En Contra de la Música (Against Music) by Julio Mendívil is a courageous and enthusiastic apologia on ethnomusicology as a discipline, in a world where identities and certainties have been dissolving to become increasingly liquid, as stated by Zygmunt Bauman. Doing this in our postmodern times undoubtedly represents a risky enterprise. Mendívil formulates a program in the concise assertions and questions that constitute the titles of his chapters: "Music Beyond Sound"; "On the Origin of Music"; "A Language Not Too Much Universal…"; "Does It Make Sense to Talk about Music?"; "What Does It Mean ‘To Know Music’?"; "The Classifications of Music"; "What Do We Call Folklore?"; "What Is Classical Music?"; "How to Define Music?"; "Are Musical Faculties Biological or Cultural?"; "Music and Landscape"; "Music and Territory"; "Music and Nationalism"; "Music as Heritage"; "On Musical Taste"; "Against Musical Intolerance"; "Music and the Media"; "Music as Merchandise"; "Music as Industry"; "On Music, Globalization and Apocalyptic Discourses"; "Music as a Negotiation of Meanings"; "Musical Instruments as Tools of Culture"; "Music as Empowerment"; and "Music as Ethnology"; among others. The last two chapters of the book—"In Defense of a Culturalist Ethnomusicology in the 21st Century," and "Ethnomusicology as a Humanist Project"—are also a sort of summary of the intentions of the whole text. A book that deals with such seemingly overused topics confronts a serious handicap for its success. It represents undoubtedly an immense challenge for the author. But the endorsement by Phillip V. Bohlman, who wrote a magnificent prologue for the book—"Music and its Otherness” —, soothes our fears from the beginning of the reading.

The title of the book is in itself a provocation to the reader, who is compelled to get into it and find out what the author's animosity ultimately consists of against an art that everyone loves. It is clearly an effective rhetorical device. As Mendívil says: the book's title alludes to the fact that "from ethnomusicology we write against music in the singular, and in favor of musics [in the plural], without any value distinctions of any kind." The book aims to help its readers reach a new conception of music where the alterities are respected in a world where the most diverse cultures converge and inevitably share common ground. Mendívil does not shy away from the commitment to tackling highly thorny issues and he attempts to give answers to them in the simplest possible way. He tries to reach a non-specialized reader, which undoubtedly constitutes a wise choice. In order to do this, he uses an essayistic tone, avoiding quotations, references, and footnotes in the text's body, nimbly discussing the proposed topics, but listing at the end of each chapter the works cited. In this sense, the author delivers an accessible text to the uninitiated, but without sacrificing depth in the treatment of the subjects, as Nicholas Cook did in his popular book Music: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 1998.

Mendívil deals with the problems of cultural relativism, without prejudice, trying to help the reader to understand music not as something fixed or given, but rather as a very wide variety of manifestations that we must learn to preserve and respect. In this sense, the book advocates without ambiguity for what we could call a musical ecology. It aims at explicitly didactic purposes: to induce the reader to take a more open, tolerant, and inclusive approach to the differences between musical cultures. Hence the subtitle, in translation, Tools for Thinking, Understanding, and Living the Musics. To speak of "musics" in the plural is, for the author, not only a discursive exercise, but also a speech act through which these differences are recognized and vindicated.

For the author, much musicological production has been no more than pseudo-science aimed at legitimizing one's own musical taste. The role of ethnomusicology in the present world is precisely to fight against this tendency, dismantling the prejudices that allow for discriminating against certain types of music that we do not like, on the premise that despising a type of music is despising the human groups that identify with it. In order to contend in favor of his arguments, Mendívil raises questions about some of the central topics of the discipline, such as the role of the media and technology in the preservation of traditional music, "authenticity" as an intrinsic value of folklore, the role of nation states in determining what constitutes a folkloric event, the essentially political role of musical nationalism, the challenges of musical appropriation and musical heritage, musical canons, classical music and otherness, the survival of musical traditions in a postmodern world, musical stereotypes, musical determinism of climate and race, the business of music, musical ethnocentrism, musical radicalism, etc. He seeks to unravel the "rubbish talk, the boring speech disguised as science, if not ideology in the purest sense of the word," hidden in many musicological practices. In his own words, it is a commitment "to disrupt myths and commonplaces" in his area of knowledge. But beyond teaching a specific discipline, Mendívil’s ultimate goal is that we become better people through ethnomusicology.

One of the merits of the text is precisely the fact that it was written by a Peruvian ethnomusicologist who lives and works in Germany and writes in Spanish on musical diversity, in a discipline where English is hegemonic. It is an extraordinarily well-documented book, with an updated bibliography including not only English-language literature, but also the vast and little known academic production in Spanish and Portuguese. The book is a true exercise of musical ecumenism that seeks rather than gives answers in order to help and encourage readers to find their own. It will become an essential textbook in Spanish-speaking ethnomusicology.

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[Review length: 949 words • Review posted on October 10, 2017]