Experience: A History

I came to write this book because of sound. Because, in truth, of one sound. But to explain that origin I have to tell a bit of a story—a bit of memoir.

Between 1990 and 2016, my life as a scholar focused on classical music and its relationships to the many frames of reference, social, cultural, historical, and philosophical, that support its expressive power and give it meaning. Starting in 2007, however, I returned to a career as a composer that I had had to abandon decades earlier. As time went by, my work with performers to bring my music to life increasingly influenced my thinking. I became ever more absorbed, and ever more puzzled, by the seemingly self-evident fact that music is made of sound. I began to dwell on the question of how, over time, sound itself has been understood, valued or devalued, made subject to description and metaphor.

These concerns led me to write two books, The Hum of the World (2019) and Experiencing Sound (2024). The title of the first refers to the sound that sparked my new cast of mind, a kind of faint background hum to all sensory perception. The title of the second became a conceptual turning point. Its source was the idea that sound, as sound, above and beyond what is heard, is an essential object of experience (even for the deaf). By the time the book was done its title had come to include the idea that, whatever experience is, sound is essential to it. But that left open the question with which I began: Just what is experience, exactly? To answer the question, or start to, required another book.

Experience: A History pays ample attention to sound, and to music, too, but it forms a departure from the familiar territory of sound studies and music history. It is really a philosophical work, an old-fashioned philosophical work that aspires to articulate a worldview rather than to engage with narrow technical questions or to elaborate a theory of this or that. The inclusion of the memoir is part of its philosophical style. It assumes that thought does not come from nowhere, and that readers are entitled to know where the writer’s thoughts do come from. This is especially important to Experience: A History because, as history has always told us, the experience we want may not be the experience we get. More on that below.

Ongoing thread. More from Lawrence Kramer to follow.