Reviews for Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity

The average rating for Performing Russia: Folk Revival and Russian Identity based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-10-11 00:00:00 Ernesto Rodriguez As a Javanese who teaches ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, Sumarsam is uniquely situated to write about the bronze percussion ensembles known in Indonesia as gamelan. The function and form of music provide by a gamelan ensemble is radically different from anything we are accustomed to in the West. Notions of melody, tone, rhythm and performance are so different from the Western tradition that even the question of notation has been difficult to settle. The relative importance of the composer and the performers is more akin to jazz than to the classical tradition, although not so prone to improvisation. The other great dimension of this book is to show how gamelan, which in performance can sound like an ancient tradition, has in fact changed radically over the centuries, as Java and it court life, on which the music was dependent, were successively influenced by the cultures brought to it by the trade winds: Hinduism, Sufism, and the colonial powers.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-16 00:00:00 Marinescu Marius classic on the subject... careful, detailed account to the history of javanese gamelan, followed by an even more detailed analysis of its main theoretical components...