The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology

Medical Ethnomusicology is a new field of integrative and holistic research and applied practice that approaches music, health, and healing anew, engaging the biological, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual domains of human life that frame and inform our experiences of health and healing, illness and disease, life and death. The power of music to create health and healing at the individual, community, and societal levels is not only linked to these domains of human life, but is intimately interwoven with the ever present and multifaceted frame of culture, which is often where meaning lies, and is a key factor that creates or inhibits efficacy.

The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology appeals to all those interested in music, medicine, and culture, and represents a new stage of collaborative discourse among researchers and practitioners who embrace and incorporate knowledge from a diversity of fields. Importantly, such knowledge, by definition, spans the globe of traditional cultural practices of music, spirituality, and medicine, including biomedical, integrative, complementary, and alternative models; is rooted in new physics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, and of course, music, dance, and all the healing arts.

The book is more than the first collected volume to establish the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and express its broad potential; it is also an expression of a wider paradigm shift of innovative thinking and collaboration that fully embraces both the health sciences and the healing arts. The authors encourage the development of this new paradigm through an openness to and engagement of knowledge from diverse research areas and domains of human life conventionally viewed as disparate, yet laden with potential benefits for an improved or vibrant quality of life, prevention of illness and disease, even cure and healing.

Benjamin Koen, Editor, is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Xiamen University. Dr. Koen is widely published and author of the book Beyond the Roof of the World: Music, Prayer, and Healing in the Pamir Mountains (OUP). Jacqueline Lloyd, Associate Editor, is Professor of Medicine and Education Director of Geriatrics, Florida State University College of Medicine. Gregory Barz, Associate Editor, is Associate Professor of Musicology (Ethnomusicology), Vanderbilt University, and author of Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania (2003), Music in East Africa (OUP, 2005), and Singing For Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda (2005). He is also co-editor with Timothy J. Cooley of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (OUP, second edition, 2008) and co-editor with Judah Cohen of The Cultural of AIDS in Afri ca: Hope and Healing Through Music and the Arts (OUP, forthcoming). He produced the CD Singing For Life, on the Smithsonian Folkways label, which was nominated for a 2007 Grammy Award for the Best Traditional World Music Album. Karen Brummel-Smith, Associate Editor, is a family physician, writer and singer. She teaches Narrative Medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine.