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Evocative, creative, disturbing, and, in places, deeply moving, this collection of essays is remarkable in its ability to approach music in a manner that allows both the power and the mystery of this art form to remain present and palpable while concurrently suggesting transcendence. It is rarely reductive and that, itself, is a notable achievement. The book is comprised of fifteen essays, two interviews and a CD, which, for me, was a symbolic descant to the stirring material offered in the different chapters.
The editors, Paul Ashton and Stephen Bloch, present the readers/listeners with an expansive range of topics that invites us to re-imagine the facility of music to mediate the depths of psyche. The authors have engaged with therapeutic and analytic material innovatively, mingling theoretical postulates of Winnicott, Bion, Langer, Eigen, Stern, Freud, and Jung with the music of Mahler, Schumann, Tavener, Piazzolla, Pärt, Beethoven, and Howlin' Wolf (citing just a few). The movement in the chapters assumes an alchemical dimension, stretching our minds and engaging our emotions. Silence carries a valence that is comparable to sound, evoking the void, emptiness, nothing. (Bloch , pp. 193-212). Like a complex musical creation, the book engaged me on multiple levels, alternately evoking disparate emotions and multifaceted thoughts.
Even as the individual pieces offer unique, insightful, and occasionally praxis-orientated scholarship, a number of leitmotifs emerge in the opus. Wetzler identifies one clearly: ‘Reaching to a place beyond language, music can move us in ways words rarely do… the impact of music can evoke overtones of something in us which we have lost, perhaps even sacrificed, in the name of our so called development, something which we are continually trying to refind’ (p. 145). This idea reverberates in Anderson's chapter on Beethoven's Passion Music, with slight variation/amplification, ‘[music] uses the transformative abilities of the ear to provoke the