What is a musical instrument, really? We would likely agree that an instrument is a physical object that transforms musical ideas into musical sounds. In this fairly passive definition, instruments are material; they are also instrumental—a means toward a music-making end. But beyond their materiality and instrumentality, could instruments play a more dynamic role in human musicking, structuring the way we conceive of musical sound, the way we listen? Jonathan De Souza's book offers a bracingly novel take on this question. Drawing in equal measure on the cognitive sciences, emic reflections informed by phenomenology, and musical analysis, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition argues that musical creativity is ineluctably bound up with the way we interact with our instruments.
De Souza's title references Heidegger's notion of Zuhandenheit, “readiness-to-hand.” A hammer—or a piano—is often invisible when we are using it; we are too busy focusing on the...
University of California Press