When I started the journey of writing this essay, I wondered at length what topic to propose and what tone it should take. Since the Yearbook for Traditional Music is a highly respected, international ethnomusicological journal, should I speak as an exponent of a small national ethnomusicology or am I allowed to take a more personal stance? Should I use this space for more canonized thoughts or could I allow myself to propose untested ones, to speak from this specific moment, inspired by recent musical events and readings? Although ethnomusicologists at home tend to be resentful when treated as only the providers of ethnographic material, should I present information in its historical, political, and social context or could I try to put forward some broader ethnomusicological thoughts?

Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose called these commandments “the Jante’ Law,” so-named for his protagonist's fictional Danish home-town in the semi-autobiographical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (orig. pub. 1933; English trans., 1936:77-78). Over the years this ironic credo of elder-dominated communal living has expanded and acquired a special resonance with respect to Swedish cultural self-image. Today in Sweden, the Jante Law occupies a place in the popular imagination as a descriptor of a specifically Scandinavian attitude, a subtly enforced culture of moderation and humility.

A Finnish fiddler trading fours with a Hindustani vocalist, Swedish herding calls soaring over a djembe and didjeridu groove, Russian refrains inserted between Finnish texts and Swedish harmonies—these are only a few examples of the transnational musical fusions and collaborations that characterize nykykansanmusiikki, or “contemporary folk music,” in Finland. It is common practice for Finnish contemporary folk musicians to collaborate with foreign artists, dig for source materials in neighbouring countries, play traditional instruments from multiple cultures, market their creations as “world music from Finland,” and speak of “global folk music communities.”

In a nation on the periphery of Europe, in a region most distant from the capital, the country's indigenous musical traditions are undergoing a process of institutionalization. A large proportion of the nation's population fears the loss of their ancient customs and national identity to the ever rising tide of foreign cultural influences. The locality itself, however, enjoys both a strong regional identity and a unique musical repertory, a repertory that plays a central role in both the text and context of the institutionalization in question. The resultant institution is multifaceted—its activities include: the collation and publication of music recordings and transcriptions; the promotion of performances by locally and nationally revered folk musicians; the creation and direction of a folk orchestra; and, most importantly, an extensive folk music education programme, culminating in a nationally recognized qualification. The organization has been quietly accused by other folk musicians of standardizing and formalizing the music it professes to support. Nonetheless, it receives financial support from the state departments for education and culture.

In 2000, I wrote an article for this journal in response to an ICTM colloquium held at Visby in 1999 about issues of musical “multiculturalism” (Slobin 2000). The idea was to test out our terminology in the light of social and musical changes. By 2006, things had changed when I co-hosted another ICTM colloquium, at Wesleyan University, on “emerging musical identities” from the transatlantic perspective, in Europe and North America. The present article scans some of the thoughts from that conference, then moves out to their implications by using the event as a mental trampoline. To carry through the metaphor, one crashes back onto the elastic surface before making another try at getting airborne, but at least one gets a good view in the process. In the following, I cite participants' remarks and relevant writings of 2006 by other authors to keep a precise “ethnographic present.”

The methodological shift in cultural studies from observation to meaning (Geertz 1973) resulted in “invisible” dance action coming to the forefront of contemporary speculation in the humanistic and social sciences (Farnell 2001b:2). As Adrienne Kaeppler observes, it cannot be considered adequate to pinpoint whatever message we receive from the visually perceived manifestation of any choreography, because this visible dimension constitutes only one component of a larger social action. In order to develop an opinion of what and how a dance communicates in a specific circumstance, we must comprehend it as a holistic entity. According to Kaeppler, the creative process of understanding dance can be interpreted in a more obvious way: from within the dancer's ability and the spectator's knowledge of the metaphor applied in the dance motion, in light of the more general social and cultural environment. Following this argument, that the “visible” and “invisible” may emerge in all their dimensions (Kaeppler 2001:31–39), dance cannot be perceived solely as form; it has a usage and an orbit that emphasize the “human” and the “social,” while most of the time concealing its invisible and loaded symbolic aspects.

As some readers may know, I have recently published a book entitled Pioneers of Ethnomusicology. In it I try to answer the questions

At the heart of the resurgence and popularity of traditional music in South Korea during the closing decades of the twentieth century lie the concerted efforts of an intimate group of friends and musical colleagues who came of age in the late 1970s. Inspired by their mentors and artistic forbearers borne of itinerant troupe performance traditions and bound together by the common goal of saving Korean music from obscurity in a nation that was catapulting itself toward Western cultural hegemony, the percussion quartet known as SamulNori emerged from its humble beginnings to become an internationally acknowledged phenomenon.