Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness
Oct 2025 · Taylor & Francis
Ebook
204
Pages
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About this ebook
Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness – that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding in Palau distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning(s), meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding in Palau thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.
About the author
Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at the University of Göttingen. She is the author of Sounds of Articulating Identity: Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council project Sound Knowledge. Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World.
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