Customer Reviews

The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The postgraduate seminar that I take part in chose this text because we hoped that it would offer a taste of various aspects of the cultural study of music that we weren't already familiar with, we hoped that it would make a good starting point for interesting discussions on issues in contemporary music and musicology. We were wrong! This book is superficial at best. A large part of every discussion was spent complaining about the poor quality of the scholarship or the hatchet job the editors have obviously done on the articles. Most of the ideas in this book are stale and much better discussions occur in other publications. It's disappointing to see authors of Lawrence Kramer's quality in a collection this bad, his was one of many articles in which simple ideas became confusing because of poor editing. This attempt to make musicology bite size fails miserably. The only useful thing about this collection is the list of further reading at the end of each article.

for some this book is very tough (see other reviews), but I found it startlingly good - well edited, insightful and covering a wide range of materials ad concepts in the field. It's interetsing that those who don't like it are usually those who also don't like the critical turn in musicology. Choose your sides!!!

This book was one of the worst reading experiences I've had. I can't imagine how the information in this book could be useful in any way. The contributors are long-winded and never really say anything substantial, probably due to poor editing. STAY AWAY!!