Jonathan Glasser's book, simultaneously erudite and accessible, brings a significant and welcome contribution to this growing field of research. J. Glasser describes a collection of historical and cultural references from the Algerian Andalusian musical tradition and, with great talent, shows that it is pervaded by themes of loss, revival, and preservation, and which in turn have contributed to the development ... Read moreof Algerian classical music.
Annales Jonathan Glasser's The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa is a landmark study of the history and contemporary practice of musicians and music lovers in the Moroccan-Algerian border area. In addition to shedding light on a little understood component of the broader network (what Glasser terms an archipelago) of Andalusi associations and performance practices, this important book explores the relationship of cultural heritage to place, narratives of origin and decline, the ways music can enliven debates about the dynamics of communal memory and belonging, and the anxieties of modernity. . . . Glasser strikes such a fine balance between his archival and field research that he creates the feeling of conversing with characters long gone (the early 20th century musician Edmond Yafil, for example) while at the same time understanding contemporary performers as embedded in a centuries- long genealogy of performance, communal memory, storytelling and place-making.
Journal of Arabic Literature Through sophisticated ethnography and painstaking multilingual archival research, Glasser shapes a compelling narrative about a notion of the lost. . . . In this book the lost becomes a complex notion which comes alive through an incisive analysis and the skilful interweaving of practitioners' and melomanes' (aficionados') words, sound recordings, printed compilations of song texts, photographs, transcriptions, and amateur associations. This is how Glasser invites his readers into an archipelago of sound, where debates and anxieties about loss and revival are embedded in the intertwining of the past, the present, and the future, giving continuity and vitality to Andalusi music. The Lost Paradise is an essential reference for researchers of the musical traditions of North Africa and the Middle East, and a crucial work for scholars of North Africa and beyond.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Based on more than a decade of research, The Lost Paradise offers a meticulous and accomplished portrayal of the Andalusian music milieu in Algiers, Tlemcen and their Moroccan borderlands and a cultural history of a century-long project of musical revival. Glasser's work provides a tremendously rich and deeply learned ethnography of the microhistories of one particular Andalusian musical tradition.
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