Interview:

In his book, “The Singing Neanderthals”, Steven Mithen advances the theory that music co-evolved with language and may be our oldest art form. Even if this is untrue, it seems clear that as our brains’ capacities evolved, our musical capacities did as well. For some reason, we need music to be fully human. Why this is, no one knows for sure. Maybe survival was better when early tribes used music as a way of cementing social bonds; maybe it was a method of imparting important information to the next generation. Or maybe, it was a way of counterbalancing the essential aloneness that is the at-timespainful by-product of that greatest of gifts that separates humans from most other creatures: consciousness of self. At its core, the subjective experience of music is to be in contact with something greater than oneself. Every performer and composer I know has had that “Oh, wow” experience when you feel that you are not playing or writing the music but are simply the vessel through which it is being realized. It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; that goes double for music. God is in the spaces between the notes. As a lifelong skeptic about most spiritual claims, this puts me into an awkward position: is this subjective feeling “real” or some trick of the brain? To which I have only an unsatisfactory counter-question: “Does it matter?”

“At its core, the subjective experience of music is to be in contact with something greater than oneself.”
– Michael Levine, film and television composer