This collection of essays, part of a series at Indiana University Press entitled Counterpoints: Music and Education, further expands editor Lucy Green's already substantial record of major publications in the field of music education research (Reference Green1997, Reference Green2002, Reference Green2008a, Reference Green2008b). This new book features a substantial introductory chapter by the editor and 20 essays by 20 other contributors – experts in music education, musicology, ethnomusicology, music performance and social information studies, among other areas.
The goal of the collection, according to the editor, is ‘to investigate aspects of the interface between’ the three terms in the main title (p. 1). This objective is pursued through case studies of musical learning-and-teaching settings culled from assorted cultural traditions and geographical locations. The breadth here of cultural and geographical representation is quite impressive – indeed, for this reason alone the book is worth a read. Stories reach us from the UK, Sweden, Greece, Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, the USA, Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, India … the list keeps going. The chapters are arranged ‘in a rough geographical line’ (p. 2), which is to say that their arrangement is more or less arbitrary. (Chapters are not organised into larger topical groupings, and the editor even advises us that the chapters can be read in any order.) The book gives the impression of an ethnographic slideshow about various musical locales, offering snapshots of colourful places and talkative folks encountered during a long, meandering, trek across the globe.
In the limited space of this review it would be impractical to name, let alone summarise, every essay. But each of the 20 chapters essentially operates under one general thesis, which I would summarise thus: personal and communal musical identities come into being neither automatically nor uniformly, but rather through the interactions of individual humans with diverse small-scale and large-scale historical and sociocultural forces. The case study in each chapter comprises a professional researcher's observation and articulation of a specific instance of such interactions. As is often true of edited collections, certain chapters will strike the reader as more substantive, more interesting and better written than others. While none of the present essays is especially lacking in any of these areas, a few of the essays conform less obviously than others to the editor's stated topic. Sophie Grimmer's chapter on the relationship between gurus (teachers) and shishyas (students) in Karnatic classical music offers relatively little explicit commentary about musical identity (although plenty is implied). John Baily's chapter (previously published as a stand-alone article) on Gujarati Muslim musician-barbers living in the UK is much more about identity – musical and otherwise – than about musical teaching and learning per se. An essay that does not explicitly engage all three areas of learning, teaching and musical identity cannot be easily described as investigating the ‘interface between’ them. This is not to say that these chapters seem out of place, or that the book lacks cohesion. The collection is best thought of as exploring three topics that overlap with one another only in part, with each chapter targeting an area that may or may not be a point of intersection.
In the Introduction, the editor offers a discussion of several broad topics which serve as informal themes running throughout the entire book, themes that help prevent the theoretical forest from being obscured by the ethnographic trees. These topics include the dynamic relationships between formal and informal education, personal and public musical identity, and globalising and localising sociocultural forces. Curiously, the editor additionally cites ‘gender identity’ as a ‘vital area’ that ‘all the chapters to some extent implicitly or explicitly address’ (pp. 17–18). While it is true that a few of the essays do tackle gender issues, the rest of the chapters – as the editor herself admits (p. 18) – merely talk about social roles that happen to be gendered, which is hardly tantamount to ‘implicitly’ addressing, to any extent, gender as a topic.
Among the most valuable aspects of the book are its discussions of postcolonial influences which shaped the musical lives of many of the essay's subjects. In particular, Roe-Min Kok's autobiographical chapter about her own musical training as a youth in Malaysia, and her subsequent university education in the USA, reveals in a very personal way several fascinating aspects of postcolonial musical life. (Kok's essay is the second of two contributions published previously.)
Each chapter receives its own bibliography and set of endnotes, which will facilitate their use as individual readings in the classroom. An unfortunate side effect of this independence is a mishmash of competing bibliographic styles. For instance, the editor's own book How Popular Musicians Learn, in its 10 separate listings, is cited as written by ‘Green, Lucy’ and ‘Green, L.’, with a subtitle and without, published by Ashgate and Ashgate Press, in London only, Aldershot only and ‘Aldershot, UK’ only, and dating from 2001, 2002, 2001/2 and 2001/02. The reference also appears in one bibliography out of chronological order, and is listed twice in the editor's biography on the back cover (once with a subtitle, once without). Such inconsistencies and errors will undoubtedly annoy the fastidious reader; however, these problems look rather small in the overall scheme of things, and certainly do not affect the book's undeniable substance or its readability.
Notwithstanding a few minor imperfections, this collection is a very worthy addition to the growing literature on global music education. It will be useful as both a scholarly and pedagogical resource, and will likely inspire much future work in this still nascent but vibrant field.
