The Carpathian basin is well suited to the investigation of performing styles in folk dance, because its dance culture is relatively homogeneous despite the variety of peoples, languages and ways of life encountered in this region. This fact invites an investigation of performing styles on a comparative basis. Moreover, the performing styles of one of the most characteristic dance dialects in Central Europe deserve close attention from the viewpoint of the cultural history of Europe as a whole.

The general structure and characteristic features of the dance stock of the Carpathian basin will be here outlined, and comparative references to the neighbouring Balkan dance dialects will help to emphasize the main characteristics of and features peculiar to the area in question.

The enigmatic union of a lyrical text with an improvisatory melody has earned for the hora lunga (or long song) a special place in the history of Rumanian folksong research. Béla Bartók first discovered this exceptional genre in the northern counties of Maramureş and Satu-Mare in the years 1912-13, and later remarked that this discovery had been the highlight of his career in Rumanian ethnomusicology (1967:24 and 1923:ii). Constantin Brailoiu (1970:405) noted the occurrence of similar improvisatory genres in other regions of Rumania, and suggested that the broader term doina be used for all such vocal improvisations, irrespective of region. In the last two decades, systematic investigations of this larger category, the doina, have been carried out by such scholars as Emilia Comişel (1959:147-74) and Mariana Kahane (1963:99-116). To facilitate a comparative study of the doina as a whole, Comişel proposed a broad classificatory scheme based on text content and social use. She also proposed an analytical framework for the study of those musical aspects which she felt were common to all doine. Kahane investigated the tonal aspects of the regional subtype found in Oltenia, and compared this specific genre with examples from Moldavia and Maramureş.

During recent years there have been two major attempts to take stock of folk music research in Austria. Walther Wünsch, former head of the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Theatre Arts in Graz, has reported on the history of ethnomusicology in Austria, and Walter Graf, who once held the chair of comparative musicology at Vienna University, has published an essay on comparative musicology in Austria since 1896. Neither of them, it seems to me, does complete justice to his subject, in that he limits himself to the work of those Austrian collectors, editors, and researchers who have dealt with fields other than Austria itself. Of course, there is as little agreement on the question of what really constitutes comparative musicology as there is on the definition of ethnomusicology. But for that very reason we should be careful not to ignore either the new field of “European ethnomusicology” or, in particular, those comparative studies that have dealt with the researches of Béla Bartók, Werner Danckert, Constantin Brâiloiu, Walter Wiora, and with the results of their collecting activities.

I feel privileged to have been invited to open this session here in Jerusalem this afternoon. You, my friends and colleagues gathered from many parts of the world, may at this moment be feeling as I do, that we live in a very remarkable time: remarkable especially for the opportunities it gives us of meeting people from different civilizations. Today, indeed, our musical traditions, so different in their origins, form and content, are in growing communication; and, on the face of it, there would seem to be unprecedented opportunities for preserving and renewing regional music in its traditional forms. These traditional forms are those of folk music, liturgical music and learned music, but exclude the popular and individualistic repertoire. Before speaking of preservation and renewal, however, we must first recognize the existence of powerful forces which are working only for music's confusion and destruction. For the advances in technology and communications made by Western industrial society have been used for very different ends.

In an earlier paper (McLean 1961)—presented at the IFMC Vienna Conference in 1960—I emphasized what seemed to me to be an extreme conservatism associated with the transmission of traditional Maori singing—or waiata—style. I outlined some of the evidence for this, and indicated ways in which accuracy of transmission was attained in practice. As a sequel, I should like now to examine Maori concepts of accuracy more closely, and go on to consider anomalies presented by such phenomena as traditionally approved reworkings of waiata texts, the undoubted existence of melodic variants of particular songs, and an evident current trend towards accelerated change in waiata singing style itself.