Today began with the solemn televised pageantry of Ronald Reagan's funeral, and then many radio stations across the country segued into extended play of the marvelous music of Ray Charles, who died yesterday. Two completely different rituals thus beautifully celebrated the two lives at death. We humans mark culturally important transitions through shared rituals replete with artistic expression. Could these two lives have been effectively celebrated today without the theatrical and musical arts that so dominated the Reagan and Charles lives and their ritualized commemorations?

Ceremonial rituals typically focus group attention through elaborations (the very slow choreographed movements of military pallbearers, the effusive praise of accomplishment), and repetitions (the extended radio play of Charles' music, the comments of listeners who called in with their Reagan and Charles stories). Death thus becomes larger than life.

In Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, Ellen Dissanayake argues that the arts are deeply grounded in who we are as a social species—and so are central to such ceremonial rituals as the carefully planned Reagan funeral and the spontaneous Ray Charles Music Festival.

Our upright stance and consequent narrow female birth canal led to helpless infants with a brain one-third its adult size, and so to a long dependent maturation during which our young gradually learn how to live successfully within our complex culture. Our upright stance also freed our arms and hands to carry, gesture, and fashion in ways that helped to define human life and art. Innate parent/child bonding is thus essential to a successful extended maturation.

Dissanayake argues that this primal parent/child love is initially expressed through mutually meaningful rhythms and modes—emotionally charged melodic interactions and imitative behaviors. These simple beginnings lead to analogous adult expressions of love and the arts—and to ceremonial rituals (such as weddings and funerals) that meld emotional human bonding with artistic elaboration. Five arts-related properties drive human life—mutuality, group membership, discovering meaning and importance, developing motor competence, and elaborating on meaning and competence.