This commentary explores interpretations of concepts that lie at the focus of Richard Widdess's paper—music, and culture—with the aim of specifying frameworks within which issues of musical meaning can fruitfully be addressed. RICHARD WIDDESS'S thought-provoking paper in this volume illuminates the idea that meaning— and in particular, meaning in music—in is best explored in terms of lived experience rather than through verbal enquiry by reference to three specific cultural examples that I suspect we can all recognise as being distinct and as being other. At the same time he relies—I think, quite correctly—on the idea that the same kind of phenomenon, music, is being manifested in each distinct cultural context. It may seem trivial and somewhat truistic even to raise these points, but I think that they can be used to point up some of the issues that I see as being involved in the understanding of meaning in cultural context. To start where Widdess started, what do we mean by I'd suggest that when we seek to explore the nature of musical meaning, this question actually breaks down into two sub-questions: what do we mean by and what do we mean by culture per se? We can think of these two questions as reflecting different facets of the concept of culture, one adverting to the dynamics of intracultural processes and the delineation of cultural boundaries, whereas the other addresses the prospectively immanent actuality of supracultural processes. How can one define culture? Supplementing Tylor's and Bloch's definitions, one can start by suggesting that is the particular means by which people have everyday lives, hence a is whatever its members think, make, believe, do, and learn amongst each other in order to live their normal, everyday lives. As Widdess points out, the dynamics of a specific are best understood through lived experience rather than mediated by linguistic representations. But what precisely determines culture, particularly a musical culture? As a complex example, in the context of Northern Territories Australian aboriginal cultures, as Widdess noted, there are particular musical entities—not works, but songs or specific song-types—and specific contexts of use of these songs that recognisably attach to one or other particular local culture. But members of these cultures also engage with—creating, performing and listening to—other musics such as rock or country music that could suggest that many of these cultures' members have been assimilated into a broader, westernised, Australian musical culture. The determining features of the local musical cultures may seem to be in the process of being obliterated by the juggernaut of global, commercial musical culture, as appears to have occurred in the case of the rich Venda musical memorialised by John Blacking (according to Jaco Kruger, 2006). In fact, rather than being obliterated, the musics of some local Australian Aboriginal cultures have been extended, not just in structure but in function; in a self-conscious process of ganma, or bi-culturalisation, earlier indigenous musical practices still persist while new practices such as heavy rock or reggae—that seem to an outsider to be wholly Western—have been assimilated into the cultural repertoire to be put to local, indigenous uses, as in the case of the Yolŋu rock band Yothu Yindi (see Corn, 2010), in this case as a means of re-articulating and sustaining Yolŋu in its local, national and global context. Perhaps it is only when a is exposed to reflective scrutiny that the issue of what constitutes arises in the first place. As Bashkow notes (2004, p. 454), …cultural boundaries are necessary for thinking and writing about human cultural worlds, but those human cultural worlds—cultures—about which we can write and speak must be understood as neither emically distinct domains nor anthropologically isolable entities but as dynamic constructs engaged in a continual process of mutual refashioning.