Customer Reviews

Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound and Healing

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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....

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!

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.

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.

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.

If you know nothing or everything about music, read this book to open up a whole new world. Draper's simple, elegant writing and natural approach to her subject will inspire readers to pay attention and listen to music with a fresh approach. This is a great gift for yourself, your children, your parents, your new amour. Listening to the cds and reading the accompanying text with friends is a wonderful reason to have a series of dinner parties.
Thanks, M. Draper, for bring music back into my life through another door I didn't even know was there.

20 years ago Maureen McCarthy was my piano teacher. I have never forgotten her remarkable ability to combine the technical skills of piano playing with the subtle meanings of the music. Even today, when I attend a concert, Maureen's words echo in my mind.

I am thrilled to discover that Maureen's capabilities have not diminished a bit. This women is blessed with uncanny insight into music, and we are lucky that she has chosen to share it with us. It is easy to write about the facts of music, but difficult indeed to write about the spirituality of it. Maureen pulls it off.

I'm allowing myself to read only a few pages a day. I don't want this book to end. Although it's a book I'll be going back to again and again. I love the section on Composing a Day to music, and I did it last week. What a difference it made to listen to 5 minutes with the music on the companion CDs at crucial times during the day, to center and focus my energy. The music Draper talks about is so beautiful, and most of it is on the CDs. I only wish all of it were. Truly an inspirational work!

There are several things that stand out upon even a preliminary acquaintance with the book. The tasteful presentation of the book, the Klimt on the cover, the quality of the paper the book is printed on all exhibit careful attention to fine detail. But there is an additional quality, which I found particularly appealing.

The author unabashedly centers her attention on eternal values, such as beauty and higher aspirations of the soul. These Òold-fashionedÓ values which the author takes as given and forever relevant, our societyÑat least that part of it which expresses itself most loudlyÑdeems irrelevant and out of fashion. The bookÕs tone, with its unhurried soft-spoken concern for beauty and lofty values, strikes me as bold and courageous. For our time is interested in flashy, quick, loud and digital (that is, small and fractured and flat and two-dimensional). The society is much less interested in the quiet, the subtle and the deep, which this book espouses. The book is set against the background of the fin de siecle, only this time it is OUR own 20th centuryÕs fin de siecle! The message, whether conscious and unconscious, that the book delivers, becomes a counterpoint and an antidote to our culture.

The carefully crafted prose of Maureen Draper's THE NATURE OF MUSIC demands and deserves a careful reader. That reader's attention will be rewarded for the effort expended. For example, speaking of Bach, she writes: "His music affirms the goodness of creation even as it acknolwedges the presence of tragedy and sorrow. Bach knows swehat Rilke knows when he writes in the eighth "Sonnet to Orpheus" that grief should walk only in the footsteps of praise, for joy already understands what grief is still learning---life is to be praised. Bach communicates this understanding through the inevitability of his cadences; their rightness brings repose, and a sense of fulfillment".

I am not a musician, but as a life-long lover of music, I found in THE NATURE OF MUSIC new insights which have already enhanced my listening habits and pleasure.