The ten massive volumes of The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music have earned a prominent place in library reference collections since they began to be published in the 1990s. Each volume is organized along broad geographic divisions and features comprehensive articles and extensive bibliographies. The Garland Handbook series aims to make some of this scholarship available to home libraries and students in the form of affordable, abridged paperback editions of the original encyclopedia volumes. The Handbook reviewed here is based on Volume 4 of the original encyclopedia, which focuses on musics of Southeast Asia.
In terms of raw page count, The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music is about half as long as the original encyclopedia volume. It is a given in any project that cuts content so drastically that much will be lost in the process; the trick is to end up with something that stands on its own. In this regard, The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music succeeds admirably. To achieve the reduced size, the editors omitted several articles altogether and pared down the remaining text. For the most part, the cuts to the articles are judicious, and the text that remains packs a lot of useful information into a small package. The remaining articles have been updated, too, but only sparsely; for the most part the editors have achieved maximum effect with these minimal changes by briefly acknowledging the effects on the performing arts of some of Southeast Asia’s most profound political changes in the past decade.
The publisher heralds the Handbook’s "new pedagogical design" (see their website at http://www.routledge.com/textbooks/garlandhandbooks/), which suggests they are hoping that teachers will adopt it as a textbook. The new price point (just under $50), the inclusion of some thoughtful "questions for critical thinking" at the end of each section, and the establishment of a companion website do indeed make the Handbook viable as a classroom text for, say, an undergraduate course covering the musics of Southeast Asia. As a whole, however, the volume still reads more like an encyclopedia than a textbook. In the course of paring down the page count, the editors eliminated interesting information about cultural contexts and musical processes, which makes Southeast Asian musics pertinent to a liberal arts education, while leaving intact long litanies of musical instruments, ensembles, and technical terms. It appears that the original volume’s sections on island Southeast Asia have been pruned to only about 35% of their original size (considerably less than about 55% for mainland Southeast Asia). Regrettably, the reductions are mostly in the sections on eastern Indonesia--areas that are woefully underrepresented in other literature. The elimination of sections on Nusa Tenggara Timur and Maluku in particular diminish the Handbook’s utility as a textbook for courses on the musics of Indonesia. The "Guide to Publications" in the back matter will be helpful to students, especially considering its inclusion of a good selection of some of the many resources that have appeared since the original encyclopedia’s publication. We should keep in mind that these inexpensive paperbacks are not meant to supersede or replace the complete encyclopedia volumes; students can easily consult the original volumes in the library for more complete bibliographic guidance if necessary.
The original encyclopedia showed ample evidence of impeccable copy-editing and proofreading; the scrupulous attention to spelling and diacritical marks, especially in languages with complex orthographies (such as Vietnamese and Burmese) made the original volume a reliable resource for spelling and pronunciation guidance. Inexplicably, many typographical errors have found their way into the Handbook. For example, Margaret J. Kartomi’s name is mangled into "Margarat J. Karomi" on page 334, and the caption for Figure 6.6 on page 77 misidentifies angklung as "Sudanese" (instead of Sundanese). Many of the diacritical and tone markings have disappeared from Vietnamese terms (I counted at least four different renditions of "Dong Son"; compare pages 248, 335, and 348). There are disturbing inconsistencies with regard to diacriticals for the various "e" sounds of Javanese, too; for example, the word pesindhèn is also rendered as pesindhén and pesindhen. On a happier note, the many black-and-white photographs, which were dark and indistinct in the encyclopedia, are reproduced much more clearly in the Handbook.
The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music is an important supplement to the literature on Southeast Asian musics. Although it is perhaps too encyclopedic in conception to serve as a standalone textbook, it succeeds in making a great deal of well-written, up-to-date information available in a single inexpensive source. In terms of breadth of scope and quality of its scholarship, the Handbook fills an important niche.
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[Review length: 761 words • Review posted on October 29, 2008]