Catherine Grant is an ethnomusicologist at the University of Newcastle, in Australia. Her Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing and diverse literature on musical sustainability, one that may well prove to be foundational. The book has two aspects that are key. First, it looks to work focused on the sustainability of languages as a model for specific ways of thinking and acting in regard to fragile worlds of music. Second, it has a kind of systematic thoroughness and level of specificity rare in the literature on expressive culture.
The book moves point by point, introducing the problem, reviewing ways of thinking about endangered musics, establishing a comparative framework for thinking about music and language vitality, discussing what we can learn from work on endangered languages, and establishing a “music vitality and endangerment framework.” The author then goes to a case study, looking at Ca Trù, a Vietnamese musical form now listed by UNESCO as in urgent need of safeguarding. A “Where to from Here?” chapter closes the book. There Grant points out that stewardship efforts on behalf of culture and cultural expressions haven’t established a laudatory record of success, and she urges scholars to broaden their vision. By that, she means looking beyond the local, which has typically been our focus, to develop a more broadly informed view of sustainability. This is not to say that she encourages us to abandon our focus on, and advocacy for, the local; it’s that she believes that a wider, more comparative, view can help efforts at the local level.
It seems that linguists have established a comparatively strong record of thinking about endangered languages. That includes establishing rationales for the importance of language diversity, establishing ways of assessing the stability of various languages, and developing strategies for maintaining and revitalizing languages. Grant’s argument is that scholars worried about the decline of various music genres can learn from, and even model their work on, those precedents. To bring us to that point, she is remarkably systematic in laying out her thinking. The book is replete with numbered points, tables, and charts. For instance, she gives us a figure that is a graded typology of language viability (76), a table of “key players in supporting vibrant and viable music genres” (40), a box with an “Exemplar statement of purpose, based on models from language maintenance, for an organization supporting music sustainability” (100), and many others. Her chapters tend to end with bulleted points. This is a mode of writing that’s quite different from the more discursive examples that tend to populate our literature. And, although for this reader, her approach is a bit unsettling, seeming almost to quantify what others generally write about in more qualitative terms, I think that the systematic presentation is a virtue here. In a sense, it gives us talking points; it gives us rationale; it gives us measuring devices; it gives us standards. In short, it gives us something to work with. We need that.
Folklorists are likely to be troubled that the author seems mostly unaware of public folklore work in the United States, much of which is directly apropos. In his thoughtful foreword to this book, distinguished ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger characterizes Music Endangerment as an important contribution to the field of applied ethnomusicology. That it certainly is. But it’s considerably more than that; it’s a book that anyone interested in the maintenance of expressive culture should know.
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[Review length: 571 words • Review posted on January 21, 2015]