Combining the approaches of ethnomusicology and music theory, Analytical Studies in World Music offers fresh perspectives for thinking about how musical sounds are shaped, arranged, and composed by their diverse makers worldwide. Eleven inspired, insightful, and in-depth explanations of Iranian sung poetry, Javanese and Balinese gamelan music, Afro-Cuban drumming, flamenco, modern American chamber music, and a wealth of other genres create a border-erasing compendium of ingenious music analyses. Selections on the companion CD are carefully matched with extensive transcriptions and illuminating diagrams in every chapter. Opening rich cross-cultural perspectives on music, this volume addresses the practical needs of students and scholars in the contemporary world of fusions, contact, borrowing, and curiosity about music everywhere.

Michael Tenzer's profile page

Michael Tenzer is a professor of music at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Balinese Music (1991, 2nd edition 1998) and Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music (2000), which received the 34th ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Society for Ethnomusicology's Merriam Prize. He is also an internationally acclaimed composer in a diversity of genres.

"Analytical Studies in World Music provides a foundation for a truly cross-cultural branch of music theory. Its central premise is as simple as it is startling: that musics of different cultures can be regarded on equal terms, and that doing so deepens our understanding not just of the pieces being studied but of music as a whole. The book not only provides extremely useful entry points to a remarkably broad range of music, but does so with exemplary scholarship: Tenzer's introduction is revolutionary in its clear-headedness, gently and reasonably advocating a radical reconception of the ways we categorize, teach, and ultimately think about music in the world today."--Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"This groundbreaking collection tackles one of the most enduring issues in ethnomusicology: the analysis of the world's so-called non-Western musics using primarily Western theories and models. The authors have rewarded us with imaginative analyses that are responsive both to the sensibilities of the insiders who created this music and to those of the outsiders who have come to know and love it."--Ellen Koskoff, Professor of Ethnomusicology, Eastman School of Music, Former President of the Society for Ethnomusicology

"Tenzer's argument is clear and well informed. I have no difficulty with my students engaging with his views.... I am confidents that ASWM will become a recognized teaching tool. I am also in no doubt about the excellence of the chapters as lessons in musical analysis."--Kevin Dawe, University of Leeds

"Written by a distinguished group of ethnomusicologists, music historians, composers, and theorists, Tenzer's innovative collection includes both works that exist in written scores and in aural tradition, music precisely notated and music substantially improvised. Each study provides unique insights into its respective culture, and the whole, far more than the sum of its parts, looks forward to a direction in scholarship in which all of the world's musical works are seen equally worthy of analytical treatment that is sophisticated, culturally informed, and intuitively generated."--Bruno Nettl, Professor of Music and Anthropology Emeritus, University of Illinois, Former President of the Society for Ethnomusicology