Performance and Aesthesis in Malay-World Musics, Religious and Secular

The Malay World has been home to a range of social formations, from nomadic hunter-gatherers on land and sea, through (semi-)sedentary swiddeners forest traders, state-incorporated peasants aristocrats. In their religious secular musics, these populations display differing performance manners organisation that reflect distinctive socio-cultural orientations. musics serve embed those orientations as aesthetically felt rather than conceptually talked about. differences are encoded mainly onto contrasts between, the one hand, highly heterophonic and/or starkly non-melismatic and, other, more homophonic melismatic styles.