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  • Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond ed. by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding
  • Peter Tregear
Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond. Ed. by Erik Levi and Florian Scheding. pp. vii + 207. Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities, 10. (The Scarecrow Press Inc., Lanham, Md., Toronto, and Plymouth, UK, 2010, £31.95. ISBN 978-0-8108-7295-0.)

Even those who believe thatWestern Art Music is essentially a non-referential art form elevated from the concerns of the everyday usually concede that such music often evokes powerful associative affects. In particular, once a particular piece or style of music becomes connected to the experience of a particular place it almost irresistibly evokes that place in the mind of that listener in subsequent hearings (the re-encountering of particular smells can produce a similarly powerful effect). Thus, even before we recognize the myriad subtle ways in which displacement and exile have informed the history of Western Art Music, we know that there is already a very powerful connection at the most personal of levels. Outside the field of ethno-musicology, music scholarship that deals with the topic is, however, sparse. Precisely because the value of Western Art Music has for so long been considered to transcend both time and place (it is not called ‘classical music’ for nothing), such a field of investigation, we can [End Page 552] presume, has been considered ‘off topic’. This is, however, no mere academic oversight. Traditional musical scholarship has thus helped us forget immigrant musical traditions and suppress minority musical cultures, as well as suppress the personal stories of exile that have accompanied them.

In their introduction to this collection of eleven essays Scheding and Levi declare that it has taken the emergence of ethnomusicology into the disciplinary mainstream to remind musicologists of ‘the importance of place’ at all. It is notable, then, that this book forms part of a series of ethnomusicological studies by Scarecrow Press. It should, however, be of interest far beyond traditional scholarly boundaries. To that extent the dense theoretical cogitations by the series editors (Philip V. Bohlman and Martin Stokes) in their foreword are unhelpful. I am not at all sure what is really meant, for instance, when they suggest that the various authors ‘ask us to listen to music outside of place altogether’ (p. vii) or that ‘[t]he musical space of displacement in Europe, which gives pride of place to the sounded, turns inward to the safe space of silence’ (p. viii). Unfortunately, elements of this prolix writing style continue into the introduction that follows. Sentences such as ‘music, even in its phenomenological absence, becomes an ontological witness of the displacement of [the Austrian-Jewish journalist and poet Walter] Lindenbaum’ (p. 2); or ‘music and poetry, forcefully subjected to displacement, speak of, mark, and enact displacement, indeed empower it, managing to suspend, deconstruct, and displace the fragility of place itself between sound and silence’ (p. 3) seem to tip the field of investigation into unnecessary obscurity, and yet the human history that lies behind it is more often than not terrifyingly distinct. That is not to say, however, that it is not also contested. Focusing upon examples of exile from the recent past, the book cannot avoid topics concerning ownership of land, and the status of refugees, that are the subject of ongoing political debate. Nevertheless when a topic like this is both genuinely new, and genuinely significant, I do think we owe it both to our discipline and to the wider community to communicate ideas about music history and music criticism wherever possible in more overtly accessible and attractive ways.

The book’s contributors explore topics pertinent to Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States organized into three sections: ‘The Silence of Displacement’, which considers the historical circumstances of displacement; ‘Displacement and Acculturation’, which looks at how musicians have evoked displaced cultural identity; and ‘Theories and/ of Displacement’, which examines what this discourse of music and displacement might mean more broadly for musicology. Given the sheer breadth of subjects covered by the contributors, and the need for each author to provide a degree of theoretical...

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