Flows of money and resources receive increasing treatment in music; however, lack of money and resources is rarely discussed comprehensively. This special half-issue of the Yearbook for Traditional Music titled “Music and Poverty” aims towards formulating a nuanced understanding of music and poverty relationships. This collection of articles considers what the complex theoretical issue of poverty can add to understandings of music and musical cultures, and vice versa. To this end, “Music and Poverty” builds on music-research publications that mention poverty and a growing number of scholarly studies of music that provide valuable information about music-of-poverty contexts. Although poverty has long formed a comprehensive focus of cognate disciplines of ethnomusicology, especially anthropology and sociology, and of studies in policy, economics, human rights, and health, most of ethnomusicology has yet to consider poverty explicitly or in detail, to open up multiple issues involved in it, and to draw on an extensive poverty literature relevant to culture.

Even though poverty is most often examined in terms of a lack of material wealth and health, a growing number of studies focus on its social and cultural aspects. Nyiwul Mabughi and Tarek Selim (2006) conclude their review of approaches to poverty by listing its multiple dimensions:

A long-standing and pervading theme in fields of inquiry such as economics, sociology, health studies, human rights, or social policy, poverty has apparently not similarly impacted scholarship on music beyond the implicit recognition—more typically found in folklore, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies—that it may have conditioned to some degree music-making among given groups within a larger society or even among larger societal entities such as countries and continents. One problem likely hindering more theoretical approaches to music and poverty is the difficulty, so often expressed in the above-mentioned fields, of finding a universally acceptable definition of poverty (not forgetting that defining “music” is also far from unproblematic). A growing literature, mostly beyond music disciplines, accounts for the many possible determining factors behind such a definition—such as family or individual income, gross national product, formal employment rate, average cost of a minimal caloric diet, access to basic sewage, and adequate housing—which may be adopted either in combination or in isolation. At the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, economists such as Amartya Sen, Mahbub Ul Haq, Deepa Narayan, Celso Furtado, and others went further in the pursuit of a multidimensional approach, considering factors such as education, availability of natural resources, and political participation in defining the boundaries indexing situations of poverty. Sen's (2010) definition of poverty as one's privation of developing individual capacities has since become an influential source of public debate (Crespo and Gurovitz 2002).

Haiti and its citizens are frequently squeezed between a confusing and uneasy pair of polarizing superlatives: the Caribbean nation is routinely identified as “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” at the same time that its culture is upheld as one of the richest in the post-colonial Americas. Although these labels can (and probably should) be dismissed as oversimplified and destructive, they do offer a striking dichotomy to contemplate. Can seeming economic poverty be balanced against so-called cultural richness? Can the domains of economy and culture be reconciled as mutually useful? Specifically, can culture be exploited to enhance daily life and improve material existence?

In socio-economically depressed urban areas, many musical programmes and projects are offered to the poor for free by community organizations, non-governmental and governmental organizations, and arts businesses, with funding from corporations, private foundations, churches, donations, governments, and concert tickets. In poor urban areas in Canada and other nation states with decaying systems of social welfare, or in non-welfare states, music making, music classes, music therapy, and musical performances including theatre, dance, and multimedia are activities within a larger series of services and goods offered by the organizations and institutions, and directed towards the well-being and survival of the poor. There are also musical rehearsals and performances that pay the poor. Such music projects’ day-to-day functionings, which are still in the early stages of being documented (Araújo 2008; Harrison 2008; Tan 2008), variously address the social deprivations that have come to define poverty, such as lack of health, livelihood sustainability, or social inclusion.

Jesus reportedly said that “the poor will be always with us” (Matthew 26:11) but, brimming with confidence after the Second World War, sociologists and economic policymakers in the United States dared to think otherwise. In a modern, affluent society, poverty was embarrassing. Social critics used to believe individuals were poor because they were unlucky or lazy or stupid, but mid-twentieth century sociologists saw the causes as cultural: if society could but change those cultures, then poverty would disappear (Galbraith 1998; Harrington 1963). The editor of this volume invited me to reflect on music and poverty in relation to my scholarly research over the past forty-five years. It so happens that the musical communities in the United States where I've done most of my field research were characterized as cultures of poverty and targeted in President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 State of the Union address in which he declared a War on Poverty. Daniel Moynihan, one of the architects of the War on Poverty in the US, put the then culture-of-poverty theory into bureaucratese: “Poverty leads to cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation which lead to poor health, inadequate education, and low mobility limiting earning potential which leads to limited income opportunities which lead to Poverty” (1966:4, my italics). While I did find material poverty in the musical communities that I participated in and studied since the 1960s, I found the people in those communities to be rich in music and expressive culture. I never found a cyclic culture of poverty in the Moynihan sense, either. Instead, I came to understand that poverty was imposed from without by discrimination, exploitation, and corruption.

I define cultural poverty as the absence or reduction of the means to express culture; and culture, in turn, consists of the shared habits of thought, feeling, and action that bind individuals to social collectives. Any absence or reduction of the means to musical expression may be termed musical poverty, which is a subset of cultural poverty. What does it mean for an individual or a social group to not have or to lose the ability for musical expression? Consider the case of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb who famously prohibited musical performance throughout his empire in 1668. Or consider the frequent bans on musical expression by the Taliban in Afghanistan over the past two decades (Baily 2009), and more recently by Islamic extremists in northern Mali. It is possible that such official prohibitions led to an overall loss of musical expression in their respective societies, but it is difficult to know this for certain. Baily suggests that censorship in Afghanistan led to increases in piracy and clandestine musical performance (ibid.). But even if we are willing to accept the possibility of an overall decline in musical forms of expression, how can we know whether this was not compensated in other, non-musical forms of cultural expression?

The saman song-dance of the Aceh Gayo Lues people, who inhabit the central mountainous areas of the province of Aceh, is one of the most dramatic and famous of Indonesia's performing arts and a key symbol of Gayo cultural identity, yet it has not to date been a subject of ethnomusicological research.

A Tanzanian Roman Catholic priest, the late Stephen B. G. Mbunga (1927–1982), has played a significant role in the history of church music in Tanzania through his compositions, involvement in music performance as a choral conductor, and scholarly writing on various aspects of church music. He is best known by scholars of the music of Tanzania through his work on the localization of church music there. In his 1963 book entitled Church Law and Bantu Music: Ecclesiastical Documents and Law on Sacred Music as Applied to Bantu Music, which was his doctoral dissertation (a work completed at and submitted to Propaganda University in Switzerland), he strongly defends the use of African music in Roman Catholic Church services in Africa. After interpreting Roman ecclesiastical laws and various directives given by top officials in the Roman Catholic Church, Mbunga argues that the use of African music in the Roman Catholic Church is consistent with and can be accomplished in accordance with these laws and directives concerning church music (see Sanga 2011:35–37). He also proposes practical ways through which musicians can undertake the task of composing African music that is appropriate for Roman Catholic Church services.

Northern Ireland experiences a large and often politically sensitive parading tradition annually between March and September. Music takes a prominent position in these parades, with flutes, accordions, bagpipes, snare drums, and bass drums being the most popular instruments on display. Percussion instruments are often the only instruments that are found in the vast majority of parading bands throughout Northern Ireland (figure 1). A particular drumming style, known locally as blood and thunder, has evolved as a result of working-class bands attempting both to imitate military styles and to adapt them to changing working-class tastes. Through a combination of ethnographic material and technical analysis, this paper enables an in-depth understanding of the way a unique tradition has developed as a result of working-class attempts to mimic the musical practices of the dominant military power without access to the tuition techniques and facilities on which that dominant style depended.

The focus of this paper is to proceed from melodic procedures to an analytical model for the comparison of rural wedding rituals in Morocco through their songs. The area of concern, however, could be extended to a much larger geographical area, encompassing not only North Africa but also the Middle East, where similar kinds of songs are found. However, in this larger area, it is rather classical urban music—developed in vocal and instrumental suite forms such as the Maghribi nuba or the Mashreki Syrian wasla—that is usually compared, while rural music has tended to be ignored in such a comparative perspective. It has been frequently pointed out (Merriam 1982; Nettl 2005:60–73; McLean 2006:314–21) that since the orientation of comparative musicology as well as Alan Lomax's well-known method of cantometrics (1968, 1976), comparative research in ethnomusicology has been rather neglected during the last few decades. This is due to the conviction that musical forms or systems should not be compared since they are socially- and culturally-bound, and thus meanings are not necessarily comparable. Anthropologists however, have had different kinds of debates on anthropological phenomena linked to music. Important documentation from sociologists, anthropologists, or language specialists provides rich ethnographic detail and reveals great local variety (see, e.g., Westermarck 1914; Louis 1979; Laoust and Lefébure 1993). It supplies recurrent evidence about wedding ceremonies and festivities in which hundreds of people gather for several days. Yet despite the fact that music fills these events in important ways, discussion of this music has most often been absent or minimal. This has led to interpretations focusing on general anthropological concerns. Among the most significant examples are concepts of purification or protection from harm, suggested as common features in wedding rituals studied by Westermarck. As noted by Hassan Rachik (2012:103–4), however, this conceals the local variety of rituals. At a descriptive level, such indifference to music has led to the confusion of ritual with other marital events, such as engagements or various contractual aspects. By focusing in this paper on the ritual performance itself, I shall draw attention to the potential of studying music in these celebrations. This means a shift in focus to components such as structure, temporality, performing places and actions, and an approach to ritual “from within” and outwards (Jankowsky 2010:25–26).

Gospel music is a type of Protestant Christian music in both white and black American traditions. White gospel or European American gospel music dates back to the late-nineteenth-century revival movement and has developed within three identifiable traditions: northern urban gospel, southern gospel, and country and bluegrass gospel. Black gospel or African American gospel music emerged in the 1930s in northern industrial cities, drawing on spirituals, jubilee singing, the blues, and hymnody from various traditions, then developed and flourished throughout North America. Today the influence of gospel music, particularly from the African American and northern urban white traditions, extends across many cultures (Shearon et al. 2012). In Japan, African American gospel music has become very popular since the early 1990s, and its popularity continues to the present day. This paper examines the way that African American gospel music took root and was localized in Japan in its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

This essay explores music/dance as a cultural export and import, and how it may be changed and interpreted/reinterpreted by the exporter and importer, using Japan as a case study. Although I am a Pacific anthropologist, I have studied a variety of Asian musics and dances, as well as Pacific ones. I started my studies of Japanese music and dance forms in Hawai'i and extended them in Japan, especially my studies of gagaku, bugaku, and kagura. I also studied Hawaiian music and dance with some of the most knowledgeable and venerated Hawaiian teachers. But along the way, I stopped my earlier studies of violin, piano, voice, and ballet/modern dance to concentrate on what might be considered “exotic.” In this essay, I combine my interest in Japanese and Hawaiian musics/dances with my interest in concepts of “the exotic.”

What is music? In my view, this is the most basic question in all musicologies, be it the so-called systematic and comparative musicology (according to Guido Adler's founding article of 1885), the historical musicology of “Western art music,” ethnomusicology, or other existing as well as possible musicologies, as far as they are oriented towards a generalizable term such as the term “music” is.