ABSTRACT
In rural areas around the world there are a very few small-scale societies that continue to sustain themselves with the oldest still-extant modes of human food production on the planet: foraging, nomadic pastoralism, and horticulture. Horticulture refers to the domestication of plants for food. This chapter provides a portal to the musical worlds of these types of societies. The music of the still-extant social formations is mainly known today through recordings made by ethnomusicologists who have lived in these isolated places for a year or more to study their music. A performance of mabo during a BaAka music-and-dance event mirrors the social organization of BaAka society and the physical activity of the hunt. Although BaAka society is closer to an egalitarian ideal than most societies in the world. BaAka music could only enter into the global musical soundscape with the invention of sound recording technology and its use by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists.
