Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 360 pp. ISBN 0-520-22083-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-520-22084-6 (paperback) Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, eds. Music and Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ix, 376 pp. ISBN 0-252-02544-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-252-06865-3 (paperback)

Abstract

Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xi, 360 pp. ISBN 0-520-22083-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-520-22084-6 (paperback). Pirkko Moisala and Beverley Diamond, eds. Music and Gender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ix, 376 pp. ISBN 0-252-02544-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-252-06865-3 (paperback). Over the last decade of the 20th century, music scholarship inched its way towards the kind of engagement with critical theory long embraced by the other arts.1 With the two books under review here, Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music and Music and Gender, music scholarship has achieved a sophisticated marriage of music and critical theory. Gone is the sometimes tiresome confessional tone of early musicology, largely absent is the glossing of musical materials too often found in sociological books on popular music. The hallmark of both volumes is their conscientious effort to map out explicit methodological and theoretical territory. Both books are rigorous, adventurous, and carefully considered collections of essays that serve as important models for the training of young scholars. My motivation for writing this review comes from my use of essays from these books in two different courses on music and identity in recent years. Interestingly, the first course was a cultural studies seminar, while the second was taught to upper-year music students.2 I was much struck by the fact that the material could be useful in such different contexts. My cultural studies students had uneven competence in music theory and history, while my music students were largely unfamiliar with critical theory. Both groups engaged in ongoing, lively debate generated by the ideas raised in these books. This review will not attempt a comprehensive description of each essay contained in both volumes. Rather, I will address particular pieces for their relevance as pedagogical material, giving greater attention to Western Music and Its Others, as a full review of Music and Gender will appear in a forthcoming issue of CUMR.3 I want to argue that if a critical and interdisciplinary approach to musical scholarship is to be useful in the academy, we must integrate it into the training of undergraduates, rather than waiting to deprogram our graduate students. MAPPING A CRITICAL THEORY OF MUSIC Of particular value in both books are the detailed introductory essays, which go beyond describing their distinct projects by advancing exciting theoretical possibilities for musical scholarship. In Western Music and Its Others, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh map a complex terrain marked by working across musical sub-disciplines (musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies and film music studies), in order to think through a range of cultural issues. These are expressed as a number of relationships (between Orientalism/Postcolonialism, Modernism/Postmodernism, and Fusion/Hybridity) through which issues of identity, representation, and appropriation may be examined. The authors skillfully negotiate this potentially unwieldy combination of attitudes and lenses, identifying a number of core conceptual problems present in any critical approach to the study of music. At the centre is the need for a multi-layered theory that is both processual and homological, understanding that music can both construct new identities and reflect existing ones (p. 31). I found this weighty (fifty-eight page) essay most useful near the end of my courses on music and identity. Once familiar with the specific essays in the book, students were better able to track its dense argument and range of theoretical terms. In their introduction to Music and Gender, Beverley Diamond and Pirkko Moisala reveal a more closely defined project: that of articulating a feminist ethnomusicology, expressed within a postcolonial frame that recognizes the fluid and relational nature of culture (p. …