Overview

Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first book to situate non-Western music within the intellectual culture of nineteenth-century Britain. It covers many crucial issues -- race,orientalism, otherness, evolution -- and explores the influence of important anthropological theories on the perception of non-Western music. The book also considers a wide range of other writings of the period, from psychology and travel literature to musicology and theories of musical transcription, and it reflects on the historically problematic term ""ethnomusicology."" Representing Non-Western Music discusses such theories as noble simplicity, monogenism and polygenism, the comparative method, degenerationism, and developmentalism. Zon looks at the effect of evolutionism on the musical press, general music histories, and histories of national music. He also treats the work of Charles Samuel Myers, the first Britain to record non-Western music in the field, and explores how A. H. Fox Strangways used contemporary translation theory as an analogy for transcription in The Music of Hindostan (1914) to show that individuality can be retained by embracing foreign elements rather than adapting them to Western musical style. Bennett Zon is Reader in Music and Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study, DurhamUniversity UK and author of Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology (Ashgate, 2000).

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Richly documented. . . . Draws upon sources from an impressive array of disciplines: biology, psychology, anthropology, ethnomusicology and history. . . . The history of the discipline of ethnomusicology, . . . is told in this fascinating monograph with admirable verve and clarity. -- Ian Woodfield * JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION * The message is clear: even in its beginning ethnomusicology was, on balance, a force for the good in a world awash with racism. . . . Zon produces an impressive body of evidence for his case. . . . A feast of discourses and sources. . . . A revelatory history. -- Shay Loya * MUSIC & LETTERS * [Brings] to the fore a sense of both the foreignness of the nineteenth-century disciplines and their familiarity, grappling as they did with many of the same problems of method and theory that continue to engage modern music scholarship. . . . Representing Non-Western Music shows Zon to be at the forefront of research on the history of music scholarship. -- Grant Olwage * VICTORIAN STUDIES * A comprehensive and meticulously researched piece of scholarship that is all the more impressive for its vast scope. . . . An admirable accomplishment that is sure to engage scholars interested in the history of the British Empire, British perceptions of music and race, and the role of the social sciences in articulating both. . . . Compellingly demonstrates how the practices of the previous century made [the work of Myers and other pioneering scholars of non-Western music] possible. -- Eric Saylor * NORTH AMERICAN BRITISH MUSIC STUDIES ASSOCIATION NEWSLETTER * Zon has done us a great service. . . . [His] history of a discipline [ethnomusicology] before it was even a discipline . . . bring[s] to light a vast array of primary source material that will be relatively unknown to most readers. . . . Intertwines nicely with currents in other disciplines, especially anthropology. * CURRENT MUSICOLOGY *

Richly documented. . . . Draws upon sources from an impressive array of disciplines: biology, psychology, anthropology, ethnomusicology and history. . . . The history of the discipline of ethnomusicology, . . . is told in this fascinating monograph with admirable verve and clarity. JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL MUSICAL ASSOCIATION (Ian Woodfield) The message is clear: even in its beginning ethnomusicology was, on balance, a force for the good in a world awash with racism. . . . Zon produces an impressive body of evidence for his case. . . . A feast of discourses and sources. . . . A revelatory history. MUSIC & LETTERS (Shay Loya) (Brings) to the fore a sense of both the foreignness of the nineteenth-century disciplines and their familiarity, grappling as they did with many of the same problems of method and theory that continue to engage modern music scholarship. . . . Representing Non-Western Music shows Zon to be at the forefront of research on the history of music scholarship. VICTORIAN STUDIES (Grant Olwage) A comprehensive and meticulously researched piece of scholarship that is all the more impressive for its vast scope. . . . An admirable accomplishment that is sure to engage scholars interested in the history of the British Empire, British perceptions of music and race, and the role of the social sciences in articulating both. . . . Compellingly demonstrates how the practices of the previous century made (the work of Myers and other pioneering scholars of non-Western music) possible. NORTH AMERICAN BRITISH MUSIC STUDIES ASSOCIATION NEWSLETTER (Eric Saylor) Zon has done us a great service. . . . (His) history of a discipline (ethnomusicology) before it was even a discipline . . . bring(s) to light a vast array of primary source material that will be relatively unknown to most readers. . . . Intertwines nicely with currents in other disciplines, especially anthropology. CURRENT MUSICOLOGY

This major study explores how various learned discourses of Victorian and Edwardian Britain represented -- in both words and notation -- music outside the western art tradition (mainly non-western but also, in the process, folk music of the British Isles). The topic is obviously an important one, bearing on the history of ethnography and social thought, ethnomusicology, the British Empire, and the history of the idea of race. Bennett Zon's book is substantial, comprehensive, extremely scholarly, and well written. It should reach a wide audience. --Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway, University of London Bennett Zon's Representing Non-Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain examines how non-Western music was represented in the literature of one of the great imperial powers. The result is an important contribution not only to the history of ethnomusicology but also to the larger issue of how conceptions of music were shaped by and, in turn, helped shape British ideas of self and other during a period that formed a great deal of the political and social situation that is still with us. Zon's knowledge of a dauntingly large body of sources is thorough and comprehensive, and he is keenly aware of the way these texts interact with and influence one another over the ambitiously long period he studies. -- David Gramit, University of Alberta, Canada

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