In the last decade, the emergence and rapid growth of ethnomusicological interest in urban phenomena has stirred up a fresh sense of methodological and conceptual inadequacy in the face of current needs. Confronted repeatedly by the complexities of the urban situation, we are pressed to reassess the resources with which to meet new problems and new demands. New questions are being asked; old ones are being reformulated.

‘Musical discourse’ can be discourse about music, or the discourse of music. My argument belongs to the first, but is chiefly about the second. It is musical discourse about the discourse of music. It uses the language of words to discuss the language of music. Musical grammars can organize words as well as verbalize music; and so its introduction, this prelude, these opening words, use some common structures of the discourse of music to discourse about music.

Musical symbols exist. They are one of several types of a semiotic class called musical signs. Musical symbols exist for those who perceive them. Inversely, for people who do not perceive musical symbols, they do not exist. Musical phenomena are not in themselves symbols, for they only become symbols when they are interpreted as such by a mentality that has physiological contact with them. (A mentality may be biological, mechanical, or electro-mechanical.) Some human beings have acquired the habit of interpreting musical phenomena as symbols, and they are capable of recognizing this fact or of describing their habit in general ways. This essay will discuss the behaviour of those people who interpret certain musical phenomena as symbol or sign, and it will disregard all others: in conversation with people who cannot perceive the existence of musical symbols, there is neither communication nor basis for discussion.

Attilio Cannargiu1 was born 50 years ago in Muravera, in the province of Cagliari in Sardinia. He tilled the soil for a brief period of his life and would doubtless have become a farmer like his father had he not been seized by an overriding passion for the launeddas.2 This love of the launeddas and music—words which for Cannargiu mean one and the same—raised a number of problems. His marriage to music, ‘his music’, has not run smoothly. But, all things being considered, the conflicts it created must be regarded as a reflection of the difficulties besetting one among many musicians in a land where folk customs are still very much alive.3

This paper documents the changes throughout the twentieth century in the processes of transmission of musical compositions from composers to performers in the Cairene musical category of al-mūsīḳa al-‘arabiyyah.2 It also examines the impact of these changes on music sound.

This essay will attempt an interpretation of the symbolic phenomena of YaraƐƐmɔ which assume the form of sounds perceived as song (lala) and gestures, inextricably linked with the songs, that are considered to be part of the dance (dzoo). YaraƐƐmɔ, performed by the Ga of southeastern Ghana,1 is a ritual in that it is both a practice through which participants relate to the sacred (Durkheim 1968:52) and “a form of religious behavior associated with (the) social transitions” of humans (Turner 1964:4–6). As a transformative, contingent ritual, being occasioned by death, it belongs to a particular class of ritual; it is a rite of passage. Like other funerary rites, those of the Ga are characterized by preliminal, liminal and postliminal phases (van Gennep 1975:148). YaraƐƐmɔ falls within the liminal phase but makes reference to the separation and incorporation phases of the passage. The music and dance of YaraƐƐmɔ, called Adowa, do not merely articulate the defining features of the ritual, but, in fact, shape it; for, as I hope to demonstrate, they constitute ritual action that is both expressive—a communication system stating the relationships among humans and those among humans, their natural environment and the supernatural—and manipulative, an encoded moral system performed to achieve certain effects in these relationships (c.f. Geertz's models of and for reality 1966:7–9). Adowa is performed at the wake the night before the burial and on the day of the burial immediately before and during the processional to the site of interment.

The Iatmul, numbering about eight to ten thousand people, dwell in some twenty or more villages along the middle reaches of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Although comparatively little is known about so many of the hundreds of different cultural groups in Papua New Guinea today, the Iatmul have caught the attention of many ethnographers over the past fifty years. Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune, for example, worked in Iatmul villages and in those of adjacent cultures in the early 1930s, and Gregory Bateson's Naven (1958) was written as a result of his observations of the Iatmul, also in the early 1930s.1 Even before the visits of Bateson and Mead, some German explorers and ethnologists had pointed out special characteristics of Middle Sepik culture (e.g., Reche 1913 and Roesicke 1914), and since the Second World War several German and Swiss anthropologists have concerned themselves with aspects of Iatmul life (Aufenanger 1960, Schuster 1965 and 1967, Hauser-Schäublin 1977, Stanek 1978, Wassmann 1978 and Weiss 1978). The main characteristics of the Iatmul language have been outlined by Laycock (1965).