Michael Church 
The Other Classical Musics 
Fifteen Great Traditions

The Other Classical Musics offers challenging new perspectives on classical music by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions.


Winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award for Creative Communication 2015


There is a treasure trove of underappreciated music out there; this book will convince many to explore it. The Economist


Whatis classical music? This book answers the question in a manner never before attempted, by presenting the history of fifteen parallel traditions, of which Western classical music is just one. Each music is analysed in terms of itsmodes, scales, and theory; its instruments, forms, and aesthetic goals; its historical development, golden age, and condition today; and the conventions governing its performance. The writers are leading ethnomusicologists, and their approach is based on the belief that music is best understood in the context of the culture which gave rise to it.


By including Mande and Uzbek-Tajik music – plus North American jazz – in addition to the better-knownstyles of the Middle East, the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and South-East Asia, this book offers challenging new perspectives on the word ‚classical‘. It shows the extent to which most classical traditions are underpinnedby improvisation, and reveals the cognate origins of seemingly unrelated musics; it reflects the multifarious ways in which colonialism, migration, and new technology have affected musical development, and continue to do today. With specialist language kept to a minimum, it’s designed to help both students and general readers to appreciate musical traditions which may be unfamiliar to them, and to encounter the reality which lies behind that lazy adjective’exotic‘.


MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; since 2010 he has been the music and opera critic of
The Independent. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings and, in 2007, two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya.


Contributors: Michael Church, Scott De Veaux, Ivan Hewett, David W. Hughes, Jonathan Katz, Roderic Knight, Frank Kouwenhoven, Robert Labaree, Scott Marcus, Terry E. Miller, Dwight F. Reynolds, Neil Sorrell, Will Sumits, Richard Widdess, Ameneh Youssefzadeh

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction – Michael Church

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam – Terry E. Miller

Java – Neil Sorrell

Japan – David Hughes

China – the guqin zither – Frank Kouwenhoven

Chinese opera – Terry E. Miller and Michael Church

North India – Richard Widdess

South India – Jonathan Katz

Mande jaliyaa – Roderic Knight

North American jazz – Scott De Veaux

Europe – Ivan Hewett

North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean: Andalusian music – Dwight Reynolds

The eastern Arab world – Scott Marcus

Turkey – Robert Labaree

Iran – Ameneh Youssefzadeh

Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – Will Sumits

Bibliographies

Über den Autor

MICHAEL CHURCH has spent much of his career in newspapers as a literary and arts editor; he is a former television critic of The Times, and since 2010 has been the opera critic of The Independent. From 1992 to 2005 he reported on traditional musics all over the world for the BBC World Service; in 2004, Topic Records released a CD of his Kazakh field recordings, and in 2007 two further CDs of his recordings in Georgia and Chechnya. He is the editor of The Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions (Boydell Press, 2015), winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Award for Creative Communication.