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World Musics in Context: A Comprehensive Survey of the World''s Major Musical Cultures. (Book Reviews: Ethnomusicology).(Book Review)-

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World Musics in Context: A Comprehensive Survey of the World's Major Musical Cultures. By Peter Fletcher, with a Foreword by Laurence Picken. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. [xv, 734 P. ISBN 0-19-816636-2. $150.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

This large and substantially illustrated book attempts to survey the world's major musical cultures in both their distant and recent past, and to some extent, in their manifestations in the present. It is a brave effort. There are few works that have tried to carry Out this ambition, and none, to my knowledge, by the pen of a single author. All of the world music surveys that come to mind-most of them are either textbooks by Americans or multivolume efforts such as the New Oxford History of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954-90) or the recent ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (New York: Routledge, 1998- 2002)-have been produced by teams of at least two, in one case five, or even dozens of authors. Moreover, World Musics in Context is unlike other so-called world music compendia that deal only with non-Western and folk repertories, for it covers the art music of the Western world as well. The words "in context" in the title suggest that this is not only about musics, but about the histor ical and cultural contexts in which the musics lived.

Writing and producing it was rather a Herculean task, and Peter Fletcher deserves a great deal of credit. It is therefore sad to report that the author died in 1996 at the age of sixty, before publication of the book. Fletcher was a distinguished and widely published music educator, music sociologist, and conductor active in the United Kingdom and Canada. It seems that his last major effort was the completion and publication of the...

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