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Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s.

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Albanian Urban Lyric Song in the 1930s. By Eno Koco. (Europea: Ethnomusicologies and Modernities, no. 2.) Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004. [xxviii, 400 p. ISBN 0-8108-4889-2. $73. (hbk.); ISBN 0-8108-4890-2 $45. (pbk.).] Music examples, index, bibliography, 2 compact discs.

"The urban song must not remain only in the mouths of singers dressed in folk costumes and fez, but it needs to put on the modern dress of our time" (p. 59). Such is soprano Marie Kraja's explanation for the efforts of a generation of Albanian singers from the educated middle class, trained in western Europe in operatic technique, who returned home in the 1930s and transformed the older Albanian urban song repertoire into art song, to be performed to the accompaniment of piano or chamber orchestra. By recasting urban song as a cultivated art form that could share a concert stage with operatic arias, these performers helped to assure a prominent place for it in Albanian musical life up to the present day. It is the Albanian "lyric" song of the 1930s and the singers, instrumentalists, composer-arrangers, and lyricists who developed it that are the primary subject of Eno Koco's excellent and well-researched study. As the first monograph in English to examine an urban song repertoire from southeastern Europe, and the first to detail musical life in the region in the early twentieth century, it will be revelatory for international readers.

Aside from his skills as an ethnomusicologist, Koco is a highly accomplished...

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