Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound and Healing

by Maureen McCarthy Draper

Book Overview

An important book that answers how music affects your mood and how music affects your brain Music has a profound influence on our lives; affecting how we think, how we act, how we feel-even who we are. By learning more about the intimate relationship between music and ourselves, we can begin to harness that power and better our lives. A classical pianist, Draper writes about the ways in which the great works of the classical canon can help us cope...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573228982
• ISBN13: 9781573228985
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Penguin Adult Hc/Tr
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Love and Inspiration in Music

This book is full of love of music and inspiration for musicians of all ages and levels. For the historian, there are many lesser known, interesting facts. For the music student, there are words of wisdom about keeping the inspiration and love in daily practice. For the music lover just beginning to build a listening library, there are wonderful suggestions for starting a CD collection (not limited to classical music). This is a book to be read slowly, to be savored and contemplated. This book invites the reader to experience music in a very sensual way, not with ears alone, but with one's whole body, mind and spirit. It is an exploration of the possibilities of music as a mood setter, a mood enhancer, or a mood anti-dote. It is about music as a healer of physical and emotional disharmonies. It is an exploration of what is universal in music and what is highly individual. There is something for everyone in this book. I highly recommend it as a gift to anyone interested in music.

The Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing

Maureen McCarthy Draper's book is an invitation to return to the joy of listening to music in a way to set moods, to mark days of the week or to simply relax and be transported by musical experiences. This invitation includes examples via the carefully selected selections of music on the accompanying CD's which depict each of the examples of how music can soothe the soul within, or elevate the awareness of beauty in a way that no other medium can. This book reminds those of us that love music of its importance, but invites us to consider it at another level of perception and gives us the suggested methods to add to our perception. It also makes a lovely gift to anyone who loves, and loves to share the joy of music....

A Jewel from One Heart to Another

Maureen Draper`s book is a jewel! In today`s time of high technology and speed, she slowed me down, called the voice of my heart and reminded me to listen to my body and to my soul. She did it all with classical music - speaking of it with great simplicity, and although i am a professional classical musician, i felt like i was entering an unknown field and wanted to know EVERYTHING about it! On the two cd`s that she recommends buying together with the book, she has chosen less known pieces, which allowed me to discover my own feelings and sense of the music, undisturbed by the familiarity of more famous pieces. She guided me through the many different landscapes of music and patiently showed me, with great knowledge and passion and tenderness, all their beauty, encouraging me, at last, to be alone in them, to observe and to fully sink in the emotions they elicited in me.This book is an unusual, unique look into the depths of music and it makes a wonderful gift. Thank you, Maureen!

A gem-like book

Maureen Draper's book is a graceful challenge to enlarge our conversation with ourselves (to paraphrase one of her lovely phrases) by expanding our relationship with music. Her comforting tone lures us into exploring the facets that make us most human by describing their musical counterparts. This book puts thoughts together in such a musical way and has so many little surprises that even a professional musician like myself finds it of great interest. Her rich literary, psychological and medical references balance what is otherwise a very practical book on how to incorporate music into the fabric of our lives. Indeed, the author even tackles the essential question of why it is so important to do so. And she does so easily, traversing the track between presenting information and speaking from the heart. I especially appreciated her subtle nuances, like making distinctions between the phases of "grief," and the kinds of music that may be appropriate to each. This short book - like a Brahms Intermezzo - covers an enormous amount of territory.

Finally, the book I have been waiting for.

Music can expand us beyond the limits of who we think we are, and this book will do just that. It explores and offers answers to such questions as: Why music affects us as it does and Why great music can tell the larger stories of our lives. Now I understand why healing music may be stimulating and cathartic as well as meditative and transcendent. And why, as the most direct path to the emotions, music helps us listen to our secret selves. The book gives us a language for talking about these things. Plus it has lists of specific music by category: sensual music, music for studying and centering, meditative music, and music for each of the four elements.There is even a chapter on making your own music, from using your voice to express and release strong feeling to creating black note bliss on the piano, even if you've never been taught.This is a humanistic approach for musicians and non-musicians alike.