Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts (review)

Music Traditions, Cultures, and Contexts is a Festschrift honouring the prominent Canadian ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond on her sixtieth birthday in 2008. Diamond, aptly described as having worked harder than anyone to ‘advance the discipline of ethnomusicology in Canada,’ studied at the University of Toronto and began her teaching career in 1973 at McGill. She went on to teach at Queen’s and York before moving in 2002 to Memorial, Newfoundland, where she is director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media and Place (MMaP) and Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music and Ethnomusicology.

As the appendix shows, Bev, as she is cordially referred to throughout, is a prolific scholar whose output is characterized by a geo-cultural focus on the music of North America, particularly First Nations, but whose theoretical contributions range over much broader territory. Her key works are the solo-authored but deeply collaborative Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008), co-edited works Music and Gender (2000, with Pirkko Moisala) and Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity (1994, with Robert Witmer), and influential articles including ‘Canadian Reflections on Palindromes, Inversions, and Other Challenges to Ethnomusicology’s Coherence’ in the fiftieth anniversary issue of Ethnomusicology, an important position paper to which only two contributing authors respond. Kay Shelemay examines ethnomusicology’s North Americanist agenda and charts both similarities and differences between Canadian and American perspectives on the intellectual history and politics of the discipline. In many ways, the changes she describes over the course of ethnomusicology’s history are paradigmatic of a broader disciplinary shift from the analysis of culture as product to culture as process; from a focus on the distant and exotic to a focus on the local, ordinary, everyday; from objective, positivist positions to largely subjective, reflexive, collaborative ones. Diamond’s work is seen as an important component of that evolution, in terms of her research methods as well as reflexive writings on the history of research into Canadian music. Neil Rosenberg also engages Diamond’s question about whether her view from North America’s margins is distinct or different from that of her American colleagues and applies it to his enjoyable history of the Nova Scotia five-stringed banjo.

Apart from these two chapters, there are surprisingly few reactions to Diamond’s body of work in this volume. Bruno Nettl offers another overview of ethnomusicology’s evolution as measured in critical self-evaluations and redefinitions, though I disagree that we are currently experiencing such a phase. He shows that we have moved significantly from our prior focus on comparison to one of difference, a theme that dominates Ellen Koskoff’s revealing account of three epiphanies whose lessons teach us to value ethnographic fieldwork because of what we may learn not merely about people living musical lives but about ourselves. Of the remaining contributions, only Charlotte Frisbie’s heavily autobiographical account of her life as a church organist seems to break new ground, and John Beckwith’s is an original contribution to a neglected chapter in Canadian lyric theatre; the remaining chapters appear to go over some quite old ground. The range and diversity of efforts are hard to distil (hence, one ventures, this book’s rather nebulous title).

It is a strange Festschrift indeed where the person honoured writes the most interesting and profound contribution. Diamond profiles her husband, her soul mate: British-born Canadian composer Cliff Crawley. It is a lovingly crafted and richly illustrated biography that showcases Diamond’s skill at creating a nuanced, three-dimensional portrait depicting Crawley’s personal history, likes and dislikes, suspicion of intellectualism, and down-to-earth engagement with the everyday experience of life. Her insights and analyses of some of Crawley’s key works demonstrate that she retains ample musicological chops.

Bookending this volume, Robin Elliott and Gordon Smith’s overture does an insightful job of intertwining their analysis of Diamond’s professional significance with her autobiographical commentary. Yet, for me, the major disappointment is the coda by Diamond...