HAUSER, Michael, 2010 Traditional Inuit Songs from the Thule Area, Copenhagen, Museum Tusculanum Press and Meddelelser om Grønland, 346, vol. 1: 827 pages, vol. 2: 729 pages and CD.

This is a book the likes of which is rarely produced in the cash-strapped world of academic publishing. It is truly the magnum opus of Danish ethnomusicologist Michael Hauser whose keen and constant attention to the Inuit songs of the Thule area has been remarkable throughout his career. Now, in more than 1,600 pages replete with musical transcriptions and luxurious photographic documentation (nearly 300 pages, many in colour), he is presenting the fruits of his lifelong labour (albeit after publishing one other important book [Hauser 1992] on traditional Greenlandic music in addition to many articles). Hauser is old school, believing in comprehensive description, measurable scientific evidence, and the purity of traditions. Hence, some of the criteria that I might generally use to review a recent publication—knowledge of the discipline’s latest intellectual developments or theoretical nuance, for instance—are arguably not relevant here. Rather, it is important to see what can be learned from an author who has paid painstakingly close attention to the details of music structure, and an author who studied with the “elder statesmen”—notably Erik Holtved whose work he describes knowingly as “an […] epoch making collection” (p. 24), which he presents in volume 2—but also more recent filmmakers such as Jette Bang and Pauline Lumholt. Most importantly, what can we learn from an author who has maintained contact with Greenlandic families for nearly half a century? His own photos and dozens of important historic ones, sometimes obtained from family members of earlier collectors, sometimes from public archival collections, are truly a remarkable contribution in themselves, one that reflects his personal networks and relationships. Hauser’s study is a rare attempt at music history through detailed comparative analysis of song forms. Focusing on the Inughuit of the Thule area, he builds on earlier work that he published (Hauser 1978a, 1978b) on a particular song structure found in his 1962 collection, a form that he traced to the drum dance songs of southern Baffin Island, demonstrating that Baffin Island families who migrated to Greenland in the 1860s were the culture bearers. Here he provides additional data to extend his analysis of this song form (characterised by “level shifted iteration” or motives that are repeated starting on a higher or lower degree of the scale). He also takes on more intractable problems, particularly the question of why very few of these “level shifted iteration” song forms appear in the earlier Holtved collection of 1937, which had a very homogeneous structural profile. By tracing the genealogy of all of Holtved’s informants (as well as Holtved’s), Hauser learns that Holtved focused his attention on the “old” Thule families who had resided in the area before the Canadian Inuit arrived in the mid-19th century. He then looks at connections to earlier migrations and to linguistic lineages, confirming similarities to the Copper Inuit from the Western Canadian Arctic. By using historically deep data and large collections, he manages to show how song forms reflect divergent family histories of migration. His conclusions rely on the assumption that the tradition has been relatively stable, and he has sufficient instances of old and new recordings to make a rather convincing case (although I return to this point at the end of this review). In Section 1 he surveys Inuit research both in Greenland and in Canada. Ever committed to the framework of geography, he organises this survey by region, even though some researchers worked in several regions. This is generally a thorough and valuable compilation, particularly with regard to Greenland. Much later, in Section 6, he returns to the histories of collecting and expands upon the information in Section …