The present compendium is a collection of lectures, papers, and essays that deal with broad topics such as globalization, ethnicity, and the diversity of musical traditions to more specific subjects such as composition, dance, education, musicology, the plucked stringed instruments of the world, as well as musical attributes like motion and stasis, time and space, pluralism and change.  These writings explore culture from the point of view of the performing arts in their contextual loci, defining their particularities and peculiarities that give a glimpse of the wide Catholicity of perceptions, functions, theories, as well as circumstances, both natural and humanly induced. In a sense, these essays reflect Ramón Pagayon Santos’s personal odyssey into the world of the arts and humanities as composer, educator, performer, researcher, and administrator, by which his sensitivities and thinking have been induced to explore the different aspects and attributes of music and beyond.