The issue is whether or not one person's transcendent experience listening to music can be compared to another's, particularly if the genres of music are very different. A. C. Douglas, one of my "Regular Reads", maintains that the transcendent experience offered by "high culture" is much superior to that offered by pop culture.
To really answer the question you have to both get inside other people's consciousness and make value judgments about their experiences.
Another thing that comes to mind when talking about a U2 performance versus that of a symphony orchestra is that part of what Bono is up to is a kind of modern shamanism. Which leads to the question of whether someone like Leonard Bernstein was just another kind of shaman. It's easy to make the case that a kind of ritual is involved in both rock and symphonic performances.
And then there's what Stanislav Grof found in his research into psychedelics and transcendent experiences back when that was legal, that the mindset of someone approaching the experience combined with the setting in which it occurs has a lot to do with the outcome.
Back in the 70's when I was getting getting my Registered Music Therapist credential, music therapy was called an "adjunctive therapy". As far as transcendent experiences go, my feeling is that music can be involved in them, but is probably not the single cause when they occur when listening to or making music.
And then there's what Stanislav Grof found in his research into psychedelics and transcendent experiences back when that was legal, that the mindset of someone approaching the experience combined with the setting in which it occurs has a lot to do with the outcome.
ReplyDeleteI have no experience of psychedelics at all, but I would go along with that idea. Peak experiences associated with music are rarely to do with just the music, it is about the context in which the music occurs.
The most obvious example is that almost everybody fondly remember the pop music that was about at the time they first fell in love!
Jonathan - Great point. Ties into how it is music can be so helpful with the dementias of old age when it takes people back to a happier time.
ReplyDeleteYour use of the phrase "peak experience" is on the money as well. That term, which I've discovered came from Maslow to describe the experience in non-spiritual terms, seems the best for that flow experience I was talking about and have been asking lots of people about ever since. Your comment on that post listing the ingredients for your experiences is still the best I've come across. Want to go back sometime and post again on that and bring that list up to post level.
What sort of amazes me is that pretty much everyone agrees with your less than a dozen times of having had the experience. I wonder if it's because of the difficulty of getting the externals right, or whether our consciousness and unconsciousness need to lie fallow for a while between them.
It also seems people don't talk much about those experiences unless asked. Since it seems the pinnacle of musical experiences I wonder why that is. Musicians don't as a rule seem more modest that other people. Maybe it's just that the experience is so intensely non-verbal that talking about it really doesn't work very well.