This Thing Called Music Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl [Hardcover]

Nettl is one of ethnomusicology's founding fathers and revered senior figures, part of a pantheon that includes Mantle Hood, David McAllester, William Malm, and Alan Merriam. Besides writing for a plethora of publications, Nettl advised dozens of doctoral candidates at the University of Illinois, and many of them celebrate their mentor in this Festschrift. Nettl represents modernist, data-centered ethnomusicology, not the current theory-based postmodern form. These 35 essays provide a broad cross section of his students and their non-Illinois contemporaries, who form a kind of Nettl-based solar system. Although many Festschriften are random collections on miscellaneous subjects, this one will serve as a kind of reader in classic ethnomusicology and could well be used by graduate students because it covers field-based, historical, (music) theoretical, medical, and childrens ethnomusicology, with essays on the US (including Native American), Europe, Latin America, and East, South, and Southeast Asia. The volume does not reflect ethnomusicologys current fascination with postmodern cultural criticism and its sometimes off-putting writing style. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.In This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno Nettl, editors Victoria Lindsay Levine and Philip V. Bohlman salute not only a great scholar and beloved teacher, but also a thinker whose search for the meaning and ontology of music has exerted a global influence.The most fundamental subject of music scholarship provides the common focus of this volume of essays: music itself. For the distinguished scholars from the field of musicology and related areas of the humanities and social sciences, the search for music itselfin its vastly complex and diverse forms throughout the worldcharacterizes the lifetime of reflection and writing by Bruno Nettl, the leading ethnomusicologist of the past generation. This Thing Called Music: Essays in Honor of Bruno NettllC€