Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music.

By Bruno Nettl. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ISBN 0-252-02135-5 (cloth); ISBN 0-252-06468-2 (pbk.). Pp. xiii, 170. $35.00 (cloth); $12.95 (pbk.).

Heartland U. is a fictional university, made up by Bruno Nettl from features of several midwestern universities in which he has worked during his long and distinguished career as an ethnomusicologist. It has a large and prestigious school of music that teaches not only theory, history, and composition but also performance to an advanced level. The school is housed in a big, impressive Music Building whose students, faculty, and administrators pride themselves on their devotion to music, "an abstraction that exists without human intervention" (p. 15), and, in particular, to the pantheon of great European composers, mainly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose names are engraved high up on the building's facade and who "are celebrated in and surrounded by rituals such as concert, rehearsal, lesson, and practice session" (p. 16). The physical facilities that are provided for these activities are lavish. The school of music is an expensive place to maintain, and in return the university receives its tribute in the form of that prestige that in American society is attached to traditional European …