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neilrcoulter's review against another edition
3.0
[review published in Imaginatio et Ratio, volume 4, pp. 57-61]
Eight years ago, Baker Academic’s “Engaging Culture” series, which included books on film, visual arts, popular culture, and leadership, added Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie’s development of a theology of music. A number of journals published reviews—including a somewhat infamous and dismissive review in Books & Culture. I read the book shortly after its publication, and I was glad for the opportunity to look at it again for this review. It is the reviewer’s burden to justify a review of an 8-year-old book, and two primary reasons come to mind immediately as I think about developments in the intervening years.
My first reason for looking again at Resounding Truth is the continuing trend of limited attention spans for thinking deeply about any kind of music. Begbie noted this in 2007, but it has grown in the years since. The ubiquitous presence of music through digital files, portable devices, and ambient soundscapes in public spaces seems to be leading people not toward deeper contemplation of and engagement with music, but rather to a perception of music as casual and disposable, primarily useful for matching or altering the listener’s mood. Consider, for example, Paul Lamere’s analysis of Spotify listener data. He found that there is a 48 percent chance that a listener will skip a streaming song before it ends; the likelihood that the listener will press “skip” in the first five seconds is 24 percent! This casual regard for music, along with the penchant for skipping when the appeal is not immediate, ought to alarm church musicians. Eight years after Resounding Truth, we clearly still need someone to “jolt our imaginations” (to borrow a phrase from Begbie) and guide us toward a more reflective, thoughtful engagement with music.
Another reason I wanted to look at Resounding Truth again is the growing body of laboratory research into music perception that has accumulated in the past eight years: research including Aniruddh D. Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain; David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation; and the work of all of the contributors to Patrick N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda’s Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotion. When I first read Resounding Truth, I chafed at Begbie’s insistence on what he calls the “integrities of the sonic order”: the physical and biological constraints that excellent music must respect. Having been socialized into the postmodern ethos of contemporary ethnomusicology, I was taught to believe that music is culturally conditioned: there are no universals, nor is music a universal language. In the years since my first read-though, I have been challenged and intrigued by the lab research that is showing that there may in fact be more universals in music perception—even across cultures—than we ethnomusicologists have cared to admit. With a mind more open to the possibilities of musical universals, therefore, I wanted to read Resounding Truth again and see if Begbie’s “integrities of the sonic order” still seem so jarring to me.
I remembered from my first reading that there is much in Resounding Truth to celebrate, and I’m happy to find that this is still very much the case. Begbie is at his best when he is explaining the grand narrative of the Bible and the Christian life. Chapter 8, “A Christian Ecology,” is a fine example of Begbie at his most inspiring. In this chapter, he looks at three questions: What kind of Creator creates? What kind of cosmos does this Creator create and relate to? What kind of calling do we have in this cosmos? Though I will disagree with some of Begbie’s implications of “tuning into and respectfully developing” the given order of the universe, I enjoyed his foundation-building in this chapter. He establishes a case for humans enjoying and appropriately using the creation. His discussion of the kind of cosmos we inhabit builds to this fantastic climax:
What a beautifully thorough bit of liturgy that is! Begbie as teacher and proclaimer of the Gospel is truly wonderful.
Another of Begbie’s strengths is his ability to read an enormous amount of material, synthesize it, and then present it as a concise summary of a large and complicated topic. In the first half of Resounding Truth this strength is on full display as Begbie gives an overview of what the Bible says about music (Chapter 2), and then moves on to a one-chapter summary of the “Great Tradition” of Western music, tracing ideas through Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, and the transition to modernism. The next chapters are biographical, giving brief but compelling sketches of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli (Chapter 4); J. S. Bach (Chapter 5); Schleiermacher, Barth, and Bonhoeffer (Chapter 6); and 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen and contemporary composer James MacMillan (Chapter 7). Covering all of that material in about 120 pages seems ludicrous—and certainly each chapter can only convey so much of the complexity of each topic—but Begbie handles it with the panache of an experienced and gifted teacher. Much of this content is, of course, standard fare for seminary or conservatory students; but it’s a gift to the “general reader” who hasn’t encountered these streams of history before.
A disappointment in these biographical chapters is that they focus on nine white, European males. Of course in some cases Begbie had little choice—who else would you look at for major trends in Reformation thought if not Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli?—this panorama is indicative of a general tendency throughout Resounding Truth to look only at the West. From the beginning, Begbie is upfront about this narrow scope, stating in Chapter 1 that “we are restricting ourselves largely to the broad tradition known as Western ‘tonal music’” (30). Again and again as I read, I felt that this self-imposed limitation was an unfortunate hindrance. I do not agree with Begbie that “given our limited space, it seems sensible to focus on the tradition of music that will be best known to readers of this book” (30). On the contrary, I believe that this narrow focus deprives the reader of a great number of “imaginative jolts” to think about music in a different way. Near the end of the book, Begbie affirms that “It may well be that cross-cultural conversation has a crucial part to play here” (257). I wish Resounding Truth could have benefited from that conversation, and I’ll point out a few specific areas that would have been better if the door for cross-cultural dialogue had been left open.
My biggest criticism of this Western-centric approach is that it limits the range of questions the reader is confronted with. The Western perspective, for example, repeatedly pulls Begbie back to the idea of music as an object: a separable, independent “thing” that can be taken off the shelf and observed on its own. Begbie says that “music is best construed first of all not as an object or objects but as something done” (39), and I completely agree; but I felt that the allure of music as an object, if not a “work,” was very strong, and Begbie is drawn to it even as he wants to see music as a social action. His chapter on Bach includes analyses of Jesus, der du meine Seele and Es ist Vollbracht, and the chapter on Messiaen looks at his Quartet for the End of Time. Occasionally Begbie shows us music “as something done,” as when he tells the story of the first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time: while Messiaen was a prisoner in Stalag 8A in 1941 (pp. 163ff.). In many other places throughout the book, however, we see that, for everything else it might also be, music is always primarily the sound, which can be observed apart from any other contextual elements.
Okay, but what is the alternative? In the traditional musics of many non-Western cultures, the musical sound is inseparable from the surrounding contextual elements: dance, drama, story, costume, location, time of day, participants, ritual, and so forth. “Music” is not a category that can be contemplated apart from everything else that happens when the musical sound is happening. In my work in Papua New Guinea, encouraging people to worship God using their distinctive local musical traditions, I’ve observed resistance to indigenized Christian worship because of this concept of traditional musics as a total package: the musical sound, instruments, costuming, dancing, and so forth. My suggestion that they then use this music (“music” meaning, to me, the sound produced by the instruments, and the singing that goes along with it; easy to incorporate into the Sunday morning service, right?) seems ridiculous to them (“music” meaning, to them, all the work of preparing for a traditional music event, which they certainly don’t want to have to do every Sunday!). For people in these non-Western communities, music is not a “work” or an object on its own. Rather, it is—together with the other expressive arts—primarily a social phenomenon that brings people together, allows important rites to occur, aids effective communication, and helps maintain proper harmony, both among humans and between humans and the spiritual world.
This is a perspective on music that can do two useful things for Westerners who are thinking about Christianity and music. First, it shows a value of music that we already, at least partially, understand—we know many ways that music brings us together socially—and expands this understanding through showing it from a different cultural perspective. Second, by taking the attention away from the musical sound as its own discrete object, it reduces the heavy burden that sound (the composition and performance of music) has to bear. The musical sound, allowed to be a part of the full context of the event in which it is heard, is now but one aspect of a total event; thus, it need not be weighed down by expectations that it somehow respect the given cosmic order. I tread very cautiously here, as I want to affirm that Christians ought to be thinking more deeply about music (holistically), while at the same time fearing that it may also be possible to place too much responsibility on musical sound. It’s a fine line, to be sure, but throughout Resounding Truth I felt that Begbie was leaning too far toward this overburdening of music. I believe that a cross-cultural conversation would have helped him stay grounded in music as an action, in which the sound itself is intimately interwoven with the many other elements of a performance.
Allowing this cross-cultural voice can also include a conversation in which Western and non-Western Christians can teach each other. What might we Westerners learn about the Bible’s references to music, for example, from communities that are culturally much more similar to biblical Near Eastern cultures than we are (in the way that Kenneth Bailey’s Middle Eastern experience has brought such fascinating insights about the gospels, and especially Jesus’s parables)? As long as we limit our scope to only Western traditions, these opportunities for exchange and mutual benefit are lost. This conversation would challenge Western theologians and musicians to consider the questions that non-Western Christians are asking—which may be quite different from the questions Messiaen and MacMillan have wrestled with in their musical thinking.
Now I return to the point that most troubled me on my first reading of Resounding Truth: Begbie’s ideas about the “integrities of the sonic order.” In order to push his readers beyond a typical postmodern perspective of music as merely an anthropocentric tool, he asks, “Might there not be something, so to speak, ‘in the notes’ and perhaps even in the makeup of all human beings that plays a key part in musical experience” (46). His response—“Indeed there is”—almost seems calculated to make ethnomusicologists bristle, as though he is about to veer into the “music is a universal language” trope. However, rather than affirm that music is a universal language, Begbie instead proposes that music is, in fact, a language of the universe. His historical overview guides the reader through the classical notion of the “music of the spheres,” and then into the modern era of music viewed as only a human creation; and now Begbie challenges his readers to consider that perhaps something valuable has been lost in that shift to modern and postmodern thought about music.
Exactly what elements constitute “integrities of the sonic order” is slightly unclear in Resounding Truth. Begbie initially refers simply to the physical and biological constraints placed upon sound production and perception: the physical properties of a plucked string, for example. To me, this seems a bit of common sense that doesn’t contribute much to a discussion of “Christian wisdom in the world of music.” Of course sound is limited by the physical properties of the universe, but that is not much of a guide for thinking deeply about music. Later, in Chapter 9, the sonic order has come to refer primarily to the harmonic series, upon which the Western tuning system is (somewhat imprecisely) based. Begbie states that “music may be grounded in a given physical order,” but qualifies that by adding that “it still involves selecting from and shaping that order, which can take diverse forms” (227). When he concludes that “however much particular individual interests may play a part, by far the majority of music made and heard can be shown to be rooted in given verities that make up what I have called the ‘sonic order’” (233), I am not at all convinced that this is the correct conclusion. On the contrary, at that point in the book I saw much greater significance in the cultural choices that inform music. I was especially disappointed that just when he reaches what ought to be the climax of his argument, he backs down, saying that “We do not have space to examine how these harmonic dimensions are played out in time, the extension of music through melody, rhythm, and meter, and the way these also relate to the physical world’s givens” (233).
Had Begbie drawn from scholars working on the laboratory research I mentioned earlier (though some important sources in this field were published after Resounding Truth, there was certainly relevant research available at the time Begbie was writing), his argument would have been stronger. Huron’s research, for example, goes beyond general notions of sonic order and investigates listeners’ expectations and predictions in hearing music—and he is careful to account for cross-cultural differences in order to isolate true universals in music perception. Without connection to this kind of research, Begbie’s integrities of the sonic order will remain imprecise, obstructing the conversation about Christian wisdom in music.
My experience—as a performing musician and as an ethnomusicologist with experience in a variety of non-Western musical traditions—is that, although music is grounded in the physical nature of the universe, that nature allows a very wide latitude for exploration and celebration. It is easy to criticize the extreme ideas of composers such as Pierre Boulez and John Cage (as Begbie does in Chapter 10; though I find much more to enjoy in both than does Begbie), but, for me, much less easy to suggest that what was wrong with their experimentation was a lack of respect for the given sonic order of the universe. Looking at musicking as a social activity rather than as a sonic “work” seems to me much more productive in thinking about a Christian perspective on music—and, indeed, all the arts, interconnected as they are.
Resounding Truth, then, contains much that is great, and some points about which I remain unconvinced. My challenge to Begbie is to co-author a follow-up to Resounding Truth with another author who represents a different cultural background, and with primary experience in a non-Western musical tradition. In that context, I would like to see Begbie continue to refine his ideas about the integrities of the sonic order (especially drawing from the empirical research on possible universals in music perception), but within the bigger picture of music as a social action, intimately interwoven with other arts and vital not for itself but for the ways that it creates and fosters community. May Begbie jolt us out of our headphones, away from our orchestral scores, and toward one another in love and celebration!
Eight years ago, Baker Academic’s “Engaging Culture” series, which included books on film, visual arts, popular culture, and leadership, added Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie’s development of a theology of music. A number of journals published reviews—including a somewhat infamous and dismissive review in Books & Culture. I read the book shortly after its publication, and I was glad for the opportunity to look at it again for this review. It is the reviewer’s burden to justify a review of an 8-year-old book, and two primary reasons come to mind immediately as I think about developments in the intervening years.
My first reason for looking again at Resounding Truth is the continuing trend of limited attention spans for thinking deeply about any kind of music. Begbie noted this in 2007, but it has grown in the years since. The ubiquitous presence of music through digital files, portable devices, and ambient soundscapes in public spaces seems to be leading people not toward deeper contemplation of and engagement with music, but rather to a perception of music as casual and disposable, primarily useful for matching or altering the listener’s mood. Consider, for example, Paul Lamere’s analysis of Spotify listener data. He found that there is a 48 percent chance that a listener will skip a streaming song before it ends; the likelihood that the listener will press “skip” in the first five seconds is 24 percent! This casual regard for music, along with the penchant for skipping when the appeal is not immediate, ought to alarm church musicians. Eight years after Resounding Truth, we clearly still need someone to “jolt our imaginations” (to borrow a phrase from Begbie) and guide us toward a more reflective, thoughtful engagement with music.
Another reason I wanted to look at Resounding Truth again is the growing body of laboratory research into music perception that has accumulated in the past eight years: research including Aniruddh D. Patel’s Music, Language, and the Brain; David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation; and the work of all of the contributors to Patrick N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda’s Oxford Handbook of Music and Emotion. When I first read Resounding Truth, I chafed at Begbie’s insistence on what he calls the “integrities of the sonic order”: the physical and biological constraints that excellent music must respect. Having been socialized into the postmodern ethos of contemporary ethnomusicology, I was taught to believe that music is culturally conditioned: there are no universals, nor is music a universal language. In the years since my first read-though, I have been challenged and intrigued by the lab research that is showing that there may in fact be more universals in music perception—even across cultures—than we ethnomusicologists have cared to admit. With a mind more open to the possibilities of musical universals, therefore, I wanted to read Resounding Truth again and see if Begbie’s “integrities of the sonic order” still seem so jarring to me.
I remembered from my first reading that there is much in Resounding Truth to celebrate, and I’m happy to find that this is still very much the case. Begbie is at his best when he is explaining the grand narrative of the Bible and the Christian life. Chapter 8, “A Christian Ecology,” is a fine example of Begbie at his most inspiring. In this chapter, he looks at three questions: What kind of Creator creates? What kind of cosmos does this Creator create and relate to? What kind of calling do we have in this cosmos? Though I will disagree with some of Begbie’s implications of “tuning into and respectfully developing” the given order of the universe, I enjoyed his foundation-building in this chapter. He establishes a case for humans enjoying and appropriately using the creation. His discussion of the kind of cosmos we inhabit builds to this fantastic climax:
What kind of cosmos do we inhabit, then? A world crafted in freedom and love, good but not God, made to flourish toward its end, and of ordered openness and diverse unity. All this is known through, and to be understood supremely in the light of, Jesus Christ, in whom the Triune God's purposes for creation have found their fulfillment, who himself embodies the future of creation, a re-created world to which even now the Spirit is directing us. (201)
What a beautifully thorough bit of liturgy that is! Begbie as teacher and proclaimer of the Gospel is truly wonderful.
Another of Begbie’s strengths is his ability to read an enormous amount of material, synthesize it, and then present it as a concise summary of a large and complicated topic. In the first half of Resounding Truth this strength is on full display as Begbie gives an overview of what the Bible says about music (Chapter 2), and then moves on to a one-chapter summary of the “Great Tradition” of Western music, tracing ideas through Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Boethius, and the transition to modernism. The next chapters are biographical, giving brief but compelling sketches of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli (Chapter 4); J. S. Bach (Chapter 5); Schleiermacher, Barth, and Bonhoeffer (Chapter 6); and 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen and contemporary composer James MacMillan (Chapter 7). Covering all of that material in about 120 pages seems ludicrous—and certainly each chapter can only convey so much of the complexity of each topic—but Begbie handles it with the panache of an experienced and gifted teacher. Much of this content is, of course, standard fare for seminary or conservatory students; but it’s a gift to the “general reader” who hasn’t encountered these streams of history before.
A disappointment in these biographical chapters is that they focus on nine white, European males. Of course in some cases Begbie had little choice—who else would you look at for major trends in Reformation thought if not Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli?—this panorama is indicative of a general tendency throughout Resounding Truth to look only at the West. From the beginning, Begbie is upfront about this narrow scope, stating in Chapter 1 that “we are restricting ourselves largely to the broad tradition known as Western ‘tonal music’” (30). Again and again as I read, I felt that this self-imposed limitation was an unfortunate hindrance. I do not agree with Begbie that “given our limited space, it seems sensible to focus on the tradition of music that will be best known to readers of this book” (30). On the contrary, I believe that this narrow focus deprives the reader of a great number of “imaginative jolts” to think about music in a different way. Near the end of the book, Begbie affirms that “It may well be that cross-cultural conversation has a crucial part to play here” (257). I wish Resounding Truth could have benefited from that conversation, and I’ll point out a few specific areas that would have been better if the door for cross-cultural dialogue had been left open.
My biggest criticism of this Western-centric approach is that it limits the range of questions the reader is confronted with. The Western perspective, for example, repeatedly pulls Begbie back to the idea of music as an object: a separable, independent “thing” that can be taken off the shelf and observed on its own. Begbie says that “music is best construed first of all not as an object or objects but as something done” (39), and I completely agree; but I felt that the allure of music as an object, if not a “work,” was very strong, and Begbie is drawn to it even as he wants to see music as a social action. His chapter on Bach includes analyses of Jesus, der du meine Seele and Es ist Vollbracht, and the chapter on Messiaen looks at his Quartet for the End of Time. Occasionally Begbie shows us music “as something done,” as when he tells the story of the first performance of the Quartet for the End of Time: while Messiaen was a prisoner in Stalag 8A in 1941 (pp. 163ff.). In many other places throughout the book, however, we see that, for everything else it might also be, music is always primarily the sound, which can be observed apart from any other contextual elements.
Okay, but what is the alternative? In the traditional musics of many non-Western cultures, the musical sound is inseparable from the surrounding contextual elements: dance, drama, story, costume, location, time of day, participants, ritual, and so forth. “Music” is not a category that can be contemplated apart from everything else that happens when the musical sound is happening. In my work in Papua New Guinea, encouraging people to worship God using their distinctive local musical traditions, I’ve observed resistance to indigenized Christian worship because of this concept of traditional musics as a total package: the musical sound, instruments, costuming, dancing, and so forth. My suggestion that they then use this music (“music” meaning, to me, the sound produced by the instruments, and the singing that goes along with it; easy to incorporate into the Sunday morning service, right?) seems ridiculous to them (“music” meaning, to them, all the work of preparing for a traditional music event, which they certainly don’t want to have to do every Sunday!). For people in these non-Western communities, music is not a “work” or an object on its own. Rather, it is—together with the other expressive arts—primarily a social phenomenon that brings people together, allows important rites to occur, aids effective communication, and helps maintain proper harmony, both among humans and between humans and the spiritual world.
This is a perspective on music that can do two useful things for Westerners who are thinking about Christianity and music. First, it shows a value of music that we already, at least partially, understand—we know many ways that music brings us together socially—and expands this understanding through showing it from a different cultural perspective. Second, by taking the attention away from the musical sound as its own discrete object, it reduces the heavy burden that sound (the composition and performance of music) has to bear. The musical sound, allowed to be a part of the full context of the event in which it is heard, is now but one aspect of a total event; thus, it need not be weighed down by expectations that it somehow respect the given cosmic order. I tread very cautiously here, as I want to affirm that Christians ought to be thinking more deeply about music (holistically), while at the same time fearing that it may also be possible to place too much responsibility on musical sound. It’s a fine line, to be sure, but throughout Resounding Truth I felt that Begbie was leaning too far toward this overburdening of music. I believe that a cross-cultural conversation would have helped him stay grounded in music as an action, in which the sound itself is intimately interwoven with the many other elements of a performance.
Allowing this cross-cultural voice can also include a conversation in which Western and non-Western Christians can teach each other. What might we Westerners learn about the Bible’s references to music, for example, from communities that are culturally much more similar to biblical Near Eastern cultures than we are (in the way that Kenneth Bailey’s Middle Eastern experience has brought such fascinating insights about the gospels, and especially Jesus’s parables)? As long as we limit our scope to only Western traditions, these opportunities for exchange and mutual benefit are lost. This conversation would challenge Western theologians and musicians to consider the questions that non-Western Christians are asking—which may be quite different from the questions Messiaen and MacMillan have wrestled with in their musical thinking.
Now I return to the point that most troubled me on my first reading of Resounding Truth: Begbie’s ideas about the “integrities of the sonic order.” In order to push his readers beyond a typical postmodern perspective of music as merely an anthropocentric tool, he asks, “Might there not be something, so to speak, ‘in the notes’ and perhaps even in the makeup of all human beings that plays a key part in musical experience” (46). His response—“Indeed there is”—almost seems calculated to make ethnomusicologists bristle, as though he is about to veer into the “music is a universal language” trope. However, rather than affirm that music is a universal language, Begbie instead proposes that music is, in fact, a language of the universe. His historical overview guides the reader through the classical notion of the “music of the spheres,” and then into the modern era of music viewed as only a human creation; and now Begbie challenges his readers to consider that perhaps something valuable has been lost in that shift to modern and postmodern thought about music.
Exactly what elements constitute “integrities of the sonic order” is slightly unclear in Resounding Truth. Begbie initially refers simply to the physical and biological constraints placed upon sound production and perception: the physical properties of a plucked string, for example. To me, this seems a bit of common sense that doesn’t contribute much to a discussion of “Christian wisdom in the world of music.” Of course sound is limited by the physical properties of the universe, but that is not much of a guide for thinking deeply about music. Later, in Chapter 9, the sonic order has come to refer primarily to the harmonic series, upon which the Western tuning system is (somewhat imprecisely) based. Begbie states that “music may be grounded in a given physical order,” but qualifies that by adding that “it still involves selecting from and shaping that order, which can take diverse forms” (227). When he concludes that “however much particular individual interests may play a part, by far the majority of music made and heard can be shown to be rooted in given verities that make up what I have called the ‘sonic order’” (233), I am not at all convinced that this is the correct conclusion. On the contrary, at that point in the book I saw much greater significance in the cultural choices that inform music. I was especially disappointed that just when he reaches what ought to be the climax of his argument, he backs down, saying that “We do not have space to examine how these harmonic dimensions are played out in time, the extension of music through melody, rhythm, and meter, and the way these also relate to the physical world’s givens” (233).
Had Begbie drawn from scholars working on the laboratory research I mentioned earlier (though some important sources in this field were published after Resounding Truth, there was certainly relevant research available at the time Begbie was writing), his argument would have been stronger. Huron’s research, for example, goes beyond general notions of sonic order and investigates listeners’ expectations and predictions in hearing music—and he is careful to account for cross-cultural differences in order to isolate true universals in music perception. Without connection to this kind of research, Begbie’s integrities of the sonic order will remain imprecise, obstructing the conversation about Christian wisdom in music.
My experience—as a performing musician and as an ethnomusicologist with experience in a variety of non-Western musical traditions—is that, although music is grounded in the physical nature of the universe, that nature allows a very wide latitude for exploration and celebration. It is easy to criticize the extreme ideas of composers such as Pierre Boulez and John Cage (as Begbie does in Chapter 10; though I find much more to enjoy in both than does Begbie), but, for me, much less easy to suggest that what was wrong with their experimentation was a lack of respect for the given sonic order of the universe. Looking at musicking as a social activity rather than as a sonic “work” seems to me much more productive in thinking about a Christian perspective on music—and, indeed, all the arts, interconnected as they are.
Resounding Truth, then, contains much that is great, and some points about which I remain unconvinced. My challenge to Begbie is to co-author a follow-up to Resounding Truth with another author who represents a different cultural background, and with primary experience in a non-Western musical tradition. In that context, I would like to see Begbie continue to refine his ideas about the integrities of the sonic order (especially drawing from the empirical research on possible universals in music perception), but within the bigger picture of music as a social action, intimately interwoven with other arts and vital not for itself but for the ways that it creates and fosters community. May Begbie jolt us out of our headphones, away from our orchestral scores, and toward one another in love and celebration!
kelvin's review
5.0
The way this author writes about music is fascinating and inspiring. The last chapter was especially interesting, talking about the amazing singular (and mystic) properties of music. Lots of wonderful quotes from all sorts of sources and many different musical examples cited. Great book.
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