A source of profound insights into human existence and the nature of lived experience, phenomenology is among the most influential intellectual movements of the last hundred years. The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures brings ideas from the phenomenological tradition of Continental European philosophy into conversation with theoretical, ethnographic, and historical work from ethnomusicology, anthropology, sound studies, folklore studies, and allied disciplines to develop new perspectives on musical practices and auditory cultures.

With sustained theoretical meditations and evocative ethnography, the book's twenty-two chapters advance scholarship on topics at the heart of the study of music and culture today--from embodiment, atmosphere, and Indigenous ontologies, to music's capacity to reveal new possibilities of the person, the nature of virtuosity, issues in research methods, the role of memory, imagination, and states of consciousness in musical experience, and beyond. Thoroughly up-to-date, the handbook engages with both classical and contemporary phenomenology, as well as theoretical traditions that have drawn from it, such as affect theory or the German-language literature on cultural techniques. Together, these essays make major contributions to fundamental theory in the study of music and culture.

Harris M. Berger's profile page

Friedlind Riedel's profile page

David VanderHamm's profile page

Harris M. Berger is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology and Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University. His work examines American popular music and the theoretical foundations of ethnomusicology and folklore. His books include Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience; Stance; Identity and Everyday Life; and Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversation, Insights. He has served as co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore, a series editor of Wesleyan University Press's Music/Culture book series, and president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Friedlind Riedel is a music and sound scholar based at Bauhaus-University Weimar, where she is a fellow of the Graduate College for Media Anthropology (GRAMA). She is also a visiting lecturer at Salzburg University and a committee member of the RMA Music and Philosophy Study Group. Her current book project explores practices and techniques of musical and dramatic staging in Burmese pyazat (musical drama) since the 1880s. Riedel is also co-editor (with Juha Torvinen) of Music as Atmosphere: Collective Feelings and Affective Sounds.

David VanderHamm is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Johnson County Community College. His research explores the phenomenon of virtuosity and its intersection with media in diverse musical traditions circulating in the U.S. His work has appeared in outlets including the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, and The Public Historian. His article "I'm just an Armless Guitarist" received the Richard Waterman Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.