Episode 23 - The Church of Music

Jeff and Darron explore Jeff’s long-simmering idea to create a secular church around the performance of music. Jeff talks about the original inspiration for his idea, they discuss the origins of music and its role in human culture, their own histories with music, why music specifically might work as a centering activity, the modern commodification of music and separation into performers and consumers, what a church of music might look like and how it might function, the potential benefits of creating a purposeful community around creation, and they even sing a little bit.

Notes:

• 2:07 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 22 - What is Life? from March 2022 (but recorded in January 2022)

• 3:09 - See the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting Wikipedia entry

• 3:48 - Listen to Luciano Pavarotti sing Ave Maria (YouTube)

• 7:04 - See the History of Music Wikipedia entry and “The origins of music: Evidence, theory, and prospects” (Music & Science, 2018)

• 7:39 - The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt

• 7:54 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Heinrich

• 8:03 - This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin

• 12:15 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 21 - The Myth of the Desert Island Self from January 2022

• 12:30 - Collective effervescence is a sociological concept coined by Émile Durkheim, read the Wikipedia entry and see “There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing” (New York Times, 2021)

• 16:51 - See “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated” (Pew Research Center, 2021) and “U.S. Public Becoming Less Religious” (Pew Research Center, 2015)

• 17:55 - Lorna Marshall was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert (Wikipedia)

• 18:25 - Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

• 18:35 - Listen to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Episode 186 - Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity from February 2022

• 19:44 - Tony Hsieh was an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, who among other things, in 1999 helped launch and was eventually CEO of Zappos, the pioneering online shoe retailer which was purchased by Amazon in 2009 for $1.2 billion. According to multiple sources Hsieh was known for taking extreme challenges regarding his body, and spoke often about partying as a central feature of his work and life. Hsieh died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in November 2020 in a house fire, and although the medical examiner determined that Hsieh died from smoke inhalation, and ruled his death was an accident, sources have suggested that drug use and nitrous oxide use may have played a role in the incident. For more on Tony Hsieh’s interesting life and tragic death see the Tony Hsieh Wikipedia entry and “The Death of Zappos’s Tony Hsieh: A Spiral of Alcohol, Drugs and Extreme Behavior” (Wall Street Journal, 2020)

• 20:52 - Mirror neurons (Wikipedia)

• 25:42 - For more on gene-culture coevolution see “Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics” (Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, 2010), “Gene–culture coevolution and the nature of human sociality” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2011), and the “Dual inheritance theory” Wikipedia entry

• 26:21 - Phish

• 34:01 - Listen to Bobby Darin sing “Beyond the Sea” (YouTube)

• 36:22 - Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Connecticut

• 37:12 - Listen to John Prine and Iris DeMent perform Prine’s tune “In Spite of Ourselves” (YouTube)

• 37:20 - Listen to “Something” by The Beatles and “The Man In Me” by Bob Dylan (YouTube)

• 41:58 - Listen to “The Weight” by The Band

• 47:18 - Didgeridoo

• 47:40 - Church of Music (San Diego)

• 56:20 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 6 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020, Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2021, and Episode 16 - Partisan Pizza from July 2021