Book review

Nicholas Tochka’s Projekt Jon (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024)

Abstract

The monograph Projekt Jon is the second extended engagement of ethnomusicologist Nicholas Tochka with Albanian “light music” after the publication of his first book Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania (Oxford University Press, 2016). Projekt Jon has appeared in the Bloomsbury Academic series “33 1/3”, which is dedicated to compact monographs exploring specific music albums, and zooms in on the eponymous album by Ardit Gjebrea, one of Albania’s most popular exponents of light music, which Tochka describes as “for intellectuals the most politically significant musical form, and for listeners, the most cherished”