Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (review)

The Global Music Series of which this book is a part—and of which Bonnie Wade is one of two general editors—represents an attempt to provide a new paradigm for teaching a world music survey course. One of two 'framing' volumes, Thinking Musically is supported by (to date) fifteen 'case studies', each dealing with a specific culture (or genre within a culture) or a few countries within a larger region (p. xi), and each accompanied by a compact disc of recorded 'selections'. The idea is that teachers can design their own courses, using the book under review as a conceptual frame, and then choosing from the series of case- study volumes any number of geographically specific music cultures that they will cover. (The seven titles listed on the Global Music Series website also have an accompanying Instructor's Manual specifically designed to assist with the teaching of the contents of the book. Presumably this is a feature of the whole series.) The books inthe series have a distinctive small format (14x22cm), but the concept is huge; indeed, the opportunities for choice might be seen as rather daunting for the average busy teacher.

The present volume is designed to frame and complement the case studies in quite specific ways:

Whereas each case study focuses on a specific culture or one designated part of the world, this text offers a basis for the contrast and comparison of diverse musics. Whereas each case study is conceived around themes that are significant in its one area, this book speaks to a set of unifying topics that recur in multiple case studies. Whereas authors of the case studies naturally present their material from ethnomusicological perspectives, this volume addresses the field of ethnomusicology more explicitly.

(p. xiii)

The emphasis is on 'thinking musically', by introducing ways to think about how people make music meaningful and useful in their lives and by presenting ways to think about basic musical concepts as they are practised in musical systems around the world (p. xi). It is intended to be read in tandem with the complementary 'framing' volume, Teaching Global Music, by the series's co-general editor, Patricia Sheehan Campbell, which guides teachers in the use of the present volume and of the series as a whole.

A quick visit to the Global Music Series website is enough to show that this is a wide-ranging and ambitious teaching concept designed to reach a span of ages from elementary school through to undergraduate tertiary-level students. It is in a sense unfair to judge this book, described as the central volume of the series, without reference to the other materials. However, since the intention here is not to review the whole series, this review is limited to examining how this book fulfils its purpose as a useful teaching tool (another volume is discussed in the next review below (Eds.)).

Wade has taken on a large task: to lay the basis for a comparative framework that will make conceptual sense of all the world's musics, all the values embedded in or attributed to them, and the varied musical systems that support them, while introducing non-specialist students to the principles of ethnomusicology as a discipline and providing a frame for fifteen supporting volumes of case studies, all in a volume of some 200 pages. The book's purpose in explaining basic concepts is to obviate the necessity of doing so in each individual volume. So this volume is carrying not only the full burden of explanation of conceptual ideas but also of the component parts and their operation in a whole series of equally logical but different musical systems. The challenge, then, is to set up the frame in such a way that the teacher or student is given maximum support in negotiating the materials. It is a task that requires constant decisions and choices, and these have been...