Encompassing ten chapters written from numerous geographic and professional perspectives and covering aspects of traditional as well as popular music, Mongolian Sound Worlds is a comprehensive overview of the histories, styles, techniques, and instruments that have shaped Mongolian music both within the country of Mongolia and in the Chinese territory of Inner Mongolia in the twenty-first century. The detailed content of this edited volume goes far beyond simple explanations of genres or traditions, instead engaging with issues embedded in Mongolian musical practices, such as ethnic identity, globalization, ecology, gender, and cultural change.
The sequencing of chapters helps to create a scaffolded experience of encountering and contemplating this complexity; after an introductory section (“Opening Snapshots”), the first chapter, “Sound, Music, Pastoralism, and Nature in Mongolian Sound Worlds,”provides a useful overview of the basic geographic and historical information that grounds all of the chapters, as well as highlights the main themes that run through the volume. In addition, the thoughtful inclusion of “Interludes,” which are written by Mongol musicians themselves, helps to balance the Euro-centric academic approach of non-Mongol contributors with the perspectives and experiences of cultural insiders. The complexities of the cultural and musical landscapes of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are made particularly clear through the chapters that address the music of ethnic minorities such as Kazakh, Oirad, and Altai Uriankhai peoples.
A further enhancement to this volume is the excellent and well-organized companion website (www.mongoliansoundworlds.org), which provides color versions of the black-and-white photographs included in the volume as well as audio and video examples that help to illustrate the main points of each chapter.
While a specific argument is not necessarily the focus of this edited volume, it admirably accomplishes its central purpose: to enrich and complicate the existing body of scholarly work on music in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. The chapters are very well-researched, combining ethnographic observation and interviews with context provided by existing work by American, European, Mongolian, and Chinese scholars. I particularly appreciated the breadth of topics surveyed by the chapters in this volume–encompassing traditional, neo-traditional, modernized, and popular musical genres. Also, the attention paid to Mongolian and Inner Mongolian ethnic minorities offers an important counterweight against the tendency in Mongolian national discourses to conflate the culture of the Khalkha ethnic majority with “Mongolian” culture more generally.
Mongolian Sound Worlds is one of only a handful of English-language volumes devoted to Mongolian music from the past twenty years, including most notably Peter K. Marsh’s The Horse-head Fiddle and the Cosmopolitan Reimagination of Tradition in Mongolia (2008) and Carole Pegg’s Mongolian Music, Dance, & Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities (2001). The fact that so few major works on Mongolian music have been published over two decades reflects the unfortunate fact that Mongolian music (and Central Asian music generally) continues to occupy a marginal position within the field of ethnomusicology. Not only does this edited volume provide an important platform for numerous emerging and established scholars of Mongolian music to disseminate their research (which, in turn, may lead to additional major publications in the future), but also hopefully it will inspire the next generation of ethnomusicologists to investigate this culturally rich although underrepresented geographical region in their own ethnographic fieldwork.
As a research source, Mongolian Sound Worlds offers a wealth of useful information and highlights the contemporary issues and theoretical frameworks that help to clarify the multifaceted cultural landscapes of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia within the ethnomusicological literature. The individual chapters work very well on their own as course readings, and the companion website provides a rich multimedia accompaniment. I have already found these materials to be very useful in my own undergraduate course on music in Central Asia. The chapters are written in a style that strikes an excellent balance between ethnographic description, theoretical insight, and accessibility for a general readership, providing an opportunity for students to have a productive and engaging encounter with scholarly writing. Chapters devoted to specific themes, artists, instruments, traditions, and genres further expand the possibilities for integrating this volume into a course that may or may not focus exclusively on Mongolian or Central Asian music.
In summary, the authors and editors whose contributions are part of Mongolian Sound Worlds have produced an admirable work that balances depth and breadth, rigor and accessibility, fascinating detail and wider thematic arcs, while also greatly enhancing the representation of Central Asian music and culture within the ethnomusicological literature.
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[Review length: 733 words • Review posted on October 7, 2023]