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Acousticians, ethnomusicologists and organologists, these general practitioners and specialists in Southeast or East Asia have come together to create a new general description of the mouth organ and of the free reed pipe. As an introduction to this issue of Circuit, connecting musicians and composers with musicologists and specialists in acoustics and sound recording, this essay takes an approach that passes through history, morphology, materials, details of workmanship and acoustics, pausing to make clarifications or corrections to a literature that is vast but scattered. Regarding the modernization of the instruments and the contexts where it occurs, the authors take the musicians’ point of view into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the two ethnomusicology departments of the Museum of Man (musée de l'Homme, Paris) and the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (MNATP, Paris) have always wanted to have sound collections essential to research, their phonotheque has brought together numerous commercial records which constitute today important resources for the sociology of music as much as for ethnomusicology. This article deals with the 78, 33 and 45 rpm record collection of the MNATP now kept at Mucem (Museum of civilizations of Europe and Mediterranean, Marseilles) and its processing as part of the projected 'overhauling' of the collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the problem caused by the change in the status of ethnomusicological recordings of the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (MNATP, Paris, 1937-2013) inventoried as "collections'' (and, as such, registered in the museum inventory) but finally considered as ''scientific archives'' and deposited at the National Archives in 2013. The author explains what justified the attribution of this status in the context of the construction of the ''museum-laboratory'' when French ethnology emerged in the 1930's as a new discipline of which the Museum was to become the main investigator. Through the example of these sound items (to use a term as neutral as possible) whose constitution is the foundation of the discipline born in France in museums, this article reveals the challenges which they provoked, and approaches the heritage process which transforms them into "intangible cultural informers". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes two scientific projects carried out, within the framework of two postdoctorate projects, for the development of the sound collections of the ''Centre for Research in Ethnomusicology'' (University of Nanterre) present in the Telemeta base which have involved ethnomusicologists and computer scientists. The first part presents the challenges regarding the development of tools for indexing and automatic analysis on large volumes of sound archives. The second concerns the study of the historical evolution of certain musical characteristics attached to the music of steel band calypso and shows that techniques of automatic extraction of musical information could be mobilized to carry out a computational study on a corpus of recordings of steel bands archived in the Telemeta database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines a collection of around 330 old catalogues of phonographic brands/labels publishing 78-rpm records of ''exotic'' music found in 2009 when the textual archives of the ethnomusicology department of the Museum of Man (musée de l'Homme, Paris) were moved to the University of Paris Nanterre. Received according to André Schaeffner's exchanges with record companies over the period 1930-1960, these ''unidentified documentary objects'' specific to record collectors and which seem foreign to the discipline, nevertheless bear witness to the methodical organization of the phonotheque of the musée de l'Homme in the first decades of its existence. The article also shows how this collection can today constitute a new object of interest for ethnomusicology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the significant operation which led, between 2012 and 2013, to the deposit of the archives of the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions (MNATP, Paris, 1937- 2013) in the National Archives but also in the Mucem (Museum of civilizations of Europe and Mediterranean) in Marseilles: what were the criteria for ''sharing'' the different elements of these archives, for setting up the "archives", what volumes were processed, what was the duration of the operations? The author thus intends to respond directly to questions from the public about what has become of these essential archives relating to the ethnomusicology of France and still considered as a source of the revival of traditional music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project Les Réveillées pursues two objectives: to allow the public to discover a corpus of ethnomusicological archives built up over more than forty years by Claudie Marcel-Dubois and Maguy Pichonnet-Andral, and to provide researchers with a device allowing them both to improve the description of this data and to publish works that offer a better understanding of the material. Since the launch of the project, a long process of modelling and structuring, to which researchers, computer scientists and professionals of scientific and technical information have all contributed, has made it possible to constitute the descriptive metadata of the corpus. Articulating the EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris) research data warehouse and the Omeka software, the platform Les Réveillées, which is scheduled to be online in the middle of 2020, will offer different levels of access to data, the possibility of analysing the data precisely and to reuse this data to publish new content collaboratively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Cirque du Soleil’s touring arena show Corteo, music is a central feature of every performance. In this article, I focus on Corteo’s touring sound technicians, who play an essential role in the show’s musical presentation. I discuss a methodological approach to my ethnographic research, which provides new insights into large-scale intermedia performance environments like Corteo. I theorize a masculine-gendered, stoic mode of emotional labour that is enacted through voice-to-voice remote communication during performance. 0rough participant observation, public intercept interviews, and what I call “working interviews”—interviews with the sound technicians that take place during performances or other operational activities—I engage directly with the technical and emotional labour practices of musical production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On July 26, 2017, the ethnomusicologist Flavia Gervasi met with José Evangelista to discuss the influence of world music on his work as a composer, professor, and promoter. Evangelista is known not only for his involvement in contemporary classical music, but also for his work in promoting non-Western music in Montreal, both as a teacher and as a cultural emissary. The goal of the meeting was to answer the following question: How does a composer who was trained in the Western musical tradition approach non-Western music, which is normally the object of epistemological reflection for ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of music?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the contemporary context of abundant online availability of music, the purpose of this essay is to provide the clinical music therapist with an understanding of how folk song can enable a deeper understanding of many song forms. This will include (1) outlining three primary functions of music as understood in recent evolutionary thought about music; (2) examining what happens when we sing with a description of the human vocal/tonal system; (3) summarizing research concerning the benefits of singing and vocal therapy approaches developed in the profession; (4) defining folklore, settling on folk song itself; (5) examining the musical structures and lyrical themes of traditional songs, focusing on specific examples from the folk music of Atlantic Canada; (6) broadening the spectrum to examine world music styles while integrating these aspects with music therapy theory; (7) suggesting how music therapists can mine this rich musical and lyrical resource in their clinical work; (8) examining the use of folk song in the context of client preference; and (9) presenting three clinical vignettes on the use of folk song in music therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the era of information highways, one might imagine that technology guarantees itself a full accessibility to the music of the Other. In reality, it is possible that some exotic acoustic phenomena could impede their own diffusion. It is the case about microtemporal musical organizations such as the suíngue brasileiro, an AfroBrazilian declination of the famous swing of jazz, and that is today widespread. Grace to a psycho-acoustic experience, we show that some French musicians largely impregnated by the Western classical music can use an “inadequate” listening for this kind of microrhythmic organization. These results are analyzed through the notion of quantization, for which the cognitive anthropology gives a relevant and explicative framework grace to the concept of inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dans cette contribution, le mot musicologie désigne "la science de la musique", dans son acception la plus large, comme démarche de connaissance portée par des disciplines disparates qui ont en commun d'avoir la musique pour objet. Or, tous les indicateurs (cursus universitaires, rencontres d'experts, ouvrages spécialisés, marathons encyclopédiques...) en portent témoignage: ceux qui consacrent leur vie à l'étude de la musique ne renoncent pas à l'idée de construire une science englobante. Nous ne renonçons pas à l'idéal d'une totalisation des savoirs, d'une musicologie fédératrice, riche de l'infinie diversité des domaines de spécialité qui la composent. Ne rêvons-nous pas encore de cette musicologie générale qui fit la marque distinctive d'une musicologie à la française? Car il faut un ciment, nous avons grandi à l'abri de cette évidence, nos institutions l'administrent. Il faut un ciment pour rassembler sous un même intitulé des entreprises de connaissance disparates qui, loin de s'autonomiser dans le panorama institutionnel des sciences de la musique, cherchent au contraire à s'y agréger et revendiquent pour cela d'être abritées sous un intitulé commun. Il s'ensuit que cet effort de généralisation - qui vise à rassembler sous les auspices de la science musicologique, mais selon des degrés de pertinence variables, les études ou les démarches de connaissance les plus diverses - s'apparente bien davantage à une juxtaposition hétéroclite et sans cesse mouvante de disciplines instituées ou en voie de l'être qu'à la mise en oeuvre d'une démarche heuristique partagée. Cette contribution propose d'inverser la perspective à partir d'analyse de cas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between world music traditions and modemist art music in the European tradition is often explored in composers' musical fusions, but the motivations and aesthetics of such works often receive less notice than those grounded in post-modern (minimalist, popular music) approaches. In this essay the author asserts a particular relationship between rigorous modem composition technique and the highly rational patterning of Indonesian and Indian music, and follow this with analysis of Unstable Centre/Puser Belah (2003) a work composed for two simultaneous Balinese gamelan. The analysis demonstrates fusion at detailed levels of pattern and structure, but the article closes with a self-critical assessment of the venture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews a certain number of findings derived from studies of improvisation, which primarily concern the notion of 'model'. This notion is of limited value when trying to capture the very process of improvisation, to grasp the unexpected, and even to closely examine the musical strategies adopted in the instant. Moreover, in many oral traditions - the inventory of which is far from completed - the structural regularities and the notion of model seem problema-tic. This phenomenon was already noticed by Bartók with respect to the peasant musics of Rumania, and is here further examined. So it is that in the north of Rumania, in Oach, violinists (often of gypsy heritage) are asked, for a fee, not to reproduce fixed forms, but rather to produce as many short modal motifs as possible in order to 'lure' the singers. During these unpredictable performances, these singers extract their own personal /dants/ from this set of motives, i.e., a complete melody which belongs to them alone and which is not to be confused with any of the melodies used by their rival singers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of oral and written modes of transmission are often associated with the idea of 'primitive' and 'civilised' in the collective imagination, and by extension, concepts of so-called literate and illiterate cultures, popular vs. learned, immaterial vs. material. In reality, oral and written modes of transmission come out of practices that, while opposed, are complementary to each other. These modes use different manners of functioning, the auditory and the visual. The oral and written traditions co-existing in music are not without a certain historical tension. This is reinforced by the search for authenticity in notation and the significance given to it, often justified from the standpoint of orality. Due to this, the 20th century has given birth to a multitude of languages, techniques, levels of perceptions and conceptions of sound structures, bringing into question the function and place of the score, a symbol seen as the pinnacle of Western musical thought. The purpose of this text is thus to explore the relationship between oral and written modes of transmission using Western contemporary musics as a point of référence, referring also to the fields of composition and ethnomusicology to point out and juxtapose their similarities and différences in approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since eBay's emergence in 1997, the international market for vintage Jamaican records has surged, yielding a bounty of rare and previously unavailable materials. This article asks whether Jamaica's history in sound is becoming irretrievably fragmented and explores how this development affects the academic study of music in the Caribbean. History and historiographic data are crucial in some kinds of ethnographic research. While the material traces of traditional musics fall outside the collection mandates of many research institutions, eBay has emerged as an excellent alternative for researchers looking for important archival materials. In Jamaica today, an increasing number of entrepreneurs sell such material on eBay, which has become a viable part of the country's informal market economy. While creating a global engagement with traditional Jamaican music on one level, the sale of these records may also be seen as part of a process of de-contextualization. By looking at the trade of early Jamaica mento music, this article addresses how collecting across borders, the process by which cultural artifacts move across national boundaries and into private collections, opens discursive authority over these objects more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]