Getting to the heart of ‘the experience’ of music is not easy and, in an attempt to present the most complete picture, our experimental traditions have increasingly and indeed quite successfully fused with multi-modal measurements. In sharp contrast, Alf Gabrielsson set out to study the ‘emergent properties’ of music through pure personal narrative, and the simplicity and honesty of his expansive, three-decade project is staggering. Acknowledgement of an underlying concern, perhaps of both researcher and respondent, occurs right away in the Preface; what if we really cannot find the words to get to the core of our musical experiences? Yet in response to a precisely worded yet unrestrictive question, 1300 accounts emerge complex and nuanced, deeply personal and able to be identified with at the same time.
The wording of the research question itself is of course fundamental. Respondents were asked in their own words to describe ‘the strongest (most intense, most profound) experience with music you have ever had’ (p. 7); carefully framed to elicit an experience being ‘in the music’ in and of itself, as opposed to music simply being present at the time something meaningful happened. The author acknowledges links to past investigations of related concepts – ‘flow’, ‘peak experiences’ and ‘transcendent experiences’ among others – but finds collection of personal accounts relating to these to be infrequent, or lacking in full detail of the context in which they occurred.
From the late 1980s, 965 Swedish respondents offered written and some oral accounts of one or more such experiences from their lifetime; these taking place between 1908 and 2004. This edition presents a painstakingly careful English translation of each account by Rod Bradbury, overseen by Gabrielsson to retain the specific ‘linguistic character’ of each. Their care has undeniably paid off, as for a task potentially beyond words, the majority of the narratives are both vivid and deeply touching; live fiddle music feeling to one respondent, for example, ‘as if the notes were real, that they were real notes that came out and touched my face like balls of cotton wool’ (p. 378). As the author himself experienced over an extended period of time, it would be difficult not to be drawn in by such thoughtful depictions.
The chapters of the book bring accounts together around themes. Some are chronological by life stage, some pertain to the core effect of the experience (e.g. feelings/emotions; inner images), some link music to another issue (e.g. music and religion, transcendence) and some are simply grouped by the manner in which the music was engaged with (e.g. singing with a choir). We are told the gender and age group of the respondent at the time of participation, and the decade in which the experience itself took place. The reader must keep in mind that the chapter titles and their order are not, however, those of the descriptive system into which the accounts are coded. This system of 150 potential categories is arranged hierarchically in a three-level scheme of main category (the over-arching theme of the account), sub-category, and specific reaction; for example, cognition (level 1), imagery (level 2), inner images of landscape, nature, persons, situations etc. (level 3). A fully coded example of a narrative is then given to clarify, which alone appears immediately useful as a teaching and discussion aid on qualitative methods in music psychology. When the frequencies of the responses are then reported, some surprises emerge as reactions often focused upon in our literature were less frequent than might be expected; only 10% of the sample, for example, noted having experienced physical shivers.
As a reader working your way through the three introductory chapters with anticipation of getting to the heart of the individual narratives, it is easy perhaps to only partly absorb that there is a second part of the study. Here, responses were given to a series of structured questions on the reported experience. For someone interested in individual differences, it was therefore a great pleasure to be reminded when finding the much later chapter working through responses to, for example, where the experience occurred and whether during listening or playing, in addition to the musical genre involved itself. Each question is methodically presented for the sample overall and analysed by age, gender and musical training. When a question arose in my head, I soon found it answered; in 54% of cases the respondent had heard the particular piece of music before, and when they heard it again on future occasions, it did not necessarily lead to another ‘strong experience’. That the music, context and the listener must interact in the experience is certainly clear.
‘Strong Experiences with Music’ may be based on a beautifully modest methodology, but it does not shy away from the complex reality of our relationship with music, including the negative; one respondent writes of having ‘felt shudders of both delight and horror’ (p. 388). It is a resource of endless links to music and memory, emotion and language, to which each reader will bring their own take on the feeling or language that groups the accounts together. A commonality of language most certainly underpins those collected by developmental stage; whether an expressed tentativeness of early engagements with music in childhood, or a sense of freedom and pride in one's own identity in those from adolescence.
Yet a secondary gift of the book which deserves much focus is its journey through the past 100 years of musical technologies as experienced by everyday people; a social historical record of how accessibility of music and the ways we engage with it have changed, yet, its effects have not. The respondents themselves, perhaps most noticeably in the chapter ‘Experiences during one's teenage years’, individually stress the importance of the time period they chose and how the music being presented by gramophone, or wireless, or Walkman, should be considered in understanding their personal story.
For those wishing to fit this text into the context of the author's long and productive career, his story and perception of the growth of music science is outlined autobiographically in a previous edition of the journal Psychomusicology (Gabrielsson, 2009). An elegant and careful investigation, this book is unquestionably a momentous contribution to the mission of the author, and our field.
