Medical Ethnomusicology is a new field of integrative and holistic research and applied practice that approaches music, health, and healing anew, engaging the biological, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual domains of human life that frame and inform our experiences of health and healing, illness and disease, life and death. The power of music to create health and healing at the individual, community, and societal levels is not only linked to these domains of human life, but is intimately interwoven with the ever present and multifaceted frame of culture, which is often where meaning lies, and is a key factor that creates or inhibits efficacy.
The Oxford Handbook of Medical Ethnomusicology appeals to all those interested in music, medicine, and culture, and represents a new stage of collaborative discourse among researchers and practitioners who embrace and incorporate knowledge from a diversity of fields. Importantly, such knowledge, by definition, spans the globe of traditional cultural practices of music, spirituality, and medicine, including biomedical, integrative, complementary, and alternative models; is rooted in new physics, philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, linguistics, medical anthropology, and of course, music, dance, and all the healing arts.
The book is more than the first collected volume to establish the discipline of medical ethnomusicology and express its broad potential; it is also an expression of a wider paradigm shift of innovative thinking and collaboration that fully embraces both the health sciences and the healing arts. The authors encourage the development of this new paradigm through an openness to and engagement of knowledge from diverse research areas and domains of human life conventionally viewed as disparate, yet laden with potential benefits for an improved or vibrant quality of life, prevention of illness and disease, even cure and healing.

Benjamin Koen, Editor, is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Xiamen University. Dr. Koen is widely published and author of the book Beyond the Roof of the World: Music, Prayer, and Healing in the Pamir Mountains (OUP). Jacqueline Lloyd, Associate Editor, is Professor of Medicine and Education Director of Geriatrics, Florida State University College of Medicine. Gregory Barz, Associate Editor, is Associate Professor of Musicology (Ethnomusicology), Vanderbilt University, and author of Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania (2003), Music in East Africa (OUP, 2005), and Singing For Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda (2005). He is also co-editor with Timothy J. Cooley of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (OUP, second edition, 2008) and co-editor with Judah Cohen of The Cultural of AIDS in Afri ca: Hope and Healing Through Music and the Arts (OUP, forthcoming). He produced the CD Singing For Life, on the Smithsonian Folkways label, which was nominated for a 2007 Grammy Award for the Best Traditional World Music Album. Karen Brummel-Smith, Associate Editor, is a family physician, writer and singer. She teaches Narrative Medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine.

1. Confluence of Consciousness in Music, Medicine, and Culture; Benjamin Koen, Gregory Barz, Kenneth Brummel-Smith
2. A Fourfold Framework for Producing Sociohistorically Specific, Clinically Relevant, Cross-Culturally Resonant, and Biomedically Viable Research on Music and Medicine; Marina Roseman
3. Religion, Spirituality, and Healing: Research, Dialogue, and Directions; Harold G. Koenig
4. Art, Culture, and Pediatric Mental & Behavioral Health: An Interdisciplinary, Public Health Approach; Michael L. Penn and Philip Kojo Clarke
5. Music-Prayer-Meditation Dynamics in Healing; Benjamin Koen
6. Healing Through Flexibility Primers: Examples from Indonesia, the United States, and Northeastern Thailand; Devon Hinton
7. The Performance of HIV/AIDS in Uganda: Medical Ethnomusicology and Cultural Memory; Gregory Barz
8. Alzheimer's Disease and the Promise of Music and Culture as a Healing Process: The Need for a Unifying Theory; Kenneth Brummel-Smith
9. Music Therapy Evidence-Based Outcomes in Dementia Care: A Way to Better Life Quality for Those with Alzheimer's Disease and Their Families; Alicia Ann Clair
10. Songwriting in the Nursing Home: Transcending the Boundaries of Institutionalization through Music; Theresa A. Allison
11. Preventive Care for the Dead: Beleganjur Music and the Communal Care of Souls in Balinese Cremation Ceremonies; Michael B. Bakan
12. The Application of Hood's Nine Levels to the Practice of Music Therapy; Michael Rohrbacher
13. Music and the Meditative Mind: Toward a Science of the Ineffable; Karen Brummel-Smith
14, Cosmological Dialogues and Celestial Battles: Shamanism, Music, and Healing in Two Contrasting South American Cultural Areas; Dale A. Olsen
15. Therapeutic Dimensions of Music in Islamic Culture; Jean During
16. Homoeopathic Healing With Music; Rajan Sankaran
17. Effects of Music for Human Health and Wellness: Physiological Measurements and Research Design; Therese West and Gail Ironson
18. Building Community Within the Healthcare Environment: Marrying Art and Technology; Jay Klein, John Graham-Pole, Matthew Beiler, Jill Sonke-Henderson, and Jolie Haun
19. Personhood Consciousness: A Child-Ability Centerd Approach to Socio-Musical Healing and Autism Spectrum "Disorders"; Benjamin Koen, Michael B. Bakan, Fred Kobylarz, Lindee Morgan, Rachel Goff, Sally Kahn, Megan Bakan
20. The Lakota Hoop Dance as Medicine for Social Healing; Kevin Locke and Benjamin Koen
21. The Educator's Role in Cultural Healing and the Sacred Space of the World Music Classroom; Léonie E. Naylor and Michael L. Naylor