This study is an attempt to gain insight into an aspect of the process of improvisation in Middle Eastern music. In contrast to a number of studies which generalize about this topic, the purpose here is to provide concentrated documentation on the way in which a single Arabic performer improvises in one maqam, using one form or genre. In this respect, our study is somewhat similar to Nettl and Foltin, which attempts to show the range of improvisatory techniques and of performance types used by Persian musicians when performing one portion of a dastgāh or mode, the darāmad of chahārgāh. It is also related to a study by Ruth Katz which compares two generations of singers from a limited population group, performing one genre in an Arabic-Jewish musical tradition.

During the month of June, 1966, I undertook a folksong collecting trip among the nomadic Lapps, visiting among others the village Nunnanen in northern Finland situated more than two hundred kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle. The well-to-do Lapps of the village, all of whom have completed four to six forms of Finnish primary school, own three thousand reindeer. Throughout the summer they live with their families in tents and follow the herd, whereas in the winter they live in villages in log houses, which were rebuilt after the Second World War. Thanks to the Finnish Ministry of Culture, I was provided with an interpreter and a battery-operated tape recorder, with which we were able to collect two-hundred-and-fifty Lapp folksongs, the so-called yoiks, among reindeer farmers and shepherds. An additional twenty-six folksongs were collected orally.

Frequent use of supplementary syllables distinguishes the singing from the speech of many Irish folk singers. These syllables are formed in the meaningful text by recourse to various procedures which have their basis in the spoken language; but the lengthening of speech in song greatly enlarges their scope. It is true that the extra syllables are weakly stressed ones; nevertheless, their number can be so great that their presence becomes quite obtrusive. They obtruded forcefully on the ear of an Anglo-Irish poet of the nineteenth century, William Allingham, as he listened to a fair-day ballad-seller singing a long Anglo-Irish song; and he took the opportunity to amuse his Victorian public by printing one of its stanzas in mock phonetic spelling:

after which he gave the orthographical text as follows:

As an aspect of my research in Colombian folksong I examined a number of published Spanish sources in an attempt to find analogues for the texts and melodies of songs I had recorded in Colombia. By this means I hoped to determine that a particular text or melody had been diffused from Spain to Latin America. This proved feasible in the case of a small number of song texts but very difficult in the case of the melodies associated with these song texts.

Des échelles à sept intervalles équidistants n'étaient connues des ethnomusicologues, il y a encore peu de temps, que dans deux grandes régions: Asie du Sud-Est et Afrique noire (cf. Stumpf, 1901; Hornbostel, 1911; Tracey, 1948; Duriyanga, 1948; Jones, 1964; Morton, 1968; Rouget et Schwarz, 1969). Récemment, l'existence de cette échelle a été signalée chez les Indiens Tepehua du Mexique. Notre but est d'apporter du matériel nouveau pour une quatrième région du monde, la Mélanésie, dont on ne pensait pas jusqu'à présent qu'elle pouvait avoir des échelles de ce type.

The Pontic Greeks, refugees from their traditional homelands that today lie within the borders of Turkey and the USSR respectively, brought with them two folk music instruments, aside from other widely diffused instruments that are almost unknown in present-day Greece: the lira (‘a three-stringed, bowed lute’) and the touloum (‘bagpipe’). While the Greeks clearly distinguish the lira from the remaining Greek instruments by calling it the ‘Pontic Lira,’ the Greeks from Pontus simply call it lira. On occasion, mainly in song texts, one discovers the Turkish designation kementze (kemençe). The name touloum (Turkish tulum) originally meant “… a tube or sack made of sheep or goat skin which serves as a vessel for oil, cheese and the like.” Curiously, in western Macedonia the ancient Greek word angion (‘vessel’) is often used in place of touloum, which, on the other hand, is totally unknown in eastern Macedonia. The reason for this difference in terminology cannot be clarified.

Of seven distinct bodies of vocal music and one body of instrumental music recognized and separately classified by the Tsonga of Mozambique and the Northern Transvaal, beer-drink music is the most often performed and comprises about 40% of the total folksong repertoire of about five hundred items (Figure 1). The other musical styles are exorcism music, girls’ initiation music, children's songs, solo instrumental music, boys’ drumming school music, and circumcision school music (Figure 2). The order given reflects the estimated man-hours of performance (the circumcision school is organized only every four or five years), and it coincides roughly with sample rankings obtained from informants during the period 1968–70. Variations of the ranking were some women's claim that girls’ initiation music is more important than exorcism music, and some men's claim that muchongolo (the national dance performed at beer-drinks) is more important than beer-songs or any other single category.

Among the Yoruba people of S. W. Nigeria, there are innumerable poetic genres, or manners of intonation, rigidly prescribed by ritual convention (labelled simply “chant” in the West). Some of these genres—notably Ijálá and Rárà—have already been treated by scholars at the textual and/or linguistic levels. Śangó praise-poetry has hitherto received attention only from the literary standpoint. In a recent classification of indigenous poetic genres (Olatunji), the rendering of ritual praise-poetry with a particular intonation is given the name Pípé Òrìşá: for each órìşá, or deity, Pìpè has its own characteristic intonation. Thus, a sub-genre of Pìpè Òrìşá (the religious counterpart to the aforementioned secular Rárá chanting) is here referred to as Şángó-Pìpé. Literally, pìpè (pronounced KPEE-KPAY) means “to call or summon;” the indigenous term pìpè òrìşà derives from a specific moment in a cult ceremony when the priest or priestess invokes the òrìşá.

African dance has, in the past, sent some admiring Western poets and artists into ecstasy and many Christian missionaries and other colonialists into a state of horror. “The quintessential aesthetic form” or “the expression of moral turpitude,” respectively, were common verdicts. And frequently, early European observers of African behavior did not consider African dance to be dance, for it was not the familiar classical ballet or foot-tapping folk dance of their home countries. Perceptions and evaluations are now more balanced. We have first-hand reports about African dance by African and other scholars, an extensive survey of old and new literature relevant to African dance, an increasing number of African dance films, and African dance companies that have performed around the world.

Dans la perspective des processus évolutifs qui boulversent actuellement les modèles traditionnels de la culture folklorique, dans la perspective des interférences et du transfert intense de produits culturels opéré entre le plan de la culture de type urbain et celle de type folklorique-traditionnel, la choréologie devrait élargir l'angle de ses investigations vers une recherche sémiotique de la danse, qui seule pourrait rendre compte au-delà des niveaux de surface, des significations profondes qui justifient l'existence de la danse dans une communauté donnée, aussi bien que de toutes les transformations qu'elle subit.