The written history of Jamaica goes back only 477 years, starting with the coming of the Spaniards under Christopher Columbus in 1494. Columbus and his men were greeted on arrival by a party of Arawak Indians, including a Chief and musicians. The Arawaks were gentle peace-loving people who had lived in Jamaica for about 800 years before Columbus came. However, they were unable to endure the enslavement and the harsh treatment which they suffered at the hands of the Spaniards and by the 16th century, with the help of European diseases against which they had no resistance, they seemed to have become extinct. They left no written records that have yet been discovered and very little of their way of life survived. No sure remains of their music culture have been found. We have looked for our remote roots from other sources. The Spaniards replaced the Arawaks with enslaved Africans, the first of whom arrived in about the year 1517. These people formed the beginning of the present day population of Jamaica, and when the Spaniards were driven out by the English, (between 1655 – 1660) they and a handful of Portuguese Jews, were all that remained. Under the English the island quickly became a slave colony dedicated to the production of sugar. Increasing numbers of Africans were brought in as slaves, and continued to be until 1807 when the slave trade was abolished. The Africans came mostly from the West Coast of Africa and were made up mostly of Fans, Akims, Ashanties, Ebos, Pawpaws and Mandingoes.

This year musicology should remember the two men who have given a greater part of their creative life to the folk song: Béla Bartók, who died a quarter-century ago on September 26, 1945, and Werner Danckert, who passed away on March 5, 1970.

I would like to begin, if I may be allowed, upon a personal note. It has been my privilege to be a member of the International Folk Music Council since its inception in 1947 – a founder member in fact. In those twenty-two years, fellow members have become dear friends. To meet them, in the various capitals of the world over the years, has added a savour and an extra dimension to life which I would have been very sorry to miss. I would like to say what a delight it is to me personally to welcome you now to my native city of Edinburgh.

This paper might well be subtitled, Why call it Ionian Heptatonic when we mean Major?

In the rosy romantic image invoked long ago by Chappell and Wooldridge, as also on the European continent by Combarieu, the archaic song of the common people has ever been drawn by instinctive tropism towards the musical forms and formulas taught over the centuries by a benevolent Church. These writers, no more alert than many among their modern successors to the observation that their information necessarily went back ultimately to Church-sponsored sources alone, sensed a natural linkage between melodic mode usages in popular tunes and the theoretical classifications that had been ordained, though retroactively, for the ancient sacred chant, and they took this connection to be symbolic and symptomatic of a profound cultural and psychological impulse.

Most of the many different ethnic groups living within Uganda have some use for flutes of one kind or another. With very few exceptions, however, the flutes are all endblown instruments either with a straight-cut sharp rim (blown across the rim obliquely) or of the notched variety. Wachsmann (1953) gives informative descriptions of most of these together with the few exceptions; the globular (ocarina type) instruments and a long transverse flute (Vern. Ludaya or Lusweje) played among the upland Gisu in Eastern Uganda. Elsewhere in East Africa transverse flutes — presumably of Arab origin — are played among coastal tribes in Kenya and possibly among the Pogoro of East Central Tanzania. Culwick's illustration of a three-stop flute played by the latter people shows two of the stops at one end and the third at the other – thus suggesting that it is a side blown flute. What he means, however, when he writes that “it is played in the normal manner” is not clear, since apart from the instances cited, indigenous transverse flutes can be found nowhere else in East Africa.

The central issue in musical theory is the problem of description. Neither musicologists nor ethnomusicologists have yet devised a system of analysis which is sufficiently powerful to explain what we can know intuitively as a result of experience in culture, namely, the essential differences between the music of Haydn and Mozart, or of the Flathead and the Sioux Indians.

In the summer of 1968 I recorded 91 songs and song fragments from the local oral tradition of a district in Donegal, the North-West county of Ireland. The district happens to be roughly co-terminous with the ecclesiastical and old civil parish of Glencolumbkille, which contains the larger part of the South-West Donegal gaeltacht (native Irish-speaking area). Since the number of monoglot Irish speakers here is now negligible, the parish is bilingual wherever Irish is spoken. The 91 items I recorded were in the proportion 34 Irish, 58 English: one song being sung in the two languages.

Des provinces de Grèce où cohabitent des populations bilingues, il en est deux qui présentent un intèrět particulier: l'Epire du Nord, où coexistent le grec et l'albanais, le Pont, où l'on parle, du moins où l'on parlait, aussi bien le grec que le turc.

The scientific exploration of musical instruments of non-European peoples and of European folk music instruments began in the second half of the nineteenth century and was intensified in this century. The purpose of its initial phase was to make some kind of inventory in order to have the necessary scientific sources at hand, which would serve as a basis for further investigations of musical instruments. Field research among the world's most varied peoples has yielded even more data concerning a substantial number of new instruments, which hitherto have remained unknown.