This volume serves as a good example of how one can apply reflective methods to ethnomusicology. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

Choice Reviews

A delight to read ... the clarity of Davis's writing opens doors for many. The confluence of historical sources and the author's sensitive ethnographic study of contemporary practices enriches the texture of the music itself. Ma'luf provides a non-European perspective on nationalism that has long been wanting in studies of modernity. The book fully deserves to become a standard text in the study of music in the Middle East/North Africa.

Philip V. Bohlman, Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of Music and the Humanities, The University of Chicago

This is an important work that provides a critical, clear and concise analysis of the impact of Tunisian cultural nationalism on, and through, the medium of music.

Richard C. Jankowsky, Ethnomusicology Forum

The musical form, like related Arab musical traditions in Morocco, Algeria, and Libya, is alleged to have been brought to North Africa by Muslims and Jews fleeing the Christian reconquest of Spain from the 10th to the 17th centuries. Davis (ethnomusicology, U. of Cambridge) examines the music in such terms as Arab musical aesthetics; modernization, Westernization, and Egyptianization; the use of notation in oral tradition; musical nationalism and cultural policy; concepts of art and popular; and relations between traditional music and the mass media.

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