Album Notes

The Listening Book and The Musical Life is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sounds and form making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers.

In this 2-CD audio edition of the classic book, W. A. Mathieu presents exercises designed to help you explore and expand your capacity for listening, appreciate the connection between sound, music, and every-day life, and discover the creative possibilities of music-making.

This series of short, engaging talks - complete with musical accompaniment - range from the serious to the whimsical, including fear of music, listening to animals, the rhythms of walking, and being a “life drummer”. The Listening Book is a joyful tool for opening up the world of music-making for everyone.

The audio material, first issued on cassette tapes in 1991, has been digitally remastered for release in 2008.

In addition, this 2-CD package contains new material from The Musical Life, W. A. Mathieu's second book.

William Allaudin Mathieu is one of the most influential musicians of his generation. He began recording solo piano albums in 1980. He has composed a large variety of chamber pieces, choral works, and song cycles, and has written three books on music, The Listening Book, The Musical Life, and Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression. Allaudin was a disciple of North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath for 25 years. He studied with composers William Russo and Easley Blackwood, and with Nubian master musician Hamza El Din, with whom he collaborates.

In the 1960s, he spent several years as an arranger/composer for Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington Orchestras, and was the musical director for the Second City Theater in Chicago (which he helped found) and for the Committee Theater in San Francisco. In the 1970s, he served on the faculties of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Mills College. In 1969 he founded the Sufi Choir, which he directed until 1982.

The past two decades Allaudin has devoted to practice, performance, recording, composition, teaching, and writing from his home near Sebastopol, California.