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Title: How Musical Is Man? (Jessie and John Danz Lectures) by John Blacking ISBN: 0-295-95338-1 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: September, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: How narrow can a scholar be?
Comment: This book is an amalgam of flaws and flawed thinking. For starters, the title is a complete misnomer: only two musical traditions are extensively analyzed while hundreds of musical traditions -Native American, South American, Aborigine, Middle Eastern, Tibetan, Asian, etc. are ignored. Not to mention the fact that the animal world -bees, whales, birds- is skipped entirely. Most of the book is spent bashing European music and society with the music and social arrangements of the Venda tribe in Africa. More exasperating, Blacking's method of proving a point is often simply to state it: "it is reasonable to suppose that music ... is a species specific trait of man." What seemed like a very interesting thesis is, for the most part, finished with this statement!
We are treated to page after page of Venda music, and told such earth-shattering truths as when analyzing music, we have to take into consideration the society that produced it. Maybe this book can be forgiven for expecting this to be a momentous insight because it was written in 1974 before cross cultural studies were common. Reading this in 2002, Blacking is simply a preaching to a bewildered crowd of the converted.
Blacking also fails to make any distinction between songs composed for dance, for opera, for solo or choral performance, for ritual, for symphonies or any for any other type of music. He doesn't take into consideration that the inspiration for, say, blues, rock, and jazz, for classical and atonal Gregorian chanting may be quite different, that their functions may make for poor comparison. I lost the last of my tolerance for this book when, in the conclusion, Blacing decided to prove that purely musical considerations, such as "the logic of the melodic pattern" and tonal relationships, are not sufficient to analyze a song the Venda used to teach their children to count. Well, why should they be? This is the Venda version of Sesame Street ditties in which "on each half-note beat, a finger is grapsed and counted ... from the left little finger to the thumb ..." Who in the world would expect purely musical considerations to explain everything in such a pragmatic piece of work? Blacking utterly fails to take into account that virtually all of the Venda's music is of this sort-it serves a social or pragmatic function-whereas Western music has long since moved away from that into the realm of aesthetic expression.
Even the section of the book in which Blacking tried to decide whether there might be universal aspects to music was an abysmal disappointment because he fails in any way to expound on his idle musing that music may have universal elements.
By the time he gets to the conclusion, he will say a half dozen things about music that are either contradictory or simply hang there without any discussion, including the "hard task is to love, and music is a skill that prepares man for this most difficult task." He states this on page 103 (of 116) without any previous mention of love in the context of music. Nor will he go on to prove his point, instead he will briefly and tangentially discuss this before moving on to how music "may represent the human mind working without interference and therefore observation of musical structures may reveal some of the sturctual pinciples on which all human life is based." Indeed a revelation if only it weren't dropped on page 115 like paratrooper who finds himself utterly alone after the drone of the plane has faded into silence on the very next page. Perhaps the most absurd thing Blacking asserts in his conclusion is that "In order to create new Venda music, you must BE a Venda, sharing Venda social and cultural life from early childhood." It's no more absurd than the claiming that for an author to portray a believable male character, she must be a man.
"The chief function" -yet another chief function-"of music is to involve people in shared experiences within the framework of their cultural experience." Once again, he states this as if it were a self-evident truth and makes no attempt to sway anyone who might be skeptical. What about those of us who lean more toward the belief that music can be, if not a universal language, at least more mutually intellgible than, say, Turkish and German? In other words, the belief that a German musician can convey much much more with a musical composition than he or she can with a lecture given to a Turkish-speaking audience? Transcending culture, seems as much an element of music as perpetuating it. What a shame such a fascinating topic was given such unforgivably narrow treatment.
You are far better off reading what Mahler had to say about music (his are the most interesting quotes in this book) or, Igor Stravinsky's wonderfully concise and presented "The Poetics of Music."
Rating: 5
Summary: best intro to ethnomusicology
Comment: This slim volume may be the be best single introduction to ethnomusicology we have. It is based on Blacking's fieldwork among the Venda, an agricultural people living in the African Transvaal. Blacking provides extensive musical examples and photographs covering children's music, ritual, spiritual possession, the musical calendar, etc. Unlike Westerners, who believe that only a few people are musical, the Venda believe that all people are musical and so all members of their culture actively make music.
Rating: 5
Summary: it shows many different cultures of music
Comment: The book is great if you really want to do a research paper on the musical history of Europe.
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Title: The Anthropology of Music by Valerie Merriam, Alan P. Merriam ISBN: 0810106078 Publisher: Northwestern University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1964 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Study of Ethnomusicology by Bruno Nettl ISBN: 0252010396 Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Pro Ref) Pub. Date: March, 1983 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Ethnomusicology: Historical and Regional Studies (Norton/Grove Handbooks in Music) by Helen Myers, Stanley Sadie ISBN: 0393033783 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: April, 1993 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: The Cultural Study of Music by Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, Richard Middleton ISBN: 0415938457 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (Publications of the American Folklore Society) by Steven Feld ISBN: 0812212991 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: December, 1990 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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