Murray Hidary + Dr. Molly Crockett

In composer Murray Hidary’s performance art work MindTravel, inner journeys take form through music, inviting listeners to make their own discoveries. In this immersive experience tailored specifically for the Rubin Museum, you will roam the Museum in a curated arc while a headset provides you with an all-enveloping music meditation as a soundtrack to your journey.

Murray Hidary knew he wanted to become composer by the time he was in high school. He also began a deep inner journey of discovery as a teenager that led him to study Eastern philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and other wisdom traditions. MindTravel is a fusion of these strands into a personal reflective practice at the piano.

The experience is preceded by a conversation with Yale University neuroscientist Dr. Molly Crockett about the neuropsychology of connection, and why music is such a powerful vehicle for communal experience.

About the Speakers

MindTravel has been brought to audiences in theaters, beaches, and parks around the world, including Central Park, TEDx, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Grace Cathedral, The National Arts Club, and festivals including Wanderlust, Carlsbad, and Burning Man. In bringing MindTravel to a broad audience, composer Murray Hidary’s goal is to create the space for people to have a powerful journey, which is at once provocative and reflective, healing and transcendent. Murray’s musical performances are a fusion of contemporary classical style, and contain a highly original expression of the avant garde.

Murray Hidary is a multi-disciplinary artist and successful tech pioneer who started his first company at age 22, after studying Music and Composition at NYU. A photographer, composer, and musician, student of theoretical physics, he has also trained in the study of Aikido and the Shakuhachi (the Japanese bamboo flute) and its ancient music tradition of the Zen monks. At age 30, Murray wrote and recorded his first symphony in St. Petersburg, Russia. Moved by direct experiences that his curiosity towards deeper levels of consciousness created through music that began with his study of zazen or moving meditation with the Japanese Zen flute, Murray translated that process to the piano and began to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become MindTravel.

Dr. Molly Crockett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. Her research explores moral emotions in the digital age, social learning and social decision-making. Prior to joining Yale, Dr Crockett was a faculty member at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology and a Fellow of Jesus College. She holds a BSc in Neuroscience from UCLA and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge, and completed a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship with economists and neuroscientists at the University of Zürich and University College London.