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The Middle East. The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 6 edited by Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight F. Reynolds. New York: Routledge Press, 2002. 1182 pages, index, Compact Disc. $ 250.00 (Cloth) ISBN 0824060423

Appropriately enough, the author includes explanatory notes and sometimes historical and social background on the contents of these samples. The advantage of these notes is to facilitate the learner's grasp of the relationship between speech and context, speaker and audience. The samples survey a variety of subjects relating to the recent history of Sudan, its internal politics, religious traditions and institutions, its TV serial drama, poetry and the Sudanese diaspora. All these have a major bearing on the speaker's choices of a medium of expression, or even a particular way of pronunciation. In short, this selection moves beyond the practical demand of learning SA, and underpins some of the cultural mechanics and linguistic structures that non-native speakers may not capture without a strategic immediacy to the listening field with its sheer creativity, lubricating gap-fillers, intensifiers, idiomatic expressions and local colloquialism. Thus the book pays reasonable attention to some important nuances, swerved meanings, and to the way practical and theoretical issues overlap making certain decisions of linguistic classification and interpretation challenging.