ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with an exploration of a concert that helps lay out some of the themes under consideration in Excursions in World Music. These include the notion of sameness and difference within ethnomusicology, and the need to adopt an ears-wide-open approach to listening—an approach that can begin to reveal what music can tell us about history, politics, race, class, and social life, among other things. The chapter then introduces the concepts of composition, time, and aesthetics, along with Alan Merriam’s model for studying musical cultures in order to prepare students for the musical materials and the methodologies included in the chapters that follow.
