This ethnographic foray into the Polish Tatra Mountains is a lively introduction to the musical scene in so-called “Rocky Podhale” from the nineteenth century to the present. Yet it is more ambitious than that. Cooley seeks to demonstrate how “over a period of two centuries, tourists and ethnographers … have joined with the long-time residents of Podhale in imagining and inventing Górale and the music-culture associated with them” (4). Whereas other scholars have focused on the importance of the górale for Polish national consciousness, Cooley has focused on the emergence of an identifiable górale identity. This he has done, surprisingly enough, with little reference to the Union of Górale (Związek Górali), founded in 1904, or the Podhalan Alliance. Rather, he focuses on developments—past and present—in górale music. Many of the book's chapters are based on his own encounter with “muzyka Podhala” (the music of Podhale) at the end of the twentieth century. Cooley himself is featured in many parts of the book, making this a very personal account.

Although ethnographers and ethnomusicologists are likely to be the book's main readers, along with Polish-Americans interested in their roots, the student of Habsburg Europe should likewise find sections of the book of interest. The probing of the identity of the highland folk should certainly resonate, as Cooley invokes “invented traditions” and “imagined communities” as well as other theoretical literature.

The first three chapters deal with more historical questions, while the rest of the book “considers muzyka Podhala in the ethnographic present” (124). Among other topics, chapter 4 interestingly interrogates the meaning of “authenticity” (looking at the playing of music in festivals versus playing in private settings). The later chapters probe muzyka Podhala as Cooley encountered it in restaurants catering to tourists (chapter 6), at weddings and funerals (chapter 7), and in the somewhat incongruous but nonetheless creative fusion of Jamaican reggae and górale music (chapter 5).

As regards the historical past, Cooley discounts any talk of the Tatras being “isolated, untouched, pure”—no surprise here, given what is known about the migrations of peoples into the region—while emphasizing the importance of tourism for establishing what and who were górale. He claims Podhale was an “ethnic melting pot” (62 and elsewhere) up until tourists from the Polish lowlands, in particular from the Russian zone, started to visit in greater numbers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This “new migration,” Cooley argues, “created the Górale ethnic group as it is understood today” (73). (The line between migration and tourism, the latter often leading to the former, is a fine one here.) This “invention” held true for muzyka Podhala as well. As evidence of this, Cooley relates how a certain influential Warsaw doctor, Tytus Chałubiński, thought nothing of instructing the górale themselves in how and what to play. To augment this solitary anecdote, Cooley uses a close and thorough examination of ethnographic works on górale music to make his argument. Given the author's closeness to actual górale, one would have liked to learn more about the role played by the górale themselves in creating this identity in that early period, the period of Chałubiński; but one looks in vain for any treatment of this in the earlier chapters. That said, Cooley's own personal research uncovers manifold ways in which the górale have continued to invent and reinvent themselves in more recent times.

Cooley occasionally gets his history wrong (claiming that, for example, mining and logging came to the region at the same time as the late-nineteenth-century tourists, when actually they long predated them), thus demonstrating an incomplete grasp of the full role played by these influential visitors to the region, who were very much concerned with conservation of the natural beauty of the mountains and strove to protect them. Nor is the book free of misspellings (particularly in the maps). Nonetheless, with its extensive presentation of melodies and lyrics and its inclusion of a 46-track CD (all of which should be of great interest to ethnomusicologists), Making Music in the Polish Tatras is quite a deluxe edition for a “dissertation book” and a labor of love on the part of the editors and the author, whose enthusiasm for his topic is contagious.