The New Guitarscape in Critical Theory, Cultural Practice and Musical Performance (review)

In The New Guitarscape, Kevin Dawe argues that the "role and agency of the guitar in music, culture and society" needs to be reassessed in light of technological developments as well as theoretical developments in academia. The book sets out to survey the long arm of the guitar as an acoustic, virtual, and symbolic instrument—or, better, agent—across different cultures and media, the totality of which Dawe terms the "new guitarscape." In support of his coinage, he draws analogies to other "scape" studies, particularly those of Arjun Appadurai ("ethnoscapes," "technoscapes," "ideoscapes"), but also R. Murray Schaefer ("soundscapes"), David Howes ("senses-capes") and Raymond Tallis ("toolscapes").

While concepts such as ethnicity, technology, and ideology seem amenable to "scape" studies, the guitar, for all its concreteness, takes some convincing. In order to develop his central argument, Dawe surveys the varied and burgeoning furcations of contemporary musicology including media and technology studies, gender studies, agency, embodiment, organology, ethnomusicology, popular musicology, historical musicology, anthropology, and semiotics. By "scaping" the guitar, Dawe encourages us to reconsider guitars not merely as familiar instruments of wood and metal, but rather as "sites of meaning construction" whose effects permeate social, cultural, political, and economic domains. Virtually no "-ology" is left unturned in Dawe's thorough, if not hyperinclusive, exposition on the current state of the guitar in all its manifestations.

Charting a coherent path through all the intersections of the guitar and the aforementioned areas is no small feat, and Dawe does so adeptly. Ironically, while the preface bids good riddance to the "universal perspective of modernism," one finds sprinkled throughout the text statements that warrant some reconciliation with the modernist perspective. One example is the choice to introduce chapter 3 with the following words of Stephen Hawking: "A complete unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding [author's italics] of the events around us, and of our own existence" (p. 41). The same can be said regarding the author's call on the same page for "an all-inclusive study of musical instruments that incorporates all the sound producing devices ever devised . . . all ways in which the physical world has been taken in hand, all examples of our material culture, our humanised technology and our attempts at 'humanly organised sound.' " Such statements have the effect of shifting the focus away from the guitar and onto the approaches themselves, and at times, it seems that the author is pursuing the same modernist agenda from which the book tries to distance itself, right down to the "attempt to model the guitar anew" (p. 41). If there is a mitigating factor, it is Dawe's perceptible passion for his subject matter, which serves to bind each of the chapters and sheds a forgiving light on its own potential contradictions.

If the protagonist of the book is the guitar, then the plot is the globalization of the guitar. The fact that the guitar is both a widely popular subject as well as an emerging academic one informs the form of the book, which offers something for readers both within and outside of academia. Chapter 1 commences with a survey of ten guitarists who demonstrate "different means of creating not only music but also, potentially, meaning on the guitar" (p. xvii). The first chapter thus provides an accessible microcosm of the global contemporary guitar scene. Throughout the text, it is apparent that the author has a much broader vision than the book's mere 197 pages can accommodate, as evidenced by the abundant references to other guitarists and Web sites in the notes.

The remaining eight chapters of the book are roughly divided into an exposition of the new guitarscape (chaps. 2-4) followed by a survey of the theoretical areas it encompasses (chaps. 5-9). In addition to some of the "core" issues in popular musicology such as gender, agency, and materiality versus virtuality, Dawe addresses "the...