Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World

by W. A. Mathieu

Overview

Music is, in one sense, merely a series of fleeting vibrations that arise and subside. How could it be that something so insubstantial fills us, and calms us, and makes us weep? Because, says W. A. Mathieu, music bridges mind and heart, self and other, and affirms our place in the world. Everyone uses the bridge of music, from casual listeners to devoted professionals. Mathieu's delightful and trenchant prose asks you to question what music is, how it works, and how to understand its value in your life, in the life of your community, and in the evolution of the cosmos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780834821804
Publisher:	Shambhala
Publication date:	12/14/2010
Series:	Shambhala Publications
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

William Allaudin Mathieu is a composer pianist whose long and varied career ranges from his early work with the Stan Kenton band and The Second City Theater, to his extensive catalogue of song cycles, works for choir, and instrumental concert music. He has recorded extensively, and is the author of The Listening Book, The Musical Life, and Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origin to Its Modern Expression.

Read an Excerpt

Another question, a most perplexing one: What is this tone that we are listening to? It is nothing. A musical tone has no substance. It is motion through time—but motion of what? The tone that began as a notion in my mind went through the muscles in my arm to a black key that operated a series of levers resulting in a felt hammer striking a taut string that agitated the room’s air in a pattern of waves that found our eardrums and traveled thence through skin and bone to a hidden liquid which, rippling like a pond in rain, cajoled teeny hair cells growing like reeds in rivers to transform the sodium ions in their roots into a train of electrical pulses that split apart and regrouped like startled birds and became at last our consciousness of something we can call G sharp, but which actually has no name complete enough to honor its power.

And the life of that G sharp didn’t stop after it was “over.” It let loose a stream of notes that had been waiting impatiently for the sluices to open, a stream begun in past ideas and actions and now racing in a sudden flood toward future oceans. Maybe every action we make does that, but every action is not G sharp—this G sharp—that I can isolate in space and in time, a G sharp that feels clear and right, and connects my inside self with yours, and with the other selves listening in the room, and with the selves we will touch when we leave the room.

We could ask more questions. Why am I doing such a thing as performing an improvisation on a piano? I have a quick answer. I need to know who I am, and this is my most complete way of knowing. And as for why are you listening? You need something as well, some connective beauty we all seem to be longing for.

Now the piece is over. In the quiet moment before applause, the sense of community is palpable. We’ve been connected, but not necessarily in the same ways to the same places. If there is anything we can hold on to in music it is perhaps this quiet, infinite instant when we can inhabit our collective body. In myriad ways, energies have been bridged. The waves have done their special work.

Editorial Reviews

[An] erudite and thought-provoking collection of essays. Mathieu more than accomplishes his goal of showing us many different ways of appreciating and listening to music.”—Spirituality & Practice

"Like his previous two books, Bridge of Waves is written in an informal, chatty style that makes clear the dynamics of music and the transformative power it has on the individual as listener or as performer.”—New Age Retailer

"Mathieu's lively and delightful essays lead you to question what music is, how it works, and what it's for.”—Branches of Light

From the Publisher