Am 1. Mai 2007 um 3:09pm schrieb James:

> I don't come close to being qualified to speak as a "scholar" on this 
> issue, but I have spent a lot of time dancing to, and in some cases 
> playing, "folk" music from the Balkans and North Africa.  I have 
> always been struck by how similar some of it is to late Medieval and 
> Renaissance music from further west in Europe.  That's certainly 
> reflected by the instruments themselves.  After hearing a particularly 
> striking example of this kind of convergence on NPR in a program 
> produced at Indiana U, I tried to find out more from the producer of 
> the show, whose name I have forgotten, and basically drew a blank.  I 
> got the impression from that conversation that not much is known in 
> detail about those connections.  What does seem obvious is that a lot 
> of people were traveling around and exchanging music and dance during 
> that extended period

Amen to than as I listen to my double cd Global Bagpipes - the Volga 
and Iran  through the Black &Mediterranean Seas to the Atlantic coasts 
of Africa and northwards as far as Hebrides & the Baltic (ARC music Inc 
  EUCD 1752), and think of the radio show about Mali, with the Kora 
ensemble that was  playing recognisable chaconne.

The map in the booklet shows boundaries for bagpipe design features - 
quite a different map for the political one we know. Maybe James has 
run across geographies of dance elements? In cloth cutting in trhe 
early 2oth c there were still strong consistencies running through the 
maghreb, into the balkans&the caucasus,  northwards up rivers , and 
eastwards overland into central asia (Tilke).

Beneath the recent history of nationstates, there are territories in 
which the various war-machines did their requistioning. But before the 
technology of war reached a level of development requiring the material 
support of territories, there were only cities that were nodes in 
geographical flows along osmotic gradients of plenty/scarcity (Braudel, 
The Mediterranean).