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Interested in Music, Cosmology, and the Social?
The abstract looks interesting.

Erica Fox Brindley, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China. New York: State University of New York Press, August, 2012, 225pp. ISBN: 9781438443140 (paperback), 9781438443133 (hardcover).

Chinese music is a broad topic that includes a wide variety of methodological premises, which music historians, ethnomusicologists, music theorists, and systematic musicologists can use for fruitful exploration. In her book Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China (MCPH, hereafter), Erica Fox Brindley, who is an intellectual and cultural historian of early China, undertakes an historical approach and works out the role of musical sound in the social, natural, and religious order. She explores “the role of music, and even sound itself, as both an agent and indicator of moral, orderly, and cosmically balanced rule” (42). Based on early imperial texts Brindley points out that already during the Warring States period (481–221BC) sound (sheng 声) is clearly a component of the cosmos and later, during the Han Dynasty (202BC–220AD), possesses special cosmic efficacy (69). The concept of sheng plays an important role in her explanations of the cosmological and political aspects of music.

Reviewed in Frontiers of Philosophy in China 2014, 9 (3): 491–494