The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8, Europe (review)

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Vol. 8, Europe. Edited by Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. [xxix, 1144 p. + 1 CD. ISBN 0-8240-6034-2. $195.]

The very existence of a volume integrating all of "Europe" as part of "world music" shows how much ground we have covered in music scholarship by 2000. One small chapter is entitled "History of European Art Music," while the rest of this huge volume (1,144 large-format pages) takes on the knotty issues of what used to be called "traditional" and "popular" music over a geographic area ranging from Iceland to Cyprus, from Ireland to the North Caucasus. This was not an enviable editorial job, and indeed, the three instigators and assemblers of the volume labored for years to find the right authorities and corral them into this encyclopedic enclosure.

The good news is that they did a great job. The authors are mostly the top authorities from their regions or outsiders who have logged the requisite miles. The coverage is intelligently, even provocatively, organized and will be useful for a wide range of readers, from students to specialists. None of this comes easily to the study of a region famous for its deeply entrenched local and national prides and prejudices, its long history of folklore and ethnomusicology studies, and its turbulent political history, not to speak of the ideological problems of dealing with the folk-popular-art divide mentioned above. In this review, I will not be able to touch even lightly on the scope and accomplishment of individual articles. Rather, I will survey some of the methodological issues raised by both the editors and their volume.

As a prelude, I must chastise Garland for its press release, since quoting from it is too much fun to pass up. Under the bold heading "DID YOU KNOW," the flyer for the volume tells prospective buyers that "the Balkan peasant does not sing to make life on the steppe bearable, but as a sign that his inner world is in order" (information bound to reassure readers) and then titillates customers with this statement: "In local Swiss legend, it's said that the art of making flutes was taught to shepherd boys by Alpbütz, a diabolical bogeyman!" Fortunately, the encyclopedia itself does not incline toward such banalities. It arrives at an extremely timely moment, when Europe is deeply engaged in a continental soul-searching about cultural, social, and political integration. Having negotiated the first wave of post-Cold War turbulence, Europe has embarked on a voyage of internal redefinition marked by supranational moves like the commissioning of standardized textbooks of history. The whole process involves tightenings and loosenings of social and legal frameworks at various social levels, in which the question of how to define and handle what is "national," "minority," "immigrant," and "regional" plays a pivotal role. All of this top-down activity tends to ignore or downplay the importance of music as a key determinant of the "identities" that are much discussed. Ethnomusicology has knocked on bureaucratic doors pretty much in vain for support and recognition of European complexity, so it is at the level of the lively Music and Minorities Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) or projects like the volume under review here that our professional contribution might eventually make a breakthrough into European consciousness.

Europe begins with an explanation and defense of the book's rationale and structure in an essay entitled "Europe as a Musical Area," penned by Tim Rice. His strategy is to identify "four distinct, but interconnected, social and cultural spheres" (p. 1): classical music of the elite, folk music of peasants, religious or communal music, and urban popular music. This framework is hardly novel, but it is durable enough to serve as a blueprint for the many individual entries. The innovations Rice needs to defend lie in two editorial decisions: the use of the...