This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl

(Hardback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

The most fundamental subject of music scholarship provides the common focus of this volume of essays: music itself. For the distinguished scholars from the field of musicology and related areas of the humanities and social sciences, the search for music itselfin its vastly complex and diverse forms throughout the worldcharacterizes the lifetime of reflection and writing by Bruno Nettl, the leading ethnomusicologist of the past generation. This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl salutes not only a great scholar and beloved teacher, but also a thinker whose search for the meaning and ontology of music has exerted a global influence. Editors Victoria Lindsay Levine and Philip V. Bohlman have gathered essays that represent the many dimensions of musical meaning, addressing some of the most critically important areas of music scholarship today. The social formations of musical communities play counterpoint to analytical studies; investigations into musical change and survival connect ethnography to history, offering a collection of essays that can serve as an invaluable resource for the intellectual history of ethnomusicology. Each chapter explores music and its meanings in specific geographic areasNorth and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle Eastcrossing the boundaries of genre, repertory, and style to provide insight into the aesthetic zones of contact between and among the folk, classical, and popular musics of the world. Readers from all disciplines of music scholarship will find in this collection a proper companion in an era of globalization, when the connections that draw musicians and musical practices together are more sweeping than ever. Chapters offer models for detailed analysis of specific musical practices, while at the same time they make possible new methods of comparative study in the twenty-first century, together posing a challenge crucial to all musicians and scholars in search of this thing called music.

Reviews

Nettl is one of ethnomusicology's founding fathers and revered senior figures, part of a pantheon that includes Mantle Hood, David McAllester, William Malm, and Alan Merriam. Besides writing for a plethora of publications, Nettl advised dozens of doctoral candidates at the University of Illinois, and many of them celebrate their mentor in this Festschrift. Nettl represents modernist, data-centered ethnomusicology, not the current theory-based postmodern form. These 35 essays provide a broad cross section of his students and their non-Illinois contemporaries, who form a kind of Nettl-based solar system. Although many Festschriften are random collections on miscellaneous subjects, this one will serve as a kind of reader in classic ethnomusicology and could well be used by graduate students because it covers field-based, historical, (music) theoretical, medical, and childrens ethnomusicology, with essays on the US (including Native American), Europe, Latin America, and East, South, and Southeast Asia. The volume does not reflect ethnomusicologys current fascination with postmodern cultural criticism and its sometimes off-putting writing style. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Victoria Lindsay Levine is professor of music at Colorado College, where she has served as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor, the Christine S. Johnson Professor of Music, and the W. M. Keck Foundation Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwestern Studies. Philip V. Bohlman is Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, Honorarprofessor at the Hochschule fr Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, and artistic director of the New Budapest Orpheum Society, an ensemble-in-residence in the Humanities Division of the University of Chicago.