World Musics in Context: A Comprehensive Survey of the World's Major Musical Cultures (review)

Abstract

This large and substantially illustrated book attempts to survey the world's major musical cultures in both their distant and recent past, and to some extent, in their manifestations in the present. It is a brave effort. There are few works that have tried to carry out this ambition, and none, to my knowledge, by the pen of a single author. All of the world music surveys that come to mind—most of them are either textbooks by Americans or multivolume efforts such as the New Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954-90) or the recent ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Routledge, 1998- 2002)—have been produced by teams of at least two, in one case five, or even dozens of authors. Moreover, World Musics in Context is unlike other so-called world music compendia that deal only with non-Western and folk repertories, for it covers the art music of the Western world as well. The words "in context" in the title suggest that this is not only about musics, but about the historical and cultural contexts in which the musics lived.