I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking about music. I’ve studied it, played it, written about it, listened to an enormous amount of it, and yet there’s something about it that remains deeply mysterious to me.
Consider how strange the whole business is.
A series of vibrations travels through the air, enters our ears, and somehow produces an experience that can bring us to tears, fill us with joy, summon memories we haven’t thought about in decades, or make us feel connected to something larger than ourselves.
How does that happen?
And why does it happen so differently for different people? One person is transported by a Bach cantata, another by a Grateful Dead jam, and still another by a piece of music that the first two might find utterly intolerable. What exactly are they responding to? Is there something in the music itself, or is the magic happening entirely inside the listener?
And perhaps the strangest question of all: Why should sound have the power to move us in the first place?
We’ll travel from Sufi mystical music to Swedish death metal, consider some fascinating ideas from philosophy and the study of consciousness, and—most importantly—listen to music together.
This won’t be a conventional lecture. It will be an opportunity to experience something familiar in an unfamiliar way, and perhaps discover that there’s considerably more going on when we listen to music than we ordinarily imagine.
No musical training or philosophical background required. Just curiosity and a willingness to listen.
Sunday, December 13, 2026
2:00–3:00 PM EST
Live online | Free
Click here to register for The Mystery of Music.
Everyone is welcome. Feel free to share this with anyone who loves music—or simply wonders why it matters so much to us.