Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians

Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians. By Timothy J, Cooley. [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp, viii + 293, ISBN 0-253-34489-1) What impact do we have on those in the of our research? Two decades of self-examination have explored the nature of fieldwork as an increasingly participatory, self-reflexive and dialogic process built on personal relationships and commensality. In a post-colonial, postmodern, global world, we are becoming increasingly aware of the range of implications that our work has inspired among the peoples and cultures we study. Timothy Cooley compellingly addresses such issues in his insightful examination of outsider involvement in the Podhale region of southern Poland. Located on the northern side of the Tatra Mountains that form part of the Carpathian Mountain crescent which extends from southern Poland into the Balkans, Podhale is home to the Gorale (Highlanders) and has a long history of association with outsiders despite its relatively isolated geographic position. In this book, the author explores constructions of ethnicity and music-culture as a direct corollary of the impact of tourists (long attracted to this mountainous region) and ethnographers (similarly attracted to a rich folk culture) in a study drawn from over ten years of research and fieldwork, and built on a dissertation and several published articles. Locating his work in the tradition of Anderson (1991) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983), Cooley suggests that over a period of two centuries, tourists and ethnographers have joined with longtime residents of Podhale in imagining and inventing Gorale as a distinct ethnic group within Poland and the music-culture with which they are associated (4). Though isolation is the most frequently cited reason for the Gorale people's distinct cultural identity, Cooley builds upon this as an irony by suggesting that outside interest also stimulated the very invention of Gorale ethnicity and that it now provides, through the tourist industry, an important motivation for maintaining this ethnicity(8). He goes on to detail the instrumental music, songs and dances that have come to identify the Gorale of Podhale as both sound/ gesture and idea, and the way these have contributed to making and maintaining the Gorale as a distinct ethnic group. Making Music in the Polish Tatras comprises seven chapters in addition to an introduction and epilogue. These chapters fall into two main parts: the first three provide a historical orientation to the region, people, music-culture and scholarship; the second four revolve around the concept of the village in today's world and provide ongoing examples of change and adaptation. Each chapter situates the discussion within an expansive theoretical framework to contextualize specific ethnographic work within larger issues relevant to ethnomusicology, folklore, and anthropology in general. These include concerns with locality and place, tourism and ethnography, music and identity, nationalism and transnationalism--all within an ethnomusicological tradition engaged with the epistemological goal of understanding rather than explaining music-culture (Titon 1997). Chapter 1 (Podhale) introduces the reader to this small region and people before focusing on the music-culture itself. Here Cooley provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the distinctive music associated with the Gorale. Dividing it into vocal and instrumental genres, music for dancing, and dance genres, he provides transcriptions and recordings based on his own field research as well as published collections. This presents a fine introduction to a little-known repertoire about which there is a dearth of information in English (see also Wrazen 1988). (A brief observation here serves to illustrate some of the idiosyncrasies of ethnoaesthetics and local terminology in presenting repertoire: I have been told that the bass pattern defining Figure 1. …

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