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In Campbell's unique view, music is not only a rich and rewarding aesthetic experience but a bridge to a more creative, intelligent, healthy and joy-filled life. His singular mission is to help return music to its central place in the modern world as a resource for growth, development, health and celebration.

Campbell's roots - ranging from a South Texas boyhood steeped in the musical heritage of the Methodist church, to the rarefied setting of Nadia Boulanger's American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France - could easily have led to a traditional career as a performer, composer, music researcher, educator, critic, theorist, therapist or teacher. But Campbell, traveling the world for 35 years with an uncommon sense of openness and understanding about music's place in our lives, has taken a different path.

Campbell describes himself simply as a man who has "listened to the world." Yet his experiences in doing so, including the influence of the pioneering work of French researcher Dr. Alfred Tomatis on the central role of the ear to overall mental and physical health, and the critical distinction between hearing and listening, have led to a renaissance body of work; Campbell is the author of eight books, including the 1997 best-selling work, The Mozart Effect®. Campbell has also produced 12 albums and in 1998 was ranked sixth on Billboard magazine's year-end Classical Artist chart. In addition he is a leading lecturer and consultant to organizations ranging from corporations to parenting groups to symphony orchestras.

Campbell traces the origin of his unique life in music to a moment as a 5-year old, sitting under the family piano in San Antonio, fascinated by a universe filled with endless sound and vibration. He was experiencing what physicists know - the world is merely sound and vibration. From that time, Campbell become engaged in everything musical, from church choirs and piano lessons to the school band.

His family's precipitous move to France led to the teenager's acceptance at age 13 as the youngest student at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, studying with the famed Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger was mentor to many of the 20th century's leading composers, conductors and soloists, and introduced Campbell to important figures including Leonard Bernstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Aaron Copland and Francis Poulenc. Campbell says that at Fontainebleau he was "no child prodigy," but there he learned the techniques fundamental to the understanding of all music, and the foundation of his life's work.

Later, a family move to Nurnberg, Germany, infused the young music student with other essential experiences - as organist in a local church and as a newcomer to the archetypal textures and music of opera, attending a different one each week. Returning to the United States, Campbell studied organ and education at the University of North Texas and accepted a scholarship in choral conducting to the University of Cincinnati College - Conservatory of Music.

Next, the experiences of his own well-traveled youth and the sense of exploration so much a part of the late 1960s took Campbell to Haiti. As an organist in the Episcopal cathedral, he discovered the traditional drumming and chanting Haitians had brought to the island from Africa. Here, contrasted with his grounding in the Western Classical tradition, was an equally rich but utterly distinct form of musical expression.

Campbell's journey then took him to Tokyo, where at St. Mary's International School he taught in the school's rigorous program for children of the international business and diplomatic community. He found music the basis for communication among children from 40 different countries with nearly as many languages. Intrigued when other teachers reported how much better young students were able to listen in language courses after a music class, Campbell began to seek a more formal framework for his interest in how mind, body and language are connected to music.

While in Japan, Campbell's role as a music critic led to a rare invitation from the Emperor to hear the performance of the Gagaku - the ancient court music of Japan and the oldest form of written music in the world - at Tokyo's Imperial Palace. Campbell experienced the absolute transcendence aspired to in this form, one of several indelible experiences that helped shape his life in music. In another such experience a few years later, Campbell ventured eastward, and traveling by motorcycle to a Balinese village, he saw two girls, perhaps 9 or 10 years of age, dancing in perfect unison yet with their eyes closed. Watching what was clearly a ceremony of passage for these young girls, Campbell knew more about what Western culture had lost by increasingly distancing music from both life's everyday rhythms and its central rituals.

Returning home, Campbell accepted a post with the Choristers Guild in Dallas and coordinated national and international choral music events. Eventually, inspired by the emerging studies in music, psychology and neurology, Campbell expanded his concept of music as a life-long listening and participatory skill important to family communication and personal development, a skill that imbues the arts with an additional set of goals and purposes. In 1982, he began in earnest to study the physiology of the brain and the psychological relationship between sound and mental function. This led to the first of Campbell's eight books, Introduction to the Musical Brain, published in 1983.

All told, Campbell's inspirations are many: Christian, Western and Eastern music, the indigenous music he heard and studied in three years of journeying around the world (he has traveled to 60 countries and taught in half that number), including South Africa, Brazil, India, Israel and Russia; his work as a faculty member of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO; and the influence of the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis.

Campbell, the man who has "listened to the world," continues to teach, perform and write, while celebrating music's ability to transcend traditional expectations. After publishing the first comprehensive introduction to music's reach and power for general audiences in The Mozart Effect®, Campbell now is focusing on a second, definitive book to help parents understand and harness its impact for children, The Mozart Effect® for Children. The book will be published in the year 2000.

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