Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles by TedSolísReview by: Sarah WeissEthnomusicology, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Fall, 2005), pp. 483-487Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20174408 .

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Book Reviews 483

hancement to the audio-visual component of the book.The authors, editors, and the publisher are to be congratulated for this ambitious and exquisitely

marshaled project that will serve as a point of departure and reference for

the foreseeable future.

Anne K. Rasmussen The College of William and Mary

Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World

Music Ensembles. Ted Solis, editor. 2004. Berkeley, Los Angeles and

London: University of California Press. 322 pp., bibliography, index.

Cloth, $65.00; paper, $35.00.

This marvelous collection is the first on the topic of what could be called

"second wave ethnomusicology"?the trend, beginning in the late 1950s, to

offer students the opportunity to participate in non-Western performance ensembles in departments of music in American and European universities.

In I960 Mantle Hood coined the term "bi-musicality," invoking comparison with bilingual capability, to describe the state of being able to perform, com

municate, and teach in more than one musical tradition. By now, nearly all

ethnomusicologists working in Europe and the United States (and many other

places as well) have had some experience with these kinds of ensembles, whether or not they have chosen to make teaching and performing in such

ensembles a prominent part of their career trajectories. The authors who have contributed to this imaginatively conceived and

well-edited volume are all leaders of world music ensembles, most in uni

versities. While the majority of the authors are non-native performers in at

least some of the musics they teach, Ted Solis and the co-creators of the

project have included contributions from several prominent, expert native

teachers who have taught?for most of their careers and largely in the United

States?their own musics to non-native students, often while gaining gradu

ate degrees and becoming academics themselves.

In his introduction to the volume,Ted Solis acknowledges the rapidly

expanding number of world music ensembles in music programs around the

world. He describes the goal of the contributors as problematizing the nature

of their performance in the language of the academy, thereby providing models for others as they try to make a place for world music performance and evaluation in tertiary education around the world. A reader seeking a

specific blueprint for the development of world music ensembles in academic

institutions will be disappointed, but one looking for explanations and explo ration of the myriad problems, possible successes, and an assessment of the

ultimate desirability of hosting such an ensemble in an academic institution

will be richly rewarded.

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484 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2005

As background to the volume, Solis poses an important ethnomusico

logical question: How do we represent the rich cultures we revere while

we acknowledge and deal with the cultural distance between us and our

students, and between both of us and these cultures? (1-2). Although the

articles are written from many perspectives and cultural experiences, some

common themes emerge. One of these involves the challenge of accommo

dating performances to the expectations an audience brings into a room with

a proscenium arch stage in it, something felt by all, even those who teach

musics whose "normal" or native performance style is ostensibly similar.

Another theme concerns the representational issues of authenticity posed

by the "dissonance" of unexpected racial pairings such as white "African"

drummers, or African American and white "Javanese" musicians performing

culturally-specific sounds, styles of movement, and dress (raising the issue

of whether or not to dress in culturally-specific performance garb). A third

recurring issue involves the problems of presenting semesterly concerts with

performers who have but a few weeks of experience, such that the instruc

tor may feel that the performance has fallen short of presenting the true

complexities and beauty of the music to audiences for whom the "amateur"

performance will be a first and last contact, while raising the attendant issues

of Orientalization and appropriation. A converse aspect of this experience, however, includes the joys of exposing students and audiences to just some

of the complexities and nuances of a magnificent music culture they might otherwise never have experienced, while reveling in the personal pleasures of group and individual performance.

RickTrimillos's contribution provides an articulate history of the de

velopment of world music ensembles in academic institutions and outlines

three of the most common positions in which an ensemble teacher can be

located: as a culture bearer, as an ethnomusicologist, and as a foreign prac

titioner. Having operated in each of these locations, teaching three differ

ent musical ensembles over the course of his career in several institutions, Trimillos is, perhaps uniquely, able to speak to the issues and problems of

each positionality. He is also able to comment on teaching similar kinds of

ensemble traditions to different ethnic and cultural groupings of university students, an important consideration when preparing to develop such an

ensemble in a university environment. Trimillos poses a variety of difficult

and thorny questions, many of which are dealt with by other authors in the

volume.

Reflecting the predominance of such ensembles in universities around

the world, four of the essays in the book are from teachers of Javanese and

Balinese ensembles. Sumarsam articulates the interconnections between

the Javanese/Dutch colonial experience and the development and spread of

Javanese gamelan throughout the world. He compares gamelan learning in

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Book Reviews 485

Java with how he and others have taught it in the United States.The narra

tive of his own trajectory from student to visiting artist to scholar provides an elegant lens through which to examine the historical development of the

teaching of gamelan outside of Java. Roger Vetter and David Harnish each

wrestle primarily with issues of representation; in particular, they worry about the authenticity of the process both in terms of teaching and learning and through the act of performing. Their candid perspectives on the Ori

entalist nature of the process are interlaced with the rationalizations about

the process that they present to their students and the readjustments they have made to their own expectations as they have matured as teachers,

performers, and researchers. As the only writer in the volume who teaches

in a university in Asia, Larry Witzleben describes different perspectives on

authenticity. As one who teaches Javanese gamelan and Chinese traditional

music to primarily Chinese students specializing in Western art music at the

Chinese University of Hong Kong, Witzleben explores the issues posed by his preference for "traditional" Javanese/Chinese oral teaching methods and

his students' notation dependence. He also describes how positive experi ences with his Chinese music ensemble have challenged the prejudices Hong

Kong music students and the music community in general harbor about the

traditional musics from China, especially during the transitional period that

Witzleben calls the pre-postcolonial period. Issues of interacting with and creating a community through perfor

mance are prominent in three of the essays. Scott Marcus describes his

interactions with the large Arab-descended community in Santa Barbara, whose members have become active participants in the production and

appreciation of his ensemble's performance. Arguments about repertoire

and performance styles are just some locations in which the politics of

Arab and Arab-American identity are negotiated and through which Marcus must work in order to present his Middle Eastern ensembles concerts. Gage Averill describes his experience of working at Wesleyan University without a significant Haitian heritage community, and his desire to create the power ful sense of community common to Haitian events among his non-Haitian,

chair-bound listeners and "nouveaux" performer/dancers. Interweaving his

field notes on one Carnival performance at Wesleyan into the text, Averill

recounts his experiences with what he calls "musical transvestism" in which,

through the embodied performance of another culture, the cultural identity of the performer is temporarily displaced, similar to a light form of trance. He

describes trying to get his students (and audience) to move beyond simply

"getting [the music] right" (100) and into a more direct sense of experiencing the inversions of Carnival. He advocates a dialogic approach to intercultural

studies in which the performance?the encounter, not necessarily the mas

tery of the music?allows students and audiences to experience collision

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486 Ethnomusicology, Fall 2005

with "other" musical and cultural languages and hence embody the aesthetics

of Haitian Carnival. For Michelle Kisliuk and Kelly Gross, the community that

must be created when performing BaAka music is that between the perform ers themselves. Writing in the form of a hocketing dialogue that reflects the

interactive structure of the music they perform and teach, Kisliuk and Gross

explore the process of leading non-BaAka musicians into the aesthetics of

the performative moment, trying to articulate what BaAka musicians feel

without smothering the necessary improvisatory nature of the interaction.

Anne Rasmussen is the only author to describe the conflicts and plea sures inherent in bringing one's teacher or other expert to perform with

one's university group. Her teaching methodology involves encouraging her

students to work out melodic elaborations and experiment with the quarter tones of Arab and Persian tuning.The resulting dialogues, often experienced as battles for control and authority, have allowed Rasmussen to continue

her own development as a teacher, helping her to decide where she will

accommodate her teachers in her own pedagogical process. David Locke and David Hughes explore differences in learning pro

cesses by comparing the expectations and experiences of American and

European university students with those of people learning similar musics

in more traditional situations, focusing, in particular, on improvisatory flow

in performance. While some students want to improvise immediately when

"tradition" suggests they wait, others refuse to move away from what they

have memorized when competent performance requires that they do so.

Using his experience teaching Ghanaian and other African ensembles, Locke

suggests that successful teaching of a world music ensembles requires clarity of purpose and honesty in choosing to teach the way one does, and balancing the right musical choices for the students with those choices required for an

understanding of the ensemble music and interaction itself. As students are

learning a different culture, Locke advocates a slow "domestication" of sound

and movement that leads eventually toward a more intellectual theory and

analysis. David Hughes presents multiple examples of different ensembles

from his department at SOAS, inviting readers to compare similarities and

differences in approaches to improvisation across a wide spectrum of pos sible teaching and learning.

Ted Solis and Hankus Netsky write from the position of insider-outsiders.

Each has pursued, rejuvenated, and largely reinvented performing traditions

of their grandparents?Mexican marimba and klezmer respectively. Because

of their double identity with respect to their ensemble traditions they expe rience their musics as both deeply familiar and decidedly foreign. Released

from the onus and angst of demonstrating cultural authority, Solis and Netsky

begin the process where many end: having experienced the flexibility and

creative nature of their own learning processes, they foster the same kind of

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Book Reviews 487

attitude in their students while insisting on rigorous development of musical

skills.

There are two interviews with teachers who have been intimately in

volved with second wave ethnomusicology from its inception, namely, Hardja Susilo and Ali Jihad Racy. Each of these esteemed performer/scholars traveled

to America to take up ethnomusicological study and ended up staying. Both

emphasize the need to accept that when one performs, one is representing not only the culture from which the music comes but also oneself. Yet this

is not the ultimate goal. For each, the most important thing a student must

learn is to understand the flow and emotion of the music, to think like Ja vanese or Arab musicians in performance. Although this concern underlies

many of the issues raised by other authors, that Hardja Susilo and AU Jihad

Racy foreground this process should inspire others to do likewise. A fitting but brief interview with Mantle Hood serves as a coda to the volume.

Performing Ethnomusicology encompasses as many different perspec tives and positions on teaching world music ensembles in universities as there

are authors writing, yet what ties them together is that these authors write as key members of the first generations of second wave ethnomusicology.

While it might be said that the original nature of the ensembles has often

determined the character of their representation on foreign soils, the fact of

the matter is that these ensembles are no longer first-generation immigrants; let's see what happens when the next generation of students takes over.

Sarah Weiss Yale University

Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tan

zania. Kelly M. Askew. 2002. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

xviii, 417 pp., tables, maps, figures, song texts and translations, notes,

glossary, references, discography, song index, index. Accompanying CD

with notes. Cloth, $72.00; paper, $34.00.

Performing the Nation:Swahili Music and Cultural Politics is an engag

ing ethnographic account and historical analysis of Tanzanian cultural policy with respect to Swahili musical performance. Drawing on over a decade of

work that included archival research, extensive interviews, and first-hand

performance experience, it is an impressive book that retains the intimacy of a personal memoir. Askew shows how various genres of popular music have

played an important role in negotiating the official articulation of "Tanzanian

national culture," and she explores the relations between musical practice,

political ideology, and economic change To demonstrate these, Askew focuses on performance as it takes place on both musical and political stages as the

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