The Whole Music Experience

Orpheus, Wikipedia I'm including another excerpt from my book Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit) .   If you are an agent or book publisher interested in this title, please contact me at wholemusicexp at gmail dot com. This exercise comes from the end of Chapter 8. The Practice--The Art of Listening The first music appreciation class I took in college featured classical music.   While you could do the following practice with any genre of music, for this session, I ask you to choose one piece of music by a single composer from baroque to contemporary classical music.   For example, you could choose a cello suite by J.S. Bach which would land you in the heart of the baroque period or you could choose Appalachian Spring by contemporary American composer Aaron Copland. For one week, listen to only listen to this piece of music.   You can listen to the music via headphones or play it within the ambiance of a room.   Listen f...

Wikipedia image (Here is another excerpt from my book Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit ), the chapter on classical music). Date with Immortals: Western Classical Music European classical composers represent the stuff of legends.  These immortal musicians traipsed through the centuries landing in the digital age.  Would classical composers capture our imagination if movie makers had not recreated their lives?  Would we have fallen in love with the classics if Mozart had not landed on the big screen played by quirky Tom Hulse or if Gary Oldman had not rendered our beloved Beethoven and unraveled the German composer’s mysterious romantic life? We knew that the biographical pictures gazed mainly at the personalities behind the music, while tossing sound bites of the composers’ music at viewers.  Lush eye-candy grabbed our attention while we learned little about the actual music.  What is classical music? Why have we add...