Don and Emily Saliers
Saturday Night & Sunday Morning: Music and Spirituality Crossing-Over

Aug 10 - 22, 2008    

Praise for A Song to Sing, A Life to Live

"I found warmth, wisdom, and love to be present on every page of this book. Emily and her father, Don, have found a way to have a deeply meaningful conversation about their life experiences and share it with the reader. The result is this beautiful expression of music as many things--healer, gift, symbol of freedom and community, and agent of change."
—Mary Chapin Carpenter

"Don and Emily Saliers trace the songlines of two very different lives through this thought-provoking book. It is full of stories, quotations from songs old and new, and even their personal discussions as they explore the boundaries between their worlds. Their words plumb the depths of human and musical differences: the way song can divide as well, bring us together and its power to bring us 'back to life' from grief or pain or spiritual anguish. May we all be able to find songlines as rich as those uniting this intelligent, affectionate, and musical father and daughter."
—Alice Parker, author, Yes, We'll Gather!, Creative Hymn Singing, and Melodious Accord

"In this sweetheart of a book, Don and Emily Saliers do far more than write convincingly about the healing power of music. They show us how it works by letting their own love of 'deep song' lead them across generational, aesthetic, and religious differences into a place of such holy listening to one another that even the angels lay down their tambourines."
—Barbara Brown Taylor, author, Bread of Angels, Home by Another Way, Gospel Medicine, The Preaching Life, God in Pain, and Speaking of Sin

"Emily and her dad have created a beautiful celebration of how music and spirit connect us all."
—Bonnie Raitt

Reviews

The Wittenburg Door Interview: Don and Emily Sailers
Read the interesting interview

In a review in the Anglican Theological Review, Paula S. Datsko Barker of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary said this about A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice.

“Don and Emily's tales of the musical practices that have shaped their beliefs and actions encompass multiple aspects of life. . . . Music in our bodies and in our families, music's connection with emotions, its creative expression in work and play—all of these serve as themes from which the authors develop an array of perspectives on music's role in local, national, global, and rehgious communities. Neither musical nor theological expertise is required to enjoy their transformative conversation. . . . The tender counterpoint of this father and daughter's deep listening invites us to enter such conversations with people who form the networks of our own lives.”

Musicians often acknowledge the Saturday night–Sunday morning dichotomy in their lives: the decadence of the one contradicting
the piety of the other. Not the Saliers, a father and daughter who are, respectively, a professor of theology and one-half of the folk-rock duo the Indigo Girls. For them, music and life are forever
linked, and music has transformed their lives.

They write of their experiences—their songlines, as they say—in different generations, discussing the universal language of music and recalling their family singing together on long car trips. They consider how the basics of music—rhythm, melody, harmony, tempo—conjure sounds that move us so profoundly, and ponder music’s inherent spirituality, and the ineffability of the creative process. While it’s fun reading about father’s and daughter’s musical differences and similarities, their distinctive musical moments prove more memorable.

Emily recalls the morning when, hearing an orchestral piece on the radio, she had to stop the car and listen. A lovely meditation on the power of music.
—June Sawyers
Booklist / November 1, 2004

What is it about us that responds to a well-crafted vase sprouting a bouquet of jonquils? A phrase you've heard from a chamber group that recurs and haunts you, not only in the hours after, but years after, when you're grieving--or when you're ecstatic? A piece of poetry that gives you the language to say what you've always wanted to say? The sheer act of beholding in a culture of distraction and forgetfulness and ugliness--that's the secret. Works of art can teach us, can reveal to us something about our inner powers of intuition, about beauty, about the root of our vital energies. The loving of art in everyday life is like breathing. It is essential for our humanity."

—Don E. Saliers, Franklin N. Parker Professor of Theology and Worship, from the keynote address of the Seventeenth Assembly, "The Love of Art in Everyday Life"