During the past twenty years, questions of musical mobility and hybridity have received much attention in ethnomusicology. Toynbee and Dueck's recent volume Migrating Music is one of the latest interventions on this topic, seeking to affirm ‘the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it’ (i).

The book has its origins in a 2009 conference of the same name, which took place at SOAS, University of London. The volume opens with an introduction, followed by thirteen single-author chapters, grouped into four sections – migrants, translations, media, and cities – each prefaced by a short introduction by the editors. The contributions in the book encapsulate the strengths of a conference format: the reader is presented with a range of case studies and theoretical approaches, written by a geographically localized yet diverse group of contributors – virtually all the authors are based in the UK or northern Europe, yet they span several disciplinary orientations (musicology, ethnomusicology, media studies, sociology, anthropology) and range from doctoral students to senior professors.

While the essays in the book are of a uniformly high standard, for reasons of space my comments below highlight those which, to my mind, make the strongest contributions to the topical orientation of the volume. Martin Stokes's essay on musical migrations in the Mediterranean supplies a strong opening, considering the complex flow of musics within this region. Opening with an anecdote about hearing Andalusian music on the radio in a hire car in Malta as a teenager, he observes that ‘the tale of Andalusi is many-layered, full of ironies, rhizomic meanderings, absences and doublings’ (28). Following these ‘meanderings’, Stokes takes the reader back to Malta, this time in 2009, and to modern Turkey, in the light of which he probes ‘the contradictory discursive terrain of neo-liberal globalization’ (29). Both Malta and Turkey seem to contradict some of the discursive frames within which the world has commonly been parsed: resonances emerge between migrant musics in the Christian and Muslim worlds, often presumed to be culturally distant; intimate ritual space moves onto the streets, and relationships between migrants and ‘homeland’ are constantly renegotiated.

The latter relationship is addressed in depth by Carolyn Landau in the following chapter, a biographical account of musical consumption by a Moroccan migrant. Born in a Berber village, Mohamed later moved to Fez and then to France, Denmark, and Canada, eventually coming to Britain. Focusing on three periods in Mohamed's ‘migratory journey’, Landau decodes an array of identities and affiliations, which additionally map changes in musical mediation: in London Mohamed has rediscovered on YouTube music that he heard on radio and cassettes as a child. Landau's case study also forms an important counterpart to sociological studies of music consumption, which have tended largely to focus on Western listeners.Footnote ¹

Other chapters turn to more ‘distant’ geographical and cultural spaces. Whilst the migration of hip hop and rap to a variety of (sub)cultural contexts has been widely discussed in ethnomusicological literature, Antti-Ville Kärjä's study of Finnish rap and Laudan Nooshin's survey of hip hop in Tehran follow these musics into less familiar territories. Another particularly welcome addition to the literature is Laura Steil's chapter on young danseurs afros in Paris. While she lays out a complex map of musical migration, spanning zouk, coupé-decalé, n'dombolo, and other styles, Steil's primary focus is on dance. Considering the articulation of ‘realness’ by dancers, she presents detailed ethnographic descriptions of social and dance interactions in two competing dance troupes. She skilfully decodes the intertwining of social authenticity with unique personal style in the construction of prestige among dancers, illustrated by some compelling field material.

A particularly rich resource is the third section, ‘Media’. Notwithstanding the broad heading, the four papers in this section are sharply focused, presenting four different readings of the entanglements of the BBC in non-Western musics, past and present. Ruth Finnegan begins by considering broadcast music in Fiji from three historical standpoints: 1937, 1978, and 2009. While the presence of the BBC is pervasive, Finnegan takes pains to point out that her account, encompassing musics from Methodist hymns to Bollywood, is not ‘some simple story of Western musics sweeping out over the islands of Fiji, whether in the imperial expansion of earlier years, or later, through some all-enveloping mass-media propulsion of Euro-American pop’ (148). She locates migration not in musics themselves, but rather in ‘the actions of countless individuals and groups, whether staying or travelling, with their sonic memories, their senses and their bodies’ (149).

In the following chapter, Kevin Robins presents an extended interview with Robin Denselow and the late Charlie Gillett, the former a political journalist and music writer and reviewer, and the latter a respected DJ, exploring some of the processes by which non-Western musics have made their way via these figures to the BBC's listening audience. Robins focuses his framing material on the ‘cosmopolitanism’ of Denselow and Gillett. While his phrase ‘good enough cosmopolitanism’ is a welcome rejoinder to over-deterministic discourses, his framing sometimes seems rather overdone: a more focused analysis might have tempered his justified praise of these important figures with an exploration of the economic and power relations that underpin the ‘world openness’ (162) of his interviewees (similar issues might also have been explored more fully in other parts of this volume).

This chapter is counterposed with Jan Fairley's account of her own experiences of making two series of programmes for the BBC World Service in 1994–5 on the subject of migrating music. This chapter, which was sadly to be among Fairley's last publications before she tragically passed away in mid-2012, considers the relationship of remote listeners to such radio programmes. The listeners were invisible to Fairley at the time of recording, yet later correspondence with them illustrated the intimacy of the radio listening experience, in which musics and the voice of the presenter are shared across great distances. Finally, John Baily offers a close reading of the BBC World Service's work in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban government. His account affirms the importance of interactive radio programming in the support of local musical traditions following lengthy suppression, and for self-expression, particularly of women. His rich discussion is tempered with the disappointment that the BBC World Service decided to axe the two programmes profiled here, leaving open questions about the responsibilities of those invested in the mediation of musics.

A final form of migration emerges from the ‘City’ section of papers: the movements of musics and musicians around and between cities. Resonating with a wave of recent ethnomusicological studies that document the processes by which students become musicians, Kristin McGee considers the ‘New York Comes to Groeningen’ jazz programme at the Prins Claus Conservatoire in Groeningen, Holland. Visiting New York musicians and the opportunity to travel to the USA to study draw young musicians to study in Groeningen; this migratory teaching paradigm strengthens the local jazz scene but also reaffirms the centrality of New York, as both a physical place and a location of a distinct style in the international jazz circuit. By contrast, Sara Cohen considers a smaller set of music networks, probing the circulation of three bands (rock and roll, doo-wop, and country) that played in Liverpool's Cavern Club at the same time as the Beatles. While the venues of the three bands overlapped somewhat in the city centre, each followed different journeys around other parts of the city, reflecting Liverpool's ethnic and class divisions as well as the availability of performance spaces for these different musics.

As is clear from the outline above, Toynbee and Dueck's volume embraces a broad view of musical migration; their introductions to the four sections helpfully survey the contents of the chapters to come, pick up core points, and create a sense of conversation which bridges the divisions between sections; this guidance will add to the value of this book as a teaching resource. Nevertheless the editors' attempts to create an overarching discursive framework for the volume do not quite succeed. Despite both the separate introductory essay and the introductions to each of the four sections, it is still not entirely clear what the book overall is trying to say. While ‘migration’ is presented as a novel theoretical focus, in practice it is often elided with other topics, including cosmopolitanism, mediation, translation, and fusion. The theoretical framing of their introduction lacks dexterity, seeming to become bogged down in well-worn approaches of the 1990s (Appadurai's ‘scapes’, Taussig's ‘mimesis’).Footnote ² The reader is presented with some broad-brush case studies and summaries of recent scholarly trends (‘academic representations of cultures have become less static’, 12) before the authors conclude with a rather naïve foray into European anxieties about migration and the ‘War on Terror’. Further, while Toynbee and Dueck acknowledge the geographical clustering of the scholars and broadcasters whose work is represented here, their reading seems implicitly to restate simplified categories of (European) ‘home’ and migrating ‘Other’. A more nuanced theoretical framing might have challenged these categories, starting with these figures themselves: scholars and broadcasters also migrate, and such migratory experiences, temporary or longer-term, are the basis of most of the work presented here.

It is precisely because of this multiplicity – in authorship, in standpoint, and in scholarly and musical journeys – that this is a rich volume, and one that deserves a place on the scholarly bookshelf notwithstanding something of a lost opportunity for explicit theoretical intervention. These excellent and concise case studies in musical migration will serve as useful teaching material at both undergraduate and graduate levels; for more seasoned scholars, in the meantime, the book offers a readable introduction to current work in the field. Finally, while graphic design seldom receives attention in an academic review, this attractive volume is worthy of an exception: the (anonymous) designer who supplied a cover image of birds sitting on five telegraph wires stretched out like a musical stave deserves praise here – an intelligent opening image for a thought-provoking volume.