Music, Transcendent Spiritual Experience, and the Grateful Dead: HOW THEY CAME TOGETHER

Music has always been paradoxical, a deeply powerful force that is nonetheless completely ephemeral. Painting, architecture, or writing all produce things; they all leave things behind them. But from the earliest stages of human development until the latter half of the nineteenth century, music left nothing behind except, occasionally, in some cases, its score, which was at best merely a blueprint. As jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy put it in a spoken-word passage at the end of Last Date, a live album recorded in 1964: “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air.¹ You can never capture