Description: This collection of essays addresses recent and historical changes in the ways in which listening has been conceived as a cultural agency and act. It argues that listening, by emancipating from an essentially implied, passive-receiving, and subjected position, has become an explicit factor in culture and the object of proactive collective and individual politics.
Brief description: Sander van Maas is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and has held positions at Utrecht University (Endowed Chair of Contemporary Composed Music) and the Amsterdam Conservatory. In 2010-2011 he was visiting Associate Professor of Musicology at Boston University and visiting scholar at Harvard. He authored The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough toward the Beyond (with Fordham University Press) and edited several volumes including Contemporary Music and Spirituality (forthcoming). He also works as a consultant for major cultural institutions around Europe.
Review Quotes: "Thresholds of Listening intervenes into an extraordinarily wide range of subjects, ranging from masochism and torture at one extreme to Cage and Kafka at the other. Chapters zoom by at high speed, covering enormous ground and wrestling on all fronts with music's potential value as a transformative biopolitical praxis. The level of scholarship is excellent, and van Maas's cast of contributors includes stellar names alongside emerging scholars. This is less a book about listening to music than a virtuosic inquiry into the relationships between listening, hearing, sound, and space and an investigation of the limits of the human body."-----Anthony Gritten, Royal Academy of Music