The introduction sets out the goal of this special issue: to explore relationships between ethnography and analysis in an open way, strengthening the discursive web of analytical approaches to world music while also bringing some of its challenges to light. The introduction reviews prior work beginning with a model from Nettl (2015) and the contrast between studies of Arabic maqam by Marcus (1992) in Ethnomusicology and Abu Shumays (2013) in Music Theory Spectrum...more >>

How can ethnography and music theory and analysis richly inform one another? One way is to incorporate the words and concepts used by high-level practitioners to build a theoretical scaffolding—to build an analytic framework that stems directly from those words and concepts. This essay develops three theoretical concept-spaces from key words used by the samba and Candomblé communities in Brazil: ritmo, balanço, and circularidade ...more >>

The analysis of movement to music often stems from examinations of video-recorded events. This allows the analyst an opportunity re-watch, pause, and slow down the movements of their participants, and to produce descriptive notation that appears alongside a score (e.g., Roeder and Tenzer 2012). Unlike prescriptive forms of dance notation (e.g., Laban 1928), such transcriptions of movement often illuminate metrical connections between music and movement. However, when video-recording is not permissible, other methods of movement analysis must be developed. This paper pilots a new technique for rigorous analysis of the interaction between movement and music, which may be used in ritual settings with no video-recording...more >>

The meters of numerous Bulgarian folk songs and dance pieces are understood to include beats with two categorically different durations, short and long. Commonly performed dance types bear conventional time signatures that index particular sequences of unequal durations, and many Bulgarian musicians know these time signatures. Yet in the case of one popular dance type, elenino horo, performers and published sources express considerable uncertainty and differences of opinion about the durational sequence and time signature. This lack of consensus serves as the starting point for a study of meter in elenino horo as performed on the tŭpan, a large, double-sided drum that is considered the time-keeping instrument in many Bulgarian folk music ensembles...more >>

Two analytical vignettes on distinct genres of Jewish liturgical music are situated in dialogue with ethnographic encounters. The first vignette reveals structural and expressive aspects of a Hasidic niggun, a type of sung melody that is understood to be a form of prayer. The analysis was first delivered in a public forum involving members of a local Jewish community and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, an influential rabbi who recalled the niggun from his family in Vienna before World War II. The analysis was therefore designed in both content and mode of delivery to resonate with ideas from Schachter-Shalomi and the community. This vignette shows how music analysis may reach new audiences by drawing on cultural knowledge and, conversely, how analysis may take on new meaning and relevance in the context of a given culture...more >>