187 articles
Music of Spain
Music of Spain, also known as Spanish Music, is the body of classical, folk, and popular traditions in the Iberian country. It spans from medieval works to modern flamenco.
Music of the Philippines
Music of the Philippines (OPM, Pinoy pop, kundiman, kulintang): the archipelago's musical traditions in three layers, indigenous Asian, Spanish-European, and American-influenced, from gangsa and kulintang gong ensembles to UNESCO-recognized hudhud and darangen chants and contemporary indie and P-pop scenes.
Nanyin
Nanyin, also called nanguan, is a traditional vocal and ensemble music genre from Quanzhou in southern Fujian, China, sung in Hokkien and regarded as one of China's oldest music genres.
Narcocorrido
Narcocorrido (narco-corrido, drug ballad): Mexican corrido subgenre narrating drug trafficking and traffickers; first documented example "El Pablote" (1931, El Paso), commercial boom from the 1970s, Sinaloan heartland, and 2025 Mexican censorship controversy.
Noha
Noha (Persian: نوحه) is a genre of religious elegiac poetry sung by a reciter called a noha-khan in mourning ceremonies for the Shia Imams, especially Imam Hussein.
Nordic hymnody
Nordic hymnody is the tradition of congregational hymn writing and hymnbook compilation in the Nordic countries, which took distinct shape after the Reformation put vernacular hymns at worship's center.
Norteño (music)
Norteño (música norteña) is a Mexican music genre from northeastern Mexico and southern Texas, played on button accordion and bajo sexto with corridos and rancheras.
Norwegian ballads
Norwegian ballads (Norwegian: middelalderballader) are medieval narrative folk songs with refrains, traced in Norway to the 1200s, with 265 ballad types and about 1,500 recorded melodies collected by 2016.
Nursery rhyme
Nursery rhyme, also called Mother Goose rhyme: short anonymous songs or verses sung to or by young children, rooted in oral tradition, first printed in Tommy Thumb's Song Book (1744), term coined in 1824.
Orin itan
Orin itan (Yorùbá for "history songs," from orin, song, and ìtàn, history) is a secular genre of Yorùbá traditional music, the song form associated with preserving historical narrative.
Pandavani
Pandavani (पंडवानी) is a solo narrative singing tradition of Chhattisgarh, India, in which one performer sings and acts out Mahabharata episodes, most famously its leading exponent Teejan Bai.
Pansori
Pansori (판소리) is a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which one singer, with a drummer, performs long narratives through song, speech, and gesture, arising in seventeenth-century Korea.
Pātere
Pātere is a fast, recited genre of Māori chanted song-poetry within the mōteatea tradition, traditionally composed by women as a public reply to jealousy, abuse, or slander.
Plena
Plena is a Puerto Rican song-and-dance genre built on hand frame drums, born in working-class barrios of Ponce around the turn of the 20th century.
Polka
Polka: a fast Bohemian couple dance and music genre in 2/4 time, originating around 1830 near Prague; also called pulka (half-step). Spread through Europe in the 1840s and carried by immigrants to Texas, the Midwest, and Mexico.
Powwow music
Powwow music is the intertribal song and drum tradition performed at powwows of Native American and First Nations communities, with singer groups called drums performing mostly in vocables.
Punto guajiro
Punto guajiro, also called punto cubano, is the traditional sung poetry of the Cuban countryside, performed as improvised ten-line décimas with strings and percussion; UNESCO inscribed it in 2017.
Regilaul
Regilaul, often called runosong in English scholarship, is the older Estonian folk song whose eight-syllable, alliterative regivärss verses are part of a Baltic-Finnic tradition perhaps 2,000 years old.
Rōei
Rōei (朗詠) is a Japanese court song genre, arising in the Heian period, in which a Chinese couplet read into literary Japanese is sung with wind instruments.
Rumba
Rumba is a family of Afro-Cuban music and dance styles, with three forms called yambú, guaguancó, and columbia, that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
Samba
Samba is a Brazilian music and dance genre with syncopated rhythms, percussion, and Afro-Brazilian origins, linked to semba and batuque, codified in Rio de Janeiro after Donga's 1916 "Pelo telefone", popularized via radio and samba schools, distinct from pagode and bossa nova.
Seto leelo
Seto leelo is the polyphonic folk-singing tradition of the Seto people of south-eastern Estonia and the Pechory district of Russia, inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009.
Sevdalinka
Sevdalinka, also called sevdah, is the traditional urban love song of Bosnia and Herzegovina, born from Slavic oral lyric poetry fused with Ottoman musical influences; monodic solo singing with saz or accordion, inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2024.
Shan'ge
Shan'ge (山歌, "mountain songs") are a category of Chinese folk song, mostly love lyrics, traditionally performed outdoors as loud, unaccompanied solo songs in free rhythm.
Shin-min'yō
Shin-min'yō (新民謡), also called sōsaku min'yō, are Japanese folk-song-style songs newly written from the Taishō period onward, peaking in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Shyama Sangeet
Shyama Sangeet (শ্যামাসংগীত) is a Bengali genre of devotional songs addressed to the goddess Kali, begun in the 18th century by Ramprasad Sen and Kamalakanta Bhattacharya.
Sindhi kafi
Sindhi kafi (سنڌي ڪافي) is a Sufi song genre of the Indus Valley in which kāfī poems, their strophes alternating with a refrain, are sung in Sindhi and related languages.
Sirventes
The sirventes was a satirical, moral, or political song genre of the troubadours of southern France, flourishing in the 12th and 13th centuries as an alternative to the courtly love song.
Skomoroshina
Skomoroshina (скоморошина) is a Russian comic folk song of the skomorokhy, medieval wandering minstrels, who peaked in the 15th to 17th centuries before Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's 1648 ban.
Slovene Partisan song
The Slovene Partisan song (Slovenska partizanska pesem) is the repertoire sung by and about the Slovene Partisans in 1941–1945, kept alive in Slovenia ever since.