SACRED MUSIC Its Origins, Powers, and Future (Traditional Music in Today's World)

What is modal music? Why did the ancient consider music the key of sciences, related to metaphysics? Is there a relation between Indian music, jazz, cante jondo, Gregorian chant? How should we understand African music? What are the relations between music and religion? And between music and magic, or therapy?

This collection of texts, covering a wide range of subject, concerns the amateur music lover as well as the professional musician. The renowned musicologist Alain Danielou here explains clearly and simply the profound concepts relating music to its essential roots.

Excerpts from Reviews

"Tradition is inevitably the basis on which innovations can develop. Change, if it results in the lost of tradition, is more often that not a loss rather than a gain."

"People who loss their language and their music cease to exist as a cultural and national entity and have no further contribution to make to world culture."

Alain Danielou

"Today, 'music from far afield' has become a reference for many specialists and connoisseurs. These treasures have inspired many contemporary composers. We owe all this to Alain Danielou. Today the existence all over the world, and especially in the Orient, of music, which is as classical as that of Bach and Mozart, is universally acknowledged: we owe that fact to Alain Danielou's farsightedness and unstinting efforts."

Noriko Aikawa
Director of the Intangible Heritage section of UNESCO