This book explores the multifarious ways in which musical identities are constructed, and emerge in the everyday lives of “adults, teenagers, and children” in myriad locations around the world, as they engage in music learning and teaching environments (2). The focus, as the editor Lucy Green says in the introduction, is to “reveal differences and commonalities in musical identity formation, learning, and teaching practices across a range of contexts, along with many potential implications for music educationalists and others” (2). The authors in the book employ a range of tools: ethnographic fieldwork involving participant-observation, interviews, passive observation, and a combination of these. Through these methods, authors try to shed light on many facets of musical identities including: how do students acquire and negotiate musical identities; how do teachers' identities affect the processes of transmission in formal and informal contexts; and how do diasporic groups construct and maintain their identity through music? The book contains research from six continents: nine chapters on Europe, two on Africa, one on South America, two on North America, five on Asia, and one on Australia.
The various ideas explored in the book, broadly summarized, include: formal and informal music learning experiences among indigenous populations in Australia; popular music as an intergenerational communicative medium in Japan; Filipino women’s early childhood musical enculturation and the effects on their musical identities as they now live in Hong Kong; preserving Balinese identity through musical teaching and transmission in Indonesia; Western musical instruction as a colonizing activity in postcolonial Malaysia; changes in the guru-shishya relationship within Karnatic classical music training in India; Gujrati Muslim immigrants’ (the Kalifa community) music-making and performances in the UK; nationalism and Greek popular music; emergence of local identity through informal music-learning in wind bands on Corfu, Greece; advocating for children’s musical games as resources for pedagogy in South Africa; personal, local, and national identities in Ghanaian performance ensembles; the role of music festivals in expressive collective identity in the Lapland region (in Sweden, Norway, and Finland); exploration of how teachers' personal experiences affect their roles as music teachers in Sweden; musical identity and masculinity in Iceland; analysis of the role played by young musicians in transmitting "traditional" Scottish music; the importance of extracurricular music-making in discovering and affirming musical identities in England; allowing students the opportunity to make expressive musical decisions and the emergence of musical identity in ensembles in the US; inclusion of informally trained students in a Brazilian music school, and its effects on students' musical identities; and the construction of musical identities on the internet.
Two chapters from the book focus on diasporic groups, and one in particular is based on "online ethnographic study" in the US or what the author calls “a netographic investigation” (300). In the online study, the author took interviews in cyberspace, in the process discovering that the students expressed that they felt a higher level of freedom in music-making inside the program, compared to the pressures of performing in real life. The author’s data clearly shows that the students considered real life to be different from virtual life. Although the author provides us with a unique understanding of how students construct their musical identities in the virtual world, the fact that this was a US-based study left me wanting more information on the students’ class, race, and ethnic backgrounds, and how each of these might have affected individual students’ experiences in the real as well as the virtual world. In the same vein, I began wondering about the racial, ethnic, and class aspects of not only students, but also teachers, while reading some of the chapters that were based in Europe. I believe a discussion of these factors--race, ethnicity, and class--would have enriched the studies, since all three profoundly affect an individual’s musical identities anywhere in the world.
Other than in music education, this book, or materials selected from it, could be useful for teaching introductory graduate or undergraduate classes in ethnomusicology or musicology. In the classroom, the book can be used to center discussions on nationalism, globalization, localization, modernity, postcolonialism, indigeneity, and other themes, in conjunction with musical identity to show how musical identity is constructed and maintained during formal and informal modes of learning and teaching among children, teenagers, and adults. More importantly, the authors have successfully foregrounded evidence in their work, using theory and external literatures only when necessary, making the book easier to read and comprehend. Finally, the use of varied data collection tools, and their use to contextualize the case studies socially, historically, and geographically, makes this book a useful resource to anyone interested in teaching or learning practical methods of data collection and data interpretation.
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[Review length: 773 words • Review posted on September 20, 2018]