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Cynthia Ford's avatar

During the Delta wave of covid, when images of pyres burning day and night on the banks of the Ganges pulsed through the media, TikTok (a suspect platform, but that's another topic) broke out in sea shanties, those songs of communal motion and effort (leaving out the problematic whale hunting), as if the terrible fear and grief roiling in the collective unconscious was answered in the motion towards communal music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ2HbYnlc3s

I have, in an armchair, lay, uncredentialed way been studying music as a potential salvific force since I read in The Master and His Emissary this: "One possibility is that music, which brought us together before language existed, might even now prove effective in regenerating commonality, avoiding the need for words, that have been devalued, or for which we have become too cynical. Let's not forget that it was with music that Orpheus once moved stones." (page 458) I have mostly focused on music in evolutionary biology and bicultural evolution, disagreeing with Dr. MacGilchrist about us not being "conniving apes." I instead think we are DIVINE conniving apes, and that much of what is called sin or evil, is vestigial and evolutionary, *but* so is music if we can reclaim it. Ellen Dissanyake, in Art and Intimacy, proposes, since music creates oxytocin (the motherhood hormone), that after the hominins left the trees for the savannah, and became bipedal, that birth needed to occur earlier, so infants couldn't cling, and the mother hominin would sing or hum or grunt to the infant she'd hidden away for a bit while gathering. In that dyad, she thinks, begins relationship, ritual, and communality.

Thus, I find this essay, and this project, ****genius****. We live in a vivisecting neo-Puritan age, so it may be that the pleasure itself (in part oxytocin) makes us discount music. The late poet Galway Kinnell said all Americans read poetry nasally as we unconsciously remember our Puritan heritage, and music is perceived by scientific orthodoxy as a byproduct (not an adaptation) of evolution, "cheesecake," but if one doesn't think it is perhaps one of the deepest, oldest, most powerful aspects of being, resonating with potential, watch this from the documentary Alive Inside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FWn4JB2YLU

My deepest longing these days is to be in an amphitheater or a beautiful auditorium, with a huge audience, listening to a requiem, a recognition of all that has been lost, that is still being lost, during which I know I would bend double with weeping and fall to the floor. And that perhaps to be followed by a second line, from the tradition of the Jazz Funeral in the American South.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQoreoDSqEE

So my intuition is that this is utterly brilliant, and deserves wide,wide attention, and Bring Em All In

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxPl9Ka4yD4

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Sukhin Tye's avatar

Beautiful, full, and fulfilling piece/writing/insights, especially with clips of music. Thank you so very much.

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