What Can Music Do Today?

Here's the final chapter of my new book 'Music to Raise the Dead'

30 months ago, I promised to publish my next book on Substack.

Today I fulfill that promise. Below I share the final chapter of my online book Music to Raise the Dead.

I’ve published the entire work in 22 installments. Each section can be read as a stand-alone essay. But taken together, they outline a secret musicology you can’t learn in music school.

Publishing a book on Substack seemed like a risky move back in 2022. I was an established author who had worked successfully with leading publishers. I knew how to operate inside the system.

So why would I walk away from all this? Why would I self-publish on an alternative platform?

The short answer is that I prefer the freedom and flexibility of self-publishing. I also enjoy the direct contact with readers that Substack provides. But, most of all, I’m just happier and more comfortable when I work outside the system.

And your input—via comments and emails—added to my learning. It helped shape the book in real time.

Of course, I could always publish Music to Raise the Dead as a physical book at a later date. (And I probably will.) But it will be a better book because of my dialogues with readers during the course of publishing it here.

The numbers worked, too.

When I made the decision to publish this book on Substack, I had 30,000 total subscribers. I felt that publishing it on The Honest Broker would be justified if I could grow that by 50%.

As it turned out, readers increased by more than 600% during the intervening 30 months. The book installments (and other writings here) got millions of views. So it was the right decision to put my energy into growing my tiny broker’s establishment.

It’s not so tiny anymore. I thank you for that.

It’s been a joy to publish this on Substack—a much more interactive and open experience than I’ve enjoyed before over the course of my 35 years writing and publishing books.

Here’s the table of contents, with links to the previous installments.

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MUSIC TO RAISE THE DEAD: The Secret Origins of Musicology

Table of Contents

Prologue
Introduction: The Hero with a Thousand Songs

1. Why Is the Oldest Book in Europe a Work of Music Criticism? (Part 1) (Part 2)

2. What Do Conductors Really Do? (Part 1) (Part 2)

3. Is There a Science of Musical Transformation in Human Life? (Part 1) (Part 2)

4. What Did Robert Johnson Encounter at the Crossroads? (Part 1) (Part 2)

5. Where Did Musicology Come From? (Part 1) (Part 2)

6. Can Songs Actually Replace Philosophy? (Part 1) (Part 2)

7. Were the First Laws Sung? (Part 1) (Part 2)

8. Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs? (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)

9. What Is Really Inside the Briefcase in Pulp Fiction? (Part 1) (Part 2)

10. Where Do Music Genres Come From?

11. Can Music Still Do All This Today?

The first ten chapters were about music history—revealing ways music has served as a change agent and source of enchantment in human life.

But the last chapter asks whether this still can happen today.

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Can Music Still Do All This Today?

By Ted Gioia

If you tried to summarize this book for someone who hasn’t accompanied us on the journey, it must sound like a fantasy or outright hokum.

How can anyone take seriously the idea of music raising the dead? How could anyone write a historical survey of music that puts so much credence in otherworldly experiences and strange vision quests?

That’s the stuff of comic books, not serious scholarship.

But there’s nothing here based merely on imaginative conjecture or flights of fancy. Everything has been documented and footnoted, all claims grounded in science and historical reality.

To be blunt, the bogus concepts aren’t those in this book, but those promulgated in the debased pop culture view of music and its heroic possibilities. The musical quest presented here is, by contrast, scrupulously realistic and fact-driven.

Yet that still leaves open the possibility that this magical power of music, although a true historic phenomenon, possesses no genuine relevance in the current day. Perhaps people long ago believed in song-driven journeys to an alternate reality, or embraced music as a change agent in human life.

But they were credulous and superstitious.  Not like us. 

Under this scenario, we can enjoy the piquancy of the heroism described in this book and the life-changing music it embraced—but we can’t actually participate in it. It’s a historical relic from a bygone day, like dancing around the maypole or wearing parachute pants.

What a disappointment!

Or, it would be a disappointment, if the quest were actually a matter of mere superstition. But, in reality, a growing body of evidence, much of it accumulated in just the last few years, tells a very different story. 

Every significant aspect of the music-driven quest described in the preceding pages is not only still relevant today, but increasingly validated by science. The engine of the universe is a musical one—reminding us of those ancient myths of deities singing the universe into existence. Closer to home, doctors now remove tumors with sound. Music and sound therapy also alleviate chronic pain, addiction, dementia, anxiety, and depression. And—as we shall see below—sound even can revive comatose patients from their deathlike state.

It’s like the ancient myth of Orpheus or the Derveni papyrus discussed back in chapter one. Yes, the hero’s musical quest is still alive today. But it now happens in a hospital under the direction of medical researchers.

Music lovers are mostly unaware of these developments. Music professors, too—they don’t read the science journals. But both musicians and listeners still feel this power instinctively. If you look at their actions you can see how they seek out music’s transformative powers.

The music business wants to sell them entertainment. But the audience keeps reaching for something more.

That’s why musical events in the 21st century emulate those of ancient days to an uncanny degree. Even a high-tech genre such as EDM (electronic dance music) typically comes embedded in quasi-ritualistic events where otherworldly experiences and altered mind states are pursued with an intense fervor not much different from the mindset ancient Romans brought to their mystery cults.

These rituals might be known nowadays as raves or parties, but the actual behavior—and the quest for transcendence that drives it—is very much an extension of the ancient practices described in this book.

Or consider the case of Burning Man. This annual festival started out on a very small scale in 1986, but now is one of the most prominent music events in the world. Every year, a massive crowd undertakes a musical pilgrimage to the Black Rock Desert, a hundred miles outside of Reno—seeking songs and self transformation.

What could possibly attract 80,000 people to this god-forsaken spot? Well, it’s no coincidence that practitioners of the vision quest have always gone to deserts as part of the hero’s journey. In this instance the festival promoters have made every possible attempt to reinforce the ritualistic nature of the event—even to the conflagration of a large wooden human effigy (hence the name Burning Man) as a kind of sacrificial enactment of personal rebirth.

And if you had any doubt that participation in this ritual is intended to be life-changing, festival founder Larry Harvey has provided a list of ten guiding principles for those who embrace him as conductor on their quest. These include “radical self-reliance,” “transformative change,” and overcoming “barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.”

That’s not a music festival, mates, that’s a vision quest.

Burning Man (Source)

But the music is an essential part of the experience. You wouldn’t get 80,000 people coming out to the desert for a lecture series. And although Burning Man might be an extreme example, something similar is happening on a smaller scale in countless music venues around the world—whether at a rock concert, a Las Vegas casino show, a Mississippi Delta juke joint, a country hootenanny, or an reenactment of Wagner’s Ring at the Bayreuth Festival.

Each of these are experiential and ritualistic in their in own unique ways. And in each instance, song provides the path on the journey to transcendence, just as it did for the Orphic mystics thousands of years ago.

This mixture of music, ritual and transcendence keeps recurring for a very good reason. We still have much to learn about the impact music and rhythm have on the human brain, body chemistry, and physiology, but we know enough to grasp how powerful songs can be on a merely organic basis, without paying even the slightest attention to metaphysics or spirituality. And our body of knowledge is increasing rapidly—perhaps too fast for our music culture to adapt to what we’ve learned.

Just a few months ago, a team of scientists at Stanford University discovered a new way of producing out-of-body experiences in a test subject. Normally this requires ketamine or PCP (angel dust), which induce changes in brain cells associated with this altered mind state. But these Silicon Valley scientists found they could achieve something similar without any drugs—merely by using rhythm.

They began testing this with mice. But they needed to invent a special instrument that used light to control the rhythmic firing of brain cells. The results were remarkable. “We could see, right before our eyes, dissociation happening," remarked one of the researchers.

Could this work with humans too?

A severely epileptic patient, who had dissociative experiences, gave them the opportunity to test their hypothesis. When they emulated the rhythm that accompanied these interludes they found they could trigger an out-of-body experience. Somehow the rhythm could remove the linkage between mind and body, although only temporarily.

The scientists eventually concluded that the brains of mammals may possess this capability as part of its functioning, although few have found a way to tap into it.

This is a remarkable finding. But it merely reinforces the cumulative history and alternative musicology presented in these pages. We now are beginning to understand what happens inside the body of shamans in the midst of a ritual experience or of others in possession trances. We can measure changes in body chemistry among participants in a drum circle or vocalists engaged in group singing. We now understand the significance of surprising brain scan patterns in the MRIs of jazz musicians engaged in improvisations. All this new science confirms the old myths.

The body of research accumulates with increasing rapidity. And the results all testify to the empirical reality of the journey discussed here. Science, not superstition, validates the transformative power of music and rhythm.

Put simply: the quest is real, and song is the conductor—in a high tech digital age just as much as in a traditional society. I could fill up a book with summaries of research projects of this sort, but the problem at this stage isn’t a lack of scientific understanding, but rather the troubling fact that almost none of the key decision-makers driving our music culture have the slightest awareness of what we’ve learned here, or its potential impact.

We suffer not from mere ignorance, but from a mismatch between our expanding knowledge base and the narrowing parameters of a click-driven musical ecosystem.

Let’s take the simple question: How long should a song last? The music industry is convinced that a 3-minute song is the ideal duration for a hit record. But this is simply a legacy from the early days of recordings when the technology only had sufficient disk space for a song of that length. The limitations of the medium imposed that constraint, and the companies who ran the record business made a virtue of necessity. The 3-minute song became an artistic rule.

But have you ever noticed how people play their favorite song over and over—when it’s finished, they put it on again from the start? Have you noticed how DJs at a party seamlessly move from one song to another, without any silence in-between, often using two turntables (or digital tools with the same effect) to create a smooth transition from song to song? Have you been to a rock concert where the band plays their hit song for much longer than three minutes—with the audience responding viscerally and enthusiastically to the expansive time frame?

This isn’t coincidence or happenstance, but aligned with what both ritual and science tell us. In my research into music-driven trance, I’ve encountered again and again accounts that specify a duration of around ten minutes before an altered mind state is achieved.

I’ve seen this both in anthropological fieldwork and scientific research. Even a skilled participant needs time for music to work its magic—and three minutes is rarely sufficient. This is why listeners repeat songs or construct playlists, or why bands in concert play their songs longer. They all understand intuitively that the song needs to be longer than 180 seconds.

It’s only the people running the music business who haven’t figured this out. 

And the industry has grown further out-of-touch with each new technological shift. Consider that the payout structure of streaming—now the major source of revenues in the music business—rewards artists who fill their albums with short songs. Tracks on Spotify count as streamed if someone listens for just thirty seconds. This arbitrary decision punishes artists who perform longer songs—but those are the songs that satisfy our deep-seated desire for longer, more immersive musical experiences.

There’s no surprise here: the music business runs on money, not the alpha and theta brain waves of trance-like experiences. When a choice needs to be made between the two, cash flow seals the deal.

It’s tempting to dismiss these considerations as irrelevant. After all, how many music fans really want to go into a trance or make a journey to another realm of existence? Mom would have told me to stay away from that crowd. That ain’t the way to have fun, son. 

But on a purely theoretical level, this subject can’t be so easily dismissed—if only because it deals with the most profound philosophical mystery of them all, namely the bridge between mind and matter. This is the deepest rabbit hole of them all, and has bedeviled philosophers, psychologists, theologians, neuroscientists, and every other kind of thinker who peers into the biggest of big issues.

A recent theory, proposed by Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, goes so far as to claim that consciousness is built on rhythm. “Synchronization, harmonization, vibrations, or simply resonance in its most general sense,” in their words, create our very sense of self—and I note with interest that these are all terms with musical associations.

They continue:

“All things in our universe are constantly in motion, in process. Even objects that appear to be stationary are in fact vibrating, oscillating, resonating, at specific frequencies. So all things are actually processes. Resonance is a specific type of motion, characterized by synchronized oscillation between two states. An interesting phenomenon occurs when different vibrating processes come into proximity: they will often start vibrating together at the same frequency. They “sync up,” sometimes in ways that can seem mysterious….

Examining this phenomenon leads to potentially deep insights about the nature of consciousness in both the human/mammalian context but also at a deeper ontological level.”

In other words, rhythm may not be just the pace of reality, but reality itself.

The implications of this emerging perspective are too large for a book on musicology, no matter how ambitious. But one overarching fact is clear: music and rhythm have a power to transport us that may seem magical, but is as real as can be—perhaps even woven into the structure of the universe.

Are there limits to the musical journey? Is there a boundary beyond which it no longer operates? The title of this book even considers a trip outside the conventional demarcating lines separating life (as conventionally defined) and whatever exists outside it—in other words, music to raise the dead.

Is that legitimate, or even possible?

Consider the case of a 25-year-old man in a coma who was recently revived by a UCLA research team merely by the application of ultrasound in a non-invasive procedure. This success was so encouraging, that the scientists tried the same procedure on even more extreme cases—including a 56-year-old man who had been in a minimally conscious state for more than a year, and a 50-year-old woman who had been in a deep coma for more than two-and-a-half years.

The ultrasound was produced by a handheld device the size of a coffee cup. After exposure to the sounds, these patients started responding to their environment and spoken commands in ways that seemed impossible before the procedure.

In this case—as with the Stanford out-of-body experiences mentioned above—none of the scientists dared to describe their tools as musical instruments.

But that is, after all, the proper term for a sound-producing device.

Ultrasound device for coma patients from BrainSonix

And the same is true of all the other expensive ultrasound machines used in medicine nowadays—which are given fancy names, such as lithotripter or phacoemulsifier. But just like a piano or guitar, these devices rely solely on sound and rhythm to work their magic, and just giving them a high-tech label doesn’t change that fact.

So, yes, music is still capable of taking us on the most far-reaching journeys, even in a high tech age—and in a manner eerily reminiscent of Orpheus reclaiming his wife from the land of the dead with his lyre.

Most of us have less ambitious journeys in mind, and almost all of them are facilitated or empowered by music. I could show how this is true in dozens of fields of human life, but let me just take one as an illustrative example: high-performance athletics.

This is truly a prototype of the hero’s journey, and has been since the dawn of history. Pindar, the most venerated lyric poet in ancient times, devoted many of his songs to praising successful athletes—and he described their exploits in the same lofty terms he would apply to the heroes of military campaigns, or even deities of mythological renown. Even today, few situations in contemporary life manage to live up to the dimensions implied by the word heroic, but sports is where many of them transpire.

Is music a suitable conductor for this type of hero’s journey?

Even in Pindar’s day, the power of music in assisting physical exploits was widely recognized. The trireme, a Greek warship that takes its name for the three ranks of rowers, invariably included one musician in its crew, whose performance literally propelled the boat.

The steady rhythms had obvious advantages in coordinating labor, but the inspirational power of music also played a factor. If only a beat were needed, a loud drum would have proven sufficient, but the mariners preferred the sound of the aulos, a wind instrument held in awe for its connections with the frenzy and ecstasy of Dionysian rites.

Plato and other ancient authorities would have prohibited its use in all social settings, so dangerous did they perceive the effects of the aulos. The fact that it was commonly employed in these physical tasks suggests that its alleged capacity to induce trance was, at least in such instances, a feature not a flaw.

As it would turn out, every vocation involving extreme strength and endurance would eventually develop its own cherished songs—whether we are talking of sailors with their shanties (especially the capstan shanties, famous for their utility in the most exhausting labor), the many hammering and digging songs, or the sad work songs of prisoners and chain gangs, to cite just a few examples.

Are we surprised, then, to see professional athletes in the current day so obsessively concerned with the musical aspects of training and performance? Sports teams have even run into music copyright issues, learning to their dismay that songs played at practice might require licensing agreements—especially with so many videos showing up on social media.

The easiest solution would be to turn off the music at the training facility, but no one dares consider that option. After all, the workouts would immediately become more tiring and oppressive—proving that songs haven’t lost their efficacy in strenuous pursuits since the days of Plato and Pindar.

We all comprehend this intuitively, but just consider the wide array of heroic songs employed at athletic events—most of which we simply take for granted. These include national anthems at the Olympics, walk-up songs for baseball players, organists at the hockey and basketball game, marching bands for football, and soccer fans singing their team song.

As the latter example indicates, when the teams fail to provide a soundtrack for the event, the spectators create their own. Athletic events have always required music—if you went to a gladiator match in ancient Rome you would have been treated to the sound of the water organ, the loudest musical instrument of its day, and a masterwork of engineering technology. Then as now, music accompanied these heroes in their high-stakes adventures.

And if you’re still skeptical, consider the fact that the regulatory body supervising track and field events in the US issued a prohibition on wearing audio equipment back in 2006, noting its potential to give unfair advantage to users.

You might think that the added weight of a music device would be an obvious detriment to performance, not a help. But athletes and trainers, who meticulously measure performance day after day have apparently reached the opposite conclusion.

Researchers increasingly validate and quantify these beliefs—proving music’s efficacy in improving endurance, lessening strain, and inspiring performance. And for a good reason. We now know that music impacts body chemistry, brainwaves, mood, heart rate, body temperature, grip strength, blood pressure, and many other parameters.

I offer these details on athletics as a single case study in how music empowers individuals who aspire to heroic achievements. But the same story could be told for a range of other disciplines.

• Most surgeons nowadays rely on song playlists during procedures, and believe it improves concentration and results.

• Computer programmers also rely on music while they write code, and many of them have enthusiastic stories to share about the benefits they have gained from working to musical accompaniment.

• Soldiers apparently need their music too—why else would government spending on military bands represent the single largest federal expenditure on arts and culture year after year?

• Or consider the case of astronauts, who invariably bring music with them on their missions, even to the surface of the moon. And when NASA sent its Voyager probe into the far reaches of the universe, the authorities decided to include a gold-plated copper recording featuring the songs of planet Earth.

You may wonder why extraterrestrials need to hear Chuck Berry singing “Johnny B. Goode” or Blind Willie Johnson’s slide guitar on “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” But music has been part of every heroic journey in the past, so it would be odd to leave it off this longest of strange trips.  

I should perhaps apologize for focusing on glamorous professions, such as astronauts and brain surgeons. I do this for dramatic effect, and because these examples reveal the capacities of music to propel vocations of the most demanding sort. But the vision quest and its music are accessible to all, just as much to a cook or factory worker as to an Olympic athlete.

Even back in the time of Orphic rituals and mystery cults, songs offered a pathway for those outside the ruling elites. They furthered democratic and egalitarian tendencies in societies where sociopolitical structures were hidebound and slow-changing. The quest structured a narrative for all who were willing to live up to its demands—and the music made it all possible.

We desperately need these real-life heroic narratives (and their music) today. It might seem that there’s no shortage of songs and stories in our data-driven consumer society. If anything, there’s a glut of them on the market. But, as we have seen, the heroes of pop culture narratives rarely provide any realistic guidance for our own lives—starring in stories propelled by fight scenes, car chases, and special effects that would be ridiculous if emulated by members of the audience.

Our songs are even more enervating and narrow in their applicability, despite the appearance of great abundance. There are thousands of music genres available for instantaneous consumption, but they are simply variants on the same theme: entertainment.

We shouldn’t be surprised, because their source is the entertainment industry, which is entrusted with responsibility for the soundtracks of contemporary living. But what a comedown from a tradition in which powerful songs originated with bards, shamans, oracles, prophets, and visionaries of various sorts.  

What happens when people no longer have access to narratives that guide their own lives? What happens when music no longer empowers their journey, but is relegated to moments of diversion or play-acting?

To answer those questions, just look around you.

We live in an age of prodigious wealth creation and consumerism with immediate access to almost every possible song, film, story, or piece of information. Yet society is afflicted with unprecedented levels of suicide, depression, mental health problems, and psychic fragmentation. The victims are people who have literally lost control over the narrative of their lives—and their numbers grow steadily each year.

Over the course of this brief book, I have traced a tradition of radical self-transformation in which music plays a decisive, catalytic role. The outlines of this tradition have maintained a surprising degree of unity and consistency over the course of more than 2,500 years, defining practices that have shaped human development in every region of the world.

This alternative musicology demands our respect, if only from our commitment to historical realism and factual accuracy, but even more for its undiminished power in guiding participants through the milestone moments of human life. So if I focus here on a musicology of heroes, it’s not because I want to bring back the knights of the Round Table or relive the siege of Troy. We ought to take the quest seriously not as a homage to the past, but as a service to the present and a foundation for the future.

Such matters are too important to leave to the entertainment business.

And there is no shortage of other organizations, institutions, traditions, and individuals that can provide the narratives and songs we need. Many of them are already doing it, although you wouldn’t know this by reading newspapers or mass media websites, which themselves tend to be compromised by the same metrics (dollars, clicks, etc.) that turned the vision quest into a shoot-‘em-up spectacle and relegated its music to interchangeable pieces of content on a playlist. 

Imagine the kind of culture we would have if we empowered visionaries and healers, truth-tellers and dreamers, or explorers of the imagination and alternative realms? Or if our institutions expanded the horizons of the world and our notions of reality rather than narrowed them? And, best of all, imagine how we would benefit if we honored heroes truly worthy of respect and emulation.

These paths are still there. And a musicology exists to empower those who dare travel on them. We do ourselves a disservice by not making the first step.

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Footnotes

Burning Man: You can read the ten principles of Burning Man at https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/.

Normally this requires ketamine or PCP: Sam Vesuna, Isaac V. Kauvar, Ethan Richman, Felicity Gore, Tomiko Oskotsky, Clara Sava-Segal, Liqun Luo, Robert C. Malenka, Jaimie M. Henderson, Paul Nuyujukian, Josef Parvizi & Karl Deisseroth, “Deep Posteromedial Cortical Rhythm in Dissociation,” Nature, vol. 586, September 16, 2020, pp. 87–94.

We could see, right before our eyes, dissociation happening: Jon Hamilton, “Scientists Say a Mind-Bending Rhythm in the Brain Can Act Like Ketamine, NPR, September 16, 2020.

consciousness is built on rhythm: This and below from Tam Hunt and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Easy Part of the hart Problem: a Resonance Theory of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 13 (October 31, 2019).