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Ma, Yo-Yo: Accomplished and versatile American cellist who often crosses between soundscapes.

The Macarena: A mid-1990s dance fad and song of the same name.

MacCrimmons: The hereditary Great Highland Bagpipe pipers to Clan MacLeod on the Isle of Skye who are are said to have invented pibroch and canntaireachd.

major mode: A particular set of eight notes in Western classical music. See major scale.

major scale: The scale of pitches in the major mode possessing the following interval relationships from lowest to highest: two whole tones, one semitone, three whole tones and one semitone.

maqam: (pl. maqamat) The system governing pitch and melody in Arab music. See also maqam ajam and maqam nahawand.

maqam ajam: An important maqam which sounds similar to the Western major mode. Pizmon Mi Zot is set in maqam ajam.

maqam nahawand: An important maqam which sounds similar the Western minor mode. Pizmon Attah El Kabbir is set in maqam ajam.

march: A piece in duple meter with a quick pace suitable for accompanying and coordinating a group of people marching.

mariachi: A term applied to both a Mexican instrumental ensemble combining plucked and bowed chordophones including the guitarrûn, vihuela and violin with trumpets, and to the musicians within the group.

Marley, Bob: A Jamaican reggae musician who, since his death in 1981, has come to be internationally associated with reggae and other Jamaican musics.

Mass: The section of the Christian liturgy when Communion is given.

The Maytals: A Jamaican ensemble which, with Frederick ìToots Hibbert, coined the term reggae in their 1968 song titled Do The Reggay.

mbube: An early twentieth-century South African vocal genre popularized in early recordings and spread internationally as The Lion Sleeps Tonight and more recently by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Features falsetto and Western-style harmony.

measure: The unit of time in Western music and musical notation in which one cycle of the meter takes place.

melekket: The notational symbols in Ethiopian Christian chant, derived from Ge'ez language characters, each representing a short melodic fragment.

melismatic text setting: A text setting in which each syllable of text is sung to two or more pitches.

melody: A sequence of pitches that have a beginning, middle and end. Often called a tune and heard in the foreground of music.

membranophones: Instruments whose sound is produced by a membrane stretched over an opening. One of the five main classes of instruments in the Sachs-Hornbostel system, membranophones are distinguished by their material, shape, the number of skins (or heads), the way the skins are fastened, the playing position and the manner of playing.

Mendelssohn, Felix: International impresario who, in the 1940s, managed musicians of the Moe Family.

metallophones: Struck idiophones made of metal.

meter: A term describing the regular pulse of much of Western classical music and its divisions into regular groupings of two, three, four and six beats. For examples of meters see the entries for duple meter, triple meter, and quadruple meter.

minor mode: A mode of eight notes in Western classical music. See minor scale.

minor scale: The scale of pitches in the minor mode possessing the following interval relationships from lowest to highest: one whole tone, one semitone, two whole tones, one semitone and two whole tones.

Misora, Hibari: The late, revered enka music singer known as ìthe Queen of Enka" and ìthe Lark".

mode: A flexible term that may refer, depending on the context, to a musical system or a particular scale of pitches. Examples of modes are geëez, major mode, minor mode and tizita. One system of modes is called maqam.

modulation: The process by which music moves from one key or scale type to another.

Moe Family: Hawaiian musicians on ukulele and Hawaiian steel guitar who performed outside Hawaii for much of the twentieth century.

morris dancers: English country dancers costumed in white, with bells attached to pads strapped to their legs, who dance to the music of the fiddle, bagpipes, or penny whistle.

mouth music: Vocal music (ìcanntaireachd) that imitates the sound of the bagpipes.

movement: A large section of a musical composition typically separated from other such sections by a pause.

mukíyu: A genre of traditional Chinese vocal music which can vary in length. Myukíyu texts deal with the concerns of everyday life and are performed by either men or women in both public and private.

music: The purposeful organization of the quality, pitch, duration and intensity of sound.

musical ethnography: The process of identifying a musical scene and studying the soundscape of which it is a part. See also participant-observation and fieldwork.

muwashah: A classical Arab vocal form which has a regular rhythm and rhyme scheme and a tripartite form.

muzak: Programmed, recorded music which creates sonic background environments in public spaces such as elevators, shopping malls and restaurants.