a welcome addition to scholarship devoted to Indian colonial and post-colonial cultural production. * Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Asian Music: Fall/Winter 00/01. *
Farrell's ... foray into archival sources compellingly details the subtleties of power play in India's and Britain's struggle to control Indian music. It is precisely these features that will prove most interesting to those scholars outside the field of music. * Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Asian Music: Fall/Winter 00/01. *
This is a remarkably balanced, wonderfully objective book * Yehudi Menuhin, THES *
Taking an historical line, Gerry Farrell has a sharp eye for the sometimes wilful, sometimes comic misuses and failures of understanding that typified the colonial experience. * Robert Maycock, BBC Music *
intriguing book ... Indian Music and The West is a substantial piece of scholarly research, with some musical analysis and examples ... you're interested in the web of routes that led to these contemporary sounds, Farrell's book is an ideal place to start. * Andy Hamilton, The Wire *
intriguing book ... if you're interested in the web of routes that led to these contemporary sounds, Farrell's book is an ideal place to start * Andy Hamilton, Wire *
a fine work, ambitious in conception and meticulous in execution ... these case studies amount to nothing less than an astounding two-century historical overview of (what Farrell variously terms) musical orientalism, colonialism, and postmodern exoticism ... I applaud Gerry Farrell's truly visionary work. I think that his book may prove to be as important a resource for South Asian studies as has been Daniel Neuman's The Life of Music in North India (1980). While Neuman's work was the first major anthropological study of a South Asian art music tradition, Farrell has blazed a pathway equally important for our time, articulating the interweaving of the many strands which have constructed the relationship between Indian Music and the West. * Matthew Allen, The Journal of Asian Studies *
the first thoroughly researched work examining the ways the West has engaged Indian music over a period extending back to the eighteenth century. There is much to applaud in Farrell's work ... Farrell's book makes a positive contribution to the ethnomusicology of cultures in contact ... an engaging work that will be of particular interest to South Asianists and to ethnomusicologists who have a particular interest in crosscultural musical interactions. * Stephen Slawek, Yearbook for Traditional Music, 31/1999 *
