Review of Michael Tenzer and John Roeder, eds., Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (Oxford University Press, 2011)

[1] Five years after the appearance of its predecessor, Analytical Studies in World Music (2006, hereafter ASWM), Michael Tenzer's companion collection, co-edited with John Roeder, proffers eleven new essays on the analysis of diverse musics. This volume, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (hereafter ACCSWM), provides additional case studies to supplement ASWM, thereby broadening the scope of materials available in this vein, as well as further pursuing what Roeder describes as "questions about the purview of musical analysis and about the possibility of cross-cultural comparison" (4). As in ASWM, the authors employ analytical tools of their choosing, some of which function comparatively while others tackle a single genre or narrow group of genres.[2] As in any edited volume, the chapters provide varied treatment of their chosen subjects. Some authors assume previous knowledge of the music they discuss, while others write for readers encountering the given repertory for the first time. The authors engage with a variety of sub-disciplines, and use a notable array of analytical tools. For example, Elizabeth Eva Leach addresses Machaut's balade De petit po through a depth/surface analogy, while Richard Widdess conducts a sort of phenomenological analysis of perceived raga in a recording by sitarist Budhaditya Mukherjee, and Lou Bunk uses what he calls "analytical fantasy" to grapple with the composition and performance processes of the BSC ensemble in Boston. The breadth of analytical approaches inspires optimism about the utility of widely contrasting methods for addressing salient aspects of music.[3] John Roeder notes, "Analysis . . . provides a basis for progressing from an appreciation of particular local patterns to a more general understanding of music in culture" (5), and this speaks to the volume's combination of anthropological and analytical concerns. Among several chapters that blend cultural and musical analysis, I particularly enjoyed Nathan Hesselink's discussion of village drumming practices (p'ungmul) in South Korea. Hesselink uses formal and metric analyses to demonstrate how the modular structure of village drumming is sufficiently accessible for introductory players while offering more complicated options for experienced participants, thus allowing people of all ability levels to participate and improvise.(1) Hesselink aims to clarify the affective and communicative powers of the music, and while I'm not sure he achieves this goal, his analysis does provide both a convincing explanation of the appeal of p'ungmul for skilled and amateur residents alike and a compelling description of how the musical structure supports its social use.[4] In this volume, as with its predecessor, the editors emphasize the roles of periodicity and temporality as important organizing elements in music from around the world. While ACCSWM is not structured around periodicity (as ASWM was), the topic is mentioned in several essays, and Tenzer and Roeder bookend the text by highlighting periodicity in the introduction and the afterword. In the introduction, Roeder notes the potential universality of some temporal processes, writing, "All the most striking similarities [among the repertories in the volume] involve rhythm" (13). He goes on to cite Drake and Bertrand 2001, quoting a segment of the study that refers to temporal processes as "universal, in the sense that they function in a similar manner irrespective of an individual's cultural exposure and experience" (13). The afterword is devoted to periodicity as a means of bringing together the two volumes as a whole: in it, Tenzer seeks "a cross-cultural topology for musical time" (415).[5] Rhythm and time form a compelling part of many chapters, but a number of other topical threads also run through several essays. For example, questions of history shape nearly all of these chapters. In their respective essays, Naoko Terauchi and Elizabeth Eva Leach tackle the relationship between performance practice and historical scores. …