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The khrueangsai pii chawaa ("Thai stringed instruments with Javanese oboe") ensemble in central Thailand is a unique and highly-regarded ensemble known for its repertoire, idiosyncratic tuning, high level of technical difficulty, and exceptionable virtuosity. Khrueangsai pii chawaa is reserved for very special royal functions including processions and dramatic performances of royal literature. Royal authority indirectly controls the performance and transmission of the ensemble and its repertoire, which is now maintained professionally only by the Fine Arts Department of the Thai government. At present only a few musicians are capable of performing or teaching the repertoire and performance style for this ensemble. The selection of new students is competitive and politicized. The khrueangsai pii chawaa ensemble is rare and kept largely outside of the gaze of ordinary spectators in Thai society. Nonetheless, a few individuals in institutions outside of Bangkok have tried to build khrueangsai pii chawaa ensembles, challenging the limits of authority and exposing tensions within the musical community. I argue that royal authority functions to keep this musical ensemble endangered by design, so that those chosen to participate maintain a powerful control over the tradition and repertoire and thereby preserve their unique social status.

Guttural singing practices in the Sayan-Altai region of south-central Siberia have been historically framed as possessing "nomadic" qualities linked with pastoral population groups indigenous to the region. As these singing practices were incorporated into a genre of national folk music for Tannu Tuva (1921-1944) and the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1961-1991)--and then later reformulated as the centerpiece of an exotic genre of world music--xöömei throat-singing was shaped by contradictory attitudes towards its purportedly nomadic characteristics, which have been essentialized at various times, for multiple reasons, by local and global actors and interest groups. In the post-Soviet era, xöömeizhi (master throat-singers) from the Tuva Republic (now part of Russia) express a revitalized nomadic sensibility through xöömei singing practices, which has come to operate both as an ideology and a disposition for Tuvan traditional music. Drawing on a selective use of history, cultural memory, and natural environments, post-Soviet xöömeizhi construct a nomadic sensibility that is embodied in music and sound-making activities, foregrounded in intercultural exchanges, and circulated as a social disposition.

© 2015, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University. When people attribute a position or action to UNESCO, they rarely specify to which of its many parts they refer. UNESCO is a nation-state based organization located in Paris, advised by hundreds of affiliated NGOs, with many national and regional centers and institutions and national commissions in many nations. Even when its member nation-states sign its conventions, their national cultural policies can vary widely in how the conventions are implemented. The complexity of UNESCO’s organization suggests that discussions of policies attributed to it must be grounded in an understanding of its structure and the relative autonomy, or lack of it, among its various parts. This essay presents such a description of UNESCO from the perspective of an international NGO, the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) and makes observations about the involvement of different parts of UNESCO in the discussions of on-the-ground events described in the other chapters.