Introduction

Abstract

In the introduction to this book, I take the following conundrum to motive the entire project: musicians sometime claim to be unsure of whether it really was they who performed a just past concert. They experience a musical absorption, an altered state of awareness in which their sense of self dramatically changes. This first chapter provides an account of what this claims amounts to, how some theorists, especially within the so-called expertise debate, have addressed it, and introduces the theoretical and empirical steps we will have to go through in order to arrive at a proper understanding of the claim. It parses these steps into three overall themes concerning the kind of self present in musical absorption, namely “the absorbed minimal self”, “the absorbed reflective self”, and “the absorbed body” and argues why a combination of phenomenology and qualitative interviews will provide the best foothold into these themes.