ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the senses, the pleasures they provide, the arts they sustain, how they merge with notions people have about rationality, logic, formality. Humans are wise, sapient, and thoughtful. But humans also swim in a sea of sensibility, of sensuality, of inner and outer observations, of judgments formed by sight, smell, touch, vibration, hearing, thirst, the passage of time, temperature, movement, a rich array of sources of information and hence guides to action. Music has a deep human function beyond creating dress-up occasions for concert evenings. For many people listening to music yields remarkable pleasure, a trancelike involvement of seemingly inexplicable intensity and richness. Music is often used in religious ceremonies to generate a sense of awe and of the potent goodness of the sect involved. Avant-garde or experimental music is an effort to stretch the known boundaries of community life, not to deny that there is a community within them.
