What Does It Mean to Lose Yourself in Music? A Phenomenological Account

This is an edited transcript of a paper delivered at the Tenth Annual Doctoral Conference of New Bulgarian University, 18–21.06.2026.

The question I want to address today, and toward which I will sketch a possible answer, is: what does it mean to lose yourself in music? I will present a phenomenological account of musical experience that approaches this question, drawing on a few different perspectives along the way.

In the past twenty years, there has been significant growth in qualitative research into musical experience. Among the most notable findings are what researchers have called strong experiences with music––experiences that seem, in some cases, to alter our ordinary ways of experiencing the world, both during and after the musical encounter. One such account describes a listener at a concert who reported that “the music was still inside me, and I was inside the music,”¹1Alf Gabrielsson, Strong Experiences with Music: Music Is Much More Than Just Music (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 78. and that there was no difference between them: it seemed like one thing. What is striking here is that music is not perceived as an object standing detached from a subject of experience. Rather, there is a permeation or diffusion of subject and object.

Another listener describes a related, though differently inflected, experience: “I forgot time and space. My body vanished. I was totally immersed in the music.”²2Gabrielsson, Strong Experiences with Music, p. 78. Here it is not only the subject-object distinction that is unsettled. What Kant called the forms of intuition––the very conditions of ordinary experience––seem to be suspended. Spatial and temporal orientation drops away, and embodiment is altered. And yet this is not an absence. The experience has a content; it is saturated and immersive, but of a different kind than ordinary experience.

From the performer’s side, comparable testimonies are available. The distinguished pianist Edwin Fischer, in a lecture course for his students, describes what he regards as the highest aim of performative practice: “One no longer feels: I play, but rather: it plays... it streams through you, and you let yourself be carried by this streaming.”³3Edwin Fischer, Musikalische Betrachtungen (Breitkopf & Härtel, 1959), p. 36. This is paradoxical, since Fischer’s remarks are addressed to students who have spent––and will continue to spend––enormous time and effort in the practice room. Musicians spend most of their lifetime practicing in a variety of ways. Even so-called virtuosos continue doing this, with some experienced musicians notably practicing not on their instrument, but simply reenacting music in their mind (as in the famous “silent” reading of scores, anecdotally ascribed to Wilhelm Kempff and esteemed by Theodor Adorno). In Fischer’s account, the paradox is that what ideally emerges from that effort is music playing itself, with the performer no longer experiencing themselves as its agent. I practice with tremendous focus and effort for years, only to, at the end, let go and let music “play itself”.

This structure has recently been conceptualized by Simon Høffding as performative passivity: “the experience of someone or something other than me causing the music to unfold the way it unfolds.”⁴4Simon Høffding, A Phenomenology of Musical Absorption (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 188. The term stems from Edmund Husserl’s concept of passive synthesis, which I will not discuss further here. Performative passivity entails an altered agency. The performer does not experience themself as simply producing the music by deliberate will; rather, the music seems to happen through them, or to unfold from somewhere other than the ordinary source of agency.

What kind of experience is this, and how do we account for it? Its features include loss of control and self-possession, dissociation from the ordinary experience of the world, absorption and flow, altered agency, and, in some accounts, a form of self-transformation. These different dimensions can be accounted for through different approaches. One can approach this from a psychological or neuroscientific perspective, focusing on the mechanisms by which the brain and mind process information in ways that produce this kind of experience. One can explore theories of flow––a state of concentrated engagement that becomes semi-automatic, or groove, a “feel” for the nuances of temporal musical flow. One can draw on 4E cognition, more recent theories of consciousness that locate mind not solely in the brain but as embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended into the environment. One can also approach these experiences through the lens of social and performative agency, focusing on the performer as an agent of gender, institutional roles, expectations, and culturally situated discursive positions.

My own question is a different one: how does this experience appear as lived? This rather general question is, in fact, grounded in a distinction between naturalistic and phenomenological approaches to the world––a distinction that was already explicitly introduced in the earliest phenomenological works of the twentieth century.

Naturalistic explanations are based on the idea that we exist as creatures or beings in a world that exists independently of our capacity for knowing and experiencing it, and that this physical and biological reality is what must be accounted for first, before we can address any form of knowledge or experience of the world. From this perspective, we are organisms with brains and bodies that interact with the environment in various ways, and there are mechanisms in place with allows us to do so. Music can be incorporated into this framework in various ways. For example, Joel Krueger has proposed the notion of affective scaffolding: music functions as an “extended (beyond-the-head) emotion-regulatory system,”⁵5Joel Krueger, “Music as affective scaffolding,” in R. Herbert, D. Clarke, and E. Clarke (eds.), Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities (Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 60. in which we experience emotions that we cannot handle on our own by offloading them onto the music and recognizing them within it. This provides one naturalistic explanation of what it is to experience ourselves in the music. And while it is certainly a legitimate account in its own right, it operates on a naturalistic basis: it presupposes that we are organisms interacting with the world in various ways, and asks how music, as part of that world and part of our environment, functions to produce these experiences of absorption.

Phenomenological approaches work in a different way and with a different orientation. Rather than asking how the world produces experience, phenomenology begins with experience itself as its starting point. Now, in different strands of phenomenology, there are different ways in which this exploration is begun and constituted. But a general idea is that what Martin Heidegger called fundamental existentials––what time is, what world itself is, but also, if we extend Heidegger, what the body is––are first given to us in and through experience. This might be transcendental or existential, pre-reflective or reflective experience, but it is experience. In attempting a phenomenology of music, or a musical phenomenology, we would therefore have to allow musical experience to determine the question. Rather than imposing a ready-made theoretical framework on the phenomenon, we attempt to think about music (and the musical self) from the perspective of musical experience itself: to start from this experience and articulate it from within.

So, to come back to the original question: what does it mean to lose oneself in music? To understand the question, we need to make explicit what it already implies. Asking what it means to lose myself implies that I first had myself––that I was somewhere familiar––and then I found myself displaced and lost into something else, music. The first logical question, then, is: what is that familiar place?

There are many possible ways of approaching this even in phenomenology. One available answer, which I fight illuminating in this context, is Martin Heidegger’s idea of our everyday self or everyday being-in-the-world. We are beings that are thrown into a world we did not choose. We did not choose where we were born, the historical conditions and prejudices of the places, times, and societies into which we arrived. There is much in the world that is not in our control. This is thrownness (Geworfenheit). We are also attuned beings: we always find ourselves in moods––good moods, bad moods, curiosity, boredom, anxiety, enthusiasm––attunements that color our entire perception of the world and that we are not in a position to choose or discard.⁶6Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (State University of New York Press, 1996 [1928]). And we are also projecting beings: we get involved with things and people, and we orient ourselves toward possibilities. We attend a conference, which is part of building a career, which is part of a life, which is part of a chain of significance that ultimately extends to our entire sense of who we are and where we belong in the world. This is how we experience ourselves as integrated into society, into institutions, into the world. According to Heidegger, everyday life is constituted by this structure: it is stretched between what has been and what is not yet. We are inherently historical beings––not merely in the sense that we have a history, but in the deeper sense that we experience time as historical: as stretched between a past that weighs on us and a future we project ourselves toward.

It is at this point that a largely overlooked figure becomes directly relevant. Günther Anders, who studied with Husserl and was deeply influenced by Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, developed a theory of the musical situation centered on the concept of the musical enclave.⁷7Günther Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen Über Musikalische Situationen,” in Musikphilosophische Schriften: Texte Und Dokumente (C.H. Beck, 2017), pp. 15-140; see esp. p. 44. According to Anders, the musical situation is an enclave within historical life: when we experience music, we detach ourselves from the stream of historical experience of time. This is not to say that we enter another world devoid of time, but our experience of time is no longer historical in the Heideggerian sense. One falls out of the ordinary world, yet remains within a musical situation––within what we might call a musical “world” and a musical time.

What happens in this enclave is that music engenders a different temporality. In musical time, we are no longer planning, remembering, controlling, or projecting in the historical sense. We inhabit a musical present that has its own internal structure of retention and anticipation, or, more specifically, its own forms of movement; but this structure is not of the historical type. Within the musical enclave, we are neither thrown in the Heideggerian sense nor projecting toward a biographical future. The ordinary self, with its characteristic structure of care, self-possession, and historical orientation, is suspended.

Anders’s central concept for what happens inside the enclave is Mitvollzug or enactment-with: one performs or listens to music while being performed or listened to as music. One is enacted with the enactment of music—there is, in effect, no difference between the self and music. As Anders writes: “man, in that he opens up in the musical situation, enacts-with exactly this form of movement in that he lives in it. This ‘living’ means something completely non-metaphorical: it means that man is now in this situation really a being of this form of movement. [...] In the enactment-with of such movements man is not only changed in his formal time structure, but is completely re-attuned and transformed.”⁸8Anders, “Philosophische Untersuchungen,” pp. 67–68. According to Anders, the self is the musical form of movement it co-enacts. Yet this losing oneself in music, finding oneself in it, and then again losing oneself, this time in one’s non-musical being, all of these modes of being entail fundamental questions about the structure selfhood, because “it is clear that I am not the same ‘within’ and ‘outside of’ the experience of musical identification. On the one hand, my self is fundamentally different, as it is constituted in a different way. On the other, in both cases, it is always I who am experiencing.”⁹9Christian Vassilev, “The Phenomenon of Musical Identification: A View from Heidegger’s Early Phenomenology,” Horizon: Studies in Phenomenology 11, no. 2 (2022): 599. https://doi.org/10.21638/2226-5260-2022-11-2-584-606

To lose oneself in music is not to become absent. It is to be displaced from the everyday self of control, projection, and self-possession, and to emerge as a transformed self. This is the thought I am currently developing in a larger project, based on the concept of musical identification: the idea that our relation with music constitutes both ourselves and music as we experience it. The I finds itself musically transformed, imbued with musical sense. It is no longer an autonomous, self-constituting consciousness, but an aspect of a ‘heteronomous’ relation with music. To lose oneself in music is to lose oneself in terms of one’s everyday selfhood and to find oneself in a transformed musical relation—one in which the relation is prior to both self and music as independent beings.