This monograph is an ethnographic study of culture and modernity in contemporary Syria, using music as the lens through which to focus on local debates about the nature of Syrian and Arab modernity. Shannon focuses on local discourses about authenticity, heritage and modernity (including nuanced etymological explorations of the Arabic-language terms these English words commonly translate), especially in regard to how they position and provide interpretive stances for the performance and reception of contemporary urban ‘classical’ Arab music.

The book consists of six chapters framed at the beginning by a preface and introduction, and at the end by brief ‘notes toward closure’ and an epilogue. The book is elegantly structured like a suite in the metaphorical maqam (musical mode) of authenticity; the chapters stand in relation to each other like the different parts of the wasla musical suite – consisting of a sequence of instrumental pieces and songs in various genres – that is the main way of organising performances of Syrian art music. If authenticity is the primary ‘mode’ of the book, the six chapters represent modulations to secondary modes or related themes such as modernity, emotion, memory, temporality, etc. Each chapter is also structured using musical metaphors, beginning with a matla' or opening evocation of the main theme of the chapter – usually in the form of an ethnographic fragment or anecdote from Shannon's fieldwork, and much of the best writing in the book can be found in these vivid and evocative sections – and ends with a qafla or closing statement, analogous to the closing melodic cadence that ends a musical improvisation.

Perhaps the main theoretical contribution of the book is its exploration and application of the idea of ‘alternative modernities’. Drawing on and critiquing the terms of contemporary debates about modernity associated with the work of Timothy Mitchell, Partha Chatterjee, Dilip Paramashwar Gaonkar and others, Shannon argues against narratives which hold that European modernity is the standard which other, alternative modernities are based on or can be measured against. The crux of Shannon's argument in relation to Syria is that because of the under-development, in material economic and political terms, of Syria under Ottoman and French rule, the only spheres left in effect for modernisation are the cultural and the spiritual (p. 65). Shannon argues that locally specific conceptions of modernity, imagined in relation to European (especially French) modernity, were in Syria defined dialectially in terms of imagined ‘authentic’ elements of Arab culture (such as emotionality and sentiment) in relation to imagined ‘inauthentic’ elements derived from the West (such as techno-rationality). Syrian modernity, and the aesthetics of authenticity on which it is based, emerges from this dialetical relationship (p. 66). This argument provides the background for the exploration in chapter six of the performance of emotion and sentiment in musical performance, embodied in the (highly valued) emotional state of tarab, a type of aesthetic bliss or rapture produced, in successful performances, ‘in and by the relationship between audiences and performers’ (p. 169).

One problem with the book lies with Shannon's explicitly exclusive focus on the musical traditions and practices of Arab ‘art music’ (though he seems uncomfortable with labels such as ‘art music’, ‘classical music’ and ‘elite music’, using these terms but frequently putting them in scare quotes) and concomittant disdain for contemporary Arab popular music, which in the book seems to be a sometimes noisy, sometimes ghostly other to the specific ‘elite’ musical traditions he is concerned with. Rather than simply reporting (and apparently largely agreeing with) his interlocutors' characterisation of the mass-mediated Arab pop song as inauthentic, vulgar and superficial (p. 24), he might have been able to give a more nuanced account of music and modernity in Syria had he not just relegated local pop music to the outsider status of an inauthentic other, but instead explored how this music as well might embody the complexities and contradictions of Syrian modernity. While Shannon recognises the constructedness of his interlocutors' discourses of authenticity, his personal allegiance to them and their music seems to prevent him from taking the step of viewing popular music with the same analytical acuity he applies to the ‘classical’ musical tradition. More could have been made of the (largely implicit) point that while both ethnomusicological and local Syrian discourses have framed this music as a ‘classical’ or ‘heritage’ tradition, its popularity across different economic classes and dependence on mediation through recordings (at the time of Shannon's mid-1990s fieldwork, mostly cassettes) largely put the lie to essentialist distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ in the Syrian context.

While the focus of the book is mostly on contemporary ideas and practices, rather than on history, it would have been interesting to go further into the question of how what was once basically a regional Ottoman urban court music has been reimagined as ‘classical Arab (and Syrian)’ music. This is mentioned briefly in a few places, but since debates over what constitutes authentic ‘Syrian’ and ‘Arab’ culture are at the heart of Shannon's concerns, and he explicitly mentions postcolonialism as a context for his analysis, exploring this angle might have added much to the argument (though he begins to approach some of these issues in the discussions in chapter two of the 1932 Cairo congress on ‘Arab music’ and in chapter three of different narratives of the origins of ‘Arab music’). The fact that the territory the modern state of Syria now inhabits was once part of the Ottoman Empire is frequently mentioned, but in Shannon's discussion the ‘colonial’ context for ‘postcolonial’ Syria appears to be primarily the relatively shorter period (1920–1946) of the French occupation and mandate.

This book should especially be of interest to ethnomusicologists, to researchers in the anthropology of the arts and the anthropology of emotions, and to those interested in the relatively new area of inquiry of music and modernity(ies) outside the West. The book also does some important work in bringing an ethnographic (as opposed to textual-critical) approach to the study of music in postcolonial contexts, though that aspect could have been further developed here.