ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is a collaborative work by a group of scholars whose goal is to promote interdisciplinary and cross-cultural discussion of the healing powers of music. The origins of the book go back to 1995, with a study of the relationship between music and healing in the early modern period (fifteenth-eighteenth centuries). The type of music therapy that the book does take some account of, however, is the general, non-expert kind--the only form which really existed before a recognized body of music-therapy professionals came into being. Exactly how such experiences are understood and articulated depends on broader cultural understandings of the nature of bodies and their relationship to the world as a whole. The book considers more fully, Western biomedicine appears to work on a very different set of cultural assumptions than the traditional forms of healing.
