Music in the West Country

When, in 1866, the nineteenth-century German scientist Ernst Haeckel coined the phrase ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ (in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen [1866], ii. 300), meaning, effectively, that the evolution of the individual recapitulates the evolution of the species, he probably did not have in mind book titles as an exemplar. But book titles always recapitulate in microcosm the macrocosm of the book they represent. Kevin Tumlinson claims that a book title ‘can indicate everything from tone to genre to setting and more ... it’s a shorthand communication with the reader’ (‘The Psychology of Book Titles’, https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/the-psychology-of-book-titles/, accessed 21 June 2018). That shorthand is especially important when it includes the use of prepositions. Prepositions divide up ‘physical and mental spaces into conceptual categories’ as René Dirven has argued. Written by Stephen Banfield, emeritus professor of music at, fittingly, the University of Bristol, this book embraces and refines these nuanced distinctions. Distinguishing the use of from and of in the title of Cecil Sharp’s Folk Songs from Somerset (1904–1909), for example, Banfield likens from to the physical space of cultural tourism, whereas of occupies a more intrinsically psychological domain (p. 267). Sensitivity to prepositional identity continues in Banfield’s own title, consequently—Music in the West Country: Social and Cultural History Across an English Region—and in his asymmetrical use of definite and indefinite pronouns to define the West Country and an English Region respectively. The West Country is of; an English Region, from

Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · German · Humanities · Literature · Meaning (existential · Classics · Diverse Musicological Studies · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy