Review

Reviewed Work(s): Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective
by Huib Schippers
Review by: Simone Krüger
Source: Ethnomusicology Forum , November 2010, Vol. 19, No. 2 (November 2010), pp.
273-275
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the British Forum for
Ethnomusicology

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/27895878

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Ethnomusicology Forum

This content downloaded from

178.83.16.109 on Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:53:10 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Ethnomusicology Forum 273

Facing the Music: Shaping Music Education from a Global Perspective

Huib Schippers
New York: Oxford University Press, 2010
vii+ 220 pp., ISBN 978-0-1953-7976-1 (pbk ?15.99)

This book is about the teaching and learning of musically diverse traditions in the
West. The author, Huib Schippers, delivers a highly engaging and accessible account
that blends theory with practice, concepts from music education and ethnomusicol
ogy with actual experience, which he draws from a 30-year background as sitar player,
music teacher and scholar. In doing so, the book advances discourse on such pivotal
themes as tradition, authenticity and context at various levels of contemporary music
education in schools, community organisations and professional training courses,
which it seeks to rethink and shape by considering global perspectives. Its rationale is
to reconsider well-established ways of teaching and learning world musics so as to
create more vibrant learning environments for transmitting and experiencing music.
What I find immediately compelling and admirable is Schippers' personal
engagement with the people whom he encountered during his career. The reader
gets a real sense of the quality of the author's interactions and learning processes,
which lends the book a sense of authority rarely encountered in the literatures on
cultural diversity in music education and transmission. Facing the Music is thus
deeply auto-ethnographic in style, combining thick, reflexive descriptions of the
author's own experiences of people, places and processes involved in the transmission
and learning of world musics with conceptualisations about a music education for
the twenty-first century.
The book's structure is also praiseworthy for its consistent and concise treatment
of very diverse contents. Each chapter explores a relevant issue surrounding cultural
diversity in music education: firstly outlining its history, concepts and theoretical
perspectives; secondly, illustrating its application to music education; and finally,
closing with a brief conclusion that brings together the main themes. For example,
an important contribution is made in Chapter 3, which explores the crucial themes
of tradition, authenticity and context. Schippers acknowledges the fact that music
education still often pivots around subject matters that valorise older, traditional
repertoires not from the West. Yet I find that terms like 'authenticity' ('recon
structed' authenticity, 56) could have been critiqued in light of more postmodern
and post-postmodern perspectives. Whilst Schippers draws on a wide range of
relevant discourse throughout, my own work on the transmission of ethnomusicol
ogy in European higher education (Kr?ger 2009) may also have been of use here.
Schippers proposes an impressive range of theoretical positions in relation to
context, transmission, interaction and cultural diversity, each having several binary
oppositions, all brought together in the form of continua that he calls the 'Twelve
Continuum Transmission Framework'. For example, issues of context can be situated
and understood at any point on a continuum between static traditions and those
contexts that are in constant flux; or on a continuum between 'reconstructed'

This content downloaded from

178.83.16.109 on Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:53:10 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 274 Reviews

authenticity and 'new identity' authenticity; or on a continuum between 'original'

context and recontextualisation (for the framework, see www.oup.com/us/companion.
websites/9780195379761/jpg/Graph.jpg). This is perhaps the most comprehensive
and inclusive framework for understanding musical transmission in culturally diverse
environments. Yet by seeking to accommodate 'everything', it naturally lacks a more
concrete proposition about world music education. I therefore find the framework
particularly useful as an analytical tool for describing specific situations of musical
transmission so as to better understand a musical tradition (as demonstrated in
Chapter 7). Yet there are also problems with the framework, which surround issues of
subjectivity and reliability (sf. 125), as well as the binary oppositions, the latter of
which may reinforce in students preconceived, stereotypical views of self versus other,
West against the rest, which raises questions as to whether continua (with their
opposing, dichotomous ends) are best suited for a framework that claims to be
inclusive and non-hierarchical. Important to note also is that the framework seems to
pivot around the transmission of musical performance practice, as demonstrated in
the final Chapter 7. Whilst performance is clearly important in students' musical
learning, a more nuanced, inclusive framework for cultural diversity in music
education could also have addressed other theoretical and practical teaching and
learning activities.
The epilogue is rather short and inconclusive about 'shaping music education from
a global perspective', which may have been a suitable platform for exploring more
concrete curriculum strategies. Thus, whilst the global aspect of the book lies
predominantly in its varied and revealing case studies and examples from teaching
and learning practices around the world, the actual ways in which music education
and transmission in schools, community settings and professional training contexts
may be shaped from a global perspective appears relatively little explored.
The book is accompanied by a user-friendly website hosted by Oxford University
Press, although much of the information is already available in the book. New
materials include photographs and (password-protected) audio/video tracks. Inter
estingly, the video examples are the sources of some of Schippers' anecdotes,
including excerpts from films/documentaries; field recordings of performance classes;
and interviews with teachers. Clearly, these are wonderful materials, but they are not
referenced in the book, leaving it to the reader to make the connections between print
and online materials. On a more practical note, references in the text (rather than as
endnotes) would have enhanced reader friendliness. Also to note are some
typographical errors, including 'Bailey' instead of'Baily' (14 and 199); 'the' instead
of'he' (41); 'a little a bit' (107); 'anount' instead of'amount' (128); 'started' instead
of'start' (136).
Overall, the book is a positive account of current issues on cultural diversity in
music education and transmission that may also have benefited from more critical
treatments of some terms and situations, and the general value of transmitting world
musics in the West. Claims like 'successfully' recontextualising a holistic, aural
tradition into a new teaching environment (150) or 'satisfying learning and teaching

This content downloaded from

178.83.16.109 on Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:53:10 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Ethnomusicology Forum 275

experiences for all involved' (165) may have benefited from a more circumspect
stance. Nonetheless, this is an engaging and authoritative book on cultural diversity
in music education that is highly effective in combining ethnographic evidence from
the author's own experience-based position as sitar player, scholar and facilitator of
music learning and teaching with a wide range of discourses from music education
and ethnomusicology.
Keeping in mind that the book's concern pivots around performance practice and
musical transmission as a reflector of a given musical tradition, this is indeed a
fascinating and engaging book, as well as an important acknowledgment (by one of
the leading academic publishers) of 'world music pedagogy' as an academic field,
which is still often ignored in certain academic circles. To this end, the book
represents a much-needed milestone that will be of relevance to music educators,
ethnomusicologists and students of ethnomusicology alike.

Reference

Kr?ger, Simone. 2009. Experiencing ethnomusicology: Teaching and learning in European universities.
Aldershot: Ashgate.

Simone Kr?ger
Liverpool John Moores University, UK
S.Kruger@ljmu.ac.uk
? 2010, Simone Kr?ger

This content downloaded from

178.83.16.109 on Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:53:10 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms