A book about ethnomusicology should have the word “music” somewhere in its title. This one does not, so it is difficult to know ahead of time what it is about. Historical Sources and Source Criticism is a collection of essays based on the proceedings of the 17th International Conference of the International Council of Traditional Music held in Stockholm, Sweden, May 21–25, 2008. A review of the online program from the conference shows that seven of the original papers were not included, and several authors have modified their original topics and titles.
As the title implies, this is not a book about contemporary fieldwork in ethnomusicology. It is a book about the evaluation of early written music and early sound recordings. The twenty-three contributors come largely from northern and eastern Europe, but their attention is on music from all over the world. This gives the volume great breadth.
That said, the individual essays vary greatly in quality and in interest. In some ways, this is a book for specialists written by specialists. But it is also a kind of sampler in its examination of many national musical traditions. Most of the papers focus on fairly narrow topics, yet only a few of them are highly technical. Thankfully for this reader, all of the essays are fairly short.
The editor, Susanne Ziegler, writes in her foreword about the difficulty of publishing all of the papers in English, since English is the native language of only one contributor (whom she leaves unidentified). She therefore laments the many problems she had in translation and transliteration. Ziegler’s editing contains a number of rough edges that betray English as her own second language. In Jürgen Elsner’s paper, for example, we encounter awkward sentences such as “In this case it concerns the uncritical use of the treatises on music influenced by Sufism or on the Sufistic doctrine leaned on music which amount odd results.” There are a number of other instances such as this in the volume, which could have profited from a native English-speaking proofreader. Still, we can be grateful to Ziegler that the book has been made available to the English-speaking world.
The book has seven main sections, starting with 1) History of Ethnomusicology, and followed by 2) Unknown Historical Sources, 3) Tracing National Musical Idioms, 4) Historical Sound Recordings Revisited—Musical Change, 5) Historical Layers of Folk Music, 6) Folk Song Collections and Source Criticism, and finally, 7) Writings on Music.
For this reader, there is perhaps one essay in each section which stands out, and space limitations restrict how many of these can be addressed here. Of special interest is Ingrid Bertleff’s paper, “Writing the History/ies of Ethnomusicology—Historical Sources, Source Criticism, and the Construction of Armchairs.” Bertleff is especially adept at outlining and defining source criticism, which she calls “a bundle of methods which enable the researcher to evaluate different kinds of sources and allow him/her to assess their origin, production, and transmission as well as their credibility and function.” She goes on to discuss the importance of looking at primary as well as secondary sources, saying “Phonographs [photographs?], correspondences, and other archive material has [sic] barely been used to reconstruct the scholarly work of earlier generations of ethnomusicologists.”
Perhaps the most engaging paper in the collection is Per Åsmund Omholt’s “How Old Is a Tune?” on the topic of Norwegian fiddle tunes. Omholt alerts us that the older a tune is thought to be, the greater its value and prestige. And because of the prestige generally associated with older music, especially from a conservative standpoint, our judgment may be warped in favor of what we want to believe, even when the evidence cannot be well determined. Using Norwegian material, Omholt finds that very old fiddle tunes, for example, can often be dressed up with new performance styles, thereby disguising them, just as more recent tunes can be played using older performance styles. He argues that in the absence of hard evidence and in the presence of uncertainty, we can and should look at dating in terms of probability.
Omholt’s paper finds a companion in Hans-Hinrich Thedens’ piece, “A Desire for the Genuine and Ancient: Dealing with Historical Sources in Norwegian Music.” Thedens looks at the building of Norwegian identity through music and includes a discussion of how the Hardanger fiddle came to be its national emblem. In doing so he indirectly connects his study of historic instruments to Omholt’s study of historic tunes.
One additional piece of broad interest is Slawomira Zeranska-Kominek’s “A Written Record of an Oral Tradition: Darvish Ali’s Treatise on Music as an Historical Source.” Drawing on the writings of Steven Feld, Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, and Albert Lord, Zeranska-Kominek persuades us of the importance of “verbalised thinking” about music, exploring the way music is contextualized within the framework of orality. Specifically, she looks at the musical theory of Darvish Ali Changi, who wrote an extended treatise on the music of present-day Uzbekistan and Afghanistan in the early-seventeenth century. Changi was, by her account, “one of the earliest ethnomusicologists” in the world, and there is much to be learned from him.
In hindsight, there is much to recommend in this book, but the reader must sort the wheat from the chaff, essay by essay, not knowing what lies ahead, and hitting stylistic bumps and potholes along the way. It has the further disappointment of a poor paperback binding, so that even on one reading, a third of all the pages fell out. It is the kind of book that ought to be found in large university libraries, if not on the scholar’s own shelf.
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[Review length: 934 words • Review posted on May 19, 2011]