Afterlife Before Genesis: An Introduction : Accessing the Eternal Through Australian Aboriginal Music (Toronto Studies in Religion)

Rating:
Summary: Turner looses the readers trust from the beginning.
Review: The methodology used by Turner is to put it mildly, unprofessional. Therefore, he looses credibility from the beginning of the book leaving one questioning throughout: what is fact vs. what is fabrication?Furthermore, he makes huge assumptions and conclusions citing secondary sources of which he displays little if any understanding. Lastly, he misconstrues even a basic understanding of western musical vocabulary: e.g., fugue, polyphony, form, etc.I would not recommend this book other than as an example of bad scholarship.

Rating:
Summary: A challenging book.
Review: This brave and seminal work takes the reader into the world of music of a Northern Aboriginal community giving the reader an insight into aboriginal culture that can only be had through an understanding of their musical tradition. This is the most thorough analysis of an aboriginal musical tradition ever carried out, through an analysis of not only the songs but the tunes that carry them. This highly scientific and academically rigorous book undoes the less than scientific tendancy to force the unknown into easy conventional categories