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Spring 2024

ZONE BOOKS

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Current cover
New in Journal of the American Musicology Society
A Review of Alien Listening

For a recent issue of the Journal of the American Musicology Society, Neil Lerner reviews Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth by Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding. Click here to learn more about the book. See the button to the left to read the full article. An excerpt appears below:

“For all that Alien Listening traffics in abstractions, there is an urgency to their argument’s faith in the ability of music to bring together and connect objects. Part of the subtitle, ‘Music from Earth,’ signals this wide scope, as they sagely point out that ‘hearing the other—whether between races, genders, species, or planetary civilizations—is a defamiliarizing act that is the initial step for all alien contact.’ In challenging us to question our most basic assumptions about music and what we think we know about it, and by doing so in a way that invites participation from scholars outside the field of music, Chua and Rehding’s tour de force of erudition has laid the groundwork for a profound rethinking of music’s place in our universe.”