MU 205: World Music

Twenty-four ethnomusicologists from eleven countries (Australia` Austria, Canada, China, Finland, Malaysia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States), balanced in age and gender, have contributed to our Handbook. The chapters, all newly written for this volume, theorize applied ethnomusicology, offer histories, and detail practical examples, with the goal of stimulating further development in the field. Some authors present contrasting case studies that encompass two or more mutually distant places. Some discuss circumstances within their own geopolitical (state) unit, while others base their arguments on their research in faraway countries. Themes and locations of their research projects in applied ethnomusicology encompass literally all world continents.

The Oxford Handbook of Community Music captures the vibrant, dynamic, and diverse approaches that characterize community music across the world. The chapters give a comprehensive review of achievements in the field to date, providing a ‘go-to’ volume that both deepens our understanding of what community music does and what it might become. The Handbook also looks to the future and charts new areas that are likely to define the field in the coming decades, such as social justice, political activism, peacemaking, health and well-being, and online engagement with music in community contexts, to mention a few.

The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology covers topics related to music, medicine, and culture, and represents a new stage of collaborative discourse among researchers and practitioners who embrace and incorporate knowledge from a diversity of fields. Importantly, such knowledge, by definition, spans the globe of traditional cultural practices of music, spirituality, and medicine, including biomedical, integrative, complementary, and alternative models. Medical ethnomusicology is rooted in new physics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, and of course, music, dance, and all the healing arts.

The presence of the phenomenological body is central to music in all of its varieties and contradictions. With the explosion of scholarly works on the body in virtually every field in the humanities, the social as well as the biomedical sciences, the question of how such a complex understanding of the body is related to music, with its own complexity, has been investigated within specific disciplinary perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body brings together these particular aspects of such relationships in a broad context and provides a platform for the discussion of the multidimensional interfaces of music and the body.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates the role of music in Christian practice and history across contemporary world Christianities (including chapters focused on communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia). Using ethnography, history, and musical analysis, it explores Christian groups as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions.

The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. In this volume, noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. This book demonstrates how music is becoming a unique mode of access into specific cites of cultural representation, exchange, contestation, and the construction of experience.