World Music: a very short introduction, by Philip V Bohlman <br></br>World Musics in Context, by Peter Fletcher

A crusade to save music's endangered species

With the musical vogue of the moment, Oxford University Press is hedging its bets: Philip Bohlman's pocket squib alongside Peter Fletcher's top-price blockbuster. David and Goliath? Well, in contrast to Fletcher, Bohlman is a professional. "I write as an ethnomusicologist," he intones from his professorial perch in Chicago. And he's got the right issues in his sights: globalisation and homogenisation, the rich West's penchant for musical tourism, the unequal power relationship between those who make music, and those who record and sell it.

Unfortunately, Bohlman is also the sort of writer who gives ethnomusicology a bad name. For example, what were Bartok and his peasant singers doing at recordings? "Encountering each other, locked into the exchange of cultural knowledge." Bohlman puts on a pseudo-philosophical show of such self-importance that the reader finally feels quite ill. Did no OUP editor point out, in a kindly way, that the first half of his book is mere throat-clearing? Or that the interesting gobbets he produces are never welded into his argument? Or that the argument itself is confusing and confused?

When Bohlman forgets his academic dignity and simply tells a tale – as with the extraordinary Congress of Arab Music which took place in Cairo in 1932 – he proves he can swing a punch. Hindemith and Bartok were among the Europeans invited to this summit, but for them it was an exercise in "orientalism": the appeal of Arab music, says Bohlman, "lay in its inertness, in the fact that its narrative had been closed".

Peter Fletcher also focuses on that congress, but welds it into a fascinating analysis of how Westernisation began to impinge on other musical identities. In Turkey, it started in 1797 when Sultan Selim III (himself a noted composer) founded an Italian-style opera house, and introduced a scale akin to the European major scale. When Ataturk came to power, Westernisation became official policy, and traditional Turkish art music was declared "insufficient for the sophisticated soul and feelings of the Turk".

Iran's Westernisation began in 1862, when Emperor Nasseraddin Shah created a band to play polkas and waltzes. The Pahlavi dynasty completed the process, to a point where the spike-fiddle was temporarily cast into outer darkness. The Cairo Opera House gave powerful impetus to Western music in Egypt, where it was decided in 1932 that indigenous styles should be formalised and notated, so as to compete. But as Fletcher points out, notated scores eliminated the controlled improvisation which lay at the heart of the Arabic maqam tradition.

Fletcher's book is perverse, provocative and compendious. His thesis is the correlation between music and history; his crusade is on behalf of all the musics at risk to the march of MTV. But he eschews use of the term "ethnomusicology". Why, he asks, should studying Javanese music be more "ethnological" than the study of Italian music? Discuss.