Tomás McAuley - The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

This large-scale project has been under way for a number of years and more people have been involved at various stages than it is possible to recount here. Building on the rich history that we highlight in the Introduction, dialogue between musicologists, philosophers, and scholars in a range of related disciplinary areas has, since 2010, flourished at the particular meeting point that has been the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group (RMA MPSG). It was at this groups conferences, bristling with ideas, debates, and passion, that the initial seeds for the current Handbook were sown. All three of the main Handbook editors have been immersed in these events from the start: McAuley and Nielsen as founding RMA MPSG committee members, and Levinson as advisory board member and, in 2017, as keynote speaker.

We thus express our gratitude here to the institutions that have made these conferences happen, notably the Royal Musical Association, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Departments of Music and of Philosophy at Kings College London, but also the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Music & Letters Trust, the Mind Association, the University of Nottingham, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, the University of Hull, Cambridge University (both the Faculty of Music and the Margaret Beaufort Institute for Theology), the University of Londons Institute for Musical Research, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Birkbeck, University of London. We are also grateful to the many associated groups that supported the conferences, whether by organizing individual panels or by collaborating on whole events. Amongst the numerous individuals whose work made the conferences possible, we thank our many previous co-organizers and colleaguesnot to mention our successorson the committee of the RMA MPSG, and offer particular thanks to Susan Bagust, John Deathridge, Vctor Dur-Vil, and Michael Fend, whose encouragements formed the cornerstone of the groups foundation.

That said, for all its historical, practical, and emotional roots in the RMA MPSG, this Handbook remains a free-standing project, one that reflects the collective goals, values, and aspirations of its individual authors and editors, rather than those of any particular organization. We also note appreciatively the work of music and philosophy study/interest groups in the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, and of the British Society of Aesthetics and the American Society for Aesthetics, which have formed natural homes for the work of many scholars represented in the pages that follow.

Given the wide scope of the present volume, we took the unusual decision to have its chapters peer-reviewed individually by readers expert in each given area. As such, thanks are owed to a veritable army of anonymous reviewers, scholars who gave generously when their time was already significantly in demand. We are deeply grateful for all of the invaluable feedback and suggestions for improvements: the Handbook would not have reached its current state without them. Our work has been very ably supported by Rachel McCarthy and Anika Babel, who provided editorial assistance during the final months of the project, and by Oliver Chandler, who helped to set numerous music examples. A very special thanks goes to Ariana Phillips-Hutton, who started work on this project as an editorial assistant, but whose outstanding contribution to the project grew through its final years to a position where the title of Associate Editor seemed more fitting. Finally, none of the editorial assistance would have been possible without generous support from the University of Cambridge (Returning Carers Scheme), University College Dublin, and the University of Oslo. The editorial work of McAuley was itself generously supported by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Rowena Anketell, whose meticulous final copyedit improved the text in innumerable places, and to the dedicated staff at Oxford University Press, in particular to Suzanne Ryan, whose enthusiasm, encouragement, and wisdom allowed this project to happen, and to Lauralee Yeary, who answered more practical queries than was reasonable with patience and grace.