ABSTRACT Newly composed folk music (NCFM, Serbian: novokomponovana narodna muzika) as a genre of popular folk music in Serbia and Yugoslavia since its beginnings in the late 1960s is distinguished by its contrast with rural traditional folk music. Although it was regarded among cultural elite as “corrupted” folk music, and in some cases as kitsch, it was unequivocally accepted as a more progressive form of folk music among the target group – newly arrived emigrants from a countryside, who in that period came to bigger cities, as well as went abroad. Emigration continued in the 1990s, when emigrant population left the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but NCFM continued to live among the emigrants, also among those of non-Serbian origin. To this day, it has survived in various post-Yugoslav emigrant communities, parallel to choreographed folklore (i.e. arrangements of traditional folk music for a dance accompaniment) and contemporary forms of popular folk music (such as popfolk and trepfolk). In this article, two levels of nostalgic existence of the NCFM will be examined – associations to the homeland and to the past, and in particular it will be examined: whether the NCFM has become a cultural heritage of the diaspora, as well as whether this popular music (unintentionally?) became a Serbian/Yugoslav cross-border “soft power”? On the cases from field researches conducted in Türkiye and Hungary, we will approach to the NCFM applying the concept of dissontant heritage, questioning apostasy of this popular genre from official cultural identity politics and considering it as a living practice which serves as an identification tool in dynamic diaspora communities.

The goal of this study is to reveal the relationships between brain activation and the quality of guitarists' solo performances by using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Students' brain hemodynamics were measured with fNIRS while playing the guitar, and there was an attempt to determine hemodynamic activity occurring in four different regions of the brain during the best and worst performances. Video recordings were taken during the students' performances, and their performance levels were evaluated using the Guitar Performance Rating Scale [GPRS]. The fNIRS data obtained during guitar performances was analyzed by comparing the hemodynamic (OxyHb) activity in different regions of the cerebral cortex. Also, following this, the t-values of the data were calculated through the MATLAB software, and were visualized in the form of a cerebral cortex heat map.As a result of the fNIRS measurements, it was observed that significant activations occurred in all regions of the participants' brains, and activity was recorded in the regions expected to be activated in tasks associated with music. Especially in the parietal region, it was determined that there was more OxyHb activity during the worst performances than during the best performances. The same situation was observed in the occipital region during the best performances. While intense OxyHb activity was seen in the right hemisphere in the prefrontal cortex region during the best performance, it was determined that the intensity of activity changed towards the left hemisphere during the worst performances. In the temporal cortex region, high OxyHb activity was detected in both hemispheres, although it was more intense and spread over a wider area in the right hemisphere during the best performances. During the worst performances, it was determined that while the activity area in both hemispheres remained the same, the intensity of OxyHb activity decreased.

This paper describes a feasibility study for the computational classification of traditional three-voiced Georgian vocal music, based on characteristic chord sequences extracted from digital scores. We demonstrate that for this purpose the differences between Western 5-line staff notation and a more appropriate heptatonic system for traditional Georgian music can be adjusted for by a simple transformation. A corpus of about 500 digital scores, consisting of labeled ‘song classes’, i.e. subsets of folk songs from different regions and of liturgical songs in different styles, served as a testbed for the development of a classification procedure based on a higher-order Markov model that - in addition to the classification - yields chord progression sequences for each ‘song class’. Their capacity for interpretation was tested by one hundred cross-validation runs, in which randomly selected subsets of ¾ of the size of each song class were used to train classifiers, which were then applied to the remaining ¼ subsets. The sizes of the intersections of the successfully classified songs in all cross-validations are interpreted as direct measures of the degree of representativeness of the songs for their respective ‘song classes’. Based on a second validation experiment, in which we split up the datasets into equally sized subsets of ½ and ¼ of the original subsets, respectively, we estimate that the smallest subset size for an interpretation of the observed chord progression patterns as properties of a ‘song class’ is of the order of 50 songs. Currently, in our corpus, this requirement is only met by the subsets from Svaneti and Shemokmedi.

In the sources of dance history in Türkiye, there is no classification that evaluates urban dances, which are mostly mentioned in entertainment contexts, in terms of function, contents and social acceptance and made with this focus. Dance in the history of the Republic has been mostly examined within the framework of identity, representation and ideological patterns, and historical analyses have been considered with this relationship focus. In addition, these subjects are embodied in the national repertory, which is generally accepted as official and thus reflects a dominant traditionalism. In this study, my aim is both to present a historical literature summary of popular urban dances and to embody similar subjects through alternative repertories in the context of the “other” determined by the relationship with the official one. Urban folk music was not included in the national repertoire, at least until the 1950s, and urban dances were not included in the category of Turkish Folk Dances in the compilations of the early Republican period. In this way, popular urban dances were left out of the national repertoire and were positioned as “the other” of dance cultures in Türkiye. This study, on the other hand, focuses on the general history of the repertoire, the definition of which is proposed as "dances that are excluded from the official discourse but exist in the cultural practices of the city, whose social acceptance has been realized and have become widespread by any agents (migration, mass media, etc.)". The draft of the urban dance repertoire, which has this quality, was determined through metadata from newspapers, magazines and new media content, and the data obtained is re-interpreted together with the previous literature sources. The case for research was determined as Istanbul, both because it changed a great deal during the 20th century, and because it converted little. Istanbul allows us to trace the sustainable clues of cultural practices, because dance practices are in a central position in the product and market relationship in this historical process.

In today’s Georgia most of the songs by contemporary authors referred to as ‘folk’ have little to do with traditional musical regularities; the examples, disseminated as specific, established variants, are also called ’folk’. Modernized instruments created in the 20th century are also regarded as folk. It is strange that their consideration as folk examples is often acceptable to their authors. The article aims to study contemporary author’s songs and to reveal their connection with the regularities of folk musical language.In the modern era author’s songs on folk motives have not yet been given scientific name. Georgian researchers refer to such examples as ‘para-folklore’, ‘modernized folklore’ and ‘pop-folk’. In all three definitions they are called folklore. The difference between them is shown only by the prefix. This article poses specific problems and shows possible solutions to them, for example: what brings the contemporary author’s songs closer to folk tradition? Why are they considered folk? What are their characteristic musical features? What factor contributes to the popularity of these examples? Also, based on the musical analysis and personal interviews, the folk character of the repertoire of contemporary author’s song performers (trio Mandili, Gogochuri sisters, group Bani, Davit Kenchiashvili) is discussed.

Historical field recordings offer insight both into past performance routines and into the processes and contexts of musical practices in their time. In the wake of renewed interest in musical traditions of the alpine region, I reassessed the magnetic tape recordings created by the Jena University doctoral student Wolfgang Sichardt (1911–2002) from multiple perspectives. The premises and context of the field research in 1936 are reconstructed, in part based on original correspondence; the reception and impact of the research in Germany and Switzerland are assessed; and the exact origin of the recordings is determined wherever possible. Descriptive transcriptions of the entire corpus of yodel and alphorn music visualize the content. The 1936 field recordings, made by Sichardt during a six-week field trip to different areas of Switzerland, document yodels, folk songs, and alphorn melodies on 12 magnetic tape reels, recorded with the latest technology at the time, the AEG Magnetophon K-2. Although the results were published afterward (Sichardt, 1939), the magnetic tape recordings remained private until they were donated to the Vienna Phonogram Archive in 2008, and only in the past decade have they been discovered by researchers.

This paper is a companion paper to Scherbaum & Mzhavanadze (2020). Jointly, the papers describe the results of an interdisciplinary study on three-voiced Svan funeral dirges, known as zär in Svan and zari in Georgian. In the present paper, to which we refer as paper 2, we focus on the (structural) musicological aspects of zär. Bluntly speaking, we want to obtain a basic understanding of ‘how zärs work’. Based on the results of the acoustical analysis of a new collection of field recordings from eleven different performances described in paper 1, where we developed a phenomenological description of the general building blocks, here we try to derive a simple model for the syntaxes of zär. The complexity of the musical structure of the zär shows a very clear connection to the history of the Svans’ settlement along the Enguri River, which is obviously systematically reflected in the Svans’ music. Finally, we see the most interesting aspects of our entire study in the implications it has for the discourse on the historical dynamics of Georgian polyphony. Thus, the results of our study challenge the generally accepted view of the development of Georgian traditional music from monophony to polyphony.

Terra Memoria is a musical piece that explores timbre, dynamic and texture, creating an unconventional formal design. Although discontinuity and interruption are experimented with to create a sense of unexpected development in the music’s progress, there are various means by which Saariaho unifies the composition. Throughout the piece, she explores different musical styles, new musical expressions, and compositional techniques in her own unique way. The music shows threads of stylistic connection to conventional music of the past centuries, minimalist-like repetition, and electronic music. Vocal and operatic writing styles are also experimented with. The composition demonstrates Saariaho’s challenge to traditional notions of form, giving her her own music vocabulary.

In this work, women jazz musicians in Turkey have been examined within the gender studies context. The purpose of this research, of which its theoretical frame was formed with a socio-musicological approach, via female musicians who are active in jazz music in Turkey, is to research and form a descriptive analysis by asking questions, such as: how gender roles affect women's careers, what steps female musicians have to go through in a sector dominated by men in order to be seen and which roles are attributed to women in jazz. Due to the fact that women jazz musicians who play instruments are a minority, the scope of the subject has been limited to ‘women jazz instrumentalists in Turkey’, and in-depth interviews were conducted with selected sources within this context. The boundaries of the research topic were determined by the conducted interviews, and utilizing the feminist theory, qualitative research methods were used. With this research, an effort was made at forming a systematic reference about female jazz musicians, which was previously not found in a thorough academic research before in Turkey. The people selected for the examination of their status in the field of jazz were seen as a starting point for the research of the subject, and following the transcription of their interviews, an attempt was made to determine the causes and conclusions of gender inequalities within jazz music in Turkey. Using the implications and the results gathered during the research, there was an intention to place an emphasis on the recognition of women jazz instrumentalists beyond what's known. In conclusion, in this paper, in order to provide support to studies of musicology with a feminist approach, up to date observations were made with the examination of women jazz instrumentalists in Turkey within the gender context.

The subject of the dhikr remains one of the unexplored areas of the Tatar religious culture today. The ‘Tatar dhikr’ has received adequate attention from researchers neither as part of the normative liturgical ritual, nor in the context of the Sufi culture that existed in the past. To some degree, it can be explained by the influence of the atheistic campaign of the Soviet decades, which caused a decline in the existence of, as well as competence in, ritual practices. At the present time, together with the return of many religious rituals to the life of the Tatar-Muslims, the dhikr has been re-introuced into the practice of normative service. Much less is known about the Sufi dhikr in the Tatar milieu, where the Yasawiya and the Naqshbandiya traditions were the most widespread. The handwritten and printed sources in Arabic script of the past are still waiting for special studies. Against this background, the materials recorded by Tatar ethnomusicologists in the last decades of the 20th century seem to be especially important: there are texts that reflect the importance of the Sufi dhikr for Muslims and show its structural features. Towards the end of the 20th century, such texts entered the repertoire of Tatar folk monajats and were recited in the style of the monajats. To a certain extent, the study of such samples provides an idea of the forms of the dhikr in the Tatar culture of the past; particularly it shows their connection with the Yasawiya tradition, and as a whole, proves the persistence of Sufi traditions in the folk culture. This paper is based on the survey of little-studied religious and historical sources, recordings, and interviews made during field trips in the 1990-2000s on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia).