Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture Book

This is the second in a series of reviews of the current editions of world music survey textbooks. I was really looking forward to reading Terry E. Miller and Andrew Shahriari's World Music: A Global Journey, because of my personal connections with the authors. Miller was my Ph.D. adviser, and Shahriari was a fellow student at Kent State University during the years I was there. I'm glad for their continuing friendships, and Terry's mentoring of me during graduate school has had an incalculable effect on who I am as an ethnomusicologist. They wrote the textbook based on their years of experience teaching the Music as a World Phenomenon class at KSU, and I also had the privilege of teaching many sections of that class during my four years at KSU. I well remember the joys and the challenges, and so I was eager to see what Miller and Shahriari have put together in a guidebook for the class.

The good: World Music: A Global Journey is one of the most beautiful looking textbooks I have ever seen. The design and layout are really nicely done, and every page is in color. Nearly every page features at least one color photo. The color scheme of sidebars, font highlights, and text boxes is excellent and very current. This is a huge contrast to Michael Bakan's World Music: Traditions and Transformations (reviewed here), which looks like it was designed decades ago. For students who judge a book by its cover (and I think many of us, if we're honest, do, to some extent), Miller and Shahriari's book is much more likely to inspire initial approval. And when students are paying such high prices for a textbook, it is nice if they can have a book that looks like it really did cost a lot to produce.

Miller and Shahriari cover an enormous panorama of musical traditions from around the world. As I mention below, I think this leads to some negative criticisms, but for the world music survey teacher who structures his or her class around listening examples, with just a brief time (one class period or less) devoted to each listening example (and I suspect that is how the majority of such classes are organized), the selection the authors present and the structure of the book may be ideal. Of course for the maximum effect in class the book is best supplemented not only with the CDs and website, but also with as many instruments and other artifacts as the teacher has available to share "hands-on" with the students. The book is presented as a series of guided tours through different musical sites, and I think (with some reservations) that it works well as a general framework. It meets average USA university students at a level that makes sense to them. I remember from my years of teaching in northeast Ohio that the students seemed sometimes frightfully insular in their understanding of the rest of the world. Presenting the world music survey as a tour, with short vignettes of experiences such as they might very well experience at some point on the carefully packaged vacation tours they are likely to take, is a decent idea.

The authors privilege traditional musics over popular musics and newer hybrids and innovations. Popular musics are not entirely absent--with short sections on Thai luk thung, Brazilian samba, and others--but the teacher who wants to focus more on pop music may be disappointed at the relatively scant coverage in this book (Shahriari wrote a separate book, Popular World Music, that focuses on popular musics). The positive side of this prioritizing of traditional musics is that Miller and Shahriari get to present some musical traditions that don't often get a hearing in world music surveys: musics from Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, and Hungary, for example. Also, the textbook conveys a sense of history to the students, suggesting to them that a music doesn't have to be new to be significant, valued, or interesting. This is an attitude that I very much support, and I'm glad the book allows that theme to come out in class discussions (though I do wish that big themes like that were more prominent and explicitly throughout the text). The recordings come from a variety of reputable labels, especially Folkways. Along with the historical perspectives in the text, the wide chronological span of recording dates will also show the students the value of "old" things. (I should also point out that the resources listed at the end of each chapter are extremely up to date, recommending some very good books on the topics--mostly from the past 5-10 years--as well as websites, audio-visual materials, and lists of popular performers from each place.)

I found the writing style very accessible for a general audience, with some obvious care not to overwhelm nonspecialist intro students with too much ethnomusicological jargon. I read the whole book cover to cover (which most students won't) and it went surprisingly fast. My experience with textbooks generally is that they have the ability to turn even the most fascinating topics into rather dull reading. That is not the case here. The introductory chapters are good--better, I thought, that Bakan's coverage of the basics of music and the "musicultural" approach.

Throughout the chapters, the authors include occasional special text boxes featuring a short, first-person bio of someone connected in some way with the music tradition being discussed. This was a really good idea, especially as a way of getting students into the mode of the suggested final project--an analysis of their own musical traditions. My suggestion for future editions would be to seek out an even wider range of people to contribute to these bios. The people included here skew towards ethnomusicology scholars, and often at retirement age or older. That's not a problem at all, but I would enjoy seeing contributions from more performers who have mainstream recognition and reputations for being involved with world musics. Names that come to mind: Béla Fleck, Jan Garbarek, Chris Thile, Joseph Tawadros, Frode Fjellheim.

The bad: I would like to see more connection drawn between music and other expressive arts. The very brief overview on pages 46-47 hints at some connections, but it insists on looking at each of the arts as a Western-defined domain. Later in the book Miller and Shahriari occasionally return to the connection between aural and visual arts, as when they suggest that the intricate decorations on Vietnamese instruments are related to the Vietnamese preference for highly ornamented musical sound (141). This is a more subtle, and useful, element to consider than what they said on page 47 about the limited ways that music can be related to visual arts. If I were teaching a world survey course, I could use much of Miller and Shahriari's structuring, but I would also want to bring in broader thematic ideas from performance studies--for example, Richard Schechner's introductory textbook, Performance Studies: An Introduction. Some of this would likely be too "postmodern" for Miller and Shahriari, but I find these broader concepts very helpful, especially when looking at unfamiliar (to me/the students) musical and artistic traditions.

The authors present a huge number of musical traditions--too many for one teacher to cover in one class--and while I appreciated the variety, I also felt that the time spent on each tradition was inadequate. Many of the descriptions of the musics and their cultures of origin seemed little more than abridged Wikipedia entries, and I think a textbook should go a bit deeper. Their section on salsa, for example--and it's one of the longer descriptions (499-505)--pales by comparison to the depth of Bakan's chapter on Latin musics.

The authors use a lot of subjective description when introducing various musical traditions and examples. I think as long as the reader understands "most people" or "most listeners" to mean "most suburban university students in the USA," there's not a big problem. Though Miller's and Shahriari's teaching experiences make their predictions of American students' responses to the music examples basically accurate, I still occasionally (and increasingly as I continued through the text) found some of their opinions off-putting. There is a kind of obsession with a continuum of "simple to complex," and the implication that some musics are simpler and others are "sophisticated," "complex," "refined," etc., is a bit risky and, I felt, out of place in the short summaries of musical traditions. The authors mean these comments to be objective and neutral, but I could understand if some sensitive practitioners took offence.

As the authors admit in the Preface, the "ethno-challenges" throughout the book run a wide range from simple to in-depth activities. They seem to have been a challenge for the authors, with quite a few of the ethno-challenges being just a variation on "If possible, attend a performance of ______ in your area." A few of the ethno-challenges, however, seemed to me almost inappropriate. For example, the ethno-challenge in the section on Tibet (237)--make a rosary and chant the "Om Mani Peme Hung" a million times--crosses a line into irreverence.

In a book of this size, some typos are inevitable. I was, however, surprised by the number of fairly obvious typos in this book--especially given that it's in its third edition. To my (subjective) perception, the number of errors was just a bit above the acceptable threshold. Also, the authors have a verbal tic of beginning sentences with "Indeed"--there is a sentence on almost every page of the book that begins this way--that becomes quite distracting.

Verdict: World Music: A Global Journey is an amazing panorama of musical traditions from all over the world. It is a substantial and attractive complete package. The musical traditions and recorded examples fly by with overwhelming speed. As such, this textbook will be most useful in world music courses that are based around a set of listening examples, where one example represents each larger tradition. However, I would have liked to see more deliberate engagement with bigger issues, connected to the musical examples and descriptions (I'm thinking, for example, of S. Brent Plate's edited volume, Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader, where each chapter looks at an artistic tradition and relates that tradition to a particular concept in visual culture studies generally; I really appreciated that framework). Miller and Shahriari move all around the big issues but don't foreground them for particular focus. Students ought to be confronted with the complex issues, for example, of musical preservation as a museum tradition; music's sometimes uneasy relationship with national governments and policies; ownership and copyright of traditional knowledge and practices; and many other issues that appear in the book but are too often breezed past without much encouragement to stop and contemplate.

The structure of Gobal Journey does not quite match how I teach a world music survey course (I may in fact find through my reviewing of all of the current textbooks that there is no textbook that fits exactly how I teach), but it is a very attractive option for many other teachers.