Music and the Future of the Human Heart

This beautiful book is about shaping the invisible principles of harmony, beauty and order by focusing on roots and routes of the art of listening to music. As such, it is a healing balm for our time of disharmony, ugliness and disorder. It is a collection of essays, reflections, art images, and musical compositions with links for the reader to listen. EuMuse uses five groups of fundamental abilities: tonal, rhythmic, kinaesthetic, aesthetic and creative abilities in order to enhance well-being and general intelligence. Marina quotes Dostoyevsky as writing: ‘Humanity can live without science, it can live without bread, but it cannot live without beauty. Without beauty, there would be nothing left in this life. Here the secret lies. Here lies the entire story.’ This is an extraordinary remark to read in our time, making us aware of what we lack, experiencing as we do ‘the poverty of beauty, purpose and dignity that afflicts us all.’

Marina asks a series of poignant questions, noting that ‘when we move away from beauty and ethics, both conceptually and linguistically, we end up with ugliness, disorder, and dissonance.’ (p. 16) We have also outsourced our memory to an engineering mindset – traditional cultures passed on their stories orally so that they could be memorised. This too involves attention and conscious listening, and while ‘sounds are what we hear, music is how we think, link, and feel.’ (p. 23) Marina calls this art Goal-Oriented Music Listening. She is right that with every new repeated listening of the same musical piece, one can find new meaning – and I would add, structure, especially when listening to the fugues of Bach. This can nurture the heart and format the mind, bringing us into finer attunement, which is also the purpose of Peter Deunov’s paneurhythmy. This is a book to muse over and contemplate as a means of refining one’s awareness and deepening one’s capacity to listen.