the classifier has to walk one and only one route in the process of classifying objects. This cut-off “tracing” cannot possibly encompass all the possible features that make an instrument what it is and inevitably eliminates several other essential qualities of the object.

In October 2009, the genre ca trù of the Việt people was listed as a part of the World's Intangible Heritage in need of urgent safeguarding due to its uniqueness, its importance to the cultural identity of its bearers, and its alarming degree of disappearance. In the relevant proposal submitted to the UNESCO Secretariat, the genre was officially called “ca trù singing,” due to the proposer's emphasis on its vocal qualities. Since the syllable ca already means “singing” or “chanting,” I forgo “singing” as being redundant. Furthermore, it is a complex genre that includes interaction with a lutenist and with a drummer, not to mention that the singer herself plays a compulsory bamboo slab. Thus, “ca trù singing” does not reflect the intended content. It is not the “singing” alone that is highly endangered. And it is not the singing alone that needs to be safeguarded for its uniqueness. Playing the đàn đáy lute is not only an essential constituent but an indivisible part of ca trù, and it is indeed forced to experience the same fate as the singing due to the fact that this long-necked lute is almost exclusively used for only one traditionally distinct genre. Whenever ca trù is mentioned, the đàn đáy as an object will become a symbol for this cultural treasure of the Việt people as depicted in journals and newspapers. The automatic association of the đàn đáy with ca trù indicates an ambiguity in the Vietnamese public's assumptions about ca trù: on the one hand, it is taken to be a traditional vocal practice; on the other, it is acknowledged to be an ensemble of which the đàn đáy is an essential component.

The year 1973 marked the opening of the Bosphorus Bridge, the first bridge to link the European and Anatolian sides of the city of Istanbul, the only city in the world that spans two continents. The same year, the first Istanbul Festival took place from 21 June to 15 July to help celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. The festival included Western orchestral, opera, and chamber music, dance, theatre, and Turkish music. The festival was the idea of businessman Dr. Nejat Eczacibaşi, who gathered thirteen other Turkish businessmen to form the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İstanbul Kültür ve Sanat Vakfi), a non-profit, non-governmental organization, abbreviated İKSV.

Africa constituted a vivid part of the popular European imagination as early as the nineteenth century. Fascinated by travel accounts and adventure novels and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by ethnographic shows and colonial exhibitions, audiences in Europe followed with great interest the “scramble for Africa,” with its spectacular discoveries on the periphery of the expanding colonial empires, just as people marvelled at the images of the first landing on the moon a century later (Lindfors 1999; Rotberg 1970). Towards the turn of the nineteenth century, new media technologies and forms of representation emerged such as the panorama or the cinematograph, conveying ever new images of seemingly exotic worlds. Thus, at Berlin's Kolonialpanorama which opened its doors for the public in 1885, a 115-metre long cyclorama, showing scenes of Germany's colonial occupation of Africa, awaited visitors. In exhibition rooms, ethnographic objects from the colonies were on display. Palm trees, a special lighting system, and artificial fog were installed to create a “tropical atmosphere” (Zeller 2002). The holistic, three-dimensional experience panoramas so created led Erlmann to speak of the “first mass medium to set up a perfect enclosure, a proto-cyberspace that enabled the viewer to become an inhabitant of image-space, someone who enters an image rather than someone who contemplates it from the outside” (1999:5–6). Other technologies such as phonography imparted not only a sonic but, as it were, a new “psychophysical” reality to the myth of Africa as a continent persisting in a seemingly timeless past (Carl 2004:126–31; see also Kittler 1986).