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Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music.

Article Excerpt
Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music. By Marcel Corbussen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. [x, 171 p. ISBN-13: 9780754664796 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN-13: 9780754664826 (paperback), $29.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Marcel Corbussen's book poses some crucial and probing questions concerning the relationship between music and spirituality. The author especially problematizes the concept of spirituality itself, rejecting it as a given and instead locating it, contingently, in the undecidable spaces--the thresholds--that exist between music and listener. Corbussen's position is decidedly postmodern, and he draws heavily on Derrida. Lyotard, Battaille, Barthes and a host of other likely suspects, engaging them all in an effort to deconstruct traditional and fixed conceptions of spirituality and to undo the notion of certain kinds of music as having intrinsic spiritual qualities. The author examines a small but diverse collection of music examples, ranging from "Hotel California" by The Eagles to John Coltrane's sacred jazz to contemporary sub/ultrasonic electronic music to the work of neo-spiritualist composer Arvo Part. Corbussen posits that the experience of the spiritual through music involves not a union with God or some kind of transcendent universal "other," nor necessarily sacred or religious music as such, but rather has to do with negotiating with the liminal, contingent "spaces between"--the thresholds, borders and margins--that open up in the act of encountering and engaging with many kinds of music. In this experience, which privileges the listener's relationship with music, essential but unstable/uncontrolled/uncontrollable aspects of music itself--including silences,...

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