Product Description

'World music' emerged as an invention of the West from encounters with other cultures. This book draws readers into a remarkable range of these historical encounters, in which music had the power to evoke the exotic and to give voice to the voiceless. In the course of the volume's eight chapters the reader witnesses music's involvement in the modern world, but also the individual moments and particular histories that are crucial to an understanding of music's diversity. World Music is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, yet individual chapters provide in-depth treatments of selected music cultures and regional music histories. The book frequently zooms in on repertoires and musicians - such as Bob Marley, Bartok, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - and attempts to account for world music's growing presence and popularity at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #180242 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

About the Author
Philip V. Bohlman, Professor of Music and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago, has taught and published from an exceptionally broad range of topics in today's world musics: folk and ethnic music in the USA; the musics of European minorities and refugees; the Middle East and South Asia; the ideological and political dimensions of music in nationalism and racism. He is the 1997 recipient of the Royal Music Academy's Dent Medal, and Bohlman has written, edited, or co-edited
seventeen books.

Customer Reviews

The academic study of music
As with the "Short Introduction to Music", this should rather be called an introduction/history to the academic study of world music. From these two books I have read, I'm not convinced that the academic musicologists are worth that much. The academic work swings from light philosophy and sociology (the encounter of one musician with an another - or more importantly, it seems, the encounter of a musicologist with a musician) ... and the market forces/CD sales which drive the music industry. Fairly simple ideas with pretty complex jargon employed.

The interaction of western academics with the music they find around them is not that interesting. Much more interesting is the development of world musics, and their interaction with one another - which is touched upon a little.

Perhaps I'm being unfair on this book. Despite the jargon used, the ideas are well described. The book reminds us that the concept of 'World Music' is relatively new (about as new as the WM section in your local HMV). And of course the work carried out by the ethnomusicologists in documenting and recording World Musics is extremely important.

VERY ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES
This is a very academic study of the phenomenon of world music. As such it provides interesting theories and also some important facts, but I doubt whether the average world music fan would derive much enjoyment from it. The author includes worldwide music from the folk, art and popular traditions and mentions that it can be sacred, secular or commercial. So far, so good, but with sentences like: “As we encounter world music, therefore, it is important to recognize the need to reckon with different epistemologies and ontologies if we are to understand what world music can mean in its virtually infinite varieties,” I nearly fell of my chair laughing. In its defence, the book does include informative albeit short pieces on the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music, the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, Rai music, Leadbelly, Celtic music, the Eurovision Song Contest, Bob Marley, Manu Dibango from Cameroon and the musics of the various diasporas. Two maps are included: The Celtic Fringe in Europe and the Polka Belt in the USA plus there are illustrations, a bibliography, discography and an index. I picked up the book without properly checking the contents - it’s great source material if you want to write a dissertation on music from different traditions, but not a text that reflects the rhythms of the rich variety of world music that is becoming more and more available to everybody in our current era of globalisation.

Critical Analysis
Your comments do not truely reflect the field. I work in the field of ethnomusicology and to begin with one of you starts with "the phenomenon" of world music. 'World' music is not a phenomenon, to describe it as such is both elitist and racist, forms of world music such as Javanese Gamelan are s upported by evidence that suggests a longer existence than most 'Western' music.
With regards the second comments approach to the lack of use in the academic field then i simply suggest you look at the history of it. The blues as you know it would not exist on record for your ears to be entertained by if early ethnomusicologists hadnt hunted searched for what was out there.
Thats not to say there isnt a clear paradox with some theorists -as it was with some back in the day - that to go to what may be a poor area when you are wealthy compromises study, but in the present day and age ethnomusicology is open to people from all backgrounds, i myself am from Trinidad and see the studies' key role as the preservation of the musics of the worlds people for future generations.