In musicology, as in life, can mean many things to many people. Such was the experience, at least, of the musicologists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists who gathered recently at Cornell for a conference on popular music in Asia and the Middle East. Organized by Philip Bohlman, a Fellow at Cornell's Society for the Humanities, and Martin Hatch of the Department of Music, the conference covered a wide spectrum of popular music genres and took in an equally colorful show of scholarly methods. The variety of musical and scholarly styles was made all the more impressive by the tight organization of the two-day affair; with sixteen speakers in eight separate events, the density of the sessions could only underscore the diversity of the subject matter. Indeed, it would appear that diversity prevailed over the whole conference as a persistent theme. The title of the opening session, Popular Music in Diverse Contexts, was the first clear suggestion. Three formal papers gave that suggestion a proper exposition, introducing music from the three featured cultural areas, as well as outlining three distinct appro hes to its study. The recurrence of musical examples from the Mid East, South Asia and Southeast Asia over the course of two days as tred the conference of some continuity; but a real formal coherence w'is to be found in the way these three basic approaches to popular music came up again in nearly all of the remaining papers. Virginia Danielson's discussion of Umm Kulthum in the first formal paper gave rise to a very particular image of the popular: that of popularity associated with a singer or some other prominent artistic personality. The enormous commercial success of Umm Kulthum, considered one of the most popular singers in the modern Arab world, caused Danielson to puzzle over possible musical or textual explanations, and eventually to examine the role of the Qur'an in her popular song style. She argued that a heightened sense of grammar, of metrical pular Music in the Middle East, uth Asia, and Southea t Asia