Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. By Judith Becker. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+194, notes, bibliography, index, compact disc, ISBN 0-253-34393-3, cloth.)

Contemporary Western ideas surrounding trance are linked to stereotypes and entrenched models. Generally, trancers are people who lived before (i.e., the distant past, the Age of Enlightenment, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), or, in current contexts, trancers are people who exist on the fringes of global societies (i.e., they practice marginalized religions, suffer from emotional or mental instability, or are attention seekers). An important part of this modeling is that trancing is often and typically gendered (i.e., practiced mainly by women). In Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Judith Becker explores connections between neuroscience and music rituals in different world contexts, thereby dispelling many of the myths that surround trancing, as well as demonstrating the multiple roles that music plays in trancing rituals. Largely due to Becker’s work, trancing is a new domain in ethnomusicological enquiry, and within this context of exploring the unknown, I found this book to be informative and engaging. The perspective of searching for common ground between science and music, specifically neuroscience and music in cultural contexts, is the overarching theme in Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. The book is organized into six chapters, an introduction, and postscript, and has an accompanying compact disc with nine sound excerpts that illustrate particular rituals Becker discusses in the text. An especially informative addition to this study are the eight colour prints, gathered together at the book’s midpoint. Another aspect of the book I found to be especially helpful was the listing of sources, including literature from a collection of disciplines, ranging from music to philosophy to biology to psychology. In the book’s acknowledgments, Becker emphasizes the collaborative nature of her work, pointing out how difficult it is to articulate really original ideas, especially when one has had the experience of studying and working with others over long periods of time: “Many thinkers have influenced me so much that I have internalized their teachings and believe them to be my own” (xi). Here, and throughout the book, Becker is generous in her acknowledgement of the work and support of other scholars, host musicians, and friends in her challenge to weave together different strands of theory and experience with respective to understanding trancing. Deep Listening: Music, Emotion, and Trancing is a single-authored book, but clearly, Becker’s research processes embodied discovering and experiencing the perspectives of many groups and individuals. In the book’s introduction, Becker outlines her critical model for studying trancing. This includes consideration of multiple scientific perspectives, as well as religious, philosophical dimensions, and ideas related to articulating inner emotion and the expression of human feelings. Her title — Deep Listeners — is borrowed from the American composer, Pauline Oliveros’ concept of the same name, referring to musical listening that “goes below the surface,” and is predicated on the notion that sound is a relative, socially constructed concept. For Becker’s work on trancing, “deep listeners is a descriptive term for persons who are profoundly moved, perhaps even to tears, by simply listening to a piece of music” (2). Becker also presents the reader with other important concepts to her study, such as music cognition paradigms, ideas of “Languaging, Musicking, and Trancing” (note her verbal use of these terms), as well as what she refers to as three “Multiple Senses of Embodiment,” or ways the human body acts in trancing modes (e.g., as a physical structure, as an embodiment of a unique, personal inner life, and as an entity that interacts with other bodies, or what she describes as “being-in-the-world”). Following the introduction is a valuable background on trancing in Europe and the United States, with documentation …