ABSTRACT
People credit peak music experiences with significant effects, as a source of inspiration to engage in certain activities and thus to become a musician, a fan and so on, and as an enduring influence on ways of being in both musical practice and other aspects of life. This draws focus to the situated, embodied experiences from which music’s meaning and effects derive, highlighting in particular the crucial role of affect in music’s social agency. The feelings produced in musical experience are inseparable from subsequent interpretations, judgements and dispositions, while music’s affective power is itself shaped by discourse. This chapter explicitly brings to popular music the insights of sociological theories of emotions and affect, finding points of connection between up-close, micro-aesthetic accounts of musical activity and larger-scale, more explicitly social and cultural perspectives. Between the poles of condescension and celebration that can limit studies of musical influence, the aim is not to disentangle these discursive constructions from music’s ‘real’ effects but rather to consider the real effects that flow from them.
