“Mathieu has found the words to tell the
power of music.”

— Pete Seeger

The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music (1991) — The Listening Book is about rediscovering the power of listening as an instrument of self-discovery and personal transformation. By exploring our capacity for listening to sound and for making music, we can awaken and release our full creative powers. Mathieu offers suggestions and encouragement on many aspects of music-making, and provides playful exercises to help readers appreciate the connection between sound, music, and everyday life.

The Listening Book is available from Shambhala Publications.

The Listening Book is available as an audio book here.

The Musical Life: Reflections on What It Is and How to Live It (1994) — Everyone, according to W. A. Mathieu, is musical by nature — it goes right along with being human. And if you don't believe it, this book is all you'll need to be convinced. Mathieu takes us on a journey through everyday experiences to open our ears to the rich variety of music that surrounds us but that we are trained to ignore-such as the variety of pitches produced by different objects, like dishes, furniture, drums, dogs-anything you can tap; or sounds that hover on the borders of music, like laughter, the clinking of glasses in a toast, or the unintentional falsetto produced by yawning. Along the way he teaches aspects of music theory that nonmusicians might ordinarily shy away from. Mathieu reveals how sensitivity to the music that surrounds us can deepen our appreciation for all of life and become a profoundly spiritual path-one that is everyone's birthright. Excerpt: The Mind of Sound.

The Musical Life is available from Shambhala Publications.

Parts of The Musical Life are available on audio book here.

Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony From Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression (1997) — An exploration of musical harmony from its ancient fundamentals to its most complex modern progressions, addressing how and why it resonates emotionally and spiritually in the individual.  W. A. Mathieu, an accomplished author and recording artist, presents a way of learning music that reconnects modern-day musicians with the source from which music was originally generated. As the author states, "The rules of music--including counterpoint and harmony--were not formed in our brains but in the resonance chambers of our bodies." His theory of music reconciles the ancient harmonic system of just intonation with the modern system of twelve-tone temperament. Saying that the way we think music is far from the way we do music, Mathieu explains why certain combinations of sounds are experienced by the listener as harmonious. His prose often resembles the rhythms and cadences of music itself, and his many musical examples allow readers to discover their own musical responses.

Read excerpts from Harmonic Experience. See Interview, 1997 for additional details. The first edition contained a few errors, for which errata are available.

Harmonic Experience (second printing, with additions and corrections) is available from Inner Traditions International