Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles. By Ted Solís, ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. Vii + 322, index, ISBN 0520238311)

Conceived with a scholarly readership in mind, including music teachers, ensemble directors, university students, and researchers, Performing Ethnomusicology features the work of ethnomusicologists, world music ensemble directors, and scholars of world music and culture, as well as the voices of cultural insiders (e.g. Ali Jihad Racy, born in the village of Ibl al-Saqi in South Lebanon, a performer, composer, ethnomusicologist, and specialist in the music of the Middle East) most of whom, like Solís, are themselves academicians. Detailed biographies of contributors and a thorough and very reliable index serve to make this collection a very useful reference tool. The lack of discographies and/or videographies of each culture represented, however, is an oversight which, had they been included, would have provided a complimentary multimedia accompaniment to the rich musical and cultural information presented in the essays. With descriptions of over fifteen world music ensembles, Performing Ethnomusicology constructs a mosaic of musical traditions, including Caribbean steel band, Indian, Balinese, Javanese, Philippine, Mexican, Central and West Africa, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Jewish klezmer music, offered as performing ensembles in a variety of university music schools. All the articles in this anthology appear to have been written expressly for this collection, with an introduction by Ted Solís and contributors from other notable authorities like Gage Averill, Michelle Kisliuk, and Mantle Hood. The second article, “A Bridge to Java” is an interview with Hardja Susilo by David Harnish, Ted Solís, and J. Lawrence Witzleben. Hardja Susilo is a Gamelan teacher and performer from Yogyakarta who has been teaching Americans how to play for over forty years. His situation as a teacher of world music is different from, say, Michelle Kisliuk in the sense that he is a culture-bearer, a member of the culture he represents. Students in his ensembles learn to play instruments “in order to enhance their understanding of the musical tradition under study” (55). Central to this interview are issues about how to teach Western students how to think as Javanese musicians. Susilo expresses his difficulty with finding pedagogical strategies that would make literate learners successful in an aural tradition, emphasizing that “playing without notation would give a musician more freedom to add or to express appropriate feeling” (62) and that “learning a culture, in this case a music culture, is not just about learning how the natives physically do it, but also how they think about it” (58). The emic or insider knowledge about a culture and/or tradition is the focus of this chapter, but, simultaneously, it addresses other issues of appropriation, ownership, pedagogy, and diffusion in the United States. In a similar vein and also written from the emic perspective, Sumarsam provides an overview of the history of Gamelan teaching and learning in Indonesia and its eventual dissemination to the United States in “Opportunity and Interaction.” Sumarsam links the study of Indonesian music directly with the initial development of ethnomusicology after World War II, outlining the lineage from Jaap Kunst and Mantle Hood, the first advocates of “bimusicality,” to present-day ethnomusicologists such as Sumarsam himself, who are responsible for world music ensembles in the academy today. Practical issues of pedagogical modifications for teaching students outside the tradition are discussed. Gage Averill begins his essay, “Where’s ‘One’?: Musical Encounters of the Ensemble Kind” with a detailed description of a carnival he hosted at Wesleyan University to illustrate the layers of “performativity” that exist when performing world music. The carnival performance was meant to confront issues of race, class, representation, and cultural difference and to actively engage students and audience in critically evaluating whether “there is a space for critical and sensual …