Like all exceptionally creative people, Zoltán Kodály was an untiring and strongly focused worker. Music education, folk music research and composition are considered his most important fields. Regardless of certain preferences at one time or another, he always understood his work in these diverse areas as mutually supporting an integral whole.

Investigations into any music require two supplementary and interdependent orders: the systematic order (of quality and quantity) and the historical order in time and space (contact and continuity). This basic truth has not always been realized. It is the systematic musical knowledge which from antiquity has been prevailing in Europe. The turning point took place only in recent times. In the last centuries European historism had dominated the scholarship of music. An illustration of the domination of history and its theoretical consequences is the classification of musical science by Guido Adler. Its characteristic feature is a division of music into two parts: one treated historically (classical music) and one treated systematically (Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft), as if any music could be studied without consideration of these two perspectives. Much has changed since Adler's classification and two opposing trends have emerged. The stronger of the two has expressed itself in an expansion of history. We can see this in the tendency to stress the historical aspect in ethnomusicology. Conversely, historians of music are now increasingly concerned with the folk music of various periods and stress its role in culture. This trend towards an historical approach in ethnomusicology can be seen in the work of various scholars and has also found its expression in the activities of the ICTM study group, set up to investigate historical sources of folk music. This study group was initiated by Walter Wiora and organized by Benjamin Rajeczky and Wolfgang Suppan. The group's efforts led to the two separate publications with the joint title “Historiche Volksmusikforschung”. In a way, this isolates and accentuates a new specialization within ethnomusicology.

General studies on the evolution of mankind normally discuss the rise of subhuman primates and hominids within their geographical-physical environments, including climate, flora, and fauna; bioanthropological problems of the species homo such as tools and their use, working activities, development of language and cognitive abilities; and the so-called Ice Age arts. But, as a rule, the beginnings of music and dance behavior are totally neglected.

There is an extensive literature on “African scales”, but only rarely is it reported what the internal order of the tone material is in the minds of the musicians themselves. Only in a few works can one find direct quotations from the musicians in their own vocabulary. One famous example is Klaus Wachsmann's documentation of the tuning process of an amadinda xylophone in Uganda, and the critical remarks made in Luganda by the two royal musicians, Mr. Evaristo Muyinda and Mr. Baziwe, while they were tuning their instruments. Simultaneously, the process of tuning was measured “live” with a Stroboconn pitch-measuring machine. Wachsmann writes (1957:14-15): “Strictly speaking there is no scale which one could describe in unambiguous terms of physical definition, but there are tuning processes in the course of which corrections are made. Their trend can be described, and in favourable circumstances one can form a realistic picture of the pattern in the mind of the tuner.”

Cases of trance, ecstasy, spirit possession, and other institutionalized states of altered consciousness have frequently been invoked is discussions of the effectiveness of musical symbols, often as if they were the most convincing proof of the extraordinary powers of music. They are, of course, more visibly dramatic than an individual's quiet and total absorption in the performance of a moving piece of music; but there is as yet no evidence that these two kinds of experience are essentially different or that the appropriately different styles of music are crucial factors in generating the different kinds of response.

This paper discusses the role of techniques and concepts roughly corresponding to the Western notion of “improvisation” in the cognitive domain of sung mantoore (praise), i.e., praise-songs, among the Ful'be (engl. Fulani, fr. peul) of Diamaré in North Cameroon. Fieldwork in Diamaré was carried out between June 1975 and October 1976 in thirty-two towns and villages of the region of Maroua, the administrative and commercial centre of the Département du Diamaré with 70,000 inhabitants. Fourteen examples, drawn from approximately 400 praise-songs recorded during the course of the study, have been selected for analysis.

In the north of Sumatra lies Lake Toba, 906 meters above sea level and situated on a mountainous plateau which has an area of 1790 square kilometers. The surrounding countryside is the home of the Batak, who number approximately two million people, generally divided into five subgroups: Toba (the largest group), Karo, Simalungun, Pakpak/Dairi and Angkola/Mandailing.1 All speak different dialects and distinguish themselves culturally. Although their music shows common basic elements, there are many differences in detail. Ethnically, the Batak are generally called Proto-Malays, whatever that may be.2 They are Austronesian speakers and belong to the old peoples of the Indonesian Archipelago. About the origin of the Batak (and Nias people as well), a number of speculations and theories of migration have been published and repeated by many authors.3 We agree with the following statement by Parkin:

Despite uncertainties and confusion about the prescise original location, manner and dating of their arrival in Sumatra, all of which are completely undocumented, there is general agreement that the Batak originate from some region of Farther India. The significance of this is that when the Batak arrived in Sumatra, and were subsequently pushed up into the mountains of Tapanuli, they brought a developed culture with them which had certain affinities with that of Greater India. Consequently, when Indians began to arrive in the archipelago at the beginning of our era, they met people with whom cultural contact was not too difficult (1978: 12).

The Kallawaya belong to the Quechua-speaking population of Bolivia and live on the eastern slope of the Andes in the Charazani valley system, north of Lake Titicaca, near the Peruvian border. Located in the Bautista Saavedra province of the Department of La Paz, the Valley and Rio Charazani cut across the Cordilleras and thus serve as a gateway to the lower-lying Yungas to the east. The Incas in their heyday prized this valley highly, for it lay at the outermost limits of their empire's expansion and opened into areas where the coca plant and tropical fruits and herbs were grown. Because of the alkaloids it contains, the coca plant (Eritroxilon Coca L.) has played an important role in rituals and cult practices since pre-Spanish times (M. Wendorf de Sejas 1982:223; J.W. Bastien 1978:19). The Kallawaya people have been known since antiquity as herbalists and healers, and the Incas are said to have accorded them special privileges on this account: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala tells in his “Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno” from about 1600 of “Callauayas” carrying Inca Tupac Yupanqui (1471-1493) and his wife Mama Occlo-Coya in a sedan chair at the Cuzcan court (F. Guaman Poma, ed. 1936: fol. 331).

Cet article explore le domaine trop peu connu des appels au bétail.1 L‘étude la plus détaillée est due à A. Johnson (1981, 1984); elle porte sur des données recueillies au nord de la Suède. En Suisse rien de semblable n'a encore été fait. Dans les années 1920 la Société Suisse des Traditions Populaires avait bien diffusé un questionnaire à ce sujet, mais les réponses, conservées au Volksliederarchiv de Bâle, ne comportent aucune transcription musicale. Le processus d'appauvrissement, particulièrement ces dernières années, de l'usage, mais aussi de l'énoncé sonore de ce répertoire lié aux travaux d‘élevage de montagne dans les Préalpes de la Gruyère, montre la nécessité d'une étude et d'un inventaire systématique des expressions musicales dans leur contexte original, ce que recommande d'ailleurs M.P. Baumann dans un important bilan qu'il établit en 1981 sur la recherche ethnomusicologique en Suisse (p. 20).2 Les appels au bétail présentés ici apportent un matériel sonore nouveau pour une région alpestre et ils peuvent être utilisés comme document d'histoire du patrimoine musical de cette région pastorale. Mais la richesse du matériel qu'ils offrent est telle que leur étude peut fournir divers angles d'approche.

The old Hungarian dance tune Csípd meg bogár [“Sting it bug”] is very popular with professional musicians, but it does not fit easily into the bartokian-kodalyian system of Hungarian folk tunes. It is seemingly of strophic structure, but because of its wide-ranging variations, one cannot easily place it among strophic melodies. The great scattering of variants will be understandable when approached from the standpoint of instrumental music with its motivic structure. Tunes of this kind have been scarcely studied so far; they represent a remarkable old layer of Hungarian and international instrumental music.