Music at the Threshold from the Sacred to the Dangerous

In Music at the Threshold from the Sacred to the Dangerous, author Sean Williams explores the connection of liminality to musical culture by focusing on how performance practices tend to occur at liminal places and times, and often by potentially marginalized people who are, in fact, central to the expression of cultural identity.Williams highlights issues of access and interdisciplinarity and shows how people use music to facilitate transformation in culturally bound ways.Featuring themes of access to the unknown, dual faith, erotic power, longing for home, transgression, and resistance, each chapter draws from an array of musical settings and cultural traditions that, considered on their own, might not be as remarkable without seeing the greater picture.Rather than focus on a single genre in a single place, this meta-ethnography casts a wide thematic net across genres, regions, and people. The erotic allure of the female-coded being who sings men to a watery death differs from the no