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For Immediate Release - NEW BOOK - Spirituality of Music - For review copies or interviews contact Clare Lewis at clareh@woodlake.com

Music is Vital to Our Survival New Book Declares

Stop what you are doing. Put your hand on your heart. Do you feel it? The beat. That is the beat of your life's breath. Beginning with your beginning and going on endlessly through your life. It is essential.

In the new book Spirituality of Music, John Bird writes about music as if it were as essential as his heartbeat. To Bird it is. Bird's unbridled enthusiasm draws readers into this passionate exploration of the importance of music in our lives. From the first heartbeat we hear in the womb to the music that escorts us out of this life, music marks the major milestones in our life: birthdays, graduation, weddings, and accompanies us through the mundane moments in our daily lives as we shower, work, and chauffer kids to soccer. But, for Bird it does more than that. Music connects us.

Music connects our intellect with our emotion, and it connects us with other people. Using examples from his own life - a lullaby sung by his father to hush him off to sleep, or a humorous tune sung by his Welsh mother - Bird illustrates how music connects us at a very early age to our family and roots. As we grow our world expands outward and so does our connection through music. All through our lives we attend concerts in the musical style of our choice to experience what Bird calls "the mystical joy of knowing we're alive, and feeling ourselves collective members of a divine creation."

Don Campbell, author of Sound Spirit and The Mozart Effect agrees. "Awaken your soul with gladness

as you feel the visual and verbal power of music," he says. "John Bird's wonderful pages help us remember that music is a bridge to spirit, soul and creative prayer."

author JOHN BIRD

While Bird enthusiastically explores the exuberance music brings to life, he realizes music is not always a joyful celebration. Music can express a powerful cry from the depths of the soul. The spirituals of enslaved Africans were born of pain and suffering. Denied possession of instruments, slaves used their voices to create an aural connection to each other and to pass coded messages to others in their struggle for freedom.

Bird is thorough in his exploration. He looks at different types of music emanating from different cultures: Celtic, Inuit throat singers, symphonic music, choral music, the blues and rock and roll. He examines not only the effect of listening to music, but also the effect of making music with others, with and without instruments. "Making music with other people can connect us with those others at a level of intimacy that goes far beyond what words can express," says Bird.

But don't just take his word for it. Throughout this beautiful book filled with full colour photographs, Bird quotes a diverse range of writers and authorities on music. He includes thought-provoking words from Beethoven, Van Morrison, John Lennon, Luciano Pavarotti, Louis Armstrong, William Shakespeare, Thomas Carlyle, and Henry David Thoreau to name a few.

John Bird will make you pause and appreciate music on a new level. As he says, "Music can be a key that opens the safe where we lock up our ability to be present to each eternal moment."