Death and Transfiguration

 Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung in the original German) is a tone poem by Richard Strauss that expresses the dying thoughts of an artist who at the end achieves transcendence.

That piece was completed in 1889. Many years later, in the closing months of the war, April 1945, he completed a somewhat similar work, unlike the previous one, with no overt program. This is his Metamorphosen for 23 strings which he started composing the day after the destruction of the Vienna Opera House.

Here is a clip of an interview with a neurophysiologist and psychiatrist who also studied meditation:

I put these three things together because they, oddly, relate to one another. The experience of listening to the Strauss pieces cannot really be "explained" or captured with musicology or music theory any more than consciousness can be captured by the study of the neurons in the brain, as Roger Walsh explains. As Wittgenstein famously said at the end of the Tractatus:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

But I think Wittgenstein would agree that those things can be expressed in music. We should just not try and talk about them...

UPDATE: If you want a hard, analytic argument for why a pure physicalist explanation of the world is insufficient, here you go: