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In the summer of 2002, more Americans – 1.3 million – heard the music of Central Asia in just a few days than in the entire previous history of the United States. Some 370,000 of them picked up the extensive, well-documented guidebook to the 36th annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which broke all attendance records. As they traipsed through the humid haze of the Washington Mall, staggering into the sun baked tents to see crafts and hear music, this crowd was in a good mood. Kids asked to see the Bactrian camels, who, like their handlers, were Texans. People crowded the sprawling crafts exhibits to watch artisans, then jammed the sales pavilions to scoop up gifts and albums, also at unprecedented levels. The surging spectators jammed the tents for most of the shows on the two days I was there. The reception was rousing. The organizers had brought not just "classic" performers, but contemporary musicians, like the Kazakh rock band Roksonaki. The small stock of their CDs sold out on the first day, and their performances regularly received standing ovations.

Diaspora has been kind enough to host a small set of articles focused on diaspora and music in Europe and North America, to which these essays can serve as introduction. Music is central to the diasporic experience, linking homeland and here-land with an intricate network of sound. Whether through the burnished memory of childhood songs, the packaged passions of recordings, or the steady traffic of live bands, people identify themselves strongly, even principally, through their music. Yet ethnomusicology came late to the notion of diasporic musics. Trained in the standard ways of cultural anthropology, researchers looked for the indigenous and the ancient. Tradition-and-change models emerged strongly in the 1960s, but were still locally based. From the 1970s on, diasporic studies have appeared with increasing frequency, but have not kept pace with the burgeoning literature in other disciplines on deterritorialization and postcolonialism. No one has formulated a worldwide viewpoint on music in diaspora, most work being done in the United States among "ethnic groups," with more recent efforts being made in Europe to look at "immigrant/guestworker" contexts. Newer work, such as Jay Pillay's, on Indian music in South Africa, is starting to expand the geographic horizon.

Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Peter ManuelThe Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. Martin StokesMoving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration. Thomas Turino

This study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Badakhshān province of Afghanistan in 1968 for the purpose of collecting musical data. A summary of the basic musical styles and instruments current in the area can be found in the,author's Instrumental Music in Northern Afghanistan.The focus of the present article is the type of Persian verse set to music by the folk singers of Badakhshān. Principally, this includes a description of the texts of the most common folksong form of the region, the felak, drawn from singers of the Faizābād (central), Darwāz (northern), Shughnān (northeastern), Wākhān (eastern) and Keshrn (western) regions of Badakhshān province.