Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People by Jim Samson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People by Jim Samson Ivan Moody Black Sea Sketches: Music, Place and People. By Jim Samson. London: Routledge, 2021. [viii, 227 p. ISBN 9780367276805 (hardcover), $160; ISBN 9780429297274 (e-book), $180.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. This is a remarkable book, far from easy to categorize and consequently of great fascination to readers with a wide range of interests. In some ways it is an ethnomusicological book, but it also deals with material that would probably escape the ethnomusicologist's net, unless we are swayed by Nicholas Cook's assertion that "We Are All (Ethno)musicologists Now" (the title of his article in The New [Ethno]musicologies, ed. Henry Stobart [Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008], 48–70). In other ways it is a vast historic-geographical survey suggesting nothing so much as a learned travelogue in the mold of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Accordingly, Jim Samson begins his introduction by asking whether there is in fact a Black Sea region. There is, naturally, no simple answer to this, as the region in question encompasses the multiple cultures of Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Armenia, and many other areas, and crosses over the religious traditions of those cultures. This deep background serves to highlight the musical results of a magnificent kaleidoscope. The first chapter, "Homo Polyphonicus," begins in the Svaneti region of Georgia and moves inexorably from its folk traditions to the question of the origins of Georgian polyphony—still highly disputed territory. But Samson is not afraid, and his ability to see the larger picture here is invaluable. In fact, and with no implication of criticism at all of the increasing number of scholars, both Georgian and non-Georgian, now working on these repertoires, I do not think there is a more penetrating overview of this subject in English. Rather than perpetuating the myth of the "mystery" of Georgian polyphony, Samson observes that for Georgian music musicologists, history has always been about polyphony. However, their story does not lend itself quite so easily to an evolutionary reading. Rather than instigating a progression from folklike chants to evolving traditions of sophisticated art music, sacred polyphony in Georgia appears to occupy a semi-stable middle ground between traditional music and art music. (p. 21) Once this is understood, much else falls into place that would not were a traditional Western narrative to have followed. "Giants, Heroes and Circassians" is the title of the second chapter, which takes us from Georgia to Abkhazia and reveals the existence of oral cultures that not only are almost entirely unknown to the world at large but also, as in the case of the Nart sagas, have lost a great deal of what presence they had in Abkhazia itself. The trail takes us to the Circassians (Adyghe), and Samson situates this culture within a very broad intersection of Slavic, Greek, Turkic, and other peoples. The Slavic and Turkic epics, he notes, were "transmuted into [End Page 566] identity markers in a chimerical quest for roots, and in the process, unnaturally clean lines were drawn between Slavic-Christian and Turkic-Muslim traditions" (p. 65). The next port of call is inevitably Turkey. Chapter 3, "Not Only Greeks," begins with the appearance of Turkish troops in Trebizond and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923. We are then taken on a whirlwind tour of the history of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires in this area of the world, involving not only Hellenes and Turks but also Armenians and other peoples; a suitable symbol of this multiplicity is the instrument known variously as the Pontic lyre and the kemençe. Samson then explores the fate of the cultural diversity once characteristic here, and does so by using three loose categories—church music, art music, and traditional music—against the background of the construction of modern nation-states that took place during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. In many ways this is one of the most fascinating parts of the book, though that is perhaps purely a personal reaction, given the breathtaking amount of scholarship evident in this publication. The fourth chapter takes readers to Ukraine, specifically...