‘I Always Remember That Moment’: Peak Music Experiences as Epiphanies

Experiences with Music: Peeking through the Static

The sociological study of music has not mirrored the popular fascination with discrete and special music experiences. One reason has been a tendency to overlook individual trajectories of music consumption in favour of collective directions, or simply static analysis. This is exemplified by Willis’s (1978: 191) concept of homology, which refers to the ‘continuous play’ between a social group and its preferred items producing ‘styles, meanings and forms of consciousness’. Homology assumes a ready-made group with unified preferences and interpretations, and Willis contends that these are determined largely by class, consistently with the contemporaneous subcultural theory. Thus homology does not account for changes in the membership of a group, nor for differing levels or kinds of engagement between members. Subcultural studies of musical practice have been criticised for privileging symbolic readings over the actual experience of subjects (Driver, 2011; Malbon, 1999), and similarly for focusing on publicly visible and ‘spectacular’ activities to the exclusion of the personal and private (‘what happened when a mod went home after a weekend on speed’, McRobbie, 1980: 68–69), meaning that such work does not fully explore how ‘subcultural’ engagements might play a role in individual biographies. One challenge to this tendency is Jones’s (1988) study of how Jamaican reggae and related music were received in the United Kingdom. His argument, that the music had a collective ‘impact’ on black and white youth, is fleshed out by ethnographic portraits of people and communities that evolved, through their interactions with the music and its associated styles and practices, in terms of their tastes, relationships and even spiritual and political attitudes. This up-close approach recognises that people’s reasons for liking reggae, and the precise kinds of subjectivity the music might express and produce, may be ‘as diverse as the infinite variety of contexts in which they hear and experience the music’ (Jones, 1988: 117). This results in an evidence-based, nuanced account of music’s effects, without downplaying the potential significance of music to cultural change: ‘For reggae did not produce ready-made forms of political consciousness, but worked through the pleasures of its consumption to propagate values, sensibilities and fundamental perspectives on life’ (Jones, 1988: 160).

‘Post-subcultural’ popular music studies are defined by more flexible concepts like music ‘scenes’, which allow a variety of meanings and practices oriented around cultural objects and styles (Bennett, 2004; Straw, 1991), and ‘neo-tribes’, which are consumption-oriented groups defined by fluidity as opposed to subcultural rigidity (Bennett, 1999). Some studies of scenes consider how a scene changes over time, like Spring’s (2004) examination of the rave scene in the city of Ruston in the United States. However, this work has been concerned more with environmental or cultural developments affecting the scene as a collective, than with the individual biographies that must comprise the history of any scene. At the other end of the scale, DeNora (2000) and Hennion (2007, 2010) each focus on very personal engagements with music. Their subjects include, respectively, people using music at home to evoke and manage memories and moods, and music lovers (‘amateurs’) engaging in elaborate, solo listening routines to enhance their enjoyment and appreciation. These up-close studies of everyday music consumption demonstrate the active nature of listening and the highly personal nature of music’s meaning and effects. DeNora and Hennion’s work focuses more on music’s effects on mood and attention than enduring change, and more on established practices than their development. However, it follows from their insights that an encounter with music can be unique and that people can develop practices and subjectivities through such encounters. The development of practices within a scene is addressed by Driver (2011) who, based on his ethnography of the hardcore scene on the Gold Coast, Australia, argues for the importance of embodied experience to both ‘learning’ and ‘earning’ (sub)cultural identity. Driver’s focus is on the development of competency and symbolic capital, but the same approach can be taken to study how the enjoyment, meaning and effects of music develop over time. Bennett’s (2013) study of music fans and ageing also considers the detail of how practices alter over time, like punks gradually ‘toning down the mohawk’, and how people change allegiances like the interview subjects who refer to sequential involvement with different music scenes. This longer view is part of the essential task of understanding how music, which is often conceptualised as only a youth concern, can be a part of life more generally. Such work can be built upon by considering the biographical significance of particular encounters with music, particularly in relation to questions about what motivates and informs people’s involvement in certain practices and scenes.

Examples of peak music experiences arise and are in some cases afforded significance in existing sociological literature. In his inaugural lecture as Donald Tovey Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, Frith (2007: 169) supports his argument that a formal musical education is not a prerequisite to musical appreciation by noting that:

It is a common trope in the autobiography of [formally/classically trained] musicians that they heard a piece of music by chance – at a concert, on Radio 3, on someone’s record player – that so moved them that they then pursued a musical education. The same experience is common in popular music.

The trope of an inspiring music experience is indeed common in non-academic literature. Pursuing this theme in academic literature, Kahn-Harris (2004: 111) reports on the significance in extreme metal culture of a person’s shocking first encounter with the genre, which can be ‘a musical experience separate from previous musical experience’ and may inspire a frantic search for more of the same. Shock and difference are also important in Laing’s (1985) analysis of punk rock, in which he calls on Barthes’s concept of jouissance to describe an experience that unsettles a listener’s assumptions. Kahn-Harris (2004: 116) notes that while initially shocking music might provide diminishing returns, long-standing scene members can be rejuvenated from time to time by ‘the experience of music through the body’. Tsitsos (2012) makes the similar finding that for the ageing punks in his study, occasionally ‘returning to the pit’ to slamdance is a way to reconnect emotionally to their scene. These examples demonstrate that certain musical experiences can have important and lasting effects.

In dance club culture, Malbon (1999) observes the importance of the ‘ecstatic’ and ‘oceanic’ experiences sought and occasionally undergone by clubbers while dancing to music in a crowd, with those terms referring respectively to experiences with and without drugs. These experiences have an ‘afterglow’ and can provide motivation for the days, weeks or even years to come, informing everyday identity:

The seemingly unreal, yet also extremely vivid experiences of clubbing can allow clubbers to go beyond themselves. Yet, and seemingly paradoxically, through this going-beyond they may find something more of – as well as something of extraordinary value within – the very self outside of which they may temporarily slip. (Malbon, 1999: 187)

This illustrates how particular, extraordinary experiences can be an important and even defining element of music cultures. They can be sought, felt strongly when they occur and reflected on and discussed in retrospect.

Cavicchi’s (1998) ‘experience-near anthropology’ of Bruce Springsteen fans reveals the way they talk about their ‘conversion’ to Springsteen’s music, through ‘Bruce stories’. In these stories the fans commonly attribute ‘radical, enduring change in orientation’ (1998: 59) to a particular experience. One fan is shown to have reshaped his previous story of becoming-a-fan to fit the prevailing ‘Bruce story’ formula for an online discussion, by adding a clearly defined setting and a more sudden epiphany. It is not suggested that the story is false and the experience is invented; rather, Cavicchi argues that Bruce stories work to order fans’ personal experiences according to socially derived categories, enabling them to understand their experiences as shared. The story formula also shapes expectations of group behaviour, by promoting values and serving as a model for reacting in certain situations. Thus the circulation of peak music experience stories might be seen as a discursive practice that helps define who belongs to a group and enables them to feel that they belong. Accordingly, peak music experiences are an avenue for studying the values of a group and the way those values are reproduced.

Epiphanies with Music?

Cavicchi uses the terms ‘epiphany’ and ‘conversion’ to emphasise similarities with the narratives of ‘born-again’ Christians. He does not refer to the use of epiphanies by sociologist Norman Denzin (1989) in the latter’s ‘interpretive biography’, although the concept is compatible. According to Denzin, epiphanies are interactional moments that leave marks on people’s lives and in which personal character is manifested. Like Giddens’s (1991) ‘fateful moments’, epiphanies can be problematic and liminal, with positive or negative outcomes. These experiences become narrative resources with which people interpret their lives for themselves and others. Importantly, Denzin notes that the meaning of experiences is given retrospectively and is never definitive; like the selves they inform, they are always unfinished productions. Further, they are never individual productions but derive from group contexts, as demonstrated by the Springsteen fan’s reshaped story, discussed above.

Epiphanies are therefore a resource for what Giddens (1991) calls the reflexive project of the self. While Denzin’s (1989) examples of epiphanies involving murder, addiction and family relations could occur in pre-modern society, the project of the self in (late) modern, post-traditional, mediatised societies is increasingly informed by and constructed from mass media and commodified leisure culture (Chaney, 1994; Giddens, 1991). Thus Woodward (2001), citing Denzin, coins the term ‘taste epiphanies’ for the stories that the participants in his study tell about significant domestic objects (like a chair or vase), as a way of presenting effective narratives of self. Woodward’s study reveals the fusion of aesthetic taste with ethical values, as well as the significance of taste to broader social and cultural identifications, supporting his proposal for biographical approaches to the study of popular culture to complement the more established study of objectified taste. With studies like Bennett’s (2013) work on music and ageing demonstrating that music consumption features significantly in people’s self-identity, it follows that people may have epiphanies arising out of their interactions with music. The examples of peak music experiences in the work of Frith, Kahn-Harris, Laing, Malbon and Cavicchi can be seen as epiphanies, as they are experiences that are remembered by people as having marked their lives and they are stories that are told to explain matters of identity. The pilot case study detailed in the following section shows how participants in the Brisbane indie music scene refer to epiphanies with music when describing how their preferences, practices and associations have developed over time.

Some of the qualities noted in the literature regarding music mean that it is particularly capable of becoming linked with specific experiences and to biographical identity. To begin with, the significant non-verbal elements of music make it relatively open to interpretation. Music involves a combination of signs: written, spoken, sung, played and gestured, not all of which are in the service of communication, representation and expression (Laing, 1985). It has therefore been called a ‘non-propositional’ medium (Frith, 1987). Thus the ‘meaning’ of a song could be based, for example, on a listener’s physical enjoyment and at odds with the lyrical content and this focus may differ between listeners. Music’s polysemy and abstractness increase the importance of the context of its reception. Frith (1998) notes that music is never heard outside a situation and, further, that different situations produce different aesthetic objects (that is, different music). Similarly, Small (1998) argues that music’s meaning lies not in objects or works but in the activities that are oriented around them, through which a group explores and celebrates its relationships and values. Accordingly, music’s dependence on context for meaning is a part of what enables its meanings to be shared and disputed and therefore to be socially significant. A range of steps are taken to control the context of music’s reception and therefore its meaning, not only by the performers, visual artists, publicists and promoters traditionally seen as music’s ‘producers’, but also by audiences, who reproduce visual styles, forms of interaction, physical responses and ways of talking about music. These discursive formations define listeners’ roles and limit or prefer meanings (Laing, 1985) but they are not entirely determinative. As in Hall’s (1981) ‘encoding/decoding’ model of communication and the ‘active audience’ theory that followed (see Lull, 1999), the production, circulation and consumption of a message are steps that are articulated to each other but each step does not determine the next. It is the ultimate, subjectively ‘decoded’ message that has an effect: to influence, entertain, instruct or persuade (Hall, 1981). Music can be seen to arrive as a partly filled narrative that is completed in the subjective experience of reception, never finally but sometimes memorably. It is for this reason that there can be peak music experiences, in which music’s partly filled narratives are completed in ways that are uniquely meaningful and have particular effects.

The dependence on context does not mean that every experience of music begins with a clean slate or produces an entirely different ‘aesthetic object’. While meaning does not inhere in music, its ability to adhere is integral to music’s social significance. Bennett (2013) notes that music’s abstractness allows meanings to be drawn in highly subjective and individual ways, engendering strong feelings of textual ownership. People take possession of certain meanings and ‘build [music] into their sense of themselves’ (Frith, 1987). One example of this is music’s capacity to evoke past times, places, thoughts and feelings. Van Dijck (2006: 361), in a study of the Dutch ‘Top 2000’ radio-event, reproduces the following online comments regarding two popular songs, John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ and U2’s ‘With or Without You’ respectively:

It was 1971, I was waiting on a boat someplace in Norway when I heard this song for the first time. It was such a perfect day, everything was right: the weather, the blue sky, the peaceful tidal waves in the fjord matching the melodious waves of music. There are moments in life that you feel thoroughly, profoundly happy. This was such moment [sic], believe me. (posted by Jan from Eindhoven)

My father died suddenly in November of 1986. That night we all stayed awake. I isolated myself from my family by putting on the headphones and listening to this song. The intense sorrow I felt that night was expressed in Bono’s intense screams. I will never forget this experience, and each time I hear this song I get tears in my eyes. (posted by Jelle van Netten from Woudsend)

In these examples, the meanings attributed to songs are not only very personal but also tied to specific past experiences. The songs provide a way of remembering and even reliving those experiences. DeNora (2000: 66) observes that reliving past experience through music is a way to perform ‘the work of producing oneself as a coherent being over time’, by reminding listeners of their accomplished identities and allowing those identities to be projected into the future. For Bennett (2013: 33), this function of music is one basis for exploring people’s long-term and post-‘youth’ investment in particular popular music, not as social pathology ‘but as a “normal” and increasingly prevalent aspect of the late modern life course’. The following section of this article shows how the concept of ‘peak music experiences’ provides an opportunity to develop this exploration of investment in music as a life-long project.

There remains the question of why, and how, some musical experiences and the meanings they carry endure more than others. What makes a peak music experience? One feature that is common to all of the examples provided so far is an intensity of feeling. Ahmed (2004) argues that it is through intensifications of feeling that people recognise and attribute meaning and value to objects, other people and themselves. The feelings that are read as being ‘in’ people or objects come from previous encounters with them and evolve over a lifetime of encounters. As a result, ‘histories are bound up with attachments precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer to the skin’ (Ahmed, 2004: 33, emphasis in original). This observation suggests a means for understanding how music experiences that involve intense feelings can leave lasting impressions, informing people’s future attitudes to the objects (songs, artists, places) that they hold responsible. As meaning is mediated by feeling, the meanings mediated by the strongest feelings may be the ones that persist. Peak music experiences can therefore provide concrete insight into the question of how encounters with music can affect people in enduring ways. This is demonstrated in the pilot case study discussed in the following section.

Finally, however, it must be emphasised that if subjectivities (ways of experiencing) are themselves shaped through experience, the role of ‘experiences’ in this research is not as uncontestable evidence of unmediated ‘reality’. Indeed, experiences are ‘not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain’ (Scott, 1992: 34, 38). Nor is the goal to determine, for example, which of the stories told by Cavicchi’s (1998) Springsteen fan was ‘true’, the original or the reshaped version. As Denzin (1989: 77) argues, the sociologist’s task is not to distinguish true and false stories, but to study:

how persons and their groups culturally produce warrantable self and personal-experience stories which accord with that group’s standards of truth. We study how persons learn how to tell stories which match a group’s understandings of what a story should look and sound like.

Plummer (1995), based on his study of sexual stories, calls for a sociology of stories, conceiving of them in two linked and critical ways: as symbolic interactions and as political processes. Accordingly, part of studying peak music experiences is to consider how both the events and their commemoration are constructed discursively, as well as how experiences shape future subjectivities by reproducing or disrupting such discourses.

‘Nodes of Awesomeness’: Peak Music Experiences in the Brisbane Indie Scene

Between September and November 2012 a pilot study was conducted with participants in the Brisbane indie music scene, ¹ to gain insight into the significance of peak music experiences for them. In-depth interviews were conducted with five amateur/part-time performing musicians aged between 26 and 34 years of age. Participating in the scene as a regular audience member and performer, the author was an ‘insider researcher’ (although that term is necessarily a simplification, Hodkinson, 2006: 133) which encouraged productive interviews and aided understanding. The category of ‘musicians’ and their age range were not theoretically based limitations but convenient, arbitrary limits to obtain homogeneity, so as to allow a deeper study of the common experience of the participants (Minichiello et al., 2008: 172).

Beyond those limits, based on the researcher’s observations of the Brisbane indie scene, the sample was ‘typical’, though not a perfect reflection. All participants were Australian-born and spoke English as their first language. The sample was more gender-differentiated than the population as a whole. All of the participants had attended university and all but one obtained their primary income from employment outside of music, both of these being common but not universal within the scene.

This study, restricted to a small and homogeneous sample from one music scene and relying primarily on interview data, acts as a pilot study in relation to peak music experiences. Pilot studies are underused and underreported but assist in defining the focus of study, particularly in qualitative research on relatively unexplored topics, and aid the design of ongoing research (Van Teijlingen and Hundley, 2001). The findings of this study, which are discussed in the ensuing sections, demonstrate the significance of peak music experiences to at least these music fans and the utility of such experiences as focus points for research into music-based sociality. Accordingly, this pilot study forms the basis for further research with larger and more varied samples and a more extensive suite of research methods.

‘I Always Remember That Moment’: The Discourse of Music Experiences

After an opening statement in which the researcher expressed a general interest in the respondent’s experiences with music, each in-depth interview proceeded according to a roughly biographical structure. In this context, all of the interview participants seemed to fall naturally to talking about peak music experiences before being asked specifically about the concept. This occurred as part of their biographical narratives of inspiration, conversion and motivation, providing further evidence of the utility of epiphanies in presenting narratives of the self (Denzin, 1989; Woodward, 2001), which may be one explanation for the apparent popularity of stories about peak music experiences. The following sections consider some peak music experiences according to the effects they were said to have in the participants’ lives.

‘Whoa, This Is It!’: Peak Music Experiences as Inspiration

One type of peak music experience that emerged from the interviews was the inspirational experience, which was recounted in response to such questions as, ‘When did you become as interested in music as you are today?’ An example is the story told by Dan, ² 26, who has performed as a singer/guitarist since he was a teenager and now also manages other artists and works for a live music venue:

when I picked up the guitar and started writing music was when I first saw [singer/guitarist] John Butler, of all people. So, um, so that – I always remember that moment as being a big, like, seeing him at um, I think Woodford Folk Festival. When I was about 15? 16? … And it just … set off my musical tangent. […] That was when I first said, ‘Okay I wanna learn the guitar.’

Nick, a 26-year-old singer and guitarist with several years of experience in a nationally touring indie-rock band, described his reaction to a festival-headlining performance by North American indie-rock band the Pixies, around five years earlier, as follows:

… and when I saw ’em I was like, [whispered] ‘Whoa’, like, this is, this is it! After that I was like, ‘I love this and I wanna, like, get involved in that and do this’, yeah. […] I might have been talking about it but I don’t think I was actually playing at that time. It was definitely one of the big … kick-alongs to get myself organised and get into it.

All of the participants attributed agentive properties to specific experiences with music, saying that a particular experience ‘set off my musical tangent’ (Dan), ‘blew my young mind’ (Martin, 33, guitarist), ‘changed my life’ (Sally, 30, keyboardist/singer) or was a ‘big kick-along’ (Nick). What these words describe is not a temporary change of mood or attention but a lasting effect from an encounter with music. As experiences of biographical significance, recalled by the participants to interpret their lives, these can be called epiphanies (Denzin, 1989).

The participants also credited these experiences with influence, guiding them to engage in particular activities or to do so in particular ways. Martin played the trumpet as a child and, when asked how he came to start playing the guitar, he recounted a particular experience: he was taken to the Gold Coast Jazz and Blues Festival each year to see trumpeters, until at one such festival he saw guitarist Tommy Emmanuel play and, ‘it was just so compelling, I think I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, um, and I didn’t start playing guitar straight away, but having seen him play, it sort of blew my young mind’. Martin’s current identification as a guitarist is traced back to this experience. For Nick, the singer of the Pixies acted as a role model for singing, showing what was allowed: ‘the way he did things his own way and he was like yelping and screaming and doin’ whatever and it’s like, “Oh, you can do it”, like you can, you know’. Dan explained that his interaction with John Butler’s music did not just inspire him to play the guitar, but also encouraged his burgeoning interest in political expression:

like I started going to like, protests and stuff where those bands would be playing, because I’d see them playing. John was always talking about certain things, like ref[ugees] – you know, I ended up writing a song about refugees, and … all that stuff.

This reiterates that identification with particular music or performers is based to some extent on affinities with particular values that can seem important to self-identity and resonate in other spheres of life. Pete, a 33-year-old singer/guitarist and music producer, recalled the youthful desire to ‘get involved’ in music as a matter of identification with certain, partly imagined types of people:

I’d been to gigs and I’d seen people who were involved in music, and they, like there was just, I think there was a sense of going, ‘Oh that’s my crew’, you know that’s, it resonates, ‘that’s sort of what I wanna … wanna be doing.’ But yeah not quite, not consciously.

The participants’ stories of peak music experiences demonstrate that the situational aspects of music consumption have a significant bearing on its meanings and effects. Martin said that in his encounter with guitarist Tommy Emmanuel he was struck by the gestural aspects of the performance:

the sheer exuberance, like of his performance […] it just seemed like such a wild performance where he was like knocking on, he was getting strange sounds out of his guitar but, it was so ah, consummate, his ability seemed like almost supernatural or something […] Very showy, which was important.

Pete found his ‘crew’ by observing not just the performers but the reactions of the audience, at a memorable festival performance by United States band Sonic Youth:

[There were] a lot of people there but it was an interesting kind of experience because, you know a third of them were just having their minds blown and I was in that third but another, you know, another third were wishing that they’d play something from Goo [1990, Sonic Youth’s first major-label album and a commercial high-point], and then another third were just there for a look and were just going, ‘What the fuck is going on?’, because it was this sort of, amazing, like my feeling from that was just going, ‘I have no idea what they’re doing’. Like it was just like, just, it was, I’m sure the acid ³ was helping but it just seemed like they were kind of from a place that none of the other bands at that festival were from […] I think that at a certain point, that difference was what I came to really value as a criteri[on] in music.

The experience of music, like any experience, occurs at the meeting of a subject and their environment and it follows that each such experience can be more or less unique. The music experiences recalled by the participants as inspirational and influential were first revelatory, allowing them to perceive values associated with the music especially clearly, and second compelling, in that those values resonated persuasively. Such revelation and resonance did not occur at an abstract, intellectual level, but were strongly felt, as reflected in the language used by the participants (‘amazing’, ‘minds blown’) as well as the failures of language to describe their experiences (‘whoa’). The qualities of revelation and connection, and the intensity with which they were felt, differentiate these experiences from the participants’ more general experience with music and explain why they are remembered and credited with inspiration and influence.

‘A Thing I’ve Been Missing Out On’: Conversion Experiences

The pilot study participants also recounted narratives of conversion in which a particular experience with music changed their taste, usually in response to an interview question to the effect of, ‘Has there ever been a time when your taste in music changed?’ Nick described such an experience when explaining how he had recently come to appreciate instrumental music, including the violin-led band The Dirty Three, when previously lyrics had been essential for him.

Nick said that he had been exploring more instrumental music, citing in particular the music of a Brisbane band with a similar aesthetic to The Dirty Three. His change of taste has endured beyond the particular experience, thus the term ‘conversion’ is appropriate.

In their conversion stories, the participants cast the appreciation of music as an activity for which techniques can be developed. While they may have ‘heard’ certain music or styles before, they ‘never really listened to it before’ or ‘never gave it the time’, until a particular experience ‘changed my sensibility’ and ‘opened my ears’. These terms were used by Martin to describe how hearing his housemate play an album (Loveless (1991) by Irish band My Bloody Valentine) at loud volume, with ‘sunlight streaming through the bay windows’, was an experience that changed his perception of both the artist and the style they represented for him (‘harsh, immersive noise more generally’). This interactive relationship between listener and music illustrates Hennion’s (2007: 105–106) point that the activity of taste is reciprocated by the object of taste opening up and revealing itself. Such opening up is not just dependent on contingencies like weather or the selection of music by a friend, but is sometimes intentionally encouraged. Pete and Sally each described their activities as teenagers, using drugs to try to create particular experiences with music, as formative of their current preferences and practices. Both recalled elaborate set-ups, involving choices of music, location, companions and drugs, with an intention to ‘listen to how far we can hear into this music’ (Pete). While the outcomes were never certain, some of these experiences turned out to be sufficiently memorable and important to be recounted during the interviews, such as Pete’s festival experience with acid as recounted earlier and a story from Sally about enjoying a ‘skipping’ CD of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew while using Ecstasy and marijuana with friends.

These stories do not describe music acting unilaterally on a person, but instead a kind of learning through experience, sometimes intentionally. The consistency implicit in the concept of ‘taste’ means that for a given listener, the same music in different situations must produce an aesthetic object that differs only subtly, or at least not unexpectedly. Those experiences with music that produce a substantially different object, meaning and effect, to the extent that the listener revises their previous notions of their own tastes, are therefore remembered and cited as significant. The participants in this study recount such moments vividly and in these experiences we can see the process of changing taste in action. Indeed, their changes of taste would be inexplicable and abstract without reference to the experiential factors that filled out the music’s partly filled narrative in a particular way, but through the prism of experience their development can be explained by them and understood by others. Once again, these experiences produce particular meanings that are mediated by particular feelings (Ahmed, 2004), leaving an imprint that informs future interactions. Thus it is the object produced in those experiences that the participants recognise as ‘a thing I’ve been missing out on’ (Nick), then seek out and interact with.

‘Get Back to That Feeling’: Motivating Experiences

When the topic of peak music experiences was expressly raised, all of the participants indicated that they recognised the concept. Pete had his own term for the idea: ‘Oh it definitely makes sense. Like there’s sort of … yeah, like I, you know I’d, like I probably called them pinnacle experiences before, but whatever you want to call it there’s these nodes of awesomeness [laughs].’ When Dan, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter-guitarist, was asked specifically if he could think of any more experiences with music that stood out for him, besides those he had mentioned, he noted the number of possible answers he could give:

I guess, ah, seeing the Kings of Leon was a big, a big thing for me, and seeing them play live was a really big thing, a really big sort of, band that stands out […] And that, I think that had a lot more to do with the people I was with […] I mean there’s so many gigs that I think back to and – you know an Arcade Fire gig at the Enmore in Sydney – but you know it’s all like an experience thing then as well. Um … I feel like I kind of have those kind of experiences every week or two. Yeah like I hear a new thing and I think, you know it just implants itself. Um … there was also another big … moment, was we did a couple of tours with […] a Sydney band. And they were just awesome, so I guess they influenced me a lot as well […] You know I can remember the first time that I listened to, um, Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan. I can remember, um, like, I think a big, like moment for me was actually the – ‘Walk the Line’, like the Johnny Cash film.

Indeed, peak music experiences appear as something that these music fans count on to maintain their motivation for scene activities. Pete explained how transcendent moments helped him to overcome exhaustion and disillusionment as a DIY venue operator:

we went on a journey of going ‘This is awesome!’ and then, kind of, towards the end going [breathlessly] ‘Fuuck’, [laughs] ‘I’m tired, I don’t wanna go!’ […] and in the end, like it just seems like it always comes back full circle to those same experiences of enjoyment that you started with in, like you know as a teen, those things that, when you really enjoy playing music or putting something on like that’s, that’s all there is, like there’s not a lot of the other aspects that you thought were gonna be there, I dunno. […] And the only way to kind of sustain it is to, um, come back to that feeling that you had as a kid of you know, really seeking out just what you really enjoy.

Such comments illustrate that one reason people maintain their involvement with a music scene is the conscious search for the kind of experiences that I have called peak music experiences. Through these experiences, they are reminded of what is important to them and, in turn, who they are. The significance placed on these experiences underlines the importance of feeling in the construction and development of music-related taste and associations.

Conclusion

The Brisbane indie music fans who participated in the pilot study spoke about what music means to them by referring to discrete, memorable experiences of music consumption. Such stories locate the meaning and power of music not in a static text completely external to the listener, nor in a structurally determined predisposition of the listener, but rather as something produced and felt through the experience in which people and music meet in a specific time and environment. Considering music in terms of an experience enables a holistic consideration of the various factors that inform music’s meaning, explaining how the same music can have a very different meaning and effect for the same person in different circumstances. Certain experiences of music stand out for the meanings they produce and the intensity with which those meanings are felt, remaining in memory and informing the meaning of future interactions. The pilot study participants called upon such peak music experiences in presenting effective narratives of self, consistently with previous findings about epiphanies (Denzin, 1989; Woodward, 2001). Specifically, the participants credited their peak music experiences with inspiration, influence, conversion and continuing motivation. Methodologically, these experiences are windows into the practical ways in which values and associations are formed and maintained. Peak music experiences make visible the more subtle and gradual, but no less important, evolutions of listeners and music. This is a new way of examining empirically the claims made for music’s power to affect subjectivities, which is in turn a step towards the more difficult question of music’s role in social ordering and change (DeNora, 2004).

Peak music experiences, as epiphanies, are grounded in cultural criteria of ‘truth’ and ‘importance’ (Denzin, 1989) and the telling of peak music experience stories is part of a discourse that reproduces these criteria (Cavicchi, 1998). From a research perspective, they can reveal what experiences and meanings are valued by a particular group and one way in which those values are reproduced. Studying this phenomenon across various groups will add to the understanding of the cultural aspects of musical experience. In order to understand the broader significance of peak music experiences, including in trans-local and global contexts, it will be necessary to conduct larger and more varied sampling, across musical styles and levels of identification as a ‘music fan’, as well as across categories like gender, age, economic background and ethnic identification, as well as across different localities. In addition to in-depth interviewing, additional methods, including focus group interviews, participant observation and reviews of secondary data sources (especially popular music commentary and criticism) would allow more nuanced and critical consideration of how peak music experiences are constructed and, in turn, how they construct people.