Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions (Religions of the World (Harvard))
Combined, the contributions to this volume offer new insight into the role of music in the history of religions, especially through what Sullivan calls the 'power of music's affinity--its mimetic capacity to attune itself to other realities or to provoke other realities into resonating in tune with it.' Each in a different way, the articles collected in this book demonstrate the modes by which the felt enhancement of music can combine with systems of meaning, while describing subsequent intellectual attempts to understand this experience on the part of religious people. The enthomusicological and music-centered perspective that the contributors bring to these and other questions invites scholars of religion better to apprehend the human phenomenon of music and thus more finely 'tune' their analyses of the mythic, ritual, and intellectual dynamics of religious traditions. (Anna M. GadeJournal of Religion)