Awe

archive of life patterns: Savage, Patrick E., Stephen Brown, Emi Sakai, and Thomas E. Currie. “Statistical Universals Reveal the Structures and Functions of Human Music.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 29 (July 2015): 8987–92. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1414495112. This study analyzed twenty musical parameters of 304 songs from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and South Africa.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

adolescents gravitate to music: Snibbe, Alana C., and Hazel R. Markus. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Educational Attainment, Agency, and Choice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88 (2005): 703–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.4.703.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

music of thirty-nine African cultures: Brown, Steven, Patrick E. Savage, Albert M. S. Ko, Mark Stoneking, Y. C. Ko, J. H. Loo, and Jean A. Trejaut. “Correlations in the Population Structure of Music, Genes and Language.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1774 (2013): 20132072. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2072. Pamjav, Horolma, Zoltan Juhász, Andrea Zalán, Endre Nemeth, and Bayarlkhagva Damdin. “A Comparative Phylogenetic Study of Genetics and Folk Music.” Molecular Genetic Genomics 287 (2012): 337–49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-012-0683-y. Callaway, Ewen. “Music Is in Our Genes.” Nature, December 10, 2007. https://www.nature.com/news/2007/071210/full/news.2007.359.html.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

I can feel it now:

https://www.myscience.org/news/wire/berkeley_talks_transcript_how_an_awe_walk_helped_one_musician_reconnect_with_her_home-2019-berkeley.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

I am still: My experience aligns with Leonard Meyer’s influential theorizing about music: that its primary function is to set up expectations and move the imagination in violations and fulfillments of those expectations. Meyer, Leonard B. Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Chapter 8: Sacred Geometries

“A great deal of art”: Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, 83.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

In the movie these wonders: There is no shortage of human efforts to own and commodify the awe-evoking wonders of life for material gain and status. Two of my favorites are these: For an eye-opening cultural history of how the wealthy commodified and collected marvels of the world, from mysterious species to other cultures’ artifacts, see: Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001. For coverage of how the landscape painting movement of the American sublime is an aesthetic justification of the westward expansion of the United States, and the colonizing and displacement of Indigenous peoples, see: Wilton, Andrew, and Tim Barringer. American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1890. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

As he tells me this: Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Lexington, KY: Createspace, 2015, 80.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

Art allows us

: Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1970, 83.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT

The archaeological record suggests: Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Henshilwood, C. S. “Emergence of Modern Human Behavior: Middle Stone Age Engravings from South Africa.” Science 295, no. 5558 (2002): 1278–80. For carbon dating evidence tracing cave painting back to over 65,000 years ago, see: Hoffmann, Dirk, et al. “U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art.” Science 359 (2018): 912–15. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap7778.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT