This paper has two parts. The first is a brief and incomplete survey of Soviet advances in the study of traditional music over the last twenty years, paying particular attention to collection, research and teaching, and dissemination of information. The second part is a discussion of some widely used Russian terms in the field of ethnomusicology. Here an attempt is made to clarify certain concepts and theories which are central to recent developments in music research in the USSR.

I would like to touch upon some problems of traditional music in the USSR in its entirety and in connection with the development of social and political conditions which took shape after the October Revolution. I believe this approach is no less important than concentration on problems that are important only for some local social and cultural community.

Important goals of ethnomusicology are to arrive at an understanding of the relations between the musical traditions and their corresponding culture—these are often internal and very subtle connections—and to contribute to the study of ethnic histories. Only when we enter the realm of history do we become interesting to students of other humanistic subjects. The entry of ethnomusicology into history may be as complex and responsible an action as man's entry into space.

Sources: In Khiva, in the last quarter of the 19th century, a special tablature for the tanbur was created by means of which an abbreviated text of the Khorezmian mäqams was fixed. Among musicians these manuscripts are called tanbur chizigi (tanbur transcriptions), while in present-day literature they are known as “Khorezmian tanbur notation”.

The question of good and evil, of man's place in the world and his relations to the superior powers always played an important role in the traditional arts of the Kazakh. The instrumental music of the Kazakh with its distinctive genre—küy—has embodied philosophical issues as fully as the verbal genres. In Kazakh culture, the connection between instrumental music and dance, movement and gesture is not important. For centuries, instrumental thinking has been formed in close connection with the narrative genres—myth, epos, historical legends, and stories about the life of the küyshy.

Though the Christian Greek orthodox and the Islamic Ottoman cultures were rivals on a political and ideological level throughout the existence of the Ottoman empire, the Greek orthodox population of the empire like the Armenians, the Jews and other ethnic groups participated in a common musical culture. The musical cooperation and exchange of all these groups resulted in a musical “lingua franca”. Even now, common characteristics are evident in the musics of these nations of the Balkans and Near East that were once under Ottoman rule. The music of the Greek orthodox church, a vital element in the culture of the eastern Roman empire before it was conquered by the Turks, survived with the Church and continued to develop in subsequent centuries. It is difficult to trace the mutual influences that inevitably took place during the centuries of coexistence of Turkish and Greek music. But it is certain that especially from the 17th century onwards, Ottoman court music became increasingly recognized as a complement to Greek orthodox church music. This was a time that witnessed an impressive regeneration of the so called “post-Byzantine” music, culminating in a bloom of creativity in the 18th century. Numerous theoretical treatises and musical anthologies of religious and secular pieces testify to the significance for Greek church musicians of Ottoman music, as an important source for musical education, technique and inspiration. It was valued above all as an instrumental counterpart to the purely vocal church music, musical instruments permitting a tangible and empirical definition of musical phenomena that cannot be realized using the voice alone.

What can one “know” about any sort of music by means of musical analysis? What relationship can that “knowledge” bear to the knowledge of performers? These questions, pertinent perhaps to all musicologists, arise particularly strongly for me because for the past three years my work on Central Australian music has involved analysing documents of fieldwork carried out by other researchers (mainly Catherine Ellis) during the 1960s and early 70s, despite the fact that I have neither field experience in Central Australia nor extensive performance experience with performers of Central Australian traditional music. What follows is not intended as an apologia for “armchair” ethnomusicology, but rather as an attempt to open up, through discussion of the problematics of historical ethnomusicology, philosophical questions I believe to be central to the ethnomusicological enterprise.

The Karelian lament, or itkuvirsi, is an extraordinary expressive form found in eastern Finland and Soviet Karelia that uses music, language, gesture, and the icons of crying to communicate affect and power. It has its roots in the ancestor worship of the ancient Karelian folk religion, and contains vestiges of classical Eurasian shamanism in its ecstatic, trancelike manner of performance. The lament is performed only by women, usually within the ritual context of funerals or weddings; however, it is also performed at non-ritual occasions with strong overtones of affect, such as when old friends meet after a long absence or as a complaint about the hardships of life. The lament is now only barely remembered by a handful of Karelian women, most of them refugees from World War II now living in Finland. The ritual contexts have completely died out in Finland, although the funeral context still partially survives in Soviet Karelia. The primary source material for this paper is drawn from my fieldwork with Karelian refugees in 1984-85, who had learned laments prior to World War II in traditional village settings.

Interest in the aid of computers within musicology has so far mainly been concentrated on (a) documentation and (b) analysis of music as notated. It still remains to take the important step into that vast field of material, problems, and research that could be labeled music as performed, both as regards the physiological, the acoustical, and the perceptive side. Here it seems possible to predict the arrival of a quite new type of research in the near future. One main problem that remains to be solved is the transformation of registered data from analogous to digital form to get numerical values directly printed out or otherwise stored for computer treatment.

When I first began to investigate the music and musical practices in the Sultanate of Oman, my attention was drawn to the use of different names for the same instrument. It became soon apparent that this was not a philological problem, but rather a question of the instrument's function in a given context. For example, a cylindrical, double-headed drum is called kāsir only when it appears in conjunction with a larger, lower sounding cylindrical double-headed drum, a ra&māni. A drum is called ra&māni only when it fulfills the function of providing the rhythmical framework. Then, the kāsir takes on the function of “filling-in” or embellishing. However, the same kāsir can function as a ra&māni. In this case, it appears in combination with an even smaller kāsir. Thus, function correlates with relative size, and determines the nomenclature.

Anyone who wonders about the aesthetic process behind convincing artificiality—its methods, functions and status—would scarcely find a more topical example than musical regionalism and, in French Switzerland in particular, representations linked to a domain of vocal music commonly described as “popular”, “folk”, “traditional” or even by the name of the region to which it refers. This music, which is performed by a large number of lay and religious choirs, is, as we shall see, one of synthesis. It lies on the border of verisimilitude because it is cast in a poetic and fictional vein, yet is evocative of past aspects of peasant song at the same time, through the incorporation of religious (Roman Catholic) and classical musical elements in simplified form. It has generally been accepted as revelatory of a specific culture, though in actual fact it derives from a patchwork of images of rurality (flashes), fractured in time and space, which court the brief impulse for escapism, for exotic sensations, to the point where its adepts become less mindful of how difficult it is to think out musical culture today.