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 DeVeaux, 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

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• Publication Date: October 16, 2015
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 428 Pages
• File Size: 1,819 KB