Être dans la musique

• Main Author: Laurent Legrain
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Catholique de Louvain 2009-04-01
• Series: Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rsa/291

“Getting into the music”… this expression, often heard in the context of interviews or abstract discussions held with jazz lovers, shows the major importance of these particular musical moments along the paths of jazz lovers. But how to approach this fugacious state analytically and, like jazz lovers, place it at the centre of our concerns ? In untying the Kantian corset bound around aesthetics, many authors have outlined the contours of a concept, that of aesthetic experience, approaching what jazz lovers evoke via this expression. Pleasure and forgetting oneself are seen as constitutive dimensions here. The concepts of “mind tripping” and “dispositive logic” dear to the sociologist Emmanuel Belin can help us, on the one hand, in better determining the particular dynamism in this form of experience and, on the other hand, in better understanding how it emerges from a collective work on the environment. Based on the ethnography of a group of jazz lovers getting themselves into shape for an evening concert, this article proposes likening the concept of aesthetic experience to that of “mind tripping” and shows what is gained in the rapprochement.