Review: Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, by Jonathan De Souza

Abstract

Book Review| April 01 2019 Review: Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, by Jonathan De Souza Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, by Jonathan De Souza. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xi, 191 pp. Zachary Wallmark Zachary Wallmark ZACHARY WALLMARK is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Psychology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Director of the SMU MuSci Lab. His research explores the nature of our affective reactions to musical timbre using tools from musicology and the cognitive sciences. He is coeditor of The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2018). His work has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the American Musicological Society (2019) 72 (1): 256–260. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.1.256 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Zachary Wallmark; Review: Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, by Jonathan De Souza. Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2019; 72 (1): 256–260. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.1.256 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the American Musicological Society Search What is a musical instrument, really? We would likely agree that an instrument is a physical object that transforms musical ideas into musical sounds. In this fairly passive definition, instruments are material; they are also instrumental—a means toward a music-making end. But beyond their materiality and instrumentality, could instruments play a more dynamic role in human musicking, structuring the way we conceive of musical sound, the way we listen? Jonathan De Souza's book offers a bracingly novel take on this question. Drawing in equal measure on the cognitive sciences, emic reflections informed by phenomenology, and musical analysis, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition argues that musical creativity is ineluctably bound up with the way we interact with our instruments. De Souza's title references Heidegger's notion of Zuhandenheit, “readiness-to-hand.” A hammer—or a piano—is often invisible when we are using it; we are too busy focusing on the... You do not currently have access to this content.