Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing

"A fascinating thesis and a timely synthesis.... Becker urges the reader to view certain arcane cultural rituals as being in the mainstream of spiritual development and argues that the resulting trance-like states may relate to the basic fabric of emotions and consciousness, which are our ancestral, animalian heritage. This is both a risky and courageous undertaking that challenges both cultural and neuroscientific studies."

--Jaak Panksepp, author of Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions

In Deep Listeners, Judith Becker brings together scientific and cultural approaches to the study of music and emotion, and music and trancing. Becker claims that persons who experience deep emotions when listening to music are akin to those who trance within the context of religious rituals. Using new discoveries in the fields of neuroscience and biology, Deep Listeners outlines an emotion-based theory of trance using examples from Southeast Asian and American musics. A companion CD includes excerpts from several of the musical genres under discussion, and a 16-page color insert presents vivid documentation of the global experience of "deep listening."

"... [A] significant contribution to the literature on music, trance, ritual, and cognition, encompassing an impressive body of literature on the subject, and bridging disciplines in an entirely new way.... This book will be important and fascinating for musicologists,cognitive scientists, and others interested in the relationship between music, emotions, the mind, and the body." --Journal of the American Musicological Society

"There is such a wealth of stimulating ideas here.... I find thet [Becker's] ideas reinforce and validate one's intuitions about music and its power to move the listener." --American Record Guide

"[S]uccessfully, yet distinctively, provides an important contribution to the growing literature on music, spirituality, and experience." --ETHNOMUSICOLOGY :Jrnl Soc Ethnom

"[Examines] music, emotion, movement, and thought through the lens of trancing." --International Journal of Listening Indiana University Press

Judith Becker is Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, University of Michigan, where she directs the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the University Gamelan. Her field of expertise is the music of Southeast Asia, and she has conducted research in Burma, Indonesia, North India, and Sri Lanka. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Introduction

An historical interlude: trance in Europe and the United States

Chapter 1: Rethinking 'Trance'

Chapter 2: Deep Listeners

Chapter 3: Habitus of Listening

Chapter 4: Trancing Selves

Chapter 5: Being in the World - Culture and Biology

Chapter 6: Magic through Emotion: Towards a Theory of Trance Consciousness

Postscript: Trancing and Human Evolution