Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music

If you've ever been to a concert or been connected to a university with a school of music, you'll discover yourself -or someone you know- in these pages:
-"In the music building you can't tell the quick form the dead without a program." (chapter 1)
-"The great ability of a violin student whom I observed was established when his dean was persuaded to accompany him." (chapter 2)
-"Some teachers of music history would accuse students who listen to Elvis Presley not only of taking time away from hearing Brahms, but also of polluting themselves." (chapter 3)
-At commencement, the graduates "were perhaps not aware that they had just participated in an event in which the principal values of the Western musical world ... had been taken out of storage bins for annual exercise." (chapter 4)

In "Heartland Excursions", one of today's foremost ethnomusicologists guides the reader on a lively and wide-raging tour or his own workplace. Bruno Nettle provides an insightful, sometimes tongue-incheek, always pitch ethnography of midwestern university schools of music from a different perspective in each of four chapters, alternating among three distinct voices: the longtime professor, the "native informant", and the outside observer, an "ethnomusicologist from Mars".

CONTENIDO:

Preface

Introduction

1. In the service of the masters
-Scholar from Mars
-The pantheon
-Mythological variations
-Pairs, sweets, and oranges: a scherzo
-Orchestral episodes
-The great masters and cultural values

2. Society of musicians
-Music communities
-The principal classes
-Classes of musicianship
-The importance of heritage
-A group of ensembles

3. A place for all musics? Confrontation and mediation
-A meeting place
-Bringing the past to the present
-Confrontation: convergences and collisions

4. Forays into the repertory
-The shape of music
-The principal works
-A society of musics
-Cultural performance

Afterword
Notes
Index