In this fourth volume of studies in the historical musicology and organology of Asia, Jonathan Condit completes his survey of Korean scores in mensural notation, and Roger Blench examines the morphology and distribution of sub-Saharan musical instruments of North African, Middle Eastern, and Asian origin.

This is the sixth volume in a series of books devoted to the history, documentation and analysis of music in Asia. Four essays are dedicated to documents from the past: fifth-century Korean tomb paintings; tenth-century Chinese scores for lute; eighth-century Japanese documents; early Chinese sutras on the perception of sound. The remainder concern contemporary documents: the notations of the Japanese end-blown flute (shakuhachi) and lute (biwa) and their relationship to performance; acoustical analysis of contemporary shakuhachi. The focus on musical documents, whether ancient or modern, provides a unifying thread which renders this volume unique in the ethnomusicological literature on East Asian music.

The fifth volume of Musica Asiatica is a collection of essays on the music of East Asia.

Fáscicle 3 publishes smaller suites and pieces, together representative of the 'middle-sized pieces' and 'small pieces' (chukyoku and shokyoku) of the threefold classification, in which the daikyoku are the largest suites. O-dai hajin-raku from a reputedly eleventh-century manuscript: Kaicbu-fu, in parallel with the conflation discussed in Fascicle 2.

This second fascicle includes two further suites from the Ichikotsu-chō mode-key group, namely Toraden, which probably originated in the early eighth century, and Shunnō-den, a ballet-suite believed to have its source in a late seventh-century piece in imitation of Cettia diphone cantans - a bush warbler with a nightingale-like song.