![]() ![]() Mathieu’s approach is at once so simple and so profound that musicians working in any style and at any level can profit from it. Reading the book will put ideas into your head singing, playing, and listening will put knowledge in your heart. The one prerequisite, beyond the ability to read music, is a willingness to do the practices. Such a regimen of careful listening reveals to us not only how music works but also how it works in us. The next step, then, is to examine how the ambiguities of equal temperament make possible a harmonic language of exquisite subtlety and beauty. Once those responses are mapped, the same process of attentive listening and introspection is applied to the impure tunings of equal temperament, which we are able to accept as more or less reasonable facsimiles of the genuine article. As you gain a conscious appreciation of these responses, a map of music’s inner geography starts to emerge. Harmonic Experience begins with the fundamental building blocks of music-single tones, sung over a drone-and shows you how to examine in minute detail your own responses to pure resonance. Mathieu shows us how, by singing and playing various combinations of notes in tune, we can learn to observe our changing responses and begin to develop an understanding of music’s power based on what happens in our own bodies and minds. That quality of being in tune is called resonance, and just as tones in correct relationships resonate together, so do we, as listeners and performers, resonate along with them. He takes as his starting point the phenomenon that comes closest to being a universal part of human experience: Our attraction to music that is in tune. A pianist and composer in both jazz and classical traditions, as well as a longtime student of North Indian singing, Mathieu has developed an approach to self-training in harmony that focuses on the listener’s response to combinations of tones. Mathieu, a musician who not only had covered much of the same lonely territory before me but had also managed to synthesize his knowledge into a teachable form. I had already spent a couple of decades in this search before I crossed paths with W. Each of these sources has supplied another piece of the puzzle, but generally I’ve found myself on my own when it came to relating the useful bits and pieces to one another and to the actual music I want to make. In my own journey as a composer and performer, that search has included playing African mbira music, exploring European tuning systems that predate equal temperament, and cracking my skull on the esoteric writings of Pythagorean philosophers. The insatiably curious among us begin to search outside the usual sources of instruction to find an answer to that question. They may indeed have learned something valuable about how music works, but what remains missing is a clear idea of how their own perceptions and responses fit into the picture. Conventional music theory courses have taught them how to label different musical elements, identify chord progressions, and notate what they hear. Even after years of university or conservatory training, most musicians still sense that a large piece of musical understanding is missing. What those students are often surprised to learn is how many professional musicians feel the same hunger. MY WIFE TELLS ME that her adult music students often begin lessons with this request: "I want to play better, of course, but what I’m really hoping to learn is how music works." The wording may vary-some say they want to learn harmony, others music theory-but the underlying need is the same: A hunger to understand how music exercises its power over our psyches. ![]()
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