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Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Bennett Zon
Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first book to situate non-Western music within the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It covers many crucial issues -- race, orientalism, otherness, evolution -- and explores the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music. The book also considers a wide range of other writings of the period, from psychology and travel literature to musicology and theories of musical transcription, and it reflects on the historically problematic term "ethnomusicology."
Representing Non-Western Music discusses such theories as noble simplicity, monogenism and polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, and developmentalism. Zon looks at the effect of evolutionism on the musical press, general music histories, and histories of national music. He also treats the work of Charles Samuel Myers, the first Britain to record non-Western music in the field, and explores how A. H. Fox Strangways used contemporary translation theory as an analogy for transcription in The Music of Hindostan (1914) to show that individuality can be retained by embracing foreign elements rather than adapting them to Western musical style.
Bennett Zon is Reader in Music and Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University UK and author of Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Ashgate, 2000).
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DETAILS
19 b/w illustrations
17 line illustrations
Size: 9 x 6
ISBN: 9781580462594
Binding: Hardback
First published: 01/Nov/2007
Price: 75.00 USD / 40.00 GBP
Imprint: University of Rochester Press
Series: Eastman Studies in Music
Subject: Music
BIC class: AVH
STATUS: Available
Details updated on 03/02/2010
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Reviews
[Brings] to the fore a sense of both the foreignness of the nineteenth-century disciplines and their familiarity, grappling as they did with many of the same problems of method and theory that continue to engage modern music scholarship. . . . _Representing Non-Western Music_ shows Zon to be at the forefront of research on the history of music scholarship. -VICTORIAN STUDIES [Grant Olwage]
A comprehensive and meticulously researched piece of scholarship that is all the more impressive for its vast scope. . . . An admirable accomplishment that is sure to engage scholars interested in the history of the British Empire, British perceptions of music and race, and the role of the social sciences in articulating both. . . . Compellingly demonstrates how the practices of the previous century made [the work of Myers and other pioneering scholars of non-Western music] possible. --NORTH AMERICAN BRITISH MUSIC STUDIES ASSOCIATION NEWSLETTER [Eric Saylor]
This major study explores how various learned "discourses" of Victorian and Edwardian Britain represented -- in both words and notation -- music outside the western "art" tradition (mainly non-western but also, in the process, folk music of the British Isles). The topic is obviously an important one, bearing on the history of ethnography and social thought, ethnomusicology, the British Empire, and the history of the idea of "race." Bennett Zon's book is substantial, comprehensive, extremely scholarly, and well written. It should reach a wide audience. --Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway, University of London
Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain examines how non-Western music was represented in the literature of one of the great imperial powers. The result is an important contribution not only to the history of ethnomusicology but also to the larger issue of how conceptions of music were shaped by and, in turn, helped shape British ideas of self and other during a period that formed a great deal of the political and social situation that is still with us. Zon's knowledge of a dauntingly large body of sources is thorough and comprehensive, and he is keenly aware of the way these texts interact with and influence one another over the ambitiously long period he studies. -- David Gramit, University of Alberta, Canada
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