Music of the Whole Earth

By David Reck and Carol Reck

Book Overview

This extraordinary book explores the richness of sound, instruments, and music from the world's astonishing variety of cultural and musical traditions. David Reck is one of the few musical scholars to realize that music can be broken down into a few basic ideas, and to show how those ideas manifest themselves in disparate cultures. Here he discusses the similarities and differences between the Western oboe and the Indian shehnai, between our large orchestras and Bali's gamelans, between a Mozart symphony, a Japanese noh drama, and a Tibetan chant.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684146339
• ISBN13: 9780684146331
• Release Date: April 1977
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 545 Pages
• Weight: 2.87 lbs.

Customer Reviews

This is Music Appreciation on a world level- old but good!

David Reck's "Music of the Whole Earth" remains one of the great staples for learning about how and why the world's peoples make music. Originally published in the 1970's, Da Capo Press has now intelligently elected to reprint this gem. Richly accompanied by Carol Reck's photographs, "Music of the Whole Earth" may at first appear to be a coffee table book. Don't let this style (in pictures and prose) fool you. There is a tremendous quantity of meat here. In fact, I highly suggest this text for required adoption on the undergraduate General Education university level. Be advised: if you are an instructor, there are no safety nets; you must know your music culture areas. David Reck will not help you with the grand world tour: he starts with musical universals and moves to worldwide examples. You must be prepared to fill in the gaps of cultural relativity. However, students may well love the lack of stuffy syntax and the inclusion of ecstatic prose. Just one caveat: this text is not without mistakes and even a few errors. Be on guard for 'golly gee, it's just wonderful' descriptions, and the tendency to infer that there are more musical universals than we have a right to take for granted. Overall, this is an A+ classic for learning about the elements of music as they are practised on our shrinking globe.dw