Category Archives: World music

by | October 15, 2026 · 6:00 am

Two fiddles and one concern: The Karakalpak ķobyz and the Albanian lahutë–UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding

This post is the third in a series featuring annotated bibliographies on performing arts inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. To promote open knowledge and preserve these traditions through scholarly writings, Bibliolore offers monthly posts over the course of one year. This post is published in conjunction with the International Day of Intangible Cultural Heritage, observed globally every 17 October.

In 2025, UNESCO inscribed two fiddles on its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding: the Karakalpak ķobyz and the Albanian lahutë. Though separated by mountains and seas, these bowed string instruments have both transmitted epics across centuries, while today the musical practices associated with them share the risk of neglect and disappearance.

The ķobyz is a two-stringed bowed instrument carved from wood, with a partially open soundbox, a fretless neck, and a pegbox. An ancient instrument of the Turkic peoples, it is an essential part of musical traditions of Central Asia, including Karakalpakstan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. In Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic of Uzbekistan, it is used to accompany the žyrau tradition of singing and storytelling, the raspy vocal timbres of which resemble the tones of the ķobyz. In neighboring Kazakhstan, the ķobyz was traditionally employed by performers known as baqsy during shamanistic rituals. Its sounds imitated the cries of animals and other sounds of the natural world, serving as a vessel for communication and a means of passage into a metaphysical realm. 

The Soviet era brought repression of Indigenous cultures, alongside the swift transformations of modern life and increased urbanization. Shamanic practices were suppressed, the repertoire handed down grew thinner, and today few ķobyz performers remain. The chain of oral transmission is broken, scattered by a world that moves ever faster.

Mylnyq-Zarlyqm, performed by Saian Aqmolda. An epic kui, an instrumental piece that is meant to express states. The original subject of this piece has been, however, forgotten.

The lahutë is a single-stringed wooden fiddle, with a wooden body and a soundboard fashioned from stretched animal skin, and it is native to the regions across northern and northwestern Albania. Its repertoire includes epic songs and verses performed by epic singers known as rapsods, a term from which the songs themselves take the name rapsodi. The repertoire has also widened in recent decades to embrace more personalized lyrics, giving voice to practitioners’ experiences and the shifting social and political landscapes they inhabit. The lahutë also belongs to the same family of instruments found across neighboring countries—Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—where it is known as the gusle. In essence, the status of the instrument in Albania and other Balkan countries as a national symbol has grown, appearing in visual depictions and national programs; nonetheless, its everyday use, particularly from the second half of the 20th century onward, has declined.

Today, lahutë playing, the recitation of epic songs, and the making of the instrument all stand at risk. These traditions are confined to certain regions and families of limited means, and the Communist period’s censorship of religious celebrations and a scarcity of resources have further weakened them. Today, transmission rests on shifting forms and contexts, with social media increasingly shaping how recordings and videos of the practice reach new audiences.

A short documentary on the art of playing and making the lahuta. Produced by Barraka Productions in 2024.

The state and status of these two instruments mirror the rapidly shifting attitudes toward rural and nomadic life in an increasingly urbanized world. Their shift from practical tools in community celebrations and healing ceremonies to symbols laden with nationalist ideology marks a profound transformation: They no longer belong to the natural world that first gave them voice. Today, community members, educators, and policymakers in their respective countries strive to help these instruments not merely survive but thrive by implementing community-based documentation initiatives, dedicating income to musicians, creating opportunities and awareness campaigns, and developing safeguarding plans. In this endeavor, researchers and writers also have a role—not only as observers, but as custodians of memory and advocates for living heritage.

RILM Abstracts includes dozens of references to scholarship on the two instruments, in different languages. The writings cover the instruments’ history, social and ritual uses, and techniques for making and playing them. 

Annotated bibliography

The ķobyz

Gábry, György. “Egy hangszertípus útja Ázsiától Európáig. I” [The journey of a type of instrument from Asia to Europe. I], Magyar zene: Zenetudományi folyóirat 20:4 (December 1979) 350–373. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1979-6652].

Explores the genesis and development of the archetype of the violin called the ķobyz and its role in Hungarian music history. According to László Lajtha, the instrument existed in both bowed and plucked forms and may have been brought from the early homeland. Werner Bachmann proposed that the oldest string instruments correspond in form, structure, and tuning to the early medieval plucked instruments of Central Asia. Central Asian sources mention the qobuz or kobuz as early as the beginning of the 10th century; some references suggest it was plucked, while others hint at the use of a bow. 

Gábry, György. “Egy hangszertípus útja Ázsiától Európáig. II” [The journey of a type of instrument from Asia to Europe. II], Magyar zene: Zenetudományi folyóirat 21:3 (September 1980) 223–248. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1980-6748].

Discusses what the archetype of the ķobyz, a Central Asian string instrument, may have looked like around the millennium. The Hungarians maintained both the name ķobyz and the instrument itself. In the 14th century, the ķobyz is mentioned among the professions, and the term hegedűs is also traceable (initially fiellator in Latin). Regarding the proliferation of the archetype in Eurasia, one must distinguish at least two types: Eastern and Western, respectively; thus we see influences first from East to West, then from West to East. The basic type of the ķobyz survived in its rounded variant as a bowed instrument. This type might have been identical with the instrument called the hagadő. The origins of the word hegedű are discussed. 

Junussova, Balzhan, Dinara Bulatova, and Saule Utegalieva. “Kazakh prima-kobyz and Kyrgyz prima-kyyak: The experience of the comparative study”, Musicologist: International journal of music studies8:2 (December 2024) 210–232. [RILM Abstracts of Music LiteratureRILM 2024-21387]. 

Considers the improved (or prima) models of the Central Asian bowed chordophones ķobyz (the Kazakh version) and ķyyak (Kyrgyz). The primaķobyz and primakyyak were invented in the 1930s and have not yet been widely studied. Similar instruments became widespread in many Turkic republics of Central Asia as part of the creation of folk orchestras. Later, musicians used them actively in ensemble and solo practice. Their popularity and available repertoire make it possible to study them more closely.

Khodzhaniiazov, Ihor. “Cobuz cumanicus: Reconstructing the instrument”, in Rabab, Rubeba, Rubāb: Fellbespannte Streichinstrumente im historischen und kulturellen Kontext [Rabāb, rubeba, rubāb: Skin-covered bowed string instruments in historical and cultural context], ed. by Thilo Hirsch, Marina Haiduk, and Thomas Gartmann. Ergon Verlag (Baden-Baden: 2025) 319–328.

The Cumans, also known as Kipchaks and Polovtsians, were a nomadic Turkic people who lived in the western Eurasian steppes from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Written sources, rare images, and archaeological artifacts document their main musical instrument, the ķobyz. Its traces appear in several folk traditions of the region, and related instruments include the South Asian sārindā and the Tibetan kokpo, among others. Researchers excavated two Cuman ķobyzes (dating from the 13th to 14th centuries) from archaeological sites in modern-day Ukraine and Russia and reconstructed them, though a lack of detail makes the results ambiguous. The ķobyz remains relatively unknown among other researchers and the public. New, detailed reconstructions of the ķobyz are proposed based on comparisons with a wide range of instruments. In addition, drawings of two reconstructed instruments are presented to better convey their structure. Another aim is to contextualize the ķobyz within similar traditions. This can help bolster our ideas about the instrument’s reconstruction and offer clues for reconstructing its repertoire.

Sajžan, Almat K̦arasaju̇ly. “Kazahskoe kobyzovoe ispolnitel’stvo: Problemy terminologii i applikaturnyh pozicij” [Kozakh ķobyz performance: The problems of terminology and fingering positions], Saryn art and science journal1:34 (March 2022) 15–22. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2022-18453]. 

The ķobyz is one of the oldest Kazakh instruments and one of the world’s earliest bowed chordophones. The traditional ķobyz is unique in that, unlike other Kazakh (wider Turkic) instruments, it has not evolved to the present day. To this day, it remains relevant in all spheres of Kazakh music. Moreover, this instrument is widely used both in solo and ensemble practice. The teaching methods of the Kazakh ķobyz school and techniques for playing traditional and modern works are examined, along with topical issues in ķobyz performance and ways to address them. A new approach to pedagogy and the development of performance techniques in general is proposed. Consideration of this technique will significantly facilitate mastering both the instrument itself and the performance of modern works, large forms, and parts in orchestras and ensembles. The traditional and modern ķobyz terminology is addressed. The ķobyz hand positions and fingering principles are seen from a new perspective. A comparative analysis of the teaching aids for playing string-bowed instruments is included. Its results were adapted and introduced into ķobyz performance practice.

Šaripbaeva, Aknar Tattibaevna. “Nositel’ tradicij muzykal’no-ispolnitel’skogo iskusstva v sociume: Na primere kazahskih kobyzistov i ukrainskih kobzarej” [The bearer of the music performance traditions in society: Example of Kazakh ķobyz players and Ukrainian kobza players], Opera musicologica: Naučnyj žurnal Sankt-Peterburgskoj konservatorii12/4:46 (2020) 92–112. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2020-14115]. 

Explores the functions of kobzars and ķobyz players in traditional society. The historical characteristics of the kobzar tradition, its genres, and its practices are described, with reference to the prominent ethnographers Filaret Kolessa and Taras Ševčenko. The Ukrainian kobza and the Kazakh ķobyz, it is argued, share a common Turkic origin. The activities of ķobyz players are characterized with reference to the work of the prominent ethnographers Alʹkej Xakanovič Margulan and Aleksandr Fëdorovič Ejxgorn. Examples of blind ķobyz players in Kazakh history, including Nyšan and Šože, are discussed, along with a lineage of ķobyz performers beginning with Yxlas Dukenov. Commonalities and differences in the historical development of folk performance traditions associated with the kobza and kobyz are explored, while the possibilities for supporting and reviving these traditional performance styles in modern society are considered.

The lahutë

Ahmedaja, Ardian. “The lahutë between everyday practice and symbolism”, Music in art: International journal for music iconography38/1-2 (2013) 144–160. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2013-8655].

The lahutë is a single-string fiddle used by Albanian lahutarë to accompany epic songs (kângë, kangë, and këngë). Its different images are influenced essentially by the connection with ideas of cultural heritage and national culture, particularly since the independence of the country in 1912. The instrument is made from a single piece of wood with a skin soundboard. The scroll on the neck of the lahutë can be shaped as a heart, a leaf, or a goat head with antlers, symbolizing the helmet of the Albanian national hero Gjergj Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg (Skënderbeu; 1405–68). The gusle, the same instrument used by the Albanians’ Slavic neighbors in Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which during the second half of the 20th century was decorated with likenesses of politicians and nationalistic symbolism, political figures or singers have rarely been portrayed on the lahutë neck. The lahutë’s bow is frequently made in the form of a serpent, possibly symbolizing the snake as a protector of the house. In the first half of the 20th century, the lahutë and the këngët e Mujit e Halilit (songs of Muji and Halili) accompanied by it became Albanian national symbols in public discussions, publications, and works of art. An example is the poem Lahuta e malcís (The highland lute, 1937) by the Roman Catholic priest Gjergj Fishta (1871–1940), where the instrument’s name represents the art of telling and the paean is based on songs accompanied by the lahutë, which the poet had learned from the highlanders living in northern Albania. The lahutë has no place, however, in Lyra shqiptare (1940) by Pjetër Dungu, the first Albanian melody collection, which contains music from the Albanian urban areas. Therefore, it is surprising to find with the melody no. 20 a drawing of a lahutar. Here, the instrument relates to traditional national culture broadly rather than illustrating a particular song or its origin. Understanding the lahutë as part of local musical practice gradually gained importance in the second half of the 20th century, although its everyday use decreased. The lahutë is also disappearing from television and radio programs and commercial recordings, despite its continued presence on the Internet, at folklore festivals, and at public gatherings of lahutarë, where only short song fragments are now played.

Ahmedaja, Ardian. “Songs with lahutë and their music”, in Balkan epic: Song, history, modernity, ed. by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petković. Scarecrow Press (Lanham: 2012) 101–132. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2012-911].

The songs with lahutë, also known as rapsodi because epic singers called rapsods sing them, are notable not only for their local presence in the Albanian-language repertories of the Balkans, but also for the multiple levels at which they represent local ritual and tradition. Performed by professionals at family and social gatherings, the songs with lahutë honor guests and invest ritual with celebratory functions. Rather than as single epic songs, the songs draw upon many different subgenres and subrepertories, most of which contain narratives about individual heroes and events in Albanian history. The rapsods often distinguish among different historical moments, for example, the earliest struggles over agricultural land, followed centuries later by conflicts between Christian and Muslim forces as the Ottoman Empire stretched across Albania. Musically, too, the Albanian epic songs show more local ballad traits than the Slavic repertories (e.g., verse structures), while also relying on more extensive, elaborate improvisation. Each rapsod employs his own melodic formulas and modal-harmonic structures, delaying the feeling of arriving at the tonic until strategic points at the beginning and end. So concentrated are the local and personal elements in the songs with lahutë that they have come to map very specific areas of historical and cultural exchange in northern Albania, as well as the areas of Albanian settlement in Kosovo and Montenegro, while distinguishing the ritual and history of those areas from the other regions of Albania, which have their own, albeit distinctive, repertories of traditional song.

Cestino, Giovanni. “Beyond the words: Framing non-verbal aspects in the performance of songs with lahuta”, Etnografie sonore/Sound ethnographies 5:1 (2022) 35–54. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2022-19116].

Scholars in epic studies have long recognized the relevance of various elements in epic singing that go beyond the verbal poem. Yet even though the field has already shifted from text to voice and from voice to singing, a voice-centered approach persists. Switching the perspective from (sung) voice to non-verbal aspects such as timbre, instrumental technique, and gesturality highlights how they relate to the voice and to one another. A Balkan repertoire of songs with lahutë and gusle is examined along with the impact of classical studies on new fieldwork data. The specific case of Kosovar singer Isa Elezi-Lekëgjekaj is discussed in detail and used as a model for mapping the non-verbal aspects of epic singing.

Čolović, Ivan, Dušan Mihailović,and Sanimir Resic. “Who owns the gusle? A contribution to research on the political history of a Balkan instrument”, in The Balkans in focus: Cultural boundaries of Europe, ed. by Sanimir Resic and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa. Nordic Academic Press (Lund: 2003) 59–81. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2003-42738]. 

Examines the Balkan folk musical instrument, the gusle, from a standpoint of political anthropology, with emphasis on political symbols, myths, rituals, and other forms of expression emerging from an imaginary political corpus.

Dietrich, Wolf. “The singing of Albanian heroic poetry”, in The oral epic: Performance and music, ed. by Karl Reichl. VWB: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung (Berlin: 2000) 83–94. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2000-38436].

Examines not epic singing itself, but rather the music of the Roma groups in the country, using recordings made with a family in the village of Balldre, north of Lezhë. The epic tradition, the lahutë, the myths themselves, and musical performances are discussed.

Croatian guslar legend Mile Krajina performs with a gusle ornamented with a falcon head and a coat of arms, two Croatian national symbols.

Pettan, Svanibor. “Singing epic songs with bowed lute: A vignette from Croatia”, in Balkan epic: Song, history, modernity, ed. by Philip V. Bohlman and Nada Petković. Scarecrow Press (Lahman: 2012) 262–276. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2012-916].

Why do Roma, despite their central role in so many Balkan musical repertories, rarely sing epic songs accompanied by bowed lute in many parts of the region? Other minorities, as well as women, similarly perform within many Balkan traditions but far less frequently in epic traditions. These questions require considering how tradition does not simply exist but is created and maintained to meet different requisites of ownership. With epics, those requisites extend further still—to the ways in which ownership seemingly generates power, and power, in the post-Yugoslav arena, eventually leads to the nation and the state. The case study of Mile Krajina, a Croatian epic singer who moves between tradition and state politics, illustrates this process. As exceptional as that journey may appear, it is not unique, and the discussion concludes with a challenge to recognize the remixing of modern narratives in epics to include minorities and majorities, the powerless and the powerful.

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by | September 27, 2026 · 6:00 am

Bali’s gamelan gong kebyar tradition

Gamelan gong kebyar emerged around the turn of the 20th century in North Bali’s Buléléng region, which came under Dutch colonial control in 1849. At the time, Bali was divided among eight kings whose rivalries allowed the Dutch to pit one kingdom against another. Dutch economic control was the intention, but their campaign was framed with moral arguments rooted in the Balinese slave trade (from which the Dutch had long benefited) and in widow sacrifice tied to royal cremations. In succession, the Balinese kingdoms fell to Dutch attacks: Lombok in 1894, Badung (Denpasar) in 1906, and Klungkung in 1908. As the historian Adrian Vickers notes, “The Dutch moved on the capital of Denpasar. On the morning of September 20, the king, his family and thousands of armed followers all dressed in white and ready to meet death in battle, marched out to meet the Dutch. Each of the leading warriors ran amok in turn, marching on as if bullets would bounce off their bodies. The Dutch opened fire on women with weapons in their hands, lance or kris, and children in their arms who advanced fearlessly upon the troops and sought death . . . surrender was impossible.”

The Dutch cavalry in Bali, circa 1906. Photo by Colin McPhee, courtesy of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.
A drawing of Balinese forces attacking Dutch troops in Kusamba on Bali’s southern coast in 1849.

The reasons that led to the artistic flowering that followed the collapse of the Balinese kingdoms are open to speculation. The Balinese musician I Nyoman Catra has suggested that the surge of experimentation functioned like medicine, helping to heal the trauma of social upheaval and colonial occupation. With the dismantling of the power and wealth of the regional courts, the arts broadened beyond the capitals and spread into the banjar (village) effectively democratizing artistic life. Furthermore, new fashions and technologies associated with modernity arrived with the Dutch, alongside a small but steady flow of European and U.S. travelers who, in the 1920s, began traveling to Bali on cruise ships.

Balinese gong kebyar musicians, circa 1906. Photo by Colin McPhee, courtesy of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

Around this time, gamelan gong kebyar and related dances were beginning to be heard and seen across both North and South Bali. Kebyar’s innovations took shape between 1910 and 1915 in North Bali’s Buléléng region, then the Dutch colonial administration center. Across the island in the late 19th century, Balinese-language literary life–sometimes blended with Kawi (known as old Javanese)–entered a particularly creative phase. Traditional poetic genres and their song forms took on mystical, romantic, historical, and sociopolitical themes, while renewed interest in classical kakawin texts also inspired a wave of Balinese literary clubs devoted to teaching Kawi recitation and translating the material into Balinese language. Another popular genre, palawakya, a non-metric Balinese form of storytelling, chanting, or prose narration with themes inspired by the Mahabharata, also emerged during this period. Clubs from different villages often competed with one another before larger, growing audiences at ceremonial religious events and at night markets.

Balinese gong kebyar musicians, circa 1906. Photo by Colin McPhee, courtesy of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

At these gatherings, the juru baca (singer/reader) and the juru basa (translator) might sit within a gamelan while kakawin verses from the Mahabharata were intoned. Alternatively, musicians within the ensemble could sing a kakawin verse on the spot–since performers were expected to know kakawin well enough to respond musically to the sung text. The gamelan would punctuate these moments with brief instrumental interludes drawn from the classical repertoire, increasingly animated by the brighter, more improvisatory phrasing that would come to define the gong kebyar tradition.

This according to the commentary by Edward Herbst that accompanies the CD The roots of gamelan: The first recordings—Bali, 1928; New York, 1941 (World Arbiter, 1999; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1999-38076).

Related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2023/06/12/lost-and-found-balinese-music/

https://bibliolore.org/2022/11/14/balinese-aesthetics/

https://bibliolore.org/2019/08/15/bali-remixed-and-revisited/

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by | June 29, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. V: Thakur and Mussolini (2013)

RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.

The series continues with another short piece by retired RILM editor Jim Cowdery. It relays a little-known (and perhaps surprising) meeting between two very different individuals who shared an interest in music’s ability to evoke powerful emotional responses.

Thakur and Mussolini

Near the end of his visit to Rome in 1933, the Hindustānī vocalist Omkarnath Thakur (1887–1968) received an invitation to dine with Mussolini; Il Duce had caught wind of Thakur’s theories and experiments regarding the inducement of emotional states by rāga performances, and he wanted a demonstration.

After a specially prepared vegetarian dinner, Thakur began with hindolam, which depicts valor. “When I was soaring in the high notes of the rāga,” he later recalled, “Mussolini suddenly said ‘Stop!’ I opened my eyes and found that he was sweating heavily. His face was pink and his eyes looked like burning coals. A few minutes later his visage gained normalcy and he said ‘A good experiment.’”

After Thakur brought him to tears with rāga chayanat, which is meant to depict pathos, Mussolini said, after taking some time to recover, “Very valuable and enlightening demonstration about the power of Indian music.”

Il Duce then returned the favor: Producing his violin, he treated Thakur to works by Paganini and Mozart. Again, both agreed on the music’s power to evoke emotion.

“I could not sleep at all the entire night,” the vocalist recalled, “wondering whether the meeting had really taken place; I thought it was a part of a dream.” The next day, two letters from Mussolini arrived—one thanking him and one appointing him as director of a newly formed university department to study the effect of music on the mind (an appointment that he was unable to accept).

This according to “Omkarnath Thakur & Benito Mussolini” by B.K.V. Sastry (Sruti 163 [April 1998] pp. 19–21; RILM Abstracts 1999-26342).

Although the exact date of this meeting is not recorded, we know that it took place in May 1933—80 years ago this month! Below, Thakur performs rāga bhairavi.

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by | June 21, 2026 · 6:00 am

A common field: The World Cup through global writings on music, sound, and soccer

Every four years, billions of people around the world stop, turn, and tune in, drawn together by the love for one game: soccer. But the soccer pitch is not the only common ground. Music and songs reach where words cannot, crossing borders of culture and language. They speak to something more elemental in us: the pull toward friendly competition, the shared desire for joy, and a kind of pride that needs no translation.

Stadiums are not only arenas of soccer competition but also stages for some of the most memorable musical creations in modern history. Few songs capture this better than Waka Waka (this time for Africa), the official anthem of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. It is a creation born from the cross-cultural collaboration of a Colombian singer of Lebanese descent, African bands and musicians from across the continent. Despite the controversy of cultural appropriation surrounding it, the anthem stands today as one of the most-streamed songs, ranking among YouTube’s top ten videos of all time by views. Since FIFA began officially commissioning anthems for the tournament in the late 1990s, these songs have taken on a life far beyond the tournament. And the tradition continues: on 8 June, FIFA released the official album for the 2026 World Cup. Spanning 18 tracks, it captures the energy and global spirit that define the event.

The official 2026 FIFA World Cup album

Given its importance in uniting people and promoting peace, the United Nations has designated May 25 as World Football Day. Building on this, the 2026 FIFA World Cup for the first time takes place across three nations, where its sound world echoes from every corner: the crowd’s roar after a goal in Mexico, the collective exhale of a near miss in Canada, the chants that build in the stands and the clapping that spreads like a wave through tens of thousands of fans in the U.S., the encouragement screamed in a dozen languages at once, the drums, the horns, the songs carried from home and sung far from it. Here in New York City, around RILM’s International Center, the streets are alive with visitors, where voices in many languages spill through squares, bars, and fan zones, reshaping the city’s soundscape. 

One of the official songs of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar featuring a collaboration between Korean singer Jung Kook and Qatari Fahad Al Kubaisi

Over a few weeks in June and July 2026, the world will beat in one place, and that place will sound like everywhere at once. As with every tournament before it, these sounds will capture the imagination of writers, scholars, and listeners alike.

Watch the first official music video of the 2026 FIFA World Cup here.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature offers over 436 bibliographic records on soccer, in Arabic, Croatian, Danish, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Notably, most publications originate from the U.K. and Germany, which is hardly surprising given the game’s central importance in both countries’ cultures and their distinguished standing in FIFA World Cup history.

The topics covered by music scholars and commentators are wide-ranging. At one end sit fan chants: their rhythms, their politics, and their role as expressions of national identity and belonging. At the other end lie more contentious questions: how the FIFA World Cup’s commercialization of music encroaches on local cultures, and what sound and noise can reveal about the acoustic life of the game. The annotated bibliography below illustrates the variety of approaches and perspectives on sound and music in soccer culture broadly, with a particular focus on the FIFA World Cup.

Annotated bibliography

Alabarces, Pablo. “‘Brazil, tell me how it feels’: Soccer, music, narcissism, and the state, or Mascherano’s failure”, Postcolonial studies 19/2 (2016) 150–167. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2016-45358]

During Brazil’s 2014 World Cup finals, Argentine fans popularized a chant, “Brazil, tell me how it feels”. The chant became viral and provoked a Brazilian response, “Argentina, me diz que se sente”. Both chants discussed the rivalry by joking at each other’s expense. Interestingly, the chant was based on the melody of a song by the U.S. rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, namely Bad moon rising, which was recorded in 1969. The relationship between popular music and soccer chants are discussed as well as the uses of popular music and global pop at the World Cup from 1962 onward, the self-presentation of the local (national) fans before a globalized media scene, and the role of sport icons and heroes for the fans and for the construction of national epics, such as the icons and heroes invoked in the chants, including both Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi. In conclusion, contemporary soccer culture must be described and interpreted in the continuous intersection of local discourses and fan practices and global events. (abstract by the author)

Argentinian fans chant “Brazil, tell me how it feels”.

Andresen, Willi. “Fair und gerecht” [Fair and just], Virtuos: Das Magazin der GEMA 4 (August 2010) 307–325. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2010-5764] 

A discussion of recent sports-related popular songs and the role of fair play in both sports and popular music, based on interviews with the rock/heavy metal singer Doro Pesch, the soccer referee Bibiana Steinhaus, bobsledder Richard Adjei, and the band Revolverheld.

Biti, Vladimir. “Koliko nam je blizak tuđin? Politička pjesma u Hrvatskoj devedesetih” [How familiar do we find the stranger? The political song in Croatia in the 1990s], in New unknown music: Essays in honour of Nikša Gligo/Nova nepoznata glazba: Svečani zbornik za Nikšu Gliga, ed. by Dalibor Davidović, Nada Bezić, and Nikolina Jovanović (Zagreb: DAF, 2012) 351–359. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2012-22248].

Discusses two kinds of political songs in Croatia in the 1990s: the songs of soccer fans performed in stadiums during the war, and the rap songs produced immediately after the Croatian War of Independence. (abstract by editors)

Cae, Hyeon-gyeong (Chae, Hyun-kyung). “디지털 테크놀로지와 ‘우리’ 소리 만들기: 2002년 월드컵 개막식을 통해 본 한국현대음악 반세기” [Digital technology and the shaping of “our” sound: Half a century of contemporary Korean music on the example of the opening ceremony at the 2002 World Cup], Eum’ak gwa minjok/Music and Korea 24 (2002) 179–193. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2002-17440] 

Studies of musical change in non-Western cultures have frequently focused on the issues of Westernization and modernization. Entering the new millennium, the distinction between the two phenomena is no longer valid in South Korea, as modern composers’ search for inspiration goes beyond the West. A good example can be found in works performed at the 2002 FIFA World Cup opening ceremony, titled Communication. The composer of the work, Kim Soo-chul, a specialist in modern and popular music, used digital technology to depict Korea’s musical evolution and its place in a shifting world, one moving from an Industrial Age centered on the West to an Information Age centered on the East. South Korea’s rising prominence in the global Internet industry reflects the broader impact of digital technology on musical and cultural exchange. Furthermore, the composer used various rhythms from around the world, such as Asian samulnori, Latin, and African rhythms, as the primary musical medium to communicate with all people. As such, he clearly expanded his search for new sound resources beyond the West, and approached music as traditional and modern, rather than Western and Eastern.

Doyle, Jennifer. “World Cup music and football noise: The Lion King, Waka Waka, and the vuvuzela”, in Africa’s World Cup: Critical reflections on play, patriotism, spectatorship, and space, ed. by Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013) 61–69. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2013-56755].

The 2010 World Cup’s anthem Waka Waka (this time for Africa) by Shakira was rooted in plagiarism, as it was built on a song by the Cameroonian group Golden Sounds (later known as Zangaléwa) without initial acknowledgment, an incident that FIFA only admitted was a remix after sustained online activism. This reflects a broader, longstanding pattern of Western artists appropriating African music with little to no credit or compensation. By contrast, the vuvuzela, a plastic horn used by fans at stadiums and beyond, represented something different: the unruly noise of a diverse crowd that resisted the World Cup’s polished commercial spectacle. Ultimately, the official song and the use of the vuvuzela point to the tensions between genuine cultural expression and the homogenizing forces of global commercialism.

The 2010 World Cup anthem Waka Waka (this time for Africa) by Shakira here.

Dubin, Steven C. “Imperfect pitch: Pop culture, consensus, and resistance during the 2010 World Cup”, African arts 44/2 (summer 2011) 18–31. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2011-49515] 

The 2010 FIFA World Cup served as a major cultural moment for South Africa as it generated an enormous outpouring of creative expression, including fashion, art objects, street art, and music. A central theme throughout the event was the “Rainbow Nation”, with South Africans temporarily transcending racial, ethnic, and economic divisions to unite around the tournament. At the same time, there were real tensions over ownership, representation, and the clash between FIFA’s officially sanctioned culture and the grassroots creativity of fans and informal entrepreneurs. The event acted as a space where ordinary social barriers dissolved, allowing new forms of solidarity and interaction to emerge through music, art, and popular culture. However, South Africans did not simply get swept up in the spectacle. They also used the moment to critically examine the divisions and inequalities that typically define life in the country.

Goldschmitt, Kariann E. (K.E.). “The sounds of selling out?: Tom Zé, Coca-Cola, and the soundtrack to FIFA Brazil 2014”, Sounding out! The sound studies blog (26 August 2013). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-49861] 

In 2013, the Brazilian musician Tom Zé faced controversy after he participated in a Coca-Cola commercial tied to the 2014 FIFA World Cup, angering fans who saw it as a betrayal of his countercultural identity. The backlash unfolded against a broader backdrop of public discontent in Brazil, where citizens were protesting the government’s prioritization of World Cup spending over basic social services. Zé responded to the criticism with a satirical EP called Tribunal do Feicebuque, which playfully addressed the “sell-out” accusations while showcasing his signature avant-garde style. Musicians faced tensions as they balanced corporate sponsorships with their artistic credibility, particularly in a politically charged environment. Ultimately, Brazilian audiences were willing to embrace World Cup-related music, but drew the line at content that seemed to celebrate the tournament’s multinational corporate apparatus.

Brazilian singer-songwriter Tom Zé.

Graakjær, Nicolai Jørgensgaard. The sounds of spectators at football (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2023-2125].

The sounds of spectators at soccer matches are often highlighted by spectators themselves, tourists, commentators, journalists, scholars, and media producers as crucial to the experience of the game. These sounds are often said to contribute significantly to the atmosphere at stadiums and to the conveyance of atmosphere in televised broadcasts. Why and how spectator sounds contribute to the experience of watching the game in these environments is addressed, and what characterizes spectator sounds in terms of their structure, distribution, and significance is discussed. Based on an examination of empirical materials—including the sounds of soccer matches from the English Premier League as they emerge both at the stadium and in the televised broadcast—the sounds of soccer watching are systematically dissected. (abstract by the publisher)

Hammond, Nicol Claire. “Vuvuzelas, pop stars and back-up dancers: The politics of rhythm and noise at the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa”, SAMUS: South African music studies 32 (2012) 37–58. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2012-14517] 

When South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup in 2010, the sound of the vuvuzela dominated the proceedings. The vuvuzela is both a symbol and a disruption of existing neo-imperial assumptions about sound, race, gender, and global capitalism in South Africa. The construction of African sound in the 2010 FIFA World Cup is evident in the music video of Shakira’s Waka Waka (this time for Africa), the tournament’s official song. In that context, the vuvuzela can be considered a queer intervention into this problematic construct. This becomes apparent when approaching the instrument through the lens of intersecting race, gender, and sexual dynamics. A queer perspective on South African music can therefore reveal the extent to which queer interventions are compatible with post-apartheid South African nationalism, despite attempts to declare queerness un-African. (abstract by author)

Fans with vuvuzelas during a game at the Green Point Stadium, Cape Town, during the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Laing, Dave, and Andy Linehan. “Soccer sounds: Popular music and football in Britain”, Popular music history 8/3 (December 2006) 307–325. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2013-22270] 

Explores the various ways in which music and soccer have been interlinked in the U.K. over the past century. The aspects covered include early novelty songs; music at stadiums (marching bands, fan-customized songs, and amplified music); mediated music in the form of records by club and national teams, as well as professional singers; and the musical components of television shows devoted to soccer. A continuing struggle exists between music from below and above, in both sports venues and media.

Leung, Godfre. “Working through Margarete: Two fantasies of the German anthem”, in Resounding pasts: Essays in literature, popular music and cultural memory, ed. by Drago Momcilovic (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) 283–310. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2011-14109].

Examines three moments in the history of postwar Germany, beginning in Munich at the 2006 FIFA World Cup, when the German crowd spontaneously sang the national anthem en masse during a match between the German and Swedish national teams, inciting much discussion in the mainstream Western European press about Germany having finally come to terms with its Nazi past. The mid-to-late 1980s period culminated in the reunification of 1990, but in 1974, the Velvet Underground singer Nico’s performance of the anthem received a profoundly different reaction. Nico’s solo album The end (1974) is discussed with a focus on the consequences of her appropriation and performance of the role of Margarete, the seductive figure of death from Paul Celan’s poem Todesfugue. Past historical moments illuminate the present, and though the very different cultural-political climates of each resist subsumption into an evolutionary narrative of postwar cultural memory, the logic of the representation and representability of the German nation in 1974 and in the period immediately preceding reunification in 1990 remains highly relevant today.

Poster for 2006 World Cup in Germany.

Sonntag, Albrecht. “Entre indifférence mutuelle et inspiration réciproque: Le football, un médiateur culturel tardif entre la France et l’Allemagne” [Between mutual indifference and reciprocal inspiration: Soccer, a belated cultural mediator between France and Germany], in Populärkultur und deutsch-französische Mittler: Akteure, Medien, Ausdrucksformen [Popular culture and German-French intermediaries: Actors, media, forms of expression], ed. by Dietmar Hüser and Ulrich Pfeil (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015) 185–198. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2015-93214].

Soccer, as a widespread cultural practice, played an important role in Franco-German municipal partnerships (twin cities) and special sports events initiated by civil society (non-governmental individuals and groups) in the postwar years. This was, however, not the case in the major soccer leagues with mass audiences. These events were characterized by pronounced mutual indifference, rooted in stereotypes that were immutably resistant even to potential intermediaries such as players and sports journalists. These patterns of perception did not change until the 1998 and 2006 FIFA World Cups hosted by France and Germany, respectively. The ethnically mixed French world championship team of 1998 permanently influenced not only German soccer, which decided to model its own reboot on the French training system, but also social debate about the pending reform of citizenship law. The World Cup in France underwent a similar transformation in 2006, when German structures became the model for modernizing French professional soccer, and the German team acquired a new, likable, and multicultural image. The evolution of this relationship is connected to the Europeanization of soccer more broadly, which inevitably led to systematic benchmarking and a convergence of practices.

Uno, Koremasa and Rejī (Reggie). 日本代表とMr. Children  [Mr. Children and the best of Japan] (Tōkyō: Soru Media/sol media inc., 2018). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2018-63504]

Details the collaboration between the Japanese pop band Mr. Children and the Samurai Blue national soccer team in the presentation of the 2006 World Cup held in Germany.

Japanese pop band Mr. Children. Image courtesy of Moshi Moshi Nippon.

Wang, Wanwan.《早安隆回》的再媒介化  [Re-mediatization of the Chinese pop song Zao‘an Longhui], Renmin yinyue/People’s music 4:720 (April 2013) 78–81. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-6466]

By the end of December 2022, the Chinese pop song Zao’an Longhui had been played more than 10 billion times online for its dynamic rhythm, bright, concise melody, and high-spirited narrative. This phenomenon earned it the status of a “super song”. The COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, which lasted more than three years in China, and the 2022 Qatar World Cup were not only major worldwide events but also opportunities to promote the song widely. Eventality is an indispensable social indicator of postmodern art’s characteristics and an important aspect of artistic concepts, artistic practice, and even public reception. It is also worth noting that the promotion of the song as an event is a production practice directly influenced by mass media. Examining how media reshapes the relationship between “meaning” and “event” in art offers a constructive way to understand the song’s popularity today.

Yun, Kyoim. “The 2002 World Cup and a local festival in Cheju: Global dreams and the commodification of shamanism”, The journal of Korean studies 11/1 (fall 2006) 7–39. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2006-51239] 

Multiple actors, both consciously and inadvertently, participated in the commodification of the shamanic tradition of Jeju Island during the 2002 FIFA World Cup festivities in South Korea, when several matches were held on the island. Approaching this sports event as an opportunity to draw global attention to Jeju and increase tourism on the island, the central and provincial governments sponsored various festivals in which shamanism was frequently appropriated as a cultural commodity. During one Jeju festival held during the tournament, diverse agents—including shamans, local residents, nonstate elites, and representatives from cultural institutions and the national and provincial governments—fashioned Jeju shamanism to foster their imagined global audience’s cultural curiosities. The desire to cultivate Jeju’s prestige mobilized many people. However, in the process of controlling and directing customary rituals for public display in specific performance contexts, the participants’ asymmetrical social positions and differing expectations and interests inevitably led to tension. Furthermore, the poor domestic and foreign attendance at festival events and the scant media coverage they received confirmed the nation’s preexisting power differentials, which globalization discourse and practices often mask. (abstract by the author)

Jeju Island 2002 World Cup stadium. Photo courtesy of Instagram @woojindrone

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by | June 8, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. IV: Mastering the mix: Choosing authentic popular music material for libraries (2018)

RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.

Next up is a piece written by editor Jason Lee Oakes that shows how RILM curates a music research experience that is itself quite musical. Focusing on popular music as an example, Oakes notes the importance of relationships (musical and otherwise), the process of finding valuable information (while filtering out what is not needed), and the delicate balance between novelty and familiarity that researchers receive in RILM’s search results.

Mastering the mix: Choosing authentic popular music material for libraries

Long before huge databases of music recordings could be shared and filtered with such efficiency, academic databases like RILM Abstracts of Music Literature developed a similar approach to information about music. Drawing on a “peer-to-peer” network of shared music research, today there are nearly a million records about music in RILM Abstracts of Literature, searchable through the EBSCO interface. But how can searches of this massive database be made as “musical” as possible, quite apart from the content itself? Taking a page from Napster and from other digital music algorithms, how can we best enhance the quality and the impact of information retrieval in academic databases through increased musicality?

A good starting point can be established through a simple observation: Music is defined by relationships. A single note doesn’t mean much in isolation. Even Tuvan and Mongolian throat singers subtly alter timbres/overtones over time to make a “single note” musical. In the broadest possible sense, then, music acquires meaning through how notes are arranged relative to other notes: arranged pitch-wise in relative intervals to form melodies and harmonies; arranged relative to time through structured rhythms, metrical systems, and other temporal modes; and through the relative arrangement of voices and instruments to create compelling timbres and textures. Musical meaning is also found in how humanly organized sounds are used to organize people—acting as a powerful symbol for cultural identity, social belonging, individual uniqueness, and other methods of negotiating human relationships.

Moving from music itself to music scholarship, database search results are usually at their most effective and appealing when a query is posed in relational terms. Taking an inverse example at first, if you search RILM Abstracts for records on “popular music” with Major Topics chosen from EBSCO’s pull-down search menu, more than 82,000 records are returned. The search result isn’t likely to be “effective or appealing” to anyone due to its single-note quality and the lack of focus that results.

But now let’s try turning this into a multi-parameter search. One quick, easy and useful parameter that can be added to the mix is “Full Text”. By clicking the Linked Full Text box on the left side of the screen, only records with attached PDFs are returned, saving the user a trip to the library in the process. At the time of writing, this search returns more than 7,000 entries. It’s still a large number, but a lot less than 82,000 and the content is just a click away.

From here it’s easy to take more steps to get a more “musical” search result by throwing more parameters, and thus a broader array of relationships, into the mix. Adding an EBSCO Subject parameter to the parameters already chosen, the search is narrowed to records where the chosen word or phrase appears in RILM Abstract’s indexing for a given record. For instance, choosing “heavy metal” as the subject returns around 100 full-text citations, a much more manageable number than 7,000.

Most important of all, the results are musical. They strike a useful balance between uniformity and diversity, a balance likewise found in music that strikes an aesthetically appealing balance between repetition and variation. While all the records in the dataset are uniform in addressing heavy metal directly and thoroughly, there’s a good bit of variation otherwise: spanning writings that examine “metal studies” as an academic field, sonic traits of drone metal in light of genre theory, the sociology of Caribbean heavy metal scenes, and perceptions of sexuality and gender around female metal fans, among many other topics.

From EBSCO to Excite, the ultimate goal of most search engines is to return a good mix of results. This helps explain the shift from the directory model of first-wave search engines like Yahoo Directory to the second wave of webcrawler search engines (Google most famously) that utilized algorithms to locate sites, collect metadata and build an index. I would submit that the latter won public favor due to two main factors: it was more likely to deliver exactly the results the user was looking for (indexes are more granular than top-down categories); and it was more likely to return unexpected results.

Needless to say, random and irrelevant results are not widely desired. They are equivalent to “wrong notes” in a melody and just about as popular. Instead, results that provide a novel yet purposeful perspective on a query are often the most impactful—like the surprising yet logical-after-the-fact twist in a melody that serves as the “hook”. Returning to the example of Napster, it hooked users not just because it found the music they already knew they wanted, but also because they ended up discovering new and unfamiliar music they went on to fall in love with—often by searching laterally through a given user’s music collection. This mix of the familiar and the novel is a sure-fire formula for a successful search interface.

With this in mind, the digital-age database manager must work to be a master of the mix—all the more so when it comes to popular music studies and other interdisciplinary fields. The popular music researcher is sure to need materials published in non-music journals and publications. What’s more, she is likely to seek out other important data strewn across magazines and fanzines, posted on blogs and other websites, and located across a range of other non-traditional sources. To accommodate their needs, RILM has been seeking out and compiling more of these “outside the box” materials, curated for potential use value as primary or secondary data.

Given the risk of information overload that comes with the widening and the blurring of traditional boundaries, effective curation becomes all the more important. Approaching a database from a musical point of view offers a step in the right direction. Editors at RILM and at other databases are increasingly placed in the role of “record collectors” who don’t just “collect” but who also filter, organize, and interpret the data we collect. Like the crate-digging DJ, we dedicate ourselves to digging for data and creatively integrating new materials. This DJ mindset also highlights the necessity of working across various old and new media and of delving into unexplored spaces to find hidden gems.

The Alash Ensemble sings “Ediski deg boostaamny” (My throat, the cuckoo), an old Tuvan tune re-worked by the group that compares the singer’s voice to birds. It exemplifies the manifold sonic and interpersonal relationships on which musicality depends.

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Filed under Asia, Ethnomusicology, Musicology, Popular music, Resources, RILM, Sound, Voice, West Indies, World music

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by | May 28, 2026 · 6:00 am

Asha Bhosle: Legendary voice of Bollywood films

Asha Bhosle and her sister Lata Mangeshkar stand as the undisputed leading voices of Bollywood film music. Across decades of cinema, both singers built extraordinary careers, contributing to thousands of film soundtracks and shaping the sound of Indian popular culture. Asha Bhosle, celebrated for her versatility and high‑energy performances, became a household name across generations in India. Her collaborations brought her international recognition, further expanding her global appeal. Over her prolific career, she earned two Grammy nominations and received India’s highest artistic honor, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, as well as the Padma Vibhushan, the nation’s second‑highest civilian award.

In the Indian film industry, playback singing refers to the practice of recording film songs in advance and then synchronizing them with actors on screen. Professional singers record the tracks, which are later inserted into the soundtrack while the actors lip-sync to them in the film. During shooting, the recorded song is played back over loudspeakers so the performers can match their timing, which is how the term “playback” originated. This method emerged in the late 1930s, once film technology made it possible to record sound separately from the image. Before that, actors and actresses had to sing their own songs while filming.

Asha Bhosle (left) and Lata Mangeshkar. (Photo courtesy of Britanica.com)

Since the late 1940s, Bhosle has been acclaimed as a playback singer, recording an unparalleled range of songs across genres and languages. Her vast body of work earned her a Guinness World Record for the most studio recordings by any artist. Known for a vocal style that was flirtatious, rhythmically bold, and refreshingly modern, she broke from traditional playback conventions and connected with a younger, more cosmopolitan audience. Alongside Lata Mangeshkar, she has also performed extensively around the world, leaving an enduring legacy in Indian music.

Asha Bhosle passed away on 12 April 2026.

This according to the entry on “Women and music” by Jennifer C. Post in The Garland encyclopedia of world music. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent (2013). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

The first image of the post is of Asha performing in 1966, courtesy of Britannica.com

Asha’s debut album cover, released in 1971.

Related Bibliolore posts:

https://bibliolore.org/2022/10/19/enchanting-voices/

https://bibliolore.org/2025/11/06/m-l-vasanthakumari-a-playback-singer-of-karnatak-vocal-pedigree/

https://bibliolore.org/2025/03/20/the-contemplative-karnatak-singer-jayashri-ramnath/

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by | May 19, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. III: What is music pedagogy? Universality of education in sound and sound in education (2019)

RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.

We follow up an inquiry into What is musicology? with a piece written by Executive Director Tina Frühauf that inspects how music education is conceived and practiced across cultures and time periods, as well as its establishment as a discipline, modern institutionalization, and more.

What is music pedagogy? Universality of education in sound and sound in education

Learning music is as old as music-making itself, tracing back to the earliest times of civilization, that is prehistory. Since then, the world’s cultures have developed different systems of teaching and learning – one may think of maguru panggul, literally, “teaching with the mallet” in Bali and Java; or the system of the Xhosa in Ngqoko, South Africa, which is based on the progression incentive–songs–techniques–terminology. Master–apprentice approaches have been common in many cultures around the globe and throughout history, from the troubadours to the guru-śiṣya paramparā tradition in India to the Bach family. But as a field of study, music education has only been established in later modernity and it was not until the 20th century that it moved towards becoming a discipline in its own right: music pedagogy.

In its broader sense, music pedagogy refers to all practical, application-oriented, as well as scholarly efforts aimed at teaching and instruction. The tasks of music pedagogy focus on ability, knowledge, experience, understanding, and interpretation in all areas of music. As such music pedagogy includes the related concepts of music education, didactics, teaching, and instruction in music, although their distinctions are neither clear nor consensual.

In its narrower sense, music pedagogy has come to refer to the scholarly reflection of and theory formation within all its fields. Systematic music pedagogy thus provides the practical, applied areas with a theoretical basis for their actions and reflects on aesthetic, psychological, and sociological questions on the meaning and effect of music and on the reception of art in the most diverse forms of music. As such it serves artistic, scholarly, and didactic practice.

With music pedagogy’s evolution in the 20th century, many distinctive approaches further developed or received refinement and new methods came to the fore. Among them, the Kodály method named after Hungary’s charismatic composer and pedagogue, eurhythmics developed by the Swiss musician and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the Schulwerk of Carl Orff in Germany and the Suzuki method created by the Japanese violinist and pedagogue.

Paralleling its establishment as an independent discipline, the institutionalization of music pedagogy began as well. Aside from its place in the academy, music university or college, and school, music education also takes place in individualized, lifelong learning and community contexts. Both amateur and professional musicians typically take music lessons, short private sessions with an individual teacher. In all these diverse efforts and approaches, all share the goal to educate people how to produce organized sound, make and transmit music, and do it well.

RILM abstracts and indexes music pedagogy topics, representing as many countries and languages as possible. RILM also offers a selection of music-pedagogy journals in full text, which you can explore at https://www.rilm.org/abstracts/.

Above: Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 2002. Ek Son (top left), one of the first four masters hired to teach for the Cambodian Master Performers Program in 1999, along with students, including sisters Yim Chanthy playing kloy (bamboo flute) and Yim Poukunthy playing takhe (behind Chanthy in white shirt); below, an excerpt from Music für Kinder (Music for children), Orff and Keetman’s own realizations of the Schulwerk material.

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Filed under Ethnomusicology, Music education, Musicology, Pedagogy, RILM, Uncategorized, World music

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by | May 14, 2026 · 6:00 am

The Iraqi maqām: An Intangible Cultural Heritage at risk

The instrumental ensemble of the Iraqi Maqam, al-chālghī, as depicted on a 2002 national stamp.

This post inaugurates a series that will feature annotated bibliographies on performing arts inscribed in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. To promote open knowledge and preserve these traditions through scholarly writings, a monthly post will be curated for Bibliolore over the course of the year.

The Iraqi maqām (المقام العراقي) is the art music of Iraq, historically performed in the country’s urban centers, namely Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul. For centuries, it has been transmitted orally from master musicians to apprentices. The core of the genre is a vocal performance in which a singer delivers classical or colloquial poetry, accompanied by a small ensemble known as the chālġī. This ensemble typically consists of the sanṭūr (a hammered dulcimer), the ǧūzaẗ (a spiked fiddle), and the ṭablaẗ (a goblet drum). In a masterful display of improvisation, the instrumentalists engage in call and response with the singer, supporting the embellished melodic mode and poetry. The canonical repertoire comprises approximately 54 modes, each with a distinct emotional and melodic character. It is said that mastering the entire system requires a lifetime of study, and today, only a few living masters have the entire repertoire memorized.

In 2008, UNESCO recognized the Iraqi maqām by inscribing it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. With documented history stretching back centuries to the Abbasid era in Baghdad, the genre stands today at a critical crossroads, challenged by shrinking performance spaces and a declining number of master practitioners. Despite this vulnerable status, musicians and scholars are actively engaged in preserving the Iraqi maqām’s legacy through dedicated research and documentation. Their writings aim to preserve the genre’s status in collective memory. A selection of key scholarly contributions to this effort is presented below.

Listen to Iraqi Maqâm: Baghdad tradition–A tribute to Yusuf Omar (Inedit: Maison des Cultures du Monde)  https://open.spotify.com/album/1ZQTW88EhMv9CgbFkMjrtD 

The Iraqi musician Hamid al-Saadi performs with Safaafir in 2023. Photo courtesy of the Bloomington Early Music Festival

Annotated bibliography

al-Aʿẓamī, Ḥusayn Ismāʿīl. المقام العراقي بين طريقتين: دراسة موسيقية لفترة الصراع خلال القرن العشرين [The two styles of the Iraqi maqām in the 20th century: An analytical study] (Bayrūt: al-Mu’assasaẗ al-ʿArabiyyaẗ li-l-Dirāsāt wa-al-Našr, 2011). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2011-51858]

Presents a comparative analysis of the two main styles of the Iraqi maqām: the traditional performance style named after the reciter (qāri’) Rašīd al-Qundarchī (1886–1945), and the modernized style named after the reciter Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī (1904–89). Aesthetic principles and recitation style characterize each school. A comparison of various reciters’ styles highlighted these differences, and anecdotes about the reception and appreciation of the musical tradition by amateurs and the broader public attest to its popularity in the 20th century.

al-ʿĀmirī, Ṯāmir ʿAbd al-Ḥasan. محمد القبانجي: مطرب العراق الأول [Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī: Iraq’s master singer] (Baġdād: Dār al-Šu’ūn al-Ṯaqāfiiyyaẗ al-ʿĀmmaẗ Āfāq ʿArabiyyaẗ, 1987). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1987-32379-32379]

The life of Iraqi maqām master singer Muḥammad al-Qubbanchī (1904–89) testifies to his immense contribution to the musical genre and to the country’s musical life in the 20th century. Analysis of key recordings illustrates his many innovations to the Iraqi maqām.

The Iraqi singer Farida Mohammad Ali performs in the Netherlands in 2017. Photo courtesy of Le Guess Who? Festival.

al-Bayātī, Muwaffaq. القطع والأصال في المقام العراقي: دراسة تحليلية [Melodic pieces and melodic connectors used in the Iraqi maqām: An analytical study] (Baġdād: Matbaʿat Bāsim, 2009). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2009-55313]

The performance of the Iraqi maqām relies on singers’ knowledge and mastery of classical and colloquial poetry, as well as the order of the melodies that constitute the repertoire. Modally, each Iraqi maqām is composed of a series of interconnected melodic pieces, known as quṭaʿ, and melodic connectors, known as awṣāl. Thirty-seven of these melodies are analyzed.

al-Ḥanafī, Ğalāl. المغنون البغداديون والمقام العراقي [Baghdadi singers and the Iraqi maqām] (Baġdād: Wizāraẗ al-Iršād al-ʿIrāqiyyaẗ, 1964). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1964-10286]

The melodies of the Iraqi maqām permeate every aspect of life in Baghdad. Such melodies are regularly recited in the mawlid ceremonies (celebrations of the Prophet Muḥammad’s birthday), ḏikr circles (God’s remembrance), and tamǧīd (religious praise). They are also performed in secular cycles accompanied by the chālġī ensemble. Names and biographies of Iraqi maqām reciters and musicians are included.

Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “Le maqām irakien: Structures et réalisations” [The Iraqi maqām: Structures and realizations], L’improvisation dans les musiques de tradition orale, ed.by Bernard Lortat-Jacob. Ethnomusicologie (Paris: Société d’Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France (SELAF); 1989) 143–149. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 1989-1012].

Analyses of the Iraqi maqām reveal a melodic conception unique to Iraqi vocal art music. A maqām is identified by fixed elements and the obligatory placement of certain parts within their respective time frames. Three musical elements, taḥrīr (vocal introduction), quṭaʿ (melodic pieces), and taslīm (final vocal cadence), are indispensable in establishing the identity of an individual maqām.

Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “A space of inclusiveness: The case of the art music of Iraq”, International journal of contemporary Iraqi studies 2:1 (2008) 115–128. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2008-53697].

The traditional art music of Iraq, the Iraqi maqām, which is part of other core Islamic maqām traditions, has historically been designed to fulfill two purposes: a supranational frame and a diversity of local content. Both of these underscore the idea of bringing together multi-ethnic and multi-social differences, articulating them on a common ground of musical content, social contexts, and performers. By bringing together the study of the social and the musical, the issue of Iraqi identity as expressed in this musical tradition is addressed. The Iraqi maqām is a strong cultural marker, as it represents the forms of relations between ethnic and social groups in the country. The interaction appears in sacred and religious ceremonies, secular meetings, and all social gatherings, as well as in transmitted moral and aesthetic values. (abstract by the author)

Hassan, Scheherazade Qasim. “Between formal structure and performance practice: On the Baghdadi secular cycles”, Theory and practice in the music of the Islamic world: Essays in honour of Owen Wright, ed.by Rachel A. Harris and Martin Stokes. SOAS musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate; 2017) 273–292. [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2017-48378].

The comparative study of the suite forms of the Islamic Middle East reveals entanglements, connections, common features, and interactions that cut across borders. Those of present-day Iraq, and particularly the Iraqi maqām, deserve special attention, not only as the distant ancestors of those developed in the Baghdad caliphate, but also because they have taken shape in a border zone where the Arab, Persian, and Turkish musical worlds overlap. The ordering of maqām within the cycles—significantly different from the Turkish fasıl and the Arabic waṣlaẗ—constitutes a significant puzzle, even more so since later 20th-century performers started to assert their prerogative to pick and choose. Yet the underlying principle, one of singing improvised music, moving from mode to mode, and incorporating composed items along the way, has been remarkably resilient. (abstract by Martin Stokes)

al-Saʿdī, Ḥāmid. المقام وبحور الأنغام: دراسة تحليلية لغناء المقامات العراقية مع نصوصها الشعرية [The maqām and the oceans of melodies: An analytical study of the singing of the Iraqi maqām and its poetry] (Baġdād: author, 2006). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2006-55181]

The Iraqi maqām is the traditional genre performed in Iraq’s urban centers. An analysis of the structure, performance style, and poetic content of each individual maqām shows the melodic complexity and poetic richness of the musical genre. Anecdotes about master musicians and from the author’s life attest to the vibrant musical life of the Iraqi maqām in Baghdad in the 20th century.

Maqam ensemble at Alwiyah Club in Baghdad in 2010. Photo courtesy of the Iraqi maqam blog.

Simms, Rob. The repertoire of Iraqi maqam (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2004-4076]

The art music of Iraq, known as Iraqi maqām, features poetry in classical Arabic and in the vernacular Iraqi dialect, sung by a virtuoso soloist and accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. It is a remarkably cosmopolitan art, sharing many features with neighboring art music traditions, particularly with Iranian music. Its repertoire consists of orally transmitted, multi-sectioned compositions, performed with some flexibility regarding ornamentation, arrangement, and development. Focusing on the period between 1930 and 1980, this reference offers a comprehensive overview of the repertoire’s musical content through tables and musical transcriptions of scalar structures, melodies, and overall forms. Information from prominent Iraqi sources is consolidated, and a selection of recordings by master musicians, including Rašīd al-Qundarchī and Yūsuf ʿUmar, is presented. An introductory section provides a brief overview of pan-Middle Eastern modal theory along with an outline of the terminology, theory, and practices specific to the Iraqi maqām. The main section of the work is a catalog of 40 maqāms that constitute the central core of the contemporary repertoire.

al-Mašhadānī, ʿAbd Allāh Ibrāhīm. موسوعة المقام العراقي [The encyclopedia of the Iraqi maqām] (Baġdād: Matbaʿat Bāsim, 2009). [RILM Abstracts of Music Literature RILM 2012-52890]

Although the Iraqi maqām represents a continuation of performance traditions originating in Abbasid Baghdad, the 20th century was the period in which the genre evolved into the form recognized today. Traditional venues like cafés and domestic spaces gave way to new listening experiences facilitated by audio technology such as radio and commercial recordings. Simultaneously, new educational institutions, often supported by the government, began to formalize its instruction in the 1960s. Today, the standard Iraqi maqām repertoire comprises approximately 54 distinct pieces, each analyzed and categorized by its unique melodic and rhythmic structures.

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by | May 4, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. II: What is musicology? (2018)

RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.

This next installment in this series, written by editor and MGG Online product coordinator Georg Burgstaller, shines a light on the discipline of musicology, reflecting on its origins, offshoots, interdisciplinarity, and more.

What is musicology?

Since its formal inception in 19th-century Europe, musicology has come to cover the gamut of music making worldwide. In its original conception the discipline was, and to a large part remains, distinct from solely enjoying or even making music, although scholars tacitly understood from the outset that it would or rather should benefit any given listener and, especially, the performer. Seeking to mirror the artistry of composers and the virtuosity of singers and players, musicologists aim to discover—usually having developed a background as musicians themselves—why music sounds the way it does, what it wishes to express, and how this is best achieved in performance.

Adding to this, the cultural study of music known as ethnomusicology has created awareness of music’s meaning in societies around the globe. While ethnomusicology and popular music studies frequently remain institutionally separate from musicology, their concerns have come to increasingly influence all music scholars, encouraging them to look beyond musical structures codified in musical notation and emphasize other ways of thinking about musical production and consumption, often broaching historically marginalized themes and considering historically marginalized people.

At the same time, musicology intersects with a host of other disciplines, often in complex and unexpected ways. These include the power of music to evoke any range of emotions in listeners and the application thereof in medicine and therapy, music’s interplay with other art forms and interactive media, and inquiries into music’s acoustic and metaphysical dimensions unfolding in time and space. At its most ambitious, musicology helps to uncover, recover, and reposition the way we view a universal human activity that is likewise telling of the human condition. To that end, musicologists are perhaps less preoccupied with their discipline’s scientific status (as signaled by the suffix -ology), but rather inspired by their own curiosity about, enthrallment with, and deep love for music.

Above: Guido Adler (1855–1941), one of the founders of musicology as a discipline; below, an introduction to Shashmaqom, one of many musical traditions studied by ethnomusicologists.

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by | April 23, 2026 · 6:00 am

From the EBSCOpost backlist. I: Helicopters in music encyclopedias (2016)

RILM staff periodically contribute writings to EBSCOpost, a lively blog run by our partners that publishes pieces pertinent to librarianship, higher education, and beyond. Over time, some of these posts are removed, and even those that remain generally recede from view, following the ephemeral nature of much digital content. With 60 years of preserving the world’s writings on music and music-related topics behind us, we are now adding a small rescue project: bringing these blog posts back into circulation. However modest, they help document our history as an organization, and we hope they will continue to resonate with our international readership as well as with any music enthusiast who happens upon them.

One of the earliest EBSCOposts was a 2016 piece by editor Jim Cowdery, who also appears in Bibliolore’s first RILMiniscences.

Helicopters in music encyclopedias

The cross-volume search capacity of RILM Music Encyclopedias offers some quirky surprises—for example, this resource currently includes nine different music-related articles with references to helicopters. These include entries on Madonna, Mickey Rooney, and the following excerpt from the article Highland region of Papua New Guinea in The Garland encyclopedia of world music:

The texts [of girls’ coming-of age songs] address topics broadly sorted in four sets: daily routine, recalling netted bags (made by all women), sores (irritated by flies), and pleasure over good food (grown or gathered); unusual events, like sighting a helicopter, European missionaries’ arrival, and death in a hospital; desires, including the romantic, with meanings often hidden in metaphor, but also the adventuresome, like wanting to ride in a vehicle; and the coming-of-age performance itself speaking of dancing together, laughing together, and becoming adults.

Above: Landing on a pile of logs on a knife-edge ridge in Nakanai, New Britain (image by Mark Beaman, BirdQuest)—perhaps the subject of the sighting; below, a performance by the Girl Guides Association of Papua New Guinea.

To learn more about RILM Music Enyclopedias, head to: https://www.rilm.org/encyclopedias/.

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