Folk song migration in Aboriginal South Australia is a difficult subject to cover. There is great confusion over migration theories in Australia. No one as yet has provided conclusive evidence regarding the place of origin of the present aboriginal people, nor indeed of whether they are an homogeneous people or descendants of several racially and culturally distinct groups. But a study of the music of South Australia does make possible some suggestions, since distinct styles and their direction of diffusion can be seen.

The various hypotheses about the coming of the aboriginal to Australia seem to differ depending on the aspect being covered by the particular researcher concerned. The theory put forward by Birdsell and Tindale is probably the best known. They based their theory on the classification of the blood groups of people from various regions, and believe that there were three separate migratory waves into Australia.

In the vast territories of Northwest Africa, there are some remarkable islets of the aboriginal Berber civilization, notably in Morocco, where the Berbers form approximately 45 per cent, of the population, and in Algiers, where they reach some 30 per cent. In addition, one can meet them in the Kabylie, in some Tunisian villages and on the Isle of Djerba. The Berbers are generally recognized as one of the indigenous tribal groups of “White” Africa who call themselves “Imazighen” (noblemen) and use their own language, a Hamito-Semitic dialect of great antiquity which spreads intermittently from the Oasis of Siwa, at the Egyptian-Lybian frontier, to the Atlantic Ocean. The main local dialects spoken in Morocco, are the ‘Tashelhit’ in the South- West and around Marrakesh, and the ‘Tamazirt’ spoken in the North-East.

A summary will be given here of the results of folk dance research in Ethiopia, carried out during two months in the summer of 1965. In the course of the expedition, collections were made in seventeen settlements in eight different Ethiopian provinces. An outline cross-section of the fund of folk dances in Ethiopia is illustrated by approximately one hundred and fifty dance variants; these were recorded on 3,000 metres of motion pictures and several hundreds of photos, with the musical accompaniments on tape. The collection included dances of the Amhara, Tigrean, Agaw, Adare, Esa-Somalian, Kullo, and Kaficho peoples, as well as those of six different Galla tribes.

Les relations commerciales entre les habitants du Golfe Persique et ceux de Zanj ou Afrique orientale sont très anciennes: n'oublions pas non plus que Mascat et Zanzibar étaient liés par une union politique de 1690 environ jusqu'à 1861. On a souvent parlé de l'influence arabe sur les peuplades de la côte est d'Afrique; on a beaucoup moins parlé des conséquences de la présence de minorités importantes d'Africains dans les principautés arabes du Golfe.

La musique arabe de Kuwait, de Bahrain et de la Côte des Pirates n'est pas sensiblement influencée par les musiques africaines: la seule exception notable concerne les danses de guerres normalement appelées ardha à Bahrain, ayala sur la Côte des Pirates; les mélodies, les textes et les danses sont indiscutablement d'origine béouine mais l'influence africaine est sensible dans les rhythmes produits par le groupe de joueurs de tambour qui danse entre les deux rangs de chanteurs arabes.

The existence at the Peninsula de la Guajira—shared by Venezuela and Columbia— of a type of clarinet with simple, inverted reeds, similar to those found in the north of Africa, poses an interesting problem of cultural transmission. The first question one must ask is, I think, at what moment in history the diffusion of such instruments towards the above-mentioned peninsula took place. I speak of diffusion and not of parallelism for an important reason: the fact that similarities, not only organological but also melodic, exist between the Goajiro music and that of other peoples referred to below.

The Goajiro instrument I describe in the present paper I saw for the first time at the Caracas Science Museum in 1947. A Goajiro Indian woman who happened to be staying there had been in contact with members of the museum's staff for some time. She informed me that the name of the instrument was uótoroyó

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, I intend to discuss organological data relating to three Yoruba members of the mbira-sansa family. I hope to show organological relationships and a possible line of derivation among these Nigerian instruments, and relationships between them and their relatives in Nigeria and in other African culture areas. In this way, I hope to add to the overall picture of the migration and distribution of the mbira family in Africa generally. Second, I want to speak about playing techniques. Here I will attempt to show some interrelationships in playing styles and some possible lines of derivation of present-day techniques.

It is known that in unwritten traditional music, both in unison singing and in performances by two or more instruments, there occur little rhythmic maladjustments and even variations of intonation and changes of notes, apart from the natural changes of register. When these variations are very marked, they produce a real heterophony. But the intention is the only thing to be kept in mind: the intention to form one single sonorous block. Therefore, there is a great difference between a defective adjustment and polyphony or heterophony properly so-called. Heterophony is the singing or the simultaneous performance of several voices or instruments which do not observe musical order, and which enter the ensemble when they wish, without paying attention to order. Heterophony appears to be a particular manifestation, among Indian people and perhaps also among people who are already incorporated into our civilization.

The three gods of the Indian pantheon are represented in sculpture with many arms, so as to symbolize a multiplicity of actions executed simultaneously. I find a similar manifestation in the classical Indian dance: a contrapuntal simultaneousness in pointing out the direction, and rhythmical accentuation, of the movement executed by the different parts of the body, each of them acting and reacting in its own way. The stony position of a quasi-polyrhythmic phenomenon in the sculptures is transformed in the dance into a polyrhythm of movement.

From my own choreographical and research work, from always having observed and used bodily reactions in the dance, I have long been aware that every part of the body has a mind and sense of its own. (This is, from a different angle, the same conclusion which led Ouspensky, in his New Model of the Universe, to say that during a dream each one of the different parts of the body thinks independently of the other parts, and in a different way from the others.)

Musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto usually been treated as separate fields. One of the reasons for this is doubtless the search for a way in which the material to be dealt with should be presented. Historical research has, as we know, to do with a body of musical fact which has been handed down through the medium of notation and therefore exists in a more or less concrete form. Non-European music and European folk music, on the other hand, are exclusively dependent upon oral tradition. To begin with, the latter does not, as Robert Lachmann once very aptly expressed it, exist for us at all. Materials must first be made indirectly tangible for us through special means, that is to say, they must be translated through recording and transcription out of the sphere of oral tradition into that of written notation. This is certainly one of the chief reasons why musical history research and ethnomusicology have hitherto gone different ways, each with its own independent aims, complexes of problems and methods.

Although contrapuntal practices of the type to be described below will be encountered in most Bushman communities within the Northern Language Group (as well as in several communities of the Central and Southern Language Groups), the Bushmen to whom I refer specifically in the title of this paper are the of South West Africa and Bechuanaland. The speak a dialect of !Kxõ (traditionally, !Kung, in the literature of ethnology), the principal Northern Bushman language. There are approximately 1500 in all, and roughly 1000 of them live within the area called Nyae Nyae over the past decade by members of the Peabody-Harvard Kalahari Expeditions. Nyae Nyae is a corruption (a convenient simplification) of the Bushman name, , which means Great Flat Place and refers to a large water pan prominent among a group of such pans in the northeastern portion of South West Africa.

The occurrence of polyphony in Yoruba choral music is significant for many reasons. First, it is almost entirely absent in traditional folk songs and is probably restricted to a small section of the Yoruba community. Secondly, in recent years polyphonic singing has become one of the essential features of a type of popular music, known among the Yoruba as juju. Although this form of music is fairly well distributed geographically, it is perhaps unique in popular folksong in its use of polyphony. It also differs from traditional polyphonic song in that it can be more easily identified with Western influences.

Before speaking of “oriental elements,” I must first of all make two qualifying statements in order not to be misunderstood. First, the musicologist, when hearing the expression “oriental music,” thinks of the art music of the Near East; but here I am speaking especially of folk music coming from the East to Greece. Secondly, I shall not speak about “the” elements in general, that is, I cannot give a complete list of existing oriental elements. I only intend to mention some phenomena which I have had the possibility of observing myself, and which, I suppose, are not very generally known.

References in early writings to African music in pre-European times often indicate the existence of harmony. On entering Mossell Bay in December, 1497, Vasco da Gama's men heard four or five flutes played by negroes, “some producing high notes and others low ones, thus making a pretty harmony” (Davidson, 1964). At Malindi, in 1498, Vasco da Gama's Logbook referred to “two trumpets of ivory … of the size of a man,” whose music “made sweet harmony” with those of anafils. Writing on the music of Ashanti and other peoples of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Bowdich mentioned “several instances of thirds” (Bowdich, 1819).

Performers of music practised and perpetuated by oral tradition are guided by their knowledge of repertoire, by awareness of usages, procedures and techniques, and above all by their musicianship. Among the Gogo of Tanzania, as indeed among other societies with oral music tradition, these enable performers not only to reproduce what they have learnt, but also to re-create it where tradition allows it; they enable them to make their own additions to existing repertoire or bring new musical types into being. Thus a traditional composer of a particular piece of music need not provide everything for those who learn his music from him. Only the essentials such as the basic text, the melody, type of accompaniment need be provided or suggested.

The Nguni Group comprises principally the Zulu, Xhosa and Swazi-speaking peoples of South Eastern Africa whose languages and cultures are closely related. Through European contact and conquest during the past century and a half, their way of life has been considerably affected. Musically, many non-indigenous forms and features have been adopted by certain sections of each community, but we shall here be concerned only with what still survives of their truly indigenous music.

For individual music-making, instruments of several varieties—particularly musical bows—were formerly used by all Nguni peoples. But their communal music seems always to have been exclusively vocal, apart from the occasional use of ankle-rattles in dance-songs.