Reviews for Tombstone - A Quick History

The average rating for Tombstone - A Quick History based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-02-05 00:00:00 Eric Gregg I have owned this book for years and just recently looked at it again. The pictures are great. I really like two things about them: most of them are razor sharp. We hear about HD and digital camera megapixels, but they couldn't be any more clear than these pictures. Also, the captions name off most of the subjects in the photos, not just the big names. A few times the photographer feels the need to talk about how well he knows some of these stars, but it never gets distracting. A lot of the performers pictured within these pages are gone now, so it is a good tribute to them as well.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-02 00:00:00 Jaime Allsup I was assigned this book as part of my undergrad studies in 1998. I decided, upon forming a Near-Eastern music ensemble this year, to go back and re-read this in its entirety. My goal was to see if there was more detailed information about maqamat or cultural terms for musical ideas from the Middle East, North Africa, and Baltic regions. I found the material to be already outdated by the 90's when it was written, finding most of the fieldwork or examples were from the 1970's. That was disappointment #1. Disappointment #2 was that much of the terminology, instrumentation naming, and styles were barely touched on, or were using terms that were Anglicized or simply no longer employed. I did learn a bit about Chinese and Japanese music that I didn't know from before, but that's because I knew essentially nothing! And disappointment #3 was that there is supposed to be an audio recording companion to this text, which was missing. I wanted to look at the discography, but none of the artists are credited by name, and not even song names were used. They use things like "karnatic song". That's not even remotely useful if you're using this as a launch point for primary music sources. In summary, there wasn't enough technical/ethnic background to make this interesting for even intermediate-level studies of Ethnomusicology, but you would require some background knowledge or training to follow some of the nuances of music theory (meters, phrasing, AABB, etc.). Overall, I wouldn't recommend this as a course book nor as layperson reading, as it fell short in both arenas.