In Thresholds Marcel Cobussen rethinks the relationship between
music and spirituality. The point of departure is the current
movement within contemporary classical music known as New Spiritual
Music, with as its main representatives Arvo PArt, John Tavener,
and Giya Kancheli. In almost all respects, the musical principles
of the new spiritual music seem to be diametrically opposed to
those of modernism: repetition and rest versus development and
progress, tradition and familiarity versus innovation and
experiment, communication versus individualism and conceptualism,
tonality versus atonality, and so on. As such, this movement is
often considered as part of the much larger complex called
postmodernism. Joining in with ideas on spirituality as presented
by Michel de Certeau and Mark C. Taylor, Cobussen deconstructs the
classification of the 'spiritual dimensions' of music as described
above. Thresholds presents an idea of spirituality in and through
music that counters strategies of exclusion and mastering of
alterity and connects it to wandering, erring, and roving. Using
the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Jean-FranAois
Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others, and analysing the music of
John Coltrane, the mythical Sirens, Arvo PArt, and The Eagles (to
mention a few), Cobussen regards spirituality as a (non)concept
that escapes categorization, classification, and linguistic
descriptions. Spirituality is a-topological, non-discursive and a
manifestation of 'otherness'. And it is precisely music (or better:
listening to music) that induces these thoughts: by carefully
encountering, analysing, and evaluating certain examples from
classical, jazz, pop and world music it is possible to detach
spirituality from concepts of otherworldliness and
transcendentalism. Thresholds opens a space in which spirituality
can be connected to music that is not commonly considered in this
light, thereby enriching the ways of approaching and discussing
music. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to show that
spirituality is not an attribute of music, not a simple adjective
providing extra information or used to categorize certain types of
music. Instead, the spiritual can happen through listening to
music, in a more or less personalized relationship with it. This
relationship might be characterized as susceptible instead of
controlling, open instead of excluding, groping instead of rigid.
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