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Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music. By Marcel Cobussen.

Review of Marcel Cobussen's 'Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality through Music' (Ashgate, 2008).

This review moves beyond a critical appraisal of Cobussen's work to ask broader questions for the study of music and spirituality/theology. It therefore forms an investigation of where the liminal thresholds of this subject might lie. The review reverses the strategies in Cobussen’s book. Cobussen procedes with what he calls a ‘decentering’ (rather then merely deconstructionalist), jettisoning of what other scholars might regard as epistemological ballast (musicological and theological literature in particular) from this subject. This review points to how that ballast might be re-employed to aid Cobussen’s haunting perspectives, and indeed how any vision of alterity (however ‘decentred’, even by different kinds of music) requires it. It points to questions that animate this discipline, and to future directions that are being taken up in Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Ashgate, 2014) ed. Sholl and van Maas, Music and Transcendence (Ashgate 2014) ed. Stone-Davis , and Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual (OUP, 2014) ed. Engelhardt and Bohlman.