In the mid-1980s, I began doing fieldwork in Northumberland, in the Northeast of England, interested in studying a regional musical revival. Research in Northumberland, a place that is comparatively small (although large for an English county), with a strong regional identity and a distinctive body of music, appealed to me as a way of thinking about musical revival and renewal, and I spent about a decade, on and off, doing fieldwork and historical research there. Then, nearly a decade later, I began fieldwork in Cape Breton, on the edge of North America, in eastern Canada, another regional world of music, one in which local music is burgeoning as never before. The Cape Breton situation is somewhat different—arguably, it is a revival, but, and equally arguably, it is not well described by that term. For the purposes of this essay, I will use the rubric revival to describe musicking in Northumberland and Cape Breton, and I will also refer to the widely influential American folk revival. When I speak, in this essay's title, of revivals “on the edge,” it is in two senses, one a matter of geography, the other one of scholarship. Northumberland and Cape Breton are both geographically on the margins, Northumberland a borderland, Cape Breton a comparatively isolated island on the edge of a continent. And in my discipline, the study of revivals has until recently been a marginal pursuit.

This article examines historical associations between music and war on the Polynesian island of Rapanui (Easter Island; figure 1). Throughout Polynesia, bellicose themes appear in the lyrics of songs commemorating legendary battles and warriors, as well as in depictions of combat in staged and un-staged performances appealing to tourist and indigenous audiences alike. On Rapanui, spears, clubs and other artefacts of war embellish performances by contemporary music and dance ensembles, together with dance moves that imitate martial activity. One recently successful ensemble has even taken the name Matato'a (an ancient term meaning ‘warrior’ or ‘guardian') as a means of symbolizing their cultural guardianship. While these performances are aimed at the tourist market, they are not devoid of local significance. Indeed, the recent push to generate a diverse repertoire of Rapanui music for cultural performances has arguably assisted in the revitalization and preservation of precontact songs, chants, and dances that would otherwise be consigned only to the memories of Rapanui elders and the dusty pages of obscure ethnographic works.

Applied ethnomusicology has a special relevance for studies on music and minorities. What constitutes this relevance in particular cases was the focus of a plenary panel discussion at the 38th World Conference of the ICTM in Sheffield in 2005, which explored cultural, social, political, and economic issues pertinent to the musical life of minority groups within the context of a larger (majority) society. Panel participants addressed the topic from the perspective of their individual research fields and the different minority groups they have worked with: Adelaida Reyes provided the example of refugee camps, Stephen Wild of the Rom ceremony of Australian Aborigines, and John O'Connell of a Song for Peace by a Kurdish singer. The aim was to contribute to discourses on applied ethnomusicology in the light of theoretical and methodological insights gained through studies of music and minorities.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam has, according to various estimates, between 900 million and 1.4 billion adherents in more than fifty countries, making it the second-largest religion in the world. Rap music and hip-hop youth culture have also, in their brief history, achieved global status, as the essays in Tony Mitchell's edited volume Global Noise (2001b) illustrate. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-standing world religion Islam and the more recently global musical genre of rap have intersected in various ways. Both the religion and the musical genre have spread over the globe as people and ideas move around, and people use the material and expressive resources at their disposal in practices of identity construction. It is not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical that some people may find it useful and compelling to imagine their identities using both Islam and rap music.

It is now almost forty years since Laurence Picken first suggested that present-day performances of tωgaku—the repertory of Japanese court music (gagaku) that was originally imported from Tang China to Japan during the seventh to the ninth centuries—bear little or no resemblance to Chinese music of the Tang period (618-907 CE), or indeed any subsequent period. This was the first time that any scholar had challenged the ideology that modern tωgaku perfectly preserves the inheritance from Tang China, an ideology that had been developed in the nineteenth century during the official standardization of gagaku. Picken based his views on preliminary study of tωgaku tablature notations—which he saw as containing important clues about the relationship of the modern inheritance to the original Chinese forms of the repertory—and on study of surviving Chinese notations (Picken 1967, 1969; see also Marett 1986 for a more detailed summary of this research).

Continuity and revival have been subjects of scholarly discussion for quite some time (for example, see Bausinger and Brückner 1969), frequently in connection with phenomena such as tradition and innovation, identification and change, authenticity, and festivals.

In the Lak region of southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, music and dance performance is not a discreet element of society; it is in performances that communities show others who they are, what they consist of and how powerful they can be. It is also in a performance that “individuals” (in the Lak sense of the term) display their identity and reveal their spiritual capacity. In addition it is in performance that the visible reality of humans meets the invisible realm of the spirits. The movement and costume elements of performance are the visual poetic representation of the spirit and human worlds as cast by the local imagination. Unlike many Highlands Papua New Guinea societies, where dance movements are kept to a minimum in order to accommodate elaborate costumes (Strathern 1979:244), among the Lak, dance movement is vigorous, powerful, and essential to a community's successful existence. Dance movements, which predominantly occur on the vertical plane (see Kaeppler and Niles 1998:482), differ significantly in style between the sexes; as Eves has recognized (1998:54), these movements are a definitive aspect of “gender conceptualisations” in the region. For male performers (and this article mainly focuses on men's dances), performance is a physical and spiritual display that transforms participants into something more than human. This article begins by introducing several key Lak notions. Local concepts concerning the individual, relationships, community, and male and female are explored. The mythical foundation of society is introduced as a basis for comprehending some of the aesthetics and emotions that underpin performance. And Lak notions surrounding the relationships between space, gender, and power are examined to reveal the invisible boundaries that divide the physical landscape.