Book Description

Mervyn Evan McLean, teacher, mentor, researcher and archivist, is the worthy recipient of this set of essays. Oceanic Music Encounters - the Print Resource and the Human Resource. The authors include colleagues and former students of an academic who was a practising ethnomusicologist only three years after the term was coined. Although most of his university career was spent at the University of Auckland, Mervyn's influence in the fields of Pacific music research and archiving were such that the contributions in this volume arc the result of both distant reputation and personal acquaintance. The volume is the product of the Study Group on Musics of Oceania within the International Council for Traditional Music, of which Mervyn has been a member for many years. The volume title is intended to encompass the span of Mervyn's professional interests, which include the role of archives in Oceanic music research and performance; material culture collections in music research and performance; the role of transcription in music research and performance; the importance of bibliographic research in tracing the connections between the past and the present; the significance of collaboration in research, particularly with scholars in other disciplines, and its significance to performance; and the colonial encounter and its implications for historical and contemporary performance.