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What’s your favorite Music or piece of Art? How do they make you feel? What do they reveal about you? What is it about music and art that causes such exuberance — we seem transported, connected, floating outside ourselves, tuned in to Something Larger. Do music and art reflect our Culture? Or do they change it? And what about education? How can we enrich our children through aesthetic appreciation?

Participants: Boyd, Freeman, Janzen, Kurzweil, Siler

Todd Boyd is a professor of critical studies in the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California. He is an internationally recognized expert on film and popular culture and is considered a "public intellectual" on matters of race, class and gender. His recent book is Am I Black Enough For You: Popular Culture from the ‘Hood and Beyond.

Robert Freeman is recognized as one of the world’s leading music intellectuals, educators and public spokesman for music education. He is Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been chief executive of two major music schools, as President of The New England Conservatory of Music and as Director of the Eastman School of Music for 25 years.

Rhoda Janzen has published over 150 poems and has won numerous prizes in poetry; she has been Poet Laureate of California twice. She is in the English Department at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) where she received the Distinction in Teaching Award for innovation in pedagogy.

Ray Kurzweil is a world-renowned inventor, computer scientist and best-selling author. He founded four technology companies based on his revolutionary inventions in artificial intelligence, including reading machines for the blind, speech recognition, and music synthesis. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including MIT’s Inventor of the Year. His two books, The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines, have sparked great interest and controversy.

Todd Siler is an artist whose artworks are held in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including major museums (Guggenheim, Metropolitan, Modern, Whitney, Israel). He is also a writer and educator who was the first visual artist to receive a doctorate from MIT (Psychology and Art). He has written two best-selling books, Breaking the Mind Barrier and Think Like A Genius. His company specializes in teaching creativity.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is the creator and host of the Closer To Truth television series and author of the Closer To Truth book. Trained in brain research (Ph.D. UCLA), he has published more than twenty books, including the Handbook for Creative and Innovative Managers and the seven-volume Library of Investment Banking. He is the president of The Geneva Companies, a leading merger and acquisition firm for private, middle market businesses.

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