Each summer, the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, mounts a huge, ten-day-long festival on the National Mall, showcasing the folk arts of selected US states, communities, occupational groups, foreign countries, and/or transnational regions. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has run every year since 1967, organized as “an annual display of living cultural heritage” (Kurin 1997:111) that typically features musicians, dancers, ritual specialists, craftspeople, storytellers, food preparers, specialized workers, learning opportunities, and discussion sessions. The emphasis is very much on “grassroots” culture, and on “foreground[ing] the voices of tradition bearers as they demonstrate, discuss, and present their cultures” (ibid.: 113). The festival is simultaneously an opportunity for the chosen locales and communities to raise their profile on an international stage, and for hundreds of thousands of Americans and overseas tourists to learn about places and cultures they might never otherwise encounter. Entrance to all events is free of charge, and annual attendance averages over one million.

On the morning of 10 January 2005, a group of people boarded an open dinghy at Namatanai, located about halfway down the east coast of mainland New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. On board were the young brothers Tony and Paul Wol, musicians of the newly formed band Twinhox of Kavieng. Buoyant with the recent recording of their debut album Sorpendeng in the nation's capital, Port Moresby, the brothers had been visiting their mother's relatives in New Hanover for Christmas and New Year celebrations and were now bound for Lihir Island, returning to the home of their parents. The boat never arrived, and the travellers were never found.

Until at least the 1980s, scholarship on Caribbean carnivals tended to overemphasize European roots because of the celebration's ties to the Christian calendar. Meanwhile, scholarship on Caribbean music has long been embroiled in nationalistic paradigms that have hindered a view of the Caribbean as a cultural region with more commonalities than differences among the music cultures of the various nations (see Bilby 1985). In this paper, I combat these paradigms with the concept of convergence, an alternative to the problematic “syncretism.” It is complementary to current notions of creolization and hybridity, but unlike those concepts, it serves to emphasize the construction of cultural meaning over biological notions of race or ethnicity.

As we left Safi and began driving along a stretch of country road on our way to Rabat, one of my female traveling companions asked me if I had a cassette of 'aiṭa on me. “Why?” I replied with a certain curiosity. “Oh …,” she continued, “I just feel like listening to it. I want to smell the soil (bghit nshdm t-trab), taste the countryside (bghit nduq l-ərubiya). ”I was struck by her answer, by how she had articulated the desire to listen to this genre of sung poetry by analogy to other senses. For her, listening to aiṭa meant to experience the countryside and, at the same time, to celebrate a rurality that for many Moroccans is an essential component of their identity. That day I did not have a cassette on me. However, the silence was soon broken by the opening verses of “Mal l-hbibi malu ‘lih” (what's wrong with my beloved, what's wrong with him); she and the others had begun singing, clapping, and rhythmically swaying their upper bodies as we continued to drive on that country road.

In discussing gong ensemble music through the gaze of movement, gaze can be conceptualized at two interrelated levels: firstly, at the general contextual level of the audience (who are the spectators?), and secondly, at the deeper semantic level of auditory-kinaesthetic relationships that manifest social meanings.

What Cartesian nonsense to think of birdsong as pre-programmed cries uttered by birds to advertise their presence to the opposite sex, and so forth! Each bird-cry is a full-hearted release of the self into the air, accompanied by such joy, as we can barely comprehend.

(J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 2008:132)

S'il s'avère que la musique est un phénomène répandu chez plusieurs espèces vivantes en-dehors de l'homme, cela remettra forcément en cause la définition de la musique, et plus largement de l'homme et de sa culture, ainsi que l'idée que l'on se fait de l'animal lui-měme.

(François-Bernard Mâche, Musique, mythe, nature, 1983:61)