Reviews: 

The years since 2000 have seen innumerable catastrophes: 9/11, global warming, pandemics, invasions, the erosion of civil rights. Throughout these difficult times, composers have produced music that bears witness and gestures toward the possibility of hope. Music of Absencebrings together essays that deal brilliantly with this new music.

– Susan McClary, Case Western Reserve University

Music of Absenceoffers a timely, even urgent set of accounts of music's engagement with the experience of sustained crisis in the twenty-first century. The expanded parameters of absence explored here go beyond silence to consider music and sound as their own form of sense-making—one that recognizes the limits of the residual belief that we can simply think our way out of crisis. While reckoning with precarity and trauma, this collection doesn't stop at diagnosis or critique. Instead, it ranges easily across genres, finding generative potential in absence, and above all, a medium for seeking connection: to each other, to history, to the environment, and to yet-unimagined, but possible futures.

– Andrea Zarafshon Moore, Smith College

This remarkable volume balances classical philosophical meditations on absence—from Aristotle to Byung-Chul Han—with the living realities of contemporary musical practice. Its essays move fluidly between metaphysics and embodied listening, revealing how sound itself can think through loss, memory, and renewal. I’m deeply honored that one of my own works was included in this dialogue—a rare experience of seeing one’s music situated within such a luminous framework of intellect, affect, and presence.

– Ken Ueno, UC Berkeley