ABSTRACT
Although some scholars have described East Asian societies and their musics in terms of a polarity between “great” traditions (centralized, urban, official, orthodox) and “little” traditions (regionally varied, rural, unofficial, heterodox), there is actually a continuum rather than a sharp division between the national and the regional, and interchange between centers and peripheries has shaped much of the history of East Asian music. Musical regions have developed in conjunction with linguistic dialects.
