What in the World Is Music?

What in the World is Music? is an undergraduate, interactive e-textbook that incorporates more than 300 video and audio links to music from around the world. The text investigates the nature and meaning of music as a universal human practice, while providing students with strong points of connection to the ways it affects their own lives. Merging the study of Western music tradition along with the ethnomusicological approach to non-Western music, and with a range of examples from both, What in the World is Music? explores how humans organize and experience sound, and the contexts in which music takes place.

is set within a thematic framework that highlights similarities across cultures and examines shared musical practices.

• Unit 1: The Foundations of Music
• presents an inquiry-guided approach to understanding and engaging with music based on four fundamental questions: What is music? (Definitions), What is it made of? (Elements), Where does it come from? (Origins), and What is it for? (Functions).
• Unit 2: Music and Identity
• examines how music operates in the shaping, negotiating, and projecting of human identity. The discussion is organized around four broad conceptual frames: the individual, the group, hybridity, and conflict.
• Unit 3: Music and the Sacred
• considers how music is used in religious practices throughout the world: for chanting sacred texts and singing devotional verses, for inspiring religious experience such as ecstasy and trance, and for marking and shaping ritual space and time.
• Unit 4: Music and Social Life
• explores the uses of music in storytelling, theater, and film; delves into the contributions of sound recording and digital technologies; and looks at the many ways music enhances nightlife, public ceremonies, and festivals.

This Routledge interactive textbook package, 978-1-138-79025-4, includes a printed book to supplement the online e-text, which is also available as a stand-alone under ISBN 978-1-315-76430-6.

Please view this informercial video, featuring the authors: https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138790254/infomercial.php

Alison Arnold is Professor in Music and Arts Studies at North Carolina State Univ. She was Editorial consultant for the Concise Edition of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, South Asia Volume, and Editor for the South Asia Volume, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, 1995-2000. She performs Irish wooden flute and whistles.

Jonathan C. Kramer, Ph.D., is Teaching Professor of Music and Arts Studies, North Carolina State University and Adjunct Professor of Ethnomusicology, Duke University. He is a two time Fulbright Fellow (India and South Korea) and a former cellist with the San Francisco Opera and North Carolina Symphony.