Experience: A History

by Lawrence Kramer

A lyrical, provocative journey into the art, memory, and meaning of experience.What does it mean to have an experience? When did we begin to believe we could “have" one at all? In A History, Lawrence Kramer traces the cultural birth of experience as a singular, life-defining event. Moving lyrically between criticism and memoir, he guides readers from Petrarch and Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf and Anne Carson; from Haydn’s luminous Creation to Billie Holiday's searing “Strange Fruit.” Along the way we encounter Niagara Falls and the Galápagos, Parisian department stores and Manhattan nightclubs, and luminaries such as Franz Schubert, Henry and William James, and Benjamin Britten.As early as the fourteenth century and accelerating after the eighteenth, records of concentrated, unforgettable moments begin to proliferate―until the possibility of having an experience becomes a demand for one. Experience turns into something to seek, curate, even consume. Yet its power lies in its the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. At once personal and tender, challenging and vulnerable, Experience fuses philosophical argument with intimate recollection. The result is both a sweeping intellectual history and a deeply human reckoning with the experiences that shape and unsettle modern life.

272 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication October 27, 2026

About the author

Lawrence Kramer is Professor of English and Music at Fordham University
and co-editor of the journal 19th-Century Music. He has held visiting
professorships at Yale, Columbia, the University of Graz, the University of
Newcastle upon Tyne, and McMaster University. His work, focused on the
interrelations of music, culture, and society, comprises numerous essays
and a series of seven books, most recently including Musical Meaning:
Toward a Critical History (2001) and Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and
Strauss (2004), both published by the University of California Press.
Next year California will bring out Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing
Music in Cinema, a collection he edited with Daniel Goldmark and Richard
Leppert on the basis of an international conference that the three
organized in 2004.

Reviews

[Jerry Edward Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Evolutionary history has provided the human species with many real advantages. These include a larger brain capacity, bipedalism aiding in mobility, the opposable thumb which aided in developing tool use and later more complicated technology, and an inclination to form social groups. Humans have built upon these physical and social attributes and produced and perfected a number of truly universal activities. Music and literature are but two such universal human activities: music as a form of organized sound set around tone, harmony, melody, and rhythm; and literature as storytelling in a variety of written forms and methods. Lawrence Kramer is a distinguished professor of English and Music at Fordham University. Kramer is an active musicologist with a number of notable musical compositions. He has written numerous influential books that bridge the gap between musicology and a broader humanistic understanding. This new book focuses on what it means to experience these observable humanistic activities. The author addresses experience as the personal perception or knowledge gained as we attend to our favored humanistic activities. Experience is a cultural solution to what we do with this knowledge we gain. What we gain is a form of reality about our environment that combines with a philosophical examination of what it means to fully understand the world with our senses. The author addresses this general notion of “experience” as a defining humanistic meaning. Experience becomes something compelling us to seek more, classify, and try to understand the world around us. The power of experience lies in the particular knowledge formed: the convergence of history, art, memory, and self. This book fuses philosophical argument with an intimate appreciation of the world as we see it. This book is a sweeping intellectual history. It is an intellectual endeavor showing just how humans reckon with and understand how it is that our experiences help shape and define modern life. This new book is highly recommended for the reader who wants to understand why the human species learns to appreciate the many things we do in our lives.