by | February 28, 2025 · 6:00 am

Nusantara heavy metal and Malaysia’s long hair ban

In 1989, the Malaysian band Search became a cultural phenomenon across the maritime Southeast Asia region (locally known as nusantara, or archipelago), successfully exporting their unique style of Malaysian hard rock and heavy metal, which came to be known retrospectively in the Malay language as rock kapak (literally “axe rock”). Their success paved the way for cross-border collaborations in Indonesia and elsewhere, including recordings, tours, and a feature-length film. Following the release of their 1985 debut album Cinta buatan Malaysia (Love made in Malaysia), Search emerged as leaders in the emerging Malay hard rock scene. As heavy metal and rock music gained popularity among youth across the country, Malaysian authorities attempted to limit its spread by imposing a ban on long-haired rockers in 1992. The government justified this measure by associating rock and metal with antisocial behavior, drug use, and other undesirable activities. Search found themselves at the heart of this controversy, as the ban restricted the broadcast of their music on national radio and television. Instead of altering their appearance, Search chose to defy the ban, leading to concert permit denials by government officials.

The Cinta buatan Malaysia cassette tape.

This episode underscores the connections and tensions stirred by Malay rock, which acted as both a crossing of nation-state borders and a challenge to religious and moral boundaries. The former can be understood in the context of inter-regional popular music exchanges within the nusantara region, while the latter reflects Malay rock’s resistance to authoritarian moral policing. The boundary crossings enacted by Search illustrate how the mobility of Malay rock, seen as an informal cross-nusantara movement predominantly led by male, working-class youth, opposed the conservative policies of ethnonational states. While Search’s movement across the region represented a porous crossing of domestic and regional borders, it was the emotionally resonant aspects of their popular ballads that attracted a wide audience across maritime Southeast Asia and even influenced politicians who sought to control their public image.

Search in 2022.

Despite the challenges posed by the long hair ban, Search persevered, consistently releasing albums and singles throughout the 1990s and 2000s, even as rock’s popularity declined in favor of pop, hip hop, and R&B across Asia. Their most recent album, Katharsis, was released in 2017.

This according to “Crossing borders and crossing the line: Nusantara mobilities of Search and the Malay rock phenomenon (1980s and 1990s)” by Adil Johan (Indonesia and the Malay world 51/151[2023] 257–278; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2023-16963).

Below are links to two classic Search music videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YM-5hmqKXPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGDvEJJfwH4

Other Bibliolore posts on international heavy metal:

https://bibliolore.org/2019/07/11/martyrdom-and-mapuche-metal/ https://bibliolore.org/2018/07/02/karinding-attacks-heavy-metal-bamboo/ https://bibliolore.org/2018/01/25/extreme-metal-in-iraq-and-syria/

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by | February 25, 2025 · 6:00 am

William Grant Still sounds African American life in the early 20th century

The U.S. composer and conductor William Grant Still, whose maternal grandmother had been a slave on a plantation in Georgia, attended Wilberforce University in Ohio from 1911 to 1915 after attending high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, where his mother taught English literature. Still learned to play the violin, cello, and oboe and wrote his first arrangements and began to compose as an autodidact. In 1917, he enrolled at Oberlin Conservatory, where he studied composition and theory. After eight months of service in the Navy during World War I, Still briefly resumed his studies but in 1919, went to work in New York as an arranger for the Pace and Handy Music Publishing Company, for which he arranged, among other things the song Saint Louis blues, which was recorded by James Reese Europe’s Hellfighters (369th Infantry Regiment Band). In 1936, he conducted the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra and in 1955, the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. In both instances, Still was the first African American conductor to do so.

A mural outside the William Grant Still Art Center in Los Angeles.

As many of the titles reveal, nearly all of Still’s work reflected African American life. His first orchestral compositions were Darker America (1924), From the journal of a wanderer (1925), and From the Black belt (1926). Two major orchestral pieces, Africa (1930) and the popular Afro-American symphony (1930), established his wide reputation and helped him earn a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933. At this time, Still turned his attention to the stage with two ballets for the Ruth Page Company of Chicago: La guiablesse (1927), set in Martinique, and Sahdji (1930), with an African background. A third ballet, Miss Sally’s party, dates from 1940. In 1934, Still received another Guggenheim Fellowship for composition and moved from New York to Los Angeles, where he completed his first opera, Blue steel (1934).

Still with Verna Arvey and their two children. Photo courtesy Judith Anne Still.

This marked the beginning of a series of stage works characterized by close collaboration with Verna Arvey, a white Jewish pianist, librettist, and writer, and Still’s second wife, which became high points of his career. Almost all these works addressed racial problems in the U.S., with Troubled island being the most notable example. Created in collaboration with Langston Hughes, it premiered in 1949 at the New York City Center. Still’s dedication to African American themes resulted in three notable text settings: And they lynched him from a tree (1940); Plainchant for America (1941), and Pages from Negro history (1943). He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship again in 1935 and 1938. During this time, Still composed for film and television while also pursuing his aspirations as a composer of serious music.

This according to the Dictionary of American classical composers (2005). Find it in RILM Music Encylopedias.

Listen to two of William Grant Still’s better known compositions below.

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by | February 22, 2025 · 6:00 am

The emergence of string quartet ensembles

As the string quartet established its place as a distinct chamber music genre, it gained a reputation as the most demanding form of instrumental music and eventually transitioned from aristocratic and bourgeois salons to public concerts. This shift required performers to adapt, transforming the music making experience from casual, intimate gatherings of like-minded individuals to more formal recitals, creating a new dynamic between performers and audience. While private quartets continued to exist alongside public performances, such practices have not been extensively documented.

Around 1800, Vienna saw a notable number of regular quartet gatherings, held in both prominent and less prominent homes, such as those of Emanuel Aloys Förster and Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. Similar activities during the late 18th and early 19th centuries were sporadically documented across various courtly, aristocratic, and bourgeois salons throughout the German-speaking region, as well as in (primarily Austrian) monasteries and charitable foundations. These quartet performances were also featured in regular quartet entertainment or as part of larger mixed programs in both large and small towns.

A drawing of the Müller quartet (1832).

While little is known about the exact musical standards of these private, semi-public, and public performances, it is likely that they were of high quality, as the performers were typically musically trained connoisseurs or professional musicians. These gatherings likely provided the foundation for developments that would dominate the 19th century: the concerts of traveling virtuosos who, from city to city, sought new partners for semi-public performances in private homes or public concerts, the concert tours of permanent ensembles, and the establishment of such ensembles in aristocratic or upper-class households.

This according to this month’s featured article on the string quartet ensemble in MGG Online.

The Shinner Quartet.

Below is a 1934 performance Mozart’s string quartet no. 21 in D major by the Kolisch Quartet.

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by | February 19, 2025 · 6:00 am

Capoeira and social justice

Capoeira, as a martial art, was created by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Today, it blends song, dance, acrobatics, and theatrical improvisation, inspiring many practitioners to become active in social causes. Capoeira often serves as a gateway for individuals to transition from physical training to social justice activities, highlighting its deep roots in resistance and subversion. For instance, practitioners in the United States, both as individuals and as communities, engage in activism by marching against racial discrimination, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, organizing clothing drives for job seekers, and advocating for economic and environmental justice in their communities. For these capoeiristas, the practice becomes a form of serious leisure that fosters personal growth, a sense of belonging, and an enhanced sense of self, while also carrying social duties and responsibilities. In this way, capoeira exemplifies how participation in a leisure community—often regarded as trivial—can profoundly reshape one’s worldview and positions capoeira itself as a powerful model for civic engagement.

Using Robert Stebbins’s concept of “serious leisure” helps illuminate how capoeira fosters social activism. Stebbins defines serious leisure as a mix of amateur pursuits, hobbyist activities, and career volunteering that individuals engage in outside of their work life, deriving personal satisfaction from it. In this context, capoeira, as a relational Afro-Brazilian martial art, encourages practitioners to leave with a heightened awareness of, and concern for, the societal structures surrounding them. Capoeira’s African roots, both as a martial art and a cultural expression, touch on themes such as authenticity, gentrification, Afrocentrism, and nationalism. These elements implicitly and explicitly engage with the social dynamics of race, influencing the practice and the ways practitioners interact with their broader societal context.

This according to Graceful resistance: How capoeiristas use their art for activism and community engagement by Lauren Miller Griffith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2023-5114).

Celebrate the UN World Day of Social Justice on February 20.

Watch a performance of capoeira music and solo techniques by children below.

Read a related post in Bibliolore:

https://bibliolore.org/2021/02/28/capoeiras-hidden-history/

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by | February 15, 2025 · 6:00 am

Music streaming and the datafication of listening

Along with the file sharing practices that preceded it, music streaming has dramatically transformed the music industry’s business model, shifting it toward a model resembling rental or licensing. In the case of Spotify, the most prominent streaming service, there is no need for users to download or store music files on their devices. Instead, only the application necessary to play audio files, which are temporarily stored in non-permanent working memory, is downloaded. No copy of the original files is ever saved on the user’s device or becomes their property, leaving users entirely reliant on a subscription service and a stable internet connection.

The objective is to analyze users’ listening habits on a statistical level, a process the digital culture scholar Robert Prey refers to as the “datafication of listening”. This involves extracting data from listening behaviors, enabling both the market and streaming platforms to tailor musical recommendations to individual users. This analytical approach has reached its peak in depth and scope through streaming platforms. The collection of such data, however, has also led to the increasingly sophisticated engineering and curation of tracks presented to users. These platforms use various methods to keep users loyal to the music filtered by the platform, while simultaneously fostering hyper-intermediation practices.

The idea of disintermediation in the cultural sector, particularly in music, which appeared imminent in the early 2000s, has ultimately been reversed. Instead of breaking free from traditional distribution systems, music has returned to a model strikingly like the one that existed prior to the advent of the MP3 format. This new form of mediation—driven by analysis, algorithms and the extensive datafication of listening habits—has transformed the inherent immateriality of streaming content into a new kind of control. This shift has created an enhanced capacity for surveillance, surpassing the systems used in previous years. By leveraging and refining these mechanisms of hyper-intermediation, streaming platforms have established a global monopoly, largely built upon the Internet.

This according to the entry on streaming by Mattia Zanotti in DEUMM Online.

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by | February 11, 2025 · 6:00 am

Katherine Dunham’s African diasporic dance aesthetics

African American dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist Katherine Dunham used ballet and African diasporic movement traditions to develop a dance methodology that subverted the white patriarchal gaze and forever changed the aesthetics of the Broadway stage. Early in her career as a dancer, Dunham cultivated techniques rooted in ballet but influenced by African dance aesthetics. Throughout her career, she attained a prominent status in the dance world, inspiring Black dance students to pursue their studies with courage and purpose. Her work also elevated Black dance forms out of the burlesque and made them more dignified.

Dunham’s technique combined Eurocentric ballet traditions with elements of the African diaspora, utilizing bodily aesthetics and movement to subversively engage the voyeuristic gaze–an approach that allowed her to manipulate socially inscribed and discursively produced identities. Through her work, including the dance piece L’ag’ya (1938) and the 1940s Broadway musicals Pins and needles and Cabin in the sky, Dunham maneuvered through dominant cultural narratives and cultivated a solid foundation for African American dancers, choreographers, and Black musical theater.

Theorizing Dunham’s work through the lenses of the voyeuristic gaze, race and culture, the sexuality of the Black body, and Black musical theater elucidates how she transgressively used dominant ideologies and spaces of racial and patriarchal oppression. By doing so, Dunham created opportunities to make African diasporic aesthetics of dance and the body legible to white audiences.

This according to “Développé: Katherine Dunham’s diasporic dance” by Amanda Jane Olmstead (Studies in musical theatre 11/3 [2017] 303–310; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2017-37090).

Below, Dunham performs accompanied by a West Indian creole music ensemble in a 1952 ballet at the Cambridge Theatre in London.

Read a related Bibliolore post:

https://bibliolore.org/2012/07/02/katharine-dunham-and-lagya/

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by | February 7, 2025 · 6:00 am

Jose Maceda reimagines time

The Filipino ethnomusicologist and composer Jose Maceda created unique works that blended his fieldwork on Filipino and other music with his expertise in European avant-garde traditions. His compositions combined innovative techniques such as spatialization, a focus on timbre, and musique concrète with Asian instruments, rhythms, and structures. Maceda was particularly drawn to a flexible approach to time, famously commenting during a flight from New Zealand to the Philippines that a recording of a Chopin Berceuse was “so stiff that I wanted to jump out of the plane!”

In a 1975 paper presented at the Third Asian Composers’ League Conference and Festival in Manila, Maceda proposed a new concept of Asian musical time, inspired by natural phenomena like bird migration and plant flowering, rather than clocks, time signatures, or barlines. In 1971, he composed Cassettes 100, a performance featuring a hundred performers with portable cassette players in the lobby of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The piece incorporated recordings of Indigenous instruments, natural sounds, and choreographed movements. As Maceda explained, “The recordings are my dictionary. They are a receptacle of ideas from which I can pull at any time.”

Maceda’s Cassettes 100 was re-staged in Singapore as part of the 2019 exhibition Suddenly turning visible: Art and architecture in Southeast Asia (1969–1989).

After graduating from the Academy of Music in Manila in 1935, Maceda continued his studies in piano with Nadja Boulanger and Alfred Cortot in Paris. He also pursued musicology at Columbia University and Queens College in New York, anthropology at Northwestern University, and ethnomusicology at Indiana University in Bloomington, as well as at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned his doctorate. Between 1940 and 1957, Maceda performed as a pianist in France, and during the same period, he also worked as a conductor in both the United States and the Philippines. He conducted works by composers such as Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Boulez, and others, including pieces from China and the Philippines. In 1958, Maceda worked as a researcher at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris, where he met influential figures such as Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis.

Maceda served as a professor of piano and ethnomusicology at the University of the Philippines from 1952 to 1990. He became renowned for his extensive fieldwork, which spanned diverse settings, including urban areas, remote mountain villages, and island communities across the Philippines. Maceda’s research also took him to musician communities in Sarawak (Malaysia), Thailand, Kalimantan (Indonesia), Africa, Brazil, and Australia, with his findings published in numerous international journals. His work focused on documenting Southeast and East Asian musical practices and folk traditions, particularly prehistorical Indigenous music. Maceda’s field recordings, which encompass 51 language groups and include music, instruments, photographs, text transcriptions, and translations, are archived at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City. From 1997 to 2004, Maceda served as the executive director of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology in the Department of Music Research at the university.

The floorplan for Maceda’s Pagsamba, performed by 241 musicians at the Parish of Holy Sacrifice in Quezon City, Philippines (1968). Image courtesy of the UP Center for Ethnomusicology.

He received numerous prestigious scholarships and awards throughout his career, recognizing his contributions to music and ethnomusicology. He was awarded research scholarships for his work in Africa and Brazil by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1968. Maceda also received the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in France (1978), the Outstanding Research Award from the University of the Philippines (1985), the John D. Rockefeller Award from the Asian Cultural Council in New York (1987), and the Fondazione Civitella Ranieri Award in Italy (1997). In 2000, he was honored as a Filipino National Artist for Music by the Philippine government. Additionally, three of his albums–Gongs and bamboo (2001), Drone and melody (2007), and Ugnayan (2009)–were released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.

This according to the entry on Jose Maceda in MGG Online.

Listen to excerpts of Ugnayan and Pagsamba below.

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by | February 4, 2025 · 6:00 am

Tin Pan Alley and early film music

From 1918 to 1928, Tin Pan Alley solidified its connection with the film industry. Although early films lacked sound, music played a crucial role in enhancing the viewing experience, often provided live by a pianist in theaters. Charles N. Daniels, writing under the pseudonym Neil Moret, teamed up with lyricist Harry Williams to compose the first commissioned title song for a film. The song, Mickey, was released by Daniels and Wilson in 1918 to coincide with the film’s debut, starring Mabel Normand, whose image was featured on the sheet music cover. Later that year, Mickey was acquired by Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, who published it in two small editions, helping to launch the trend of title songs that remains popular to this day.

Many famous silent film stars, such as Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Pearl White, graced the covers of sheet music as early as 1914. March of the movies by M. A. Althouse (1915) features an illustration of an audience in a nickelodeon, watching Chaplin in his tramp costume, accompanied by a pianist in the pit. Those Keystone comedy cops by Charles McCarron (1915) showcases a classic photo of Mack Sennett’s Keystone cops on the cover, with Ford Sterling on the phone and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle eavesdropping on the conversation. Over the next twenty years, the film industry would become a powerful promoter of songs, with major studios even acquiring some of Tin Pan Alley’s most prominent firms to manage their musical needs.

The composer Ernö Rapée helped popularize the use of thematic music—stock melodies designed to accompany common silent film scenes—through two well-known collections he published in the mid-1920s. Many orchestra leaders in smaller towns and cities relied on these books as a guide to provide music for films. Rapée also composed several original scores, with his most famous being the 1926 What price glory? The theme song from the film, with lyrics by Lew Pollack, became a major hit under the title Charmaine.

Below is a recording of Charmaine performed by David De Groot and The Piccadilly Orchestra in 1927.

The advent of talking pictures made music’s role in film even more crucial. Broadway musicals were a natural fit for adaptation to the new medium, and film studios quickly realized the need to hire composers and lyricists to create both background music and songs for their films. Hit songs also served as excellent promotional tools to attract audiences to theaters, prompting studios to acquire music publishers to profit from their catalogs. Major studios like Warner Bros., MGM, and Paramount became heavily involved in music publishing.

The Great Depression had a significant impact on Broadway, forcing many writers who relied on the numerous revues and shows to turn to Hollywood for work. While some were dissatisfied with how their songs were often treated as mere commodities—added or removed from films at will—others found the medium creatively fulfilling. Over time, unique musical films emerged featuring songs that were just as memorable and well-crafted as the Broadway hits of the Tin Pan Alley era.

This according to Tin Pan Alley: An encyclopedia of the golden age of American song (2012). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

An example of the early use of music in film from One week featuring Buster Keaton (1920).

Related posts in Bibliolore:

https://bibliolore.org/2019/10/29/the-smithsonian-institutions-object-of-the-day-october-29-2019-fred-beckers-beale-street-blues/

https://bibliolore.org/2023/01/23/random-film-accompaniment/

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by | January 31, 2025 · 6:00 am

Throbbing Gristle, industrial music, and civilization wrecking

In 1976, four artists from England—Genesis P-Orridge, Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson, and performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti—formed Throbbing Gristle to challenge the conventional music of their time. Their goal was to create a new type of music free from traditional structures. Previously, they had collaborated in the performance project COUM Transmissions, which disbanded after a controversial live performance of Prostitution in London, featuring public nudity and masochistic art. Influenced by avant-garde composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Weldon (J.J.) Cale, as well as 1960s bands like the Velvet Underground, Throbbing Gristle took music innovation further. They completely dissolved conventional song structures and introduced noise generators and oscillators as musical instruments for the first time. Their abrasive and antagonistic approach to music delved into themes of fascism, death, mutilation, and industrial decay, incorporating a cacophony of mechanical noise, tape loops, anti-melodies, and harsh beats. An English member of Parliament once referred to the group as the “wreckers of civilization.”

Listen to Throbbing Gristle below:

https://throbbinggristle.bandcamp.com/album/d-o-a-the-third-and-final-report

https://throbbinggristle.bandcamp.com/album/20-jazz-funk-greats

In the years that followed, Throbbing Gristle released several albums that left many of their contemporaries perplexed. However, the adventurous and rebellious spirit of bands like Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, and Einstürzende Neubauten drew inspiration from Throbbing Gristle, leading them to create their own innovative sounds. By the late 1970s, Throbbing Gristle established the Industrial Music label, giving birth to a new genre known as “industrial”. In 1981, believing they had accomplished their mission, Throbbing Gristle disbanded.

Genesis P-Orridge performs in Culver City, California (1981).

The existence of the band was as much rooted in conflict as it was experimentation. In her memoir Art Sex Music, Cosey Fanni Tutti described at length an abusive relationship with fellow Throbbing Gristle member Genesis P-Orridge. “There was a lot of turmoil, emotionally and personally [in the group],” she said. “The music was like an outlet for that because it was–and it’s a bit of a cliché–the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. None of us really knew why it worked so well, but once we got into the studio, we just had a great time. But then once we were out of the studio, we were tearing each other apart. It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.”

Cover art for the album 20 jazz funk greats (1979).

After Throbbing Gristle ended, several other industrial acts continued to develop the new musical genre. Furthermore, former members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti went on to form the group Chris & Cosey and the record label CTI.

This according to The Gothic and dark wave lexicon: The lexicon of the black scene (2003). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.

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by | January 28, 2025 · 6:00 am

The rubāb’s cultural heritage in Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s national instrument, the rubāb, a short-necked lute, is also popular in northwest India and Pakistan and may be the ancestor of the sarod. Carved from a single piece of mulberry wood and covered with skin, the instrument has a lively and percussive sound. The Afghan rubāb is often decorated with mother-of-pearl inlay, which accentuates the wood’s deep tones and textures.

The sound of the Afghan rubāb is easily distinguished from that of other Central Asian lutes, due to its unique construction and sympathetic (or resonance) strings. An unusually shaped instrument often richly ornamented with inlaid bone or mother-of-pearl, the rubāb is appreciated by musicians and collectors alike. Although the instrument first appeared between the 18th and 19th centuries, its sound as we know it today emerged in the 20th century. The musician and teacher Ustad Mohammad Omar, a singer from Kabul, led a highly prestigious band for many years and made the rubāb famous in Afghanistan and internationally. Legend has it that, inspired by another lute, the sarod, he altered the instrument to better suit the aesthetics of kiliwali, another genre of Afghan music. Luthiers in Kabul, most notably the celebrated Juma Khan Qaderi, began reproducing Mohammad Omar’s rubāb alterations. Distinct from other Afghan rubābs in the way it is played and its characteristic sound, the Kabuli rubāb quickly took hold in Central Asia, gradually supplanting all other Afghan rubāb practices.

In December 2024, UNESCO recognized the art of building and playing the rubāb as intangible cultural heritage in Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Master players of the rubab are deeply respected as elders within their communities, often taking the lead in initiating specific ceremonies and rituals. The craft of making a rubāb traditionally involves carpentry, woodcarving, marquetry, and inlay work, typically passed down as a family tradition through hands-on practice. Although rubāb craftsmanship is predominantly done by men, performers are of all genders, ages, ethnicities, and religious backgrounds. The rubāb has long been referenced in poems and literature, with various cultures sharing myths and stories about the instrument, which are often narrated by elders and masters during social gatherings.

An older woman teaches teaches a boy to play the rubāb.

This cultural heritage, however, is currently threatened in Afghanistan under the Taliban authorities’ near-total ban on music, considered corrupting in their strict interpretation of Islamic law. Since coming to power in 2021, Taliban authorities have banned music in public, from performances to playing tracks in restaurants, in cars or on radio and TV broadcasts. They have shuttered music schools and smashed or burned musical instruments and sound systems. Taliban authorities have encouraged former musicians to turn their talents to Islamic poetry and unaccompanied vocal chants–also the only forms of music allowed under their previous rule from 1996 to 2001. There is local resistance to the Taliban’s decrees, however. As a rubāb builder named Sakhi asserts, the cultural value of the rubāb in Afghanistan must not be lost. He states, “The value of this work for me is . . . the heritage it holds. The heritage must not be lost.”

This according to The Garland encyclopedia of world music. South Asia: The Indian Subcontinent (2013, find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias) and “Le timbre du rubāb de Kaboul” by Roy Sylvain (Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 34 [2021] 77–94; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2021-10988).

Below is a performance of an Afghani folksong by Quraishi on rubāb and accompanied by Samir Chatterjee on tabla.

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