Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, this edited volume of 17 essays is organized into three parts. The chapters in Part I (‘Music, consciousness, and the four Es’) question the assumption that consciousness is a matter of what is going on in individual brains, and investigate the ways in which musical consciousness arises through our embodied experience, is embedded in our social and cultural existence, extends out into world, and is manifested as we enact our relationships with and within it. Part II (‘Consciousness in musical practice’) engages with music as a corporeal and culturally embedded practice, conjoining individuals in the social sphere, and extending consciousness across actual and virtual spaces. The chapters in this part explore composition, improvisation, performance, and listening as practices, and consider how music, a paradigmatic example of meaningful action, reveals consciousness as grounded in doing, as well as being. Part III (‘Kinds of musical consciousness’) considers the nature of consciousness under a wide range of musical situations. The chapters in this part seek to deconstruct any invidious distinction between everyday and altered states of consciousness, suggesting that, through the manifold range of experiences it affords, music discloses consciousness across a phenomenological continuum encompassing multiple modalities. Taken as a whole, the volume exemplifies many fertile ways in which music studies can draw upon and contribute to larger debates about consciousness more generally.
Toward a neurophysiological foundation for altered states of consciousness