Composer/musician Brad Raylius Daniel is the founder and president of the Association for the Holistic Understanding of Music (AHUM), a global affiliation of musicians, academics, and related professionals dedicated to the collection and dissemination of information concerning the vital role of music throughout the course of human development, as well as the promotion of its inclusion in standard education curriculums and our general historical paradigm. He is known for his genre-blending, original works such as the series of futuristic ambient albums released under the name The Raylius Experiment, especially Ever Expanding Inner Universe, Outer Realms, and Seeds of Life, which are imbued with a unique mix of classical, avant-garde, minimalist, and popular electronic. He composed the score to the 1999 award-winning documentary film Wadd: The Life and Times of John Holmes. His alternative rock band Raylius, which at times has featured drummer D.J. Bonebrake (X, the Knitters, Orchestra Superstring) and guitarist Stan Whitaker (Happy the Man, Ten Jinn, Oblivion Sun), has recorded the albums All Tied Up and After the Fall. He also continues to compose for orchestra and chamber ensemble, with such recent works as the orchestral suite Investigations Into Silence.

His musical training began with guitar lessons at age 8 and quickly progressed at age 12 to university-level studies in composition and conducting with Jack M. Jarrett of Virginia Commonwealth University and piano with Vera Zathureczky Lendvay of the College of William & Mary. Other instruments he would master at a young age and for which he would achieve recognition included violin, viola, flute, drums, timpani, and banjo. He was awarded first place in the original music category of the national Parent-Teacher Association’s Cultural Arts Contest for his solo piano work “Dream of Peace” (Nocturne No. 1), became one of the first Composition Fellows of the Eastern Music Festival, and won the Richmond Symphony Youth Orchestra’s concerto competition with a performance of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. He also performed or conducted his original compositions Elegy for Piano and Orchestra, Symphony No. 2 (King Lear), Piano Sonata No. 1, and Three Piano Pieces, all before graduating high school.

After relocating to Los Angeles, Daniel’s areas of interest expanded greatly. He became a sought-after studio musician and performer, playing rock, jazz, new wave, and electronic music. He began arranging for and producing other artists, as well as recording his original rock and electronic experimental music. Extensive research work also started at this time, originally from the perspective of a composer seeking deeper understandings of music’s power and potential. As he was meticulously developing a distinctive ambient-electronic musical style evocative of the vibratory qualities of the natural environment, larger questions about the place of music in human life drew his attention. He immersed himself in the music of other cultures and began delving into foreign philosophies and lifestyles. He undertook an exhaustive study of Eastern scriptures—especially those of ancient India and China—and became involved in book publishing, serving variously as typesetter, proofreader, editor, and even publisher for multiple volumes of scriptural commentaries by several revered Indian swamis. He also dedicated some years towards researching the correlations between the various secular and religious philosophies of the West and the East. The trail of multi-cultural investigations inevitably led him back to the fields of ethnomusicology, ancient musical practice, and musical origins.

He then undertook the extraordinary task of writing A Big History of Music, a unique multi-disciplinary approach to the story of music from its most archaic origins to today.