Publication Reviews

(from accordions to zithers); education; and Yamaha music-teaching. Each of

these entries helps show the range of topics covered in the single volume. While
some terms might have been grouped more systematically in a structured
classification system, it is pleasantly surprising to see just how many diverse
topics are included (for example, industrial relations, playground songs, subsidy
and yodelling).

A comprehensive index from 'a cappella singing' to 'Zyklus' provides an

extremely useful reference tool. There are simply hundreds of key terms shown
(names, fields, places, groups, bands, titles, etc). A useful part of the index is the
use of bold type to indicate main entries, and plain type to show the numerous
other topics that are included elsewhere in the book. For example, one can see
that the accordion has its own entry and is further referenced elsewhere in the
book. There are also many personal names included, which is a further useful
feature of the book.

It would be impossible in any review to cover comprehensively each of the

entries in a book such as this. I have attempted to generalise about some of the
entries that have stood out for me. In closing this brief review of a very long book,
it should be stressed that this is a ground-breaking work on Australian music and
dance which will certainly be the main reference book on this area for years
to come.

HENRY JOHNSON
University, of Otago

Bull, M and Back, L (eds) (2003) The Auditory Cuiture Reader,

Oxford and New York: Berg

When any of us realise the importance of soundscape, we experience an

awakening. This happened to me in 1987 when I tuned my ears to Philip Tagg,
who was giving a lecture at the University of Tampere about Soundscape and
Popular Music. That was the first time I ever heard the term soundscape, and I
have not regained tranquillity since.

It seems that Les Back and Michael Bull have experienced a similar awakening,
asking us to rethink sound's relationship to community, social experience, and to
power. In the introduction, they present thoughts in a "series of aphoristic
reflections" from Nagel to Bourdieu, to Schafer and Gilroy. According to the
writers, sound studies transgress academic divisions, and "visually based
epistemology is both insufficient and often erroneous in its description, analysis
and thus understanding of the social world" (3). They want to promote agile
listening which involves the tuning of ears to listen "again to the multiple layers
of meaning potentially embedded in the same sound" (ibid).

The two editors demand that the division between music studies and sociology
should be deconstructed. They are interested in the areas which, for a long time.

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have interested popular music scholars, such as globalization, place, identity,

belonging, history and memory - but also musical form, the dialogue with the
people who produce and create music, and participation in the spaces where
music is enjoyed. They select some themes from the articles and foreground
them: for example, the ways in which sound connects us in ways that vision does
not, and whether the ears are/have been passive or not. The discussion upon
dangerous sounds includes an interesting analysis by Horkheimer and Adomo
about Homer's Odyssey. The hero outwits the Sirens by tying himself to the mast,
with the oarsmen's ears blocked with wax. This passage thus becomes the "first
description of the privatization of experience through sound", and thus
experience also becomes aesthetized (7-8). Thematic threads in the book include
theoretical and epistemological questions, historical studies, cross-cultural
examples, accounts of urban life and popular culture and finally, the place and
significance of music.

The first of the 30 articles is 'Open Ears' by R. Murray Schafer. He is the

celebrated pioneer of soundscape studies, who sometimes tells a story about how
members of The Grateful Dead wrote to him saying his Tuning of the World was
the best book ever written. Who knows, maybe it is. Still, here Schafer goes on
reading and writing interesting things about sound. He moves to the interesting
psychoanalytic area of confession, tracing the roots of gehoren (to belong to) and
gehorchen (to obey) to horen (to hear): "We hear sound. We belong to sound. We
obey sound" (30). Schafer pays attention to the fact that Freud spoke little about
sounds, but listened very intensively to a person signalling in "one way through
controlled grammatical speech and in another way in the accents and accidents
that surrounded conscious communication" (32). But Freud, as well as Jung,
failed to understand the importance of the acoustics where the unconscious was
concemed. What Schafer does not mention is that some of the later post-
structuralist psychoanalysts, Kristeva included, have taken acoustics more
seriously. It is worthwhile, however, to notice how logic, ethics and aesthetics
became silent disciplines and remained so for centuries after St Augustine.

'Hearing Loss', by Professor of Religion Studies at Princeton University, Leigh

Eric Schmidt, offers an ear-opening history of the ocularcentrism and hierarchical
view of the senses that "was widely replicated in theological terms from
Augustine onward" (43). But he also glances at the efforts of the French and other
historians to offer a historical anthropology of the senses (especially Corbin and
Ong). He puts the discourse of Marshall McLuhan in its place by calling it the
"mythology of modem westem visuality" (46), which was constmcting common
rhetorical strategies of alterity: "The other to this westem technology and
epistemology was for McLuhan the 'ear culture' of tribal, non-literate peoples in
which spoken words had 'magical resonance'" (ibid). This juxtaposition is built
with an unreflective colonialist lens, as Schmidt aptly describes, dividing the
world between 'us' and 'them'.

The two main plots that the writer finds from the twentieth century Grand Story
of modem vision and hearing are, firstly, a hierarchy of the senses, and secondly,
the marked dichotomy between eye and ear cultures. Schmidt is far more in

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favour of, for example, Corbin's multi-sensory approach on the complexity of the
social, religious, aesthetic and erotic imaginations of the culture of the
Enlightenment. In fact, when reading about the American philosopher Benjamin
Rush, I begin to notice the connection with today's sound education and ear
cleaning exercises with Enlightenment philosophies! Rush lectured on the senses
to his students in Philadelphia saying that the more we cultivate and relish of all
the senses, "the more we shall be able to increase our knowledge" (52). Schmidt
also reminds us of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, which also was a listening
prison.

The first section is completed with Don Ihde's piece on 'Auditory Imagination',
a chapter from his 1970s book Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound,
a captivating and, in many ways, imaginative article. Steven Connor continues to
explore important and scarcely studied phenomena. Here he reports on clapping,
as a specialisation of the action of manual striking that is a distinctive
accomplishment of primates. Douglas Kahn discusses how musical and other
'sounds' were distinguished in the twentieth century westem avant-garde, which
according to him, was amazingly conservative. Paul Filmer ends the first section
with a basic sociological perspective on the persistence of "musica practica",
collective amateur music activity, a bit too much a collection of citations to my
taste though.

The second section, 'Histories of Sound' is a good one. Bruce R. Smith takes us
to London around the year 1600 (as in his book from seven years ago). Not
surprisingly, it is not the inhabitants of England themselves but the foreign
visitors who have been the best source of information for Smith. For example,
Paul Hentzner (1598) noted that English people are "vastly fond of great noises
that fill the ear, such as the firing of cannon and the ringing of bells" (129).

Perhaps the most intriguing chapter here is Mark M. Smith's 'Listening to the
Heard Worlds of Antebellum America'. His interesting task is to "listen to how
contemporaries heard the articulated and intimately related principal political,
economic, and social developments of Antebellum America" (137). He is most
interested in subjective and cognitive understandings of sound and the heard
world, in order to historicise and contextualise them. Smith argues that this aim
is different from the main concems of the World Soundscape Project, which,
according to him, focused on the demonstration of raised decibel levels over time.
It is interesting to read how the elites from both North and South applauded and
encouraged the association of sound with notions of "progress", and economic
depression with silence; and how that slowly changed. Masters in the So^uth of the
US exercised immense infiuence on soundscapes, and regulated the tiiries when
slave songs were permitted. Masters even made the slaves wear bells so it would
be harder for them to escape. But Mark M. Smith also describes the imaginative
ways in which the slaves could resist the acoustic order: "This was resistance
sotto voce" (147). This article provides food for thought for popular music
scholars; in the end, however. Smith gets a bit too excited by his research
material- without providing sufficient analysis.

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When reading Karin Bijsterveld's article I started to think that the book would
have profited from all the writers reading each other's pieces. Noise and the
dynamics of modem life is the topic here, as well as in the article by Smith.
Bijsterveld has studied the European and North American Noise Abatement
campaigns of the early decades of the twentieth century. She examines
technology and the symbolism of sound, and offers some interesting citations
from the early complaints about noise, although her conclusions about
symbolism, noise and power remain scant. The last historical piece is by Jonathan
Sterne, whose publication The Audible Past has already cemented his reputation
as a cultural historian of sound. In this publication he writes as fascinatingly as
ever on medicine's acoustic culture, stethoscope and mediate auscultation; an
important thread in the article is the discussion with Foucault.

Many already know Alain Corbin's famous book on Village Bells; Sound and
Meaning in the Nineteenth Century French Countryside. His chapter in this
collection on the auditory markers of the village will hopefully seduce people to
read the whole book. Bells still presents interesting food for thought as can be
understood from Steven Feld's new project The Time of Bells (2006). In this
book, Feld revisits acoustemology ("a union of acoustics and epistemology") and
the sound worlds of the Kaluli people. It was touching to read how one of the
long-time 'co-workers' of Feld, Ulahi, made a song about the puzzlement of who
is going to hear her songs. Feld explained, when making the record Voices ofthe
Rainforest, that "many people in Australia and in America would someday hear
her sing" (234). But who would be listening, "[a]nd what would they possibly
understand of her world within?" (ibid).

Cora Bender attacks the sources of paradoxes of identity, when describing how
Ojibwa powwow-sounds celebrate both Native identity and mainstream US
nationalism. Paul Moore offers a densely packed and interesting article about
'Sectarian Sound and Cultural Identity in Northem Ireland'. Jo Tacchi raises
important themes on 'Nostalgia and Radio Sound' in her article, which draws for
her study on the domestic consumption of radio sound in Bristol. Tacchi uses the
notion of nostalgia very much in the same way as Svetlana Boym, using
Battaglia's notion of practical nostalgia, that questions the "assumption that
nostalgia has a categorically negative social value for indigenous actors" (291).
The 'city' articles feature memory and sound. 'Aural Postcards: Sound, Memory
and the City' by Fran Tonkiss is a short lyrical postcard in itself. Music in
everyday life, identity and group singing, and racism at foolball stadiums, are
central figures in another short piece, 'Sounds in the Crowd' by Les Back. Jean-
Paul Thibaud gives an interesting glimpse into the great work of the French
soundscape researchers, based at CRESSON, the sound laboratory at the
Grenoble School of Architecture. They want to take seriously the dynamic nature
of listening and moving at the same time.

Thibaud, here, considers the micro-ecology of musical navigation, following the

'Walkman-listener through the urban environment and studying the balance
created between the heard environment and places travelled through. "[T]he

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sonic delimitations between domestic and public spaces by establishing a

continual listening between the two spaces" (333) are interesting here, as well as
for Michael Bull, who examines the music in cars, and the movement from home
soundscapes to car soundscapes. An interesting point made by Thibaud is the
ways in which different walkers in the city may choose, without knowing each
other, the same pathways according to radio-wave reception (a phenomenon
Thibaud calls a topophonic knot). Caroline Bassett's is a short but interesting
discussion on mobile phones and the dialectic between presence and absence; and
again the discussion involves the increasingly fragmented nature of urban
lifestyles. '

The Music section includes articles by Paul Gilroy (situating himself strongly in
the story about the importance of the guitar, Jimi Hendrix and 'the electric
church'), Vic Siedler ('Diasporic Sounds'), Stuart Hall ('Calypso King')^ Richard
Sennett and Julian Henriques (reggae sound system dance). Susan McClary
discusses Bessie Smith and the ways in which desire and pleasure are articulated
from a woman's listening point (the audience heard 'we' even if the singer said
T , as John Coltrane once said), Sanja Sharma discusses cultural hybridity which
may enter into the smorgasbord of contemporary urban culture, arguing that some
things within sounds may remain untranslatable within the regimes of hegemonic
representation. Today's smorgasbord, a Danish originality, has proven this right.

This is a book we all should read. It offers more than a good basis for anyone
interested in auditory culture,

HELMIJARVILUOMA
University ofJoensuu

Coyie, R (ed) (2005) Ree/ Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and
Cultural Identities., Eastieigh: John Libbey Publishing

As a musicologist, I find myself returning to writings on film music for their

readability and inclusivity, both traits exemplified in this volume. Editor Rebecca
Coyle considers this collection a continuation from her last anthology of
Australian film music scholarship. Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary
Australian Film Music, updating the collection to discuss films from the 1990s
and early 2000s (including Blackrock, Bootmen, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Paradise
Road, The Bank, beDevil, and One Night the Moon). Reel Tracks opens with a
description of the use of Australian film music at the 2000 Sydney Olympic
Games. Coyle essentially asks "How does one represent Australia musically?'.
The reader is invited to explore the multitude of Australian cultures and identities
that have been shown through the music and sounds used in the films discussed.

While the book's title includes the term "cultural identities", Coyle sometimes
slips into the trap of discussing an Australian "national identity" in jher intro-

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