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  • Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music
  • Alexander Carpenter
Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music. By Marcel Corbussen. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. [x, 171 p. ISBN-13: 9780754664796 (hardcover), $99.95; ISBN-13: 9780754664826 (paperback), $29.95.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

Marcel Corbussen’s book poses some crucial and probing questions concerning the relationship between music and spirituality. The author especially problematizes the concept of spirituality itself, rejecting it as a given and instead locating it, contingently, in the undecidable spaces—the thresholds—that exist between music and listener. Corubussen’s position is decidedly postmodern, and he draws heavily on Derrida, Lyotard, Battaille, Barthes and a host of other likely suspects, engaging them all in an effort to deconstruct traditional and fixed conceptions of spirituality and to undo the notion of certain kinds of music as having intrinsic spiritual qualities. The author examines a small but diverse collection of music examples, ranging from “Hotel California” by The Eagles to John Coltrane’s sacred jazz to contemporary sub/ultrasonic electronic music to the work of neo-spiritualist composer Arvo Pärt. Corbussen posits that the experience of the spiritual through music involves not a union with God or some kind of transcendent universal “other,” nor necessarily sacred or religious music as such, but rather has to do with negotiating with the liminal, contingent “spaces between”—the thresholds, borders and margins—that open up in the act of encountering and engaging with many kinds of music. In this experience, which privileges the listener’s relationship with music, essential but unstable/uncontrolled/uncontrollable aspects of music itself—including silences, improvisation, paramusical sounds created through extended techniques, etc.—become key moments for Corbussen in tentatively locating and defining both music and spirituality.

This book is not divided into conventional chapters, but rather into thirteen “Thresholds,” each with a unique subtitle (for example, “The Desert in the Desert,” “Stories,” and “The Abyss”). It begins by announcing itself as a threshold: the entries into and exits from books comprise ambiguous “space[s] between” (p. 20), as Corbussen asserts. A threshold represents a kind of paradoxical space, simultaneously marking both inside and outside (like a margin, or a frame, a threshold is, in Derrida’s philosophy, an undecidable: a concept/term/space that does not conform to a dichotomy, and works to undermine dualistic thought). Equally slippery is the spiritual: like music, the spiritual escapes or resists language. Music and spirituality, then, suggests Corbussen, “meet in each other in a space which is inaccessible for language” (p. 67). This space is, after Attali, “a realm of ‘fantastic insecurity’ ” (p. 26), into which Corbussen looks in order to “reconsider spirituality through music . . . it is perhaps through music that an experience with a spirituality that can never be contained, captured, or caught by any fixed pair of terms becomes possible” (pp. 36–37).

The first music example the reader of Thresholds encounters is the rock ballad “Hotel California,” by The Eagles. Corbussen asks, rhetorically, if interaction [End Page 67] with this song might lead to “new possibilities” for “address[ing] issues of place, identity, belonging, memory?” (p. 3) He finds in this song a kind of celebration of the loss of control and certainty; this instability subsequently becomes a critical conceit, tying together a range of examples, from Schumann to Coltrane to Pärt. In all of these examples, the reader is presented with musical wanderers and wanderings, with explorers and explorations that undermine identity and chase after spirituality as the unattainable (p. 149). The publisher’s blurb on the back of the books suggests that “Hotel California” is one of a number of musical works that are “analyzed” in Thresholds, but this is a misnomer: Corbussen merely references the song’s lyrics, in particular the lines “I heard the mission bell / and I was thinking to myself / this could be heaven or this could be hell,” to suggest that music, in this song and elsewhere, posits itself as a spiritual juncture—a threshold—between the known and unknown world, between here and there, heaven and hell (p. 3). Indeed, there is relatively little “analysis” as such in this book: subsequent music examples, ranging from improvisational treatments of Schumann’s...

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