Music and Letters

Although Johnny Farrajand Sami Abu Shumays strive constantly to connect their findings to their theorizing, their arguments for the links theycreatearelargely unpersuasive.Torepresent appropriately the region’s vast geography, cultural diversity, and the concomitant musical styles and contexts found in both, the authors should have explored maqa  m music through the lens of a composer. Historians or anthropologists interested in al-Mashriq’s post-First World War history and practices would expect any book to account for colonialism, nationalism, modernization , and globalization as significant determinants in music-making. Unfortunately, Inside ArabicMusic failsto do so. ISSA BOULOS HarperCollege,Palatine,Ill doi:10.1093/ml/gcab018 ß TheAuthor(s) (2021). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Musicians’ Migratory Patterns: American^Mexican Border Lands. Ed. by Mauricio Rodrı́guez. CMS Cultural Expressions in Music. Pp. 110. (Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2020. ISBN 978-1-1383-2534-0 (hardcover), »45; -0-4294-5044-0 (ebook), »13.59.) MauricioRodrı́guez’seditedvolume Musicians’Migratory Patterns: American^Mexican Border Lands is a most exciting book in that it splendidly illustrates the potential of a new format in academic publishing that we might tentatively term a short edited collection. Halfway between a special issue and a full-length edited collection, the book is comprised of a short preface, six articles, and no conclusion; we might describe it as a close cousinto the ‘minigraph’çwhich in itself is halfway between a long article and a monograph. The articles themselves vary in length (from ten to twenty-nine pages) andalso, aswe shall see, intone and approach. Such alternative academic formats havefounda home in recent years inthe Routledge Focus imprint, as well as other initiatives such as the Royal Musical Association’s monograph series, and it is encouraging to see examples like this startingto exploretheir possibilities. In terms of its subject matter, the book inserts itself in a relatively long-standing current in scholarship focusing on how musics and musical practices shape, and have in turned been shaped by, the complex dynamics of the US^Mexico border. Key examples include Alejandro L. Madrid’s edited volume Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.^Mexico Border (New York, 2011), Helena Simonett’s Banda: Mexican Musical Life across Borders (Middletown, Conn., 2001), and Mark Edberg’s El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction ofa Cultural Persona on the U.S.^Mexico Border (Austin, Texas, 2004). Perhaps because of the limitations imposed by the need to write a short preface, Rodrı́guez does not explicitly mention or engage with this scholarly tradition in his introduction, and his goals might therefore come across as rather modest and somehow haphazard, as he writes: ‘I primarily wanted to depict some of the current artistic and researching voices that, with their everyday work, shape and enrich the multicultural diversity of both countries. . .. If there is a general concept that somewhat ties together most of the present essays, it is something that I loosely define as New Immigrant Mexican Music, and this collection is written with the research and experiences that directly (or indirectly ) try to understand contemporary Mexican expressions at theborder andbeyond.The adjective ‘‘New’’ in this context should be understood in its literal meaning, including musics that are always new as the result of the emerging works of improvisation, experimentation, and listening.’ There are no promisesças is oftenthe case inthe prefaces of edited collectionsçto revisit, challenge , problematize or revolutionize the field of study, or systematically to tackle the matter at hand using a range of well-defined perspectives. This might come initially as a bit of a shock to a reader expecting a more conventional academic text; what Rodrı́guez and his co-authors propose here instead can be described as a less regulated, more serendipitous journey across the borderç and one that delivers no shortage of pleasures indeed. The first chapter (A¤ lvaro G. Dı́az Rodrı́guez’s ‘Sound through the Looking Glass: An Approach to the Dimensional Sonology on the Tijuana^San Diego Border’) skilfully confronts us with the very physicality (and aurality) of liminal spaces: the contribution takes the shape of a sonic journey around the beach shared by Tijuana and San Diego. The journeyçdespite the obligatory...