Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds (review)

Western historiography has—despite the continued cultural, economic, and political interchange of the peoples around the Mediterranean basin—generally been reluctant to address the region as a whole after its political fragmentation at the end of Antiquity. In recent years, however, it has become acceptable and even fashionable to speak of the Mediterranean as a whole when discussing a broad range of topics, from medieval history to modern cuisine. Although this has in some ways served as a corrective to earlier binary oppositions between its West and Oriental 'other', it has also given birth to a plethora of 'Mediterranean' discourses with widely varying historical, geographical, and cultural boundaries that lack a common, let alone intellectually coherent, definition of 'Mediterraneanness'.

The difficulty of establishing such boundaries is a recurrent theme in Mediterranean Mosaic: Popular Music and Global Sounds, which discusses 'popular' music that in some sense reflects or is associated by its creators, marketers, or consumers with the Mediterranean and its surrounding peoples. The editor, Goffredo Plastino, forthrightly confronts the major problem of defining his subject in an introductory chapter, which begins by relating his own encounters in record shops with CDs evincing significantly different conceptions of what constitutes 'Mediterranean music'. These engaging stories serve as the pretext for a brief but useful survey of the ways in which scholars such as Fernand Braudel, Predrag Matvejević, and John Davis have employed the term 'Mediterranean'. This discussion, however, fails to engage with Michael Herzfeld's critiques of Mediterraneanism and was evidently completed too soon to draw on Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell's monumental new reappraisal of Mediterranean history (The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000)).

When Plastino turns again to music, he notes the existence today of multiple categories of 'Mediterranean music' mutually distinguishable by the ways in which they may (or may not) express particular historical or modern visions of the Mediterranean as a political or cultural area, as well as by their degrees of kinship (real or purported) to the traditions of one or more of the sea's surrounding countries. Having thus established a broadly syncretic framework for 'musical Mediterraneanness' that ecumenically encompasses everything from Western art music to contemporary Global Pop, he states that his motivation for undertaking the present book was 'to verify and analyse each of the questions connected to the reception and diffusion of "Mediterranean music" by carrying out a properly systematic survey in various places and in different musical cultures' (p. 18). 'Properly systematic' in this instance means primarily a series of ten case studies of varying scope that proceed anticlockwise around the Mediterranean from Spain to Italy. Lebanon, Syria, Albania, and Slovenia are notably missing from this series, and the treatment of France is limited mostly to discussing the music of North African immigrants. Two essays of somewhat broader geographic range by Franco Fabbri and Philip V. Bohlman serve, respectively, to preface and conclude the set.

Fabbri mischievously begins his chapter, which focuses mainly on representations of the Mediterranean and its indigenous musical cultures in Anglo-American popular music, by questioning the very existence of 'Mediterraneanness'. After pointing out the disagreements between culinary traditions masked by contemporary outsiders' creation of a generic 'Mediterranean cuisine', he then finds that the best analogy for generically Mediterranean music resistant to scientific taxonomies is that of an empty suit of armour. This image, borrowed from Italo Calvino's The Non-Existent Knight, serves Fabbri as an appropriate introduction to a historical overview showing how extra-Mediterranean producers and consumers of popular music have represented music from that region during the latter half of the twentieth century. In so doing, he provides some needed perspective for today's 'Mediterranean music'—a category often closely allied in its claims to authenticity with the broader repertories of 'World Music'—by reminding the reader of the mainstream popularity achieved by Italian and Greek songs during the 1950s and early 1960s.

In particular...