Reviews

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  Music and the Performance of Identity on Marie-Galante, French Antilles
  Reviewed by Lauren Poluha
  Ron Emoff’s latest book is a musical ethnography that seeks to illuminate the role of music in the production of history and identity on the small Caribbean island of Marie-Galante. The author, an associate professor of anthropology and music at the Ohio State University at Newark, conducted fieldwork on Marie-Galante during the summers of 1997 and 2002, and the ethnographic content of Music and Performance has been gleaned from these trips. Music and Performance is...
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  Remains of Ritual: Northern Gods in a Southern Land
  Reviewed by David Locke
  I read this book three times before writing this review. The first time through was frustrating: the organization of information seemed jumbled up and the writing style needlessly arty. Rather than review it then, I let the book "lie fallow" on the shelf for a few months. On second reading, the book's design drew me in and I came to appreciate its many well-written, evocative passages, as well as its strongly argued ideas and conclusions. Rather than aggravating me with an...
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  Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code (SOAS Musicology Series)
  Reviewed by Jesse Ruskin
  Although African drum languages have been of scholarly interest since the late 19th century, only a few book-length works have been published on the subject. As one of the most in-depth studies of an instrumental speech surrogate to date, Amanda Villepastour's book makes a valuable contribution to this literature. Her subject is the bàtá, a family of double-headed drums from southwestern Nigeria that is closely linked to òrìṣà (deity) devotion among Yor...
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  Shir Hodu: Jewish Song from Bombay of the ‘30s
  Reviewed by Michael A. Figueroa
  The past few decades witnessed a growing interest in the music of the Jewish communities of India. Indeed, the emergence of the close-knit community of Indo-Judaic Studies in the academy at-large more or less coincided with this increased attention to Indian Jewish music. Sara Manasseh, an ethnomusicologist who has been at the forefront of this surge, has collaborated with record producer Julian Futter in the release of a fascinating compact disc, entitled Shir Hodu: Jewish Song from...