Soundscapes from the Americas: Ethnomusicological Essays on the Power, Poetics, and Ontology of Performance ed. by Donna A. Buchanan (review)

This edited collection is dedicated to the memory of distinguished ethnomusicologist Gerard Béhague, and the writings that it gathers, each by a former protégé, reflect his influence. A man of many accomplishments, Béhague served a term as president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and another as editor of its journal, but he was also widely recognized in his lifetime as a leading scholar of Latin American music. He founded the graduate program in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, long regarded as a preeminent center for Latin American scholarship, as well as the journal Latin American Music Review, a benchmark venue for publication on the topic. Unsurprisingly, each essay in the present collection, save the introduction, gives a case study of a local music scene within the Western Hemisphere, and all but one feature Latin American sounds. It has ambitions beyond matters geographic, however. Presented in editor Donna Buchanan’s introduction as a sort of portrait of a “Texas school of ethnomusicology,” the volume illustrates the unique methodological, theoretical, and political concerns that shaped Béhague’s work. It also argues that he transmitted those concerns to his many influential students and thereby helped to reshape music studies well beyond the field of ethnomusicology.

Buchanan’s solid introduction situates the emergence of “Texas-style” ethno-musicology amid a community of like-minded thinkers who gathered at UT-Austin in the latter half of the twentieth century, taking faculty positions in disciplines ranging from folklore to anthropology to ethnic studies. Together, this loose coalition of scholars established a distinctive ethnographic approach to performance, one characterized by an emphasis on difference and hierarchy, an inclination toward accessible writing, and the displacement of attention from the textual object to performers, audiences, and the unfolding performance event. Above all, it was distinguished by the conception of performances as occasions for dramatizing and negotiating the power dynamics that run through any social situation. As music’s representative within this scholarly community, Béhague brought its ideas to bear within his own field, decentering scores or notated traces in favor of extramusical dynamics, including the impact of sonic behavior on the society within which performances are planned and executed. As Buchanan notes, such an approach is likely to be regarded as rather rote by contemporary students and scholars, but it was certainly not at the 1984 publication date of Béhague’s collection Performance Practice: Ethnomusicological Perspectives. Resignifying “performance practice” to cover the gamut of things that happen in the course of execution, that text also helped to legitimate scholarly attention to otherwise-mundane sites, forms, and appurtenances of performance. Indeed, while Buchanan specifies that “Texas style” ethnomusicologists take “performance” to name a marked mode of behavior that is reflexively acknowledged as such—as “enacted intent”—the term’s definition remains capacious enough to have prefigured and facilitated music studies’ later embrace of the performativity studies widely associated with Judith Butler, wherein an acting is a doing, and “enactments … both express and persuade” (13–14).

By way of illustrating Béhague’s legacy, all seven of the volume’s entries treat matters dear to him. Not all of his interests are represented: for example, his interest in crossing the musical boundaries sketched by a reified opposition like high/low or art/folk/popular weighs little here. However, the book’s three sections, organized around musical histories and their relation to national imaginaries, the consolidation of social relationships in and through the act of performance, and the staging of ethnic identity, together reflect with some fidelity the issues to which Béhague turned repeatedly in his own work.

The first section concerns the relation between modes of performance and evolving conceptions of national or ethnic identity. Each piece is grounded in a different sort of historical methodology, ranging...