Music makes an altar out of our ears. A single struck tone, a note blown from a flute, can flush the body with goodness.
W. A. Matthieu
Music Makes An Altar
Topic: Creativity, Culture, & the Arts
Music makes an altar out of our ears. A single struck tone, a note blown from a flute, can flush the body with goodness.
William Allaudin Mathieu, born in 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a composer, pianist, music theorist, choir director, and writer. He began studying piano at age six and later earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1958. His musical education included work with jazz composer William Russo and classical theorist Easley Blackwood. In his early twenties, Mathieu arranged and composed for the Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington orchestras, with Kenton’s Standards in Silhouette album featuring only his arrangements.
Over the years, William Allaudin Mathieu deepened his musical range through long-term study with Hamza El Din in Middle Eastern music and Pandit Pran Nath in Indian raga. These traditions, along with his background in jazz and classical music, shaped his distinctive voice as a composer and teacher. He launched his record label, Cold Mountain Music, in the 1970s and composed a wide range of solo piano works, chamber pieces, and choral music. He also co-founded The Second City in Chicago and later directed The Committee in San Francisco. From 1969 to 1982, he led the Sufi Choir in San Francisco.
William Allaudin Mathieu has consistently encouraged musical participation as a natural human ability. He has taught at Mills College and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and is known for training “tone-deaf” choirs to sing in tune. His books—including The Musical Life—explore music as a way of listening and living. He now lives near Sebastopol, California, where he continues to compose, teach, and write.
The Musical Life
Mathieu, W A. The Musical Life. Shambhala Publications, 24 May 1994.
W. A. Matthieu
Theme: The Musical Arts
About This W. A. Mathieu Quotation [Commentary]
W. A. Mathieu invites us to approach music as a sacred encounter. When he writes, “Music makes an altar out of our ears,” he suggests that listening itself becomes a form of devotion. A single tone—a bell’s strike or a note from a flute—can “flush the body with goodness,” not simply because it pleases the ear, but because it carries a current that reaches the whole being. Music, in this view, is not just sound; it’s a living presence we receive through attentive listening.
In the context passage, Mathieu expands this idea, describing every sound as “like the first Word, a creation story in itself.” He speaks of sound as “the audible form of vital energy that passes through your life,” reminding us that music is not confined to performance. Whether in silence, conversation, or the sounds of everyday life, we are constantly in the presence of this energy. The way we listen determines how deeply we engage with it.
This way of listening is central to Mathieu’s vision of the musical arts. For him, music is less about technical skill and more about sensitivity. It is “an exchange between souls,” shaped by our willingness to be open. The altar, then, is not just in the ear but in the quality of attention we bring to each moment. By hearing more deeply, we allow the music of life to move through us.
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat on: The Musical Life by W. A. Mathieu [Book review Excerpt]
W. A. Mathieu is a composer and a teacher who believes that being musical doesn’t really have to do with knowing how to play an instrument or to sing in tune. It is, he says, “a way of being aware, an angle of perception, a tilt of the ear.” Mathieu’s The Musical Life: Reflections on What It Is and How To Live It is a spiritual masterpiece that speaks volumes about meditative listening, the bounties of life, the joys of creativity, and the mystical oneness of all things.
“The secret of the musical life,” Mathieu writes, “is to be open to vibration at every level, to appreciate it wherever you find it.” The hum of traffic, the samba in brushing your teeth, the thumping of your blood are always within earshot. “Every sound,” according to the author, “is like the first Word, a creation story in itself. Sound is the audible form of vital energy that passes through your life.”
Music is within us; music is all around us. That is why a certain song can spark a memory and we are transported to the past. That is why the phrase, we make sweet music together describes a good thing… And that is why we can refer to a mystical experience as something akin to the music of the spheres.
Mathieu compares music to fireworks—”ephemeral constructions that hang in the sky and heighten our senses.” He moves a step closer by defining music as “an exchange between souls.” When Mathieu describes what it is like to be a composer, it sounds like being a holy man. Perhaps that’s because the author has played tambourine at the center of Sufi dancing for 25 years.
So what do we have here? A celebration of life where sound, music, harmony, and melody are all around us. “Music,” writes Mathieu, “makes an altar in our ears.” We approach it by becoming sensitive, open, generous listeners…
We begin our lives listening to the many sounds surrounding us in the womb. When we are dying, the last faculty to shut down is usually hearing. In between, there is so much to see that we seldom take the time to cultivate the art of listening. Listening uses other practices: attention, being present, openness. It is holy work, involving in the inventive phrase of W.A. Mathieu, a Sufi musician, “making an altar out of our ears.”
—Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Book review, The Musical Life by W. A. Mathieu.
Hazrat Inayat Khan [Commentary]
“The sound of air finds expression in all wind instruments made of wood, brass and bamboo; it has a tendency to kindle the fire of the heart, as Rumi writes in his Masnavi about the flute. Krishna is always portrayed in Indian art with a flute. The air sound overpowers all other sounds, for it is living, and in every aspect its influence produces ecstasy.
—Hazrat Inayat Khan [The Sufi Teachings of Hazrat Inayat Kahn, Volume II].
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