Though philosophical thinking about music education is as old as Plato’s Republic and the subject has in recent years attracted the attention of some philosophically minded music educators, the philosophy of music education has not received much attention by contemporary philosophers, certainly as compared with the attention given by philosophers to other questions about music such as the ontology of musical works and the nature and role of musical form and musical expressiveness.
The relative lack of attention to music education among contemporary philosophers is itself a philosophically interesting question. Music-making is, after all, one of the oldest of human activities: a bone flute found in the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany dates back at least 35,000 years. Music is nowadays widely considered to be one of the “fine” or major arts, a prime example of artistic activity in which sensuous objects possessing salient qualities of form, expression, and symbolism are created by artists expressly for the directed attention of others, for whom these works are thought to repay repeated scrutiny. Musical practice is also frequently regarded as an exemplary case of craft, an activity in which particular sets of skills and knowledge are deployed in order to bring about certain kinds of ends. Music often bears an intimate, if complicated, relationship to the public sphere by dint of its potential for personal, public, and social expression. In these ways, music is nearly universally acknowledged to hold an important place in the realm of human affairs. If we grant the premise that education is one of the central means by which human thought, beliefs, ideals, and practices are articulated, preserved, and transmitted from one generation to another, questions about the nature and goals of music education ought to be of great interest to philosophers.
There are of course many important philosophical questions about education in general, such as the role of education in human development, whether the goal of education ought to center on the transmission of knowledge, the education of the citizenry, emancipation and freedom from oppression, social justice, the inculcation of correct habits or virtue, indoctrination into the faith, the training of skills, principles for the establishment of curricula and teacher training programs, and so on. In the context of a philosophical inquiry into music education in particular, one might expect philosophers to address themselves to more specialized questions: What is there to learn about music? What is it about musical practice that ought to be subject of education? To what extent should music education be concerned with the training of musical skills and musicianship, or with listening skills and familiarity with a repertory, with factual information about historical musical practices, or with digital and electronic techniques for composing and performing music? Should music education include discussions of philosophical or music-theoretical issues? To what extent should music education focus on the formal aspects of music, its expressive or symbolic meanings, or the instrumental purposes that music might serve such as entertainment, the facilitation of religious or other states of mind, the transmission of culture, virtue, or the education of the soul? What is – or should be – the connection between music education and the education of taste or sensibility? To whom should education be addressed? Should the primary audience of music education be potential practitioners, whether amateur or professional, or musical audiences? Should music education address itself to the general public or the musical elite? What is the relationship between formal institutions such as conservatories and schools of music and informal learning environments such as bars, clubs, garages, and internet chat rooms, and what implications, if any, do these various kinds of settings have for music education? Are the goals of “music appreciation” classes different from the goals of conservatory training? What institutions and methodologies (such as Suzuki, Kodály, Orff, Dalcroze, and solfège) are most appropriate to the attainment of those goals we identify for music education? To what extent and in what ways are the goals of music education affected by the particularities of individual historical, cultural, social, and national contexts?
Ultimately, answers to questions such as these will depend on how one understands the nature of musical practice itself and how one construes the core values of that practice. But this observation raises a further complication. There is no single non-contentious understanding of what constitutes musical practice. Consider for example the base definition of music one finds in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: “the art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion” (Soanes and Stevenson 2004: 942). Even to the extent that one thinks of music as “art,” we must remember that the history of the meanings and applications of the term “art” is complex (see Shiner 2003). And, in any case, there are surely instances of music – work songs, anthems, dirges, religious chants, and so on – whose main function is not necessarily tied to a concept of art, much less to the requirement that musical sounds produce beauty of form, harmony, or the expression of emotion. The truth of the matter seems rather to be that music, like all multifaceted and culturally embedded practices and social experiences, comprises a network of multiple overlapping and at times even conflicting sub-practices, any number or combination of which might be apt candidates for preservation and transmission and, hence, for education. In this sense, the philosophy of music education recapitulates the historical and conceptual context surrounding most of the central questions of the philosophy of music. Given these complexities, perhaps the wisest plan of attack then is not to attempt a totalizing account of the philosophy of music education at the outset but rather to look into some of the domains of musical meaning and value that music educators have thought worthy of focused attention.
Let us take as a starting point that music is an activity dealing with sounds. One of the chief fascinations of music is that its very materials have intrinsic interest of at least two sorts. First, sounds are sensuous objects and the ways in which they are heard in combination interest us as audibly sensitive creatures. Second, it is a striking fact that sounds and their combinations are tied to mathematical ratios and that musical sounds may become a subject of mathematical analysis. The mathematical side of music manifests itself not only with respect to tonally based features of music such as scales, modes, melodies, and harmonies but also with respect to rhythm, timbre, and texture.
It is possible, then, to think of musical education chiefly in terms of the identification, analysis, and appreciation of musical materials and sound structures presented in time, whether that study is conducted along mathematical lines, phenomenological lines, or a combination of both. The phenomenological approach traces its lineage to Aristoxenus, the mathematical approach to Pythagoras (see Chapter 24, “Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in this volume). In either case musical analysis seeks to identify the materials of music and to examine how music, considered as sequential structures of sound, works – that is, the way in which musical sounds function.
To the extent that music education focuses on the analysis of the nature of musical materials and structures, it directs our attention to a central domain of musical meaning. The presumption of musical analysis is that analysis enhances one’s understanding of specific musical works and performances, that it adds to our understanding of the creation, performance, and appreciation of musical styles and technical matters with respect to harmony, counterpoint, and composition, and that it helps to develop and refine those skills relevant to these aspects of music.
Musical analysis may at first glance seem to be a more or less purely descriptive affair. It is, however, inescapably normative. The questions of what is to count as musical material and where one is to look for musical function are necessarily drawn from and favor particular musical styles, periods, and preferences. Heinrich Schenker’s emphasis on melodic and harmonic structural development (Schenker 1979), for example, seems well suited to much European music from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century in which tonal development is the pre-eminent organizational feature. It is arguably less congenial to motivically driven development (i.e. development where melodic or rhythmical figures are employed as the primary unifying elements), not to mention music written during and after the so-called breakup of tonality where loyalty to tonal centers is attenuated or rejected entirely. Conversely, mathematical models designed to cope with relationships of elements in atonal music – for example, models based on set theory (Forte 1973) – are not well suited to capture the felt dynamic effects of tension and resolution central to tonal music. More fundamentally than these questions of applicability, musical analysis implicitly assumes that the meaning and value of music are to be found primarily in musical form, a position for which philosophical defense is required.
It is possible to anchor the music educational interest in sound structures under the philosophical purview of aesthetic formalism. The basic presupposition of this line of thought rests on a view of music as one of the “fine arts,” having as its goal the production of objects (works of art) whose main value derives from their very contemplation. The view, classically formulated in a discourse stretching from Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Baumgarten to Kant (Shaftesbury 1991 [1711]; Hutcheson 1973 [1725]; Baumgarten 1954 [1735]; Kant 1914 [1790]), was coincident with the rise of performance venues such as court salons and the concert hall in which composers, performers, and listeners were seen to be engaged in the collective activity of the presentation and appreciation of repeatable works, autonomous objects created for the express purpose of satisfying “disinterested” apprehension. According to aesthetic formalism, the qualities appropriate to such an attitude are qualities of form: qualities of design or structure, without reference to concepts or the practical significance of what might be thought to be represented or expressed in the work. We derive pleasure from such experience, Kant had argued, from the harmonious free play of the cognitive powers of the imagination and the understanding in the contemplation of “purposiveness without purpose” (1914: 79). On this line of thought music education is a species of aesthetic education: the goal of music education should consist in the training of the ability to produce and to respond properly to such objects.
We can distinguish two basic versions of aesthetic formalism based on differing understandings of the qualities deemed relevant to disinterested aesthetic experience. On what we can call the “strict” version of aesthetic formalism, the relevant properties are construed relatively narrowly as perceptual properties of a certain sort: the sensual, syntactic, and structural properties of musical works – the sorts of properties congenial to certain forms of musical analysis and which Eduard Hanslick famously designated “tonally moving forms” (1986: 29). The relevant qualities of musical form include aesthetic properties pertaining to melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, the dynamic qualities of music, the flow of musical events, the effect of repetition and other structural features on expectation, and so on.
Musical educational programs based on strict aesthetic formalism identify these undeniable attractions of musical forms in motion, inculcate modes of attention appropriate to such displays, provide technical vocabularies, devise instructional methods, and articulate the standards enshrined in the canon of works thought to best instantiate aesthetic achievements in the history of music. In this context an important task of musical education is the development of connoisseurship, what in an earlier era would have been called “the education of taste.” It is tempting at this point to characterize the view as elitist but it must also be remembered that in focusing on perceptual properties, the view connects with the familiar idea that the appreciation of music is at some level at least something akin to a human universal.
On the other hand, strict aesthetic formalism does not accord well with the intuitions of a great many listeners. However alluring the attraction of the formal side of music, and even if we set to one side the question of the myriad roles of music in practical matters and social experience, people generally think that, if musical art is anything, it is an expressive art, an art intimately tied to the emotions. The expressivity of music does not sit easily with strict aesthetic formalism. One can of course, as Hanslick himself did, bring the idea of musical dynamism under the rubric of musical form (1986: 11). We certainly hear musical forms as musically tensive, creating musical conflict, leading toward musical resolutions, and so on. But listeners also typically hear what are often called “garden variety” emotions in the music they listen to. It may not do justice to our experience to enlist such broad terms as “sadness” or “happiness” or “pathos” to describe these experiences but we feel that something like this is going on in the music. If we cannot find exactly the right words to describe our expressive experiences of music, we yearn to do so.
Considerations such as these may not close the door on aesthetic formalism, however. It is possible to save the idea of aesthetic experience and the attitude appropriate to its contemplation by widening the range of what might be thought to be a candidate for appreciation from an aesthetic point of view. On the strict version of aesthetic formalism, the relevant properties were said to be perceptual and structural qualities and their relations as presented in time. It is possible, however, to argue that expressive and even representational properties can be appreciated from an aesthetic point of view. We distinguish for example the “murder” of Desdemona by Othello on stage from an actual homicide. Analogously, we might say of music education that its goal is to enhance our understanding of the aesthetic side of music including what expressive and representational potential the music might have. Let us call this the “enhanced” version of aesthetic formalism. We may regard this view as a formalist view in at least two senses: (1) one can still say that what one is focusing on are properties and their structural relations, the way in which, say, expressive properties are worked out, and (2) one can argue that it is through an apprehension of the formal properties that the expressive properties are made manifest. On the enhanced view, the musical working out of expressive properties is what captures our aesthetic attention. This move directly addresses the criticism of strict aesthetic formalism that it concentrates on an overly narrow range of musical properties while still holding onto the idea that an apprehension of music is at root an aesthetic affair.
One might even take a further step and claim that the working out of expressiveness in music can provide the basis for an understanding of the expressive side of life. That is, one might advance a cognitivist version of the enhanced aesthetic formalist position, arguing that in some sense understanding the expressive side of musical works from an aesthetic point of view provides knowledge about our inner lives, enriching our imaginative understanding of feeling, perhaps even deepening our empathetic relationship with other human beings, in each case providing a means to the education of feeling.
The cognitivist version of enhanced aesthetic formalism has in fact been quite influential in contemporary music education circles. It has been championed most notably by the music educator Bennett Riemer (2003) who draws from the expressivist views of the philosopher Susanne Langer (1953) and the writings of the psychologist Howard Gardner on “musical intelligence” (1983). The view has been defended in recent years by the philosopher Roger Scruton. Scruton argues that music shares an important feature with human life – organized movement – and that our sympathetic response to music is “a way of shaping our inner life to fit the perceived life of another” (2007: 61). Music education, then, should aim to train people to hear the movement that lies in the music, especially by attending to the structural relationships and developments enabled by tonality. In this way music has a deep cultural, and specifically moral, significance: it helps to develop our emotional knowledge, concerning what to do and what to feel (Scruton 1997, 2007). The view harkens back to Friedrich Schiller’s famous claim that beauty can confer on a person social character, that “through Beauty we arrive at freedom” (1954: 27).
The cognitivist version of enhanced formalism has considerable attraction for educators. Not only does the view expand the range of proper music interest beyond what was sanctioned by the strict view but it also explicitly claims a measure of depth and importance in human affairs for music and, by extension, for music education. By focusing on expressive and other sorts of meaning that would have been regarded as “extra-musical” on the strict view, the cognitivist version of enhanced musical formalism underwrites methods for identifying, creating, and evaluating expressive musical meaning, goals relevant to practitioners and non-specialists alike.
On the other hand, the view depends strictly on the possibility of developing an adequate philosophical theory of what, on the strict version of aesthetic formalism, would have been regarded as extra-musical. The strict version strove to maintain the autonomous nature of musical meaning. On the enhanced version we are in need of a theory to explain how exactly expressive, representational, or symbolic meaning is related to formal qualities and the sense in which such meanings are to be understood aesthetically. In the specifically cognitivist variant of the view we also expect an account of the sense of knowledge put in play by the theory. Questions such as these about musical expression, representation, symbolization, and knowledge, have been the subject of extensive philosophical discussion and go beyond the scope of the present chapter. But in the context of the kinds of claims being made for music education, it is important to highlight two other questions of central concern. With respect to the cognitivist version in particular one is prompted to ask: what is the warrant for claiming that people who develop their imaginative understanding of musical expressiveness in fact increase their understanding of human emotion, much less deepen their empathetic understanding of other people? It is well known that some of the cruelest people in history have apparently had sophisticated appreciations of music. Scruton, in considering the general problem of the “evil aesthete” acknowledges that there is no a priori reason why an acquaintance with culture should enliven real sympathies, arguing that no institution and no art yet devised has been able to prevent atrocities (Scruton 2007: 41–3). That allowance, however, simply provides more fodder for the skeptic. And with respect to all versions of aesthetic formalism we may ask, what exactly is the place of specifically aesthetic understandings of music in the context of the myriad practices of music more generally?
Philosophical approaches to music education that rest on strict and enhanced versions of aesthetic formalism have as their subject a particular range of musical practice: music as an art. Such broader cultural functions as music is thought to have are accommodated under the general rubric of aesthetic experience. As we noted at the outset, however, music is produced and enjoyed in a wide range of contexts and circumstances in which music can be understood as having many different kinds of functions. Many of the functions that music might serve come quickly to mind: supporting religious rituals and states of mind, sustaining ethical and political institutions and principles, providing instructional and didactic support, enhancing interpersonal and communal socialization, stimulating military and athletic passions, and so on. The list is indefinitely large. The aesthetic properties of music may – and often do – play a part in these contexts but they are not necessarily central to them.
Praxialism is an approach to the philosophy of music and music education that seeks to address such concerns by proceeding from the diversity of musical practices in particular cultures. The basic outlines of the view were articulated by Philip Alperson (Alperson 1991, 2008) and have been developed by music educators (Elliott 1995; Regelski 1996). Alperson argues that music is itself best understood as an amalgam of forms of human activities defined in terms of the specific skills, knowledge, and standards of evaluation appropriate to such practices. The view calls into question the hard distinction between the intrinsic and the instrumental values of music, arguing that the philosophy of music should take as its subject not only the specifically aesthetic values of music deriving from the sensuous, structural, and referential aspects of music, but also the artistic values of music pertaining to the larger cultural and social significance that have been a part of musical practice since antiquity. The view has affinities with Christopher Small’s discussions of the social experience of music-making (Small 1998), with some contemporary currents in what is called the “new musicology” that bring to musicological study issues concerning feminism and gender studies, race studies, and national, political, and social formations (Kerman 1985; Kramer 1990; McClary 1991, 2000; Subotnik 1991), and with contemporary approaches in ethnomusicology (Nettl 1983).
Some theorists (e.g. Elliott 1995: 125–8) have supposed that the praxial view is inconsistent with or antithetical to an aesthetic-based approach. There is no principled reason, however, why, on a praxialist view, the creation, performance, or appreciation of music undertaken with respect to aesthetic properties should be excluded or devalued. Such a position would be inconsistent with a principle tenet of praxialism, that philosophical theorizing should be driven by actual human practice. Nor would praxialism seek to change the emphasis in music education classrooms from “high art” or “serious” music to “low art” or “pop” or “folk” music. Rather, more radically, it aims to cut through such value-laden categories. The praxial approach may include an examination of the connection between aesthetic and non-aesthetic functions, where relevant, in matters pertaining to both the production and the reception of music. The view encourages a position of value pluralism with respect to musical styles and musical activities. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that arguments can be made for the extra-aesthetic significance of aesthetic experience, as Scruton has done from a Schillerian and Kantian point of view, as Heidi Westerlund has done from a Deweyan perspective (Westerlund 2003), and as Theodore Gracyk has done by looking at the connections between aesthetic experience and the articulation of gender and racial identity in rock music (Gracyk 2001).
Praxialism poses its own problems. It is a contextualist view. That in itself does not distinguish it from aesthetically based views since it is possible to argue that the understanding of aesthetic properties, terms, and appropriate habits of mind must be understood in the context of the history of development of aesthetic theory and practice. What does distinguish the view is its embrace of anthropological, sociological, and social and political concerns that take the philosophy of music and the philosophy of music education beyond the confines of aesthetic considerations. The question here is not simply how accounts of aesthetic and extra-aesthetic experiences can be reconciled in cases where such a relation is postulated. The concern is broader, asking what the object of philosophical inquiry into music ought to be. This is an issue that goes to the heart of the question of the nature, methodology, and aims – not only of the philosophy of music and music education but also of philosophical inquiry itself.
See also Analysis (Chapter 48), Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Chapter 24), Ethnomusicology (Chapter 49), Evaluating music (Chapter 16), Expression theories (Chapter 19), Kant (Chapter 30), Hanslick (Chapter 33), and Sociology and cultural studies (Chapter 51).
Alperson, P. (1991) “What Should One Expect from a Philosophy of Music Education?” Journal of Aesthetic Education 25: 215–42.
—— (2008) “The Instrumentality of Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66: 37–51.
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