'Elven Music in Our Times', Mira Sommer

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

In fact, I can't recall elves dancing at all. At least not physically.

Oh, but of course they did! Remember Luthien in the forest of Neldoreth?

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

There's a tradition of healing music in Japan, using the Zen bamboo flute (the Shakuhachi), which also to me sounds like something the elves would get into. But I don't imagine many Downers would second me on that.

I definitely would! I don't find it at all hard to imagine that Daeron or Tinfang Warble playing the flute could have sounded like this; or, if you'd like something a bit less cuddly and New-Agey, maybe that.
I also hear something Elvish in Chinese/Japanese compositions for the pipa, like e.g
Dance music for a festive evening in Rivendell
A tone poem commemorating the heroic struggles of the Noldor in the First Age
(titles invented by me)
What I find interesting about this kind of music is that one the one hand, it's very disciplined and rigorously elegant, while on the other hand (at least to European ears) it does have a weird, 'otherworldly' (...not going to discuss that in mid-sentence...) charm and, in some pieces (esp. the last one I linked) a wild, fairish abandon that really rocks. Very Elvish on both sides of the scale, as far as I'm concerned.

Gwath, I think I totally see where you're coming from. Keeping in tune with the idea of Middle-earth as calque on medieval/Dark Age Europe, it certainly makes sense to look for parallels to Elven music within the European musical tradition, whether Celtic or Gregorian.
But it just occurred to me that the culture of Middle-earth as described in the book is probably just as much a translation from the (imaginary) original as the English of the narrative representing the Westron of the 'real' Red Book. As The Prof himself said in LotR, Appendix F:

This linguistic procedure [i.e. representing the Rohirric language by Anglo-Saxon, Pw.] does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances [...]

We find non-European cultural influences in various parts of the Legendarium. Both Adûnaic and Khuzdûl were modelled on the Semitic language family. The Tengwar have a lot in common with Asian scripts like Devanagari or its descendants (in structural principle, if not in actual letter shapes). So why couldn't the 'original' music of the Elves have sounded like something from Tunisia or China?