The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures. Ed. By Harris M. Berger, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm

Enquiry into the musical mind seems especially energized at the moment. Researchers are employing an ever-expanding set of strategies and technologies to study music perception and practices, from the experimental to the aesthetic. This co-edited volume showcases the particular power and currency of work guided by methods and ideas from phenomenological and ethnomusicological traditions to understand musical consciousness, practice, and meaning as they are situated and enacted. The goal is thus to work with musical encounters in their actuality, rather than through abstraction. This is an expansive and sophisticated collection of voices with twenty-two chapters grouped into seven sections, covering a diverse range of theories, phenomena, and music cultures. The publication invites readers into a rich and engaged intellectual community positioned by the editors in the preface as a ‘wide middle way’ between the theoretical eclecticism observable in some recent research and an ‘isolated dogmatism that unquestioningly adheres to a body of canonical works’ (p. xxi). Their middle way certainly feels very wide at times, but the collection and the phenomenological movement it promotes are ultimately all the richer for this.