In Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China, Erica Fox Brindley shines light on the realm of intellectual and political discourse in early China by demonstrating how discussions about music were used by the state and the educated elite to promote their political, religious, and cultural agendas. Music and its supplementary notions of harmony and balance have played a central role in Chinese philosophical and religious literature, and Brindley's new study is a notable contribution to our understanding of the ways in which music and its associated metaphors were utilized by different agents as devices of rhetorical persuasion. According to the author, the subject and ultimate goal of this study are not to reconstruct early Chinese musical theories or actual performances but to discover how early Chinese thought theorizes about music. In other words, the book “narrates a history of idealized representations of music and its changing values in society” in order to “shed light upon common attitudes towards music, its relationship to individuals and ideals of government, and views on harmony and the significance of sound in society and the cosmos” (pp. 11, 12).

The first part of the book focuses on the application of discourses on music in the sociopolitical sphere. Chapter 1 begins with a brief history of the public musical performances of Zhou court culture. Brindley argues that these ritual performances were effective on multiple levels. On one hand, music provided the ruling elite with a common formal language that was instrumental in facilitating pre-imperial interstate diplomacy; on the other hand, these lavish performances helped to augment the prestige and religious authority of the court. Chapter 2 investigates the use of music as a tool of cultural unification by the new imperial regime of the Han, which drew on previous philosophical theories that presented music as a device of mass psychology in order to present the emperor as the only ruler who could “unify moral sensibilities and, ultimately, cultural mores” (p. 47). Music, especially the notion of musical harmony, was thus a convenient metaphor for propagating imperial projects of standardization and unification. Chapter 3 revisits the relationship between musical sounds, cosmic qi, and the emergence of theories that described the cosmos as a “natural, regulated system of causal resonance” (p. 83). The chapter thus demonstrates how knowledge of and control over musical sounds endowed the emperor with a unique religious authority as a cosmic regulator.

In the second part of her study, Brindley shifts her focus from the political sphere to the effects of music on individual human bodies. Chapter 4 underlines the use of musical metaphors in discussions on the topic of emotions in early Chinese philosophical literature. Brindley argues that music was portrayed not only as a tool of self-cultivation and moral transformation but also as a means to aesthetically manifest one's inner virtue and effectively help one to morally influence others. Chapter 5 discusses the figure of the sage-ruler who uses music in order to attune the internal cycles of his own body to the natural rhythm of the universe. This type of correspondence, argues Brindley, functions as a source of religious authority, as it allows the sage to use his knowledge of the structure of the cosmos to foretell the future through divination. The book concludes with chapter 6, which examines the medical implications of the correspondence between individual psycho-physical processes and natural cycles. Brindley concludes that rhythmic exercises that combine music and dance are often portrayed in medicalized terms as a tonic that “nourishes and restores the proper cosmic flow in the body” (p. 154).

A culmination of several years of research, this study is the first book-length monograph on the theorization of music in early China since Kenneth DeWoskin's A Song for One or Two: Music and the Concept of Art in Early China (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1982). Taking full advantage of the plethora of newly excavated manuscripts, this book is a welcome addition to the study of early Chinese intellectual and cultural history. A minor point of contention is Brindley's decision to uniformly translate the character yue 樂 as “music.” Although she acknowledges the intrinsic connection between this character and the religious realm of ritual practice and admits that the semantic field of this concept refers to a range of choreographed performances much broader than the contemporary understanding of the term “music,” Brindley chooses to render yue as “music” “not only for the sake of simplicity, but also because . . . dancing and the other visual aspects of yue usually appear to be of secondary importance” (p. 6). This dissonance could have been resolved by referring to yue as “musical performance,” a translation that would also highlight the corporal aspects of the term, which Brindley emphasizes in the second part of her book. Aside from this minor criticism, Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China is an important study that breaks new ground in a regrettably understudied area of early Chinese thought.