Since David Reck’s Music of the Whole Earth (1977), the undergraduate classroom has undergone several publishing and pedagogical experiments, introducing various ideologies and shifting positions associated with multiculturalism and representation. No matter; our best efforts and intentions—including pluralisations and emphases on flux—a textbook project on “Musics of the World / World Musics” remains a significant site of challenge.

Pieces of the Musical World: Sounds and Cultures is among the newest additions to the extant variations on the same theme. Some important creative approaches and conceptualisations distinguish Pieces of the Musical World. The text is composed of fourteen chapters and supported by fourteen audio examples. The philosophy and pedagogical rationale of focusing on in-depth music analysis, but informed by rich cultural, historical, and biographical contexts to enhance understanding and appreciation of each selected music culture, largely explains the selection of only one piece for each case study. A supporting website with additional images and audiovisual examples and suggested links complement the text as useful teaching resource, a practice that has become normal in the textbook publishing industry.

An integral aspect of the philosophy, conceptualisation, and organisation of the text is a required statement on the motivation or compelling reason why the one piece is selected—“Why this piece?” Most authors give close attention to this question and provide interesting anecdotes and strong musical justifications. (Chapters 1, 10, 11, and 14 are especially outstanding in this regard; chapters 3, 4, and 5 are not as strong.) The chapters are organised around three main themes: Music and Place; Music and Spirituality; Music and Movement. Although there is an impressive geocultural balance, a close reader can hardly overlook the dominant presence of African and African-derived cultures: Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Nigeria; then African American and Latin American musics. The themes and their sub-variations may first seem encompassive, but there exists some ideological reductionism, such as the clear emphasis on contemporary issues, processes, and products. Chapter 1 articulates influences of current discourses in ecomusicology and acoustemology, and subsequent chapters deal with issues of diaspora, mobilities, transcultural flows, hybridity, place-space, diaspora, soundscape, technologies of the body, musicking, cultural translation, and others. Even in this ambitious representation of the contemporary, closely related sites of gender and identity are scattered in the chapters, especially in chapters 2, 3, 7, and 12.

The text integrates biographical notes to complement the musical, historical, and general contextual data, which should stimulate and enhance teaching and expected students’ responses. Most chapters include detailed musical transcriptions and basic, but sometimes challenging, music vocabularies such as anhemitonic pentatonic and heterophony. Although most world music texts address these terminologies, it would be most helpful to assemble and briefly define these at the beginning of the text (i.e., not as an appended glossary) so that each subsequent chapter and teacher would not have to struggle with definitions afresh.

Certain chapters expertly navigate the challenges in composing a world music text. These challenges ramify from technical details of music or sound to issues of perception, cognition, and aesthetics, as summed up in the following ideas on the “intersensory” in chapter 11: “…by invoking references to specific smells, touches, and tastes, listeners are intimately woven into the singer’s sensory world. The associations of these sensory references are deeply culturally determined” (p. 203). Focusing on the Dinka, Sudan, this chapter crafts an impressive discussion of the place of music in relation to war, peace, and violence, another significant contemporary phenomena and yet within a solid pedagogical and methodological framing.

These concepts and the practices represented can potentially present formidable challenges to pedagogical tools and strategies, especially within the bounded time-space usually allotted to each culture or chapter in the classroom. The various and yet complex African American sub-genres evoked in chapter 12, for example, will definitely overwhelm, if not confuse students, unless a whole semester is devoted to the chapter. As with any textbook, however, other aspects appear overly simplistic. The description of “Music and Diaspora” in the final thematic section falls short of engaging some of the nuances and more insightful terminologies associated with diaspora discourses such as incipient, secondary, overlapping diasporas, and de-diasporisation, especially as they illuminate the scope and affective impact of musical creativities associated with them. It is important to locate and conceptualise “homeland” diasporas in our contemporary discourses and research praxes, and not just those “outside” of the primary or secondary homelands.

Despite some of these drawbacks, this textbook will aid the teaching of diverse musical traditions in specific historical and performance contexts, even with its emphasis on contemporary traditions, issues, and processes. Given the wide geocultural and time-space covered, it is reasonable and inevitable that many chapters under the three major themes overlap, apart from the common sub-themes they are expected to address. All chapters are grounded in specific fieldwork contexts but in order to enlarge the musical and cultural horizons of students teachers may have to rely on supplementary texts, which illustrate each unit with additional genres or styles from the respective geocultural area. Finally, the benefit of focusing on only one musical piece encourages teachers to cover additional chapters in a typical semester. I strongly recommend Pieces of the Musical World; it definitely represents a competitive addition to the growing list of texts on world music cultures for the undergraduate classroom.