Quote: Originally posted by Brian Prunka | This is a great essay, very interesting (and seemingly quite scholarly to me - certainly you have a lot of reference points).
If I may make two requests/suggestions:
1- Please use standard capitalization throughout. This would greatly increase the readability. At the moment there appears to be no capitalization at
all.
2- If you could footnote sources for some of the info/claims, that would be enormously helpful. Even if it's not page numbers, just something like
(Feldman, 1996) would help. As it is, you are presenting a synthesis of your studies, which while quite interesting and informative, is kind of a
dead end for anyone reading who would like to learn more. It's great that you listed your general sources at the end, but it's rather opaque.
Of course even as-is it's a great read. My area of interest is mostly Arabic music so this provides a lot of interesting context to various things
I've heard over the years, such as the absence of oud in Turkish performance practice until (relatively) recently - I wasn't aware that this was true
of qanun as well. Discography is much appreciated as well. |
Thanks, it's very gratifying to see that this is useful and basically makes sense, doesn't include egregious errors, etc., to someone like you with
specific knowledge of this field, rather than just my enthusiastic but nonspecialist rateyourmusic.com audience...
Do you have recommendations for books on Arabic music history, or are you overall synthesizing knowledge from many small and/or unwritten sources? I
forget if I've maybe already asked you this.
As for capitalization and footnotes - I've gotten similar feedback before, or maybe just imagined someone wanting me to include those things, but I
appreciate your framing, around functionality and capacity to spur further investigation. In both cases I specifically wanted to do things
'non-academically' or 'incorrectly' in order to exemplify 'non-institutionally-valid' but still 'good' writing, but it may be sort of a
baby-and-bathwater situation and I may take your suggestions for a future list or future edit of this list. |