Brand has produced a fascinating book based on his travels through Asia, which reads as 15 short stories. His narrative style, and desire to ‘illuminate life as part of a constellation of the cultural, social, political, educational, and musical context’ (p. 179), presents a challenge to the type of educational scholarship that he says ‘fails to acknowledge the soul of the music teacher’ (p. 185). He gives several reasons for writing this book but he says that most of all he wants to show to his students, whose view of music might be ‘provincial and ordinary, the poetry of music teaching’(p. v).

The stories in this book range from the heartbreaking story of a music teacher whose wife and two children were killed by a car driven by a drug addict, who is himself dying of AIDS, to exhilarating accounts of music teachers who have struggled through adversity and are providing a wonderful experience to students who would otherwise have nothing to brighten their lives. Brand travels through Thailand, China, Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar: he visits a remote teacher in a cave in Laos and stumbles upon another in a park in Bangkok.

To undertake this adventure required bravery: Brand has put himself in many difficult and dangerous situations, and it is good that he has been given the opportunity to undertake this life-changing expedition. However, I question how much it is to do with ‘comparing approaches to music education’? Whilst I accept his point entirely that the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of music teaching need to be enriched by the ‘who’ (p. vi), and understand that for him it was necessary to find the ‘soul’ of music teachers, I do not necessarily believe that the only way to do this was to search out the extremes in Asia. This implies that other music teachers in many nations are not as committed to their students, do not offer free lessons when students cannot afford to pay, and do not make sacrifices for them. My experience of many music teachers tells me the contrary. What Brand has found, it seems to me, are ordinary people living in very extraordinary conditions. But why does he believe that a teacher ‘engaged in meaningful and artistic work’ will have any more to offer music education because ‘his home-studio is only found by walking past beggars without legs, whose hands are pressed together and head bobbing’? Is he really suggesting that there are not teachers known to us all who have not ‘change(d) students’ lives for the better’?

I also question whether he has really done what he set out to do: how can he know if he has found the ‘soul’ of somebody? As he admits, he can only accept the ‘truth’ as it is given to him. He appears to be interested in giving the teachers a voice, but at the same time readily accepts that he has, ‘altered, embellished, or compressed the dialog of these music teachers’ stories in order to maintain literary coherence, achieve dramatic effect, and sustain reader interest throughout the narrative’. We also know little about how he actually communicated with them. Did he speak all their languages or was he relying on an interpreter for some of it? If the latter, then the ‘voice’ of the music teacher will be even further removed. What does he want us to learn? There is little context given, beyond the place where the music teacher is operating, and little to help us understand the cultural order of the communities or the social and political realities.

One of my difficulties with this book, as a reviewer in an academic journal dealing with music education, is the fact that it has been written in a sensationalist style. The chapter ‘Wooden Phalluses on Top of Piano Books: Dalat, Vietnam’ begins with the sentence, ‘The man who greeted me at the door, with his dirty shorts and zipper fly still open, is the piano teacher’. Although I enjoyed reading Brand's descriptions of the conditions under which these teachers live, and details about their lives, there is probably less than 10% about music teaching in it. It could be suggested that it is more about research methodology than music education per se, and this would certainly be another criteria for inclusion in the academic literature. For this to be the case, however, some methodological rigour concerning autobiographical or life history narrative would have enhanced the book's standing.

Perhaps what I have written will lead you to believe that I did not enjoy this book; this is far from the truth. I was fascinated by these stories and was taken into a world that is normally only found in travelogues. However, although I salute the idea of widening the horizons of western music students to include music teachers in extreme situations, I feel Brand tells us more about 15 individual music teachers than about the teaching of music more generally in Asia.