ABSTRACT
The sociological study of music has not mirrored the popular fascination with singular, extraordinary experiences. The absence is explained in part by a historical suspicion of subjective experience, although such experience has increasingly come to the fore with developments in sociology. Specifically, it has been recognised that the very subjectivity of music’s meaning is crucial to its social significance, so that to understand such significance it is necessary to get close to experience. Work in this area has been more concerned with general and typical experience, consistently with a tendency to favour the analysis of established meanings, practices and tastes, although some recent work takes a more biographical approach. The study of peak music experiences builds on and advances particular disciplinary directions in relation to popular music, and particular theoretical approaches from sociology more broadly, including interpretive biography and the sociology of emotion and of memory. In this chapter, these strands are identified and synthesised, with reference to the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, to develop an appropriate framework for this new topic of study.
