Reviews for The New (Ethno)musicologies

The average rating for The New (Ethno)musicologies based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-01 00:00:00 Glenn Edgar This is another book in Oxford UP's Global Music Series, which I am finding to be a good way of getting a basic, broad knowledge of various world musics. This book was one of the better books in the series so far, with one sizeable drawback. My only major criticism was that Murphy did not do a thorough enough job of compiling the accompanying CD. There were several listening exercises in the text that required the reader to search out the relevant examples via the internet. While this wasn't particularly difficult, I strong feel that this kind of textbook should be more self-contained. Web sources can change and go out of date at any time, a problem I ran into a couple of times when finding the necessary pieces. Otherwise, Music In Brazil was through and engaging. Murphy framed his examination of the music through the idea of national and regional identities. He covered a wide range of traditional and popular music. I was especially pleased with the way he elucidated the melding of traditional forms and styles with international genres like punk, rap, and techno

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-18 00:00:00 Walter Wiese Another in the Global music series. This covers samba, choro, etc. as well as the traditional musics of the northeast and south, and the contemporary music -- Brazilian versions of rock, rap, etc. The CD is a disappointment; the music on it is good, but, presumably due to "intellectual property" restrictions (I hate this whole concept and the consequent hypertrophy of copyright, which was never intended to be a concept of "property" rights), many of the most important genres discussed at length in the book are not represented by the music, making it difficult to keep the differences in mind (or even understand them). For instance, the book discusses several types of samba, but there isn't a single samba track -- even though the book discusses it as "the national music" of Brazil. Otherwise, it was a good book.