This is a book I actually come back to quite often. In many ways it was decisive in establishing in the early 1970s that what we call music is in fact a wide reality, and one that means many different things to many different people. This is more than a book on music: it is a book on accepting the other through music. For me it has been decisive in reminding myself always that things, notions, concepts, are just ways of organising thought, like music is humanly organised sound (the title for the first chapter of the book, by the way). And when you think of the world that way, there is no room for anything more than empathy.