"Music is like a thousand different languages all rolled into one," writes Don Campbell, author of nine books including the best-selling The Mozart Effect. He is an internationally celebrated expert on the transformative power of sound, tone, and music. This new edition of an anthology he assembled in 1991 contains a foreword by Paul Winter who concludes, "Each morning, as we hum or chant or strum or drum, we can celebrate the renewal of our path, our life-song, or the journey of our fledgling species, with our own humble offering of this glorious gift called music."
On these pages you will find an interview with by Dr. Alfred Tomatis by Tim Wilson on the importance of the ear, essays on the value of using music in hospitals by Dr. Arthur Harvey and Cathie Guzzetta, the findings of music therapists Barbara Crowe and Joseph Moreno, the spiritual interpretation of sound and music by Pir Hazrat Inayat Khan and Swami Chetanananda, and the role of music as a means of healing in Rudolph Steiner's curative education by H. Walter.
Several of the most intriguing pieces in this soulful volume are on the spiritual practice of listening. Bradford S. Weeks, a physician, calls it "an approximation of selflessness whereby one person opens not only their ears but their heart." And Derrick de Kerckhove in an essay on "Oral versus Literate Listening" reveals how important it is in our electronic milieu to eliminate noise or unnecessary information.