Brass bands, equipped with European instruments and repertoire, often funded from the proceeds of the sale of common lands, proliferated across the cities, towns and villages of south-eastern Mexico from the mid nineteenth century. Variously called músicas de viento or filarmónicas, these novel ensembles expressed community solidarity and dignified the aural space of the remote rural communities in which the Liberal state hoped to forge active and productive citizens. Apart from serving as a conduit for external civilising influences while satisfying the military and patriotic demands of the Liberal state, these bands also supported the ceremonial and ritual needs of parish and municipal administration.

In this short, readable and entertaining book, Charles V. Heath traces the history of the band of the capital of the state of Oaxaca, North America's southernmost federal entity. Reasons for the band's unbroken genealogy, going back to pre-Conquest times, can be found, the author argues, in the determination of rulers located in the central valley of Oaxaca to counteract the province's intractable topography, kaleidoscopic ethnography and territorial complexity. In its various incarnations, passing from the colonial militia, through the national army and the Liberal National Guard, to be shuffled in the twentieth century between municipal and state governments, the State Band of Oaxaca was expected to contribute to the cultural and political integration of an otherwise intractable and ungovernable territory.

Assessing the cultural and political impact of music, and of a musical ensemble, is a daunting challenge for a historian, even within the confines of the band's immediate audience and local context. Although the state of Oaxaca contains nearly one quarter of the Republic's 2,378 municipalities, many of which would have acquired their own brass bands during the nineteenth century, Heath confines his analysis to bands of the state capital, which comprised two or three times as many musicians (30–60) as the standard village band (12–20). Indeed, at times during its chequered history, the State Band of Oaxaca would call upon a strings section and function as a full orchestra. On his visit to Oaxaca in 1944 to direct the band's rendition of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, Leopold Stokowski even included ‘real church bells, real rifle fire, [and] dynamite blasts to simulate cannon’ (p. 110).

A slender primary source base, the result of frequent changes in the band's patrons, leaders and budgets, allows for only a sketchy account of its history. The idiosyncrasies of musical directors, their jealously guarded repertoire of sheet music, uniforms and instruments, the reputation and travels of the band beyond the state and even the Republic, musicians’ discipline: each receives some mention. Unexplored, however, are the recruitment, training and ethnicity of musicians, or the relationship of the state band to the capital's schools and to village bands further afield. To compensate for the weak source base, Heath uses the history of the band, and its presumed monopoly of the aural space at the centre of the city – ‘the kiosk became the liberal state's acoustic temple of modernity’ (p. 51) – as a scaffolding for a much broader history, firstly of Oaxaca's place in the development of Mexico's cult of liberal-patriotism during the nineteenth century (which Heath defines as a ‘civil religion’), and secondly of Oaxaca's response to the cultural programmes of the Mexican Revolution. The history of music and of the state band is given only a minor role in this broader cultural narrative. In Heath's account of the post-Second World War flowering of the Guelaguezta mid-summer festival, which celebrates Oaxaca's diverse indigenous cultures, village bands and band music are curiously absent, an absence explained perhaps by the indelibly European and nineteenth-century pedigree of brass bands and their repertoire. The relationship between European and indigenous musical traditions merits much fuller probing. No mention is made of the vogue in late twentieth-century south-eastern Mexico of village band competitions, echoing the rivalry of the colliery bands of northern England. Important secondary sources from neighbouring Puebla might have inspired the author to widen the aperture beyond a single band, for example. Marco Velazquez and Mary Kay Vaughan, ‘Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico’, in Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen Lewis, The Eagle and the Virgin Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Duke University Press, 2006), and Ariadna Acevedo-Rodrigo, ‘Playing the Tune of Citizenship: Indian Brass Bands in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, 1876–1911’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, vol. 27, pp. 255–72, are absent from the bibliography. In spite of these reservations, however, this will be an inspiring text for students of the cultural history of modern Mexico.