Overview

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In The Music between Us, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music’s uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience.                Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and anthropology, Higgins’s richly researched study showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, Higgins argues, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides. Moving beyond the well-worn takes on music’s universality, The Music between Us provides a new understanding of what it means to be musical and, in turn, human. 

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The Music between Us approaches the question of music through a vast amount of recent and fascinating work that implicates, if not demonstrates, music's central place in human nature: thought, feeling, synesthesia, language, and community. It eschews claims of metaphysical essence or universals, instead speaking to deep and normative aspects of the musical in human life and behavior. Assembling an extraordinary amount of data and results from cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, ethnomusicology, and sociology, Kathleen Marie Higgins's book is worth reading purely for its compendium effect. (Daniel Herwitz, University of Michigan)

The Music between Us approaches the question of music through a vast amount of recent and fascinating work that implicates, if not demonstrates, music's central place in human nature: thought, feeling, synthesthesia, language, and community. It eschews claims of metaphysical essence or universals, instead speaking to deep and normative aspects of the musical in human life and behavior. Assembling an extraordinary amount of data and result from cognitive psychology, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, ethnomusicology, and sociology, Kathleen Higgins's book is worth reading purely for its compendium effect. --Daniel Herwitz, University of Michigan

Author Information

"Kathleen Marie Higgins is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Music of Our Lives and Nietzsche's ""Zarathustra."""

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