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The subject of music spans an enormous territory, and the risk of any publication about it is that writers (and readers) will find themselves getting easily lost. In his latest book, Roger Kennedy has avoided this pitfall by focusing on an original and important theme, that of the power of music: where does this almost mysterious power originate, he wonders, how does it manifest itself, and why and how can music make composers, performers, and listeners feel empowered? By exploring such issues from different angles the book represents a valuable addition to the growing psychological and psychoanalytical literature on the complex relationship between music, bodily and mental - both cognitive and emotional - processes.
Gustav Mahler, in a letter to Lois Marshall, stated that ‘we find ourselves faced with the important question how, and indeed why music should be interpreted with words at all’ (quoted in Cooke, 1980, p. 54) - a rhetorical question also faced by many others, Kennedy himself included. If language is then inadequate to describe the beyond words musical experience, would this paradoxically make his book redundant? Not at all, of course, as the exploration of the reasons for such alleged incompatibility between musical and verbal languages, of how it manifests itself and what the respective functions of these two languages are in human lives, both personal and collective, is of great importance. Music, Kennedy explains, can ‘convey areas of experience that language cannot reach … [it] has the unique ability, unlike language, to convey simultaneously contrary emotions’ (pp. 6-7); ‘it does not have a clear object … nor an obvious narrative structure: [unlike verbal language] it is not representational’ (p. 11). Indeed, it may have a dreamlike quality: ‘one enters the dark world in which language and daily structures of time and causality no longer reign supreme’ (p. 15). Music allows us to lose ourselves in it ‘while also remaining ourselves; these are the mom