Books in the Nineties: A Collaborative Review Essay. Part I

Abstract

We return here to an initiative begun in the first issue of this volume of ourJournal, the collaborative review essay, by five authors, each discussing some significant works that seem to have fallen through the cracks of our book review section between 1987 and 1997. The first installment, written by Hiromi Lorraine Sakata, Melinda Russell, and Victoria Lindsay Levine, and reviewing a sampling of major ethnographies, innovative approaches to methodology and presentation, and works on ethnomusicology and its history, appeared in vol. 45, no. 1. Following are the last two sections, by Ellen Koskoff and Deborah Wong, devoted to ethnomusicological approaches to Western music and to texts and educational resources. Our purpose is to pay tribute to and briefly comment on these works, and to summarize what they suggest about new directions that are emerging in our discipline as we begin the twenty-first century.