How Do You Get Inside a Piece of Music?

Robert Greene says following the notes, the logic, and the progression is how he enters music, and the result is a sublime experience. A concert makes the exercise a little harder because the music is of a different order, but the same entry is still possible.

In the 70s, while he was in college, he went to Grateful Dead concerts and followed some of their long instrumental pieces the way he follows Scarlatti. The pieces were quite sublime. Recording the music leaves a listener outside it, at the level of entertainment and base stimulation. The sublime route is to be inside the work. With a movie from another period, he wants to feel inside the movie, as if he is there. Attention fixed on how other people are looking at you skips the cultural moment. Culture can and should be sublime when it is experienced from the inside. Being really present to the work is, in his view, where the best experiences always come from.

Andrew Huberman adds that merging with people who are not at the concert, rather than with the performers, means you are in many ways not there. Wanting to share is a gimmick and a trap. Mundane experiences can become sublime, peak experiences are awesome too, and there is no reason not to report them, but the speed of the reporting, and the fact that it happens separate from the experience, seems very important.