This paper examines the unusual ragotpatti (origin of raga) section of Ksemakarna’s Ragamala (1570), in which each raga is said to originate from a specific sound of the animate or inanimate world—from birdsong and animal calls to the noises of everyday labour. While art historians have analysed these verses for their influence on the ragamala painting tradition, their music-theoretical implications remain largely unexplored. Modern scholarship on raga has often characterised elements such as time and season associations, and visual and aesthetic embodiments, as “extra-musical,” peripheral to raga grammar and performance. Through a close reading of sonic analogy in earlier sangitasastra (technical treatises on music), this paper investigates the musicological function of these origin sounds. By examining how premodern theorists mobilised so-called “extra-musical” material to conceptualise raga, the paper argues that such sounds were not peripheral but central epistemic devices within premodern raga theory. For ethnomusicology, this case study invites a reconsideration of raga theory not as a bounded sonic object reducible to tonal structure, but as a form of acoustemological knowledge that embedded musical identity within ecological, visual, and social worlds.

In the music theory and performance of Javanese gamelan music, gatra is an important concept for measuring time and governing interactions within an ensemble. Despite its importance, definitions of the term vary over whether it is a metrical unit inhabited by melody or a unit of melody with specific metric characteristics. Due to metric emphases on the second and fourth beats, Western scholars describe gatra as essentially the reverse of a Western 4/4 measure (Perlman 2004, Pickvance 2005). This treatment of gatra as a metric unit stands in opposition to how Javanese scholars describe it as both melodic and metric (Sumarsam 1995/2023, Supanggah 2004). This paper argues that the analogy between gatra and Western measures caused the definition of the term to shift, resulting in the current divide. To demonstrate this, I trace the term’s usage from its origins in the Indonesian nationalist movement through its shift in twentieth-century scholarship. Gatra, originally used both melodically and metrically, gained an analogy with measures which obscured its melodic definition in favor of an easily understandable description for Western audiences. Scholars read Sumarsam’s (1995) critique of using gatra to describe the act of composition as a critique of its melodic definition, which contributed to the unpopularity of this usage despite Sumarsam’s own support of it. By examining this history, this paper reveals how cross-cultural analogies have the potential to influence the music theory of non-Western traditions by causing concepts to shift in definition to better fit Western frameworks.

This paper investigates the construction of accompaniment patterns in Guinean Susu balanyi music, as a means of understanding the structural intervallic foundations of this improvisatory, polyphonic genre. As accompaniment patterns form the backdrop for songs and more elaborate improvisation, understanding their characteristic combinations of intervals is essential to an overview of their systemic use. This paper focuses on intervals rather than specific pitches, as this is a modal system whose instruments, although nowadays commonly tuned to a C-major scale, were historically equiheptatonic.

In the Susu balanyi (also bala, balafon) tradition of Western Guinea, a soloist improvises over one to several supporting parts. As these musical lines layer and interlock, they create interval paradigms, a backdrop of interval patterns that establishes a context for the lead player and/or supports a singer. My analysis of more than twenty balanyi pieces created by six master players, where each piece consists of at least three accompaniment patterns, often also including sample runs and songs, reveals four types of recurring interval paradigms. These range from extremely simple, where only one note changes from one collection to another, to neighbor-tone dyads, to more complex changes.

My analysis builds on the work of scholars such as Eric Charry, whose balanyi analysis invokes such concepts as “harmony” and “tonic,” as well as Susu scholar Joe Luther Williams, whose transcriptions provide additional sources to the scores of patterns included in this analysis that I learned via years of lessons with balanyi master N’Camara Abou Sylla.

Since the emergence of 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) in early modern Europe, proponents of 12-TET have pointed to the guitar and other fretted instruments as evidence that equal temperament represents not only a theoretical compromise, but a practical necessity. Such theorists have suggested that fretted instruments must rely on 12-TET in order to diminish the dissonances of historical tuning systems and enable consonant playability in all major and minor keys. Thus, for centuries, the guitar and similarly fretted instruments have been considered to be inextricably linked to the theoretical structure of 12-TET. Although 12-TET has achieved hegemony in the modern era (at the expense of historical, alternative and global systems of tuning and temperament), there persists a niche subculture of guitarists who will not so simply acquiesce to this theoretical ubiquity.

This paper explores the many ways in which contemporary guitarists have sought to reject the predominance of 12-TET by way of organological modification. Based on interviews with instrument builders and “microtonal” guitarists, this study examines how, in their pursuit of intonational idiosyncrasy, such instrumentalists have repositioned the concept of “in tune-ness” as a value that is negotiated through community discourse, craft knowledge and performance practices. In foregrounding these interventions, this study emphasizes that “in tune-ness” is not simply an inherited epistemological framework, but, instead, is a socio-cultural construction that remains ever evolving.