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Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions. Lawrence E. Sullivan, editor. 1997. Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions. viii, 320 pp., photos, music notation and transcriptions, figures, notes, bibliography. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $16.95.
Enchanting Powers is a collection of eleven essays, each one written by a leading scholar in his or her field. Two of them are reprints of articles already published elsewhere: Jonathan Hill, "Musicalizing the Other: Shamanistic Approaches to Ethnic-Class Competition Along the Upper Rio Negro," and Kay Kaufman Shelemay's "Mythologies and Realities in the Study of Jewish Music." The essays deal differently and through different approaches with music in the world's religions and its role in evoking the religious experience.
In his introduction, the editor of the volume, Lawrence E. Sullivan, refers, among other things, to the great Renaissance humanist Marcilio Ficino (1433-1499), emphasizing his ideas that reflect the intersection of music and religion, and of music and philosophy. It should be noted in this regard that most of his outstanding views were essentially shared by Greeks, Arabs, and other thinkers.
The attempt to analyze and define where music and religion intersect in the life and thought of different human social and cultural groups and creeds through the ages, as well as their present transformations, is undoubtedly a tremendous and highly challenging undertaking. Indeed, it is not an easy task to juxtapose visions, or a set of basic ideas belonging to cultures, with a written legacy expressed and conceptualized in numerous forms, with the scholarly analysis of thoughts and beliefs of non-literate societies as suggested in the oral traditions they transmitted.
Most of the essays included in the volume are remarkable in themselves. Two of them are of a general theoretical nature: In "World Musics and World Religions, Whose World?" Philip Bohlman, who refers to various twentieth-century examples, attempts to show how the sacred combined with everyday life endows religious practice with the power to recast the sacred as everyday life, and how,...