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Page 1: A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the … · A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision/Bennett Reimer ... John Cage 1st component (sounds): Maintained, indeed

Christina Bartholomew

February 22, 2016

A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision/Bennett Reimer

Chapter 5: The Meaning Dimension of Musical Experience, Part 2 (148-167)

I. A Description of Music and Art

A. Definitions of art (and of music) are notoriously risky because we don’t want to pin

down a particular conceptual characterization. “There is something distasteful, even

repulsive, to many artists about being specified, as definitions attempt to do, and it

is taken sometimes as an artist’s mission to violate, often gleefully, accepted notions

of what art is and does.” (p148)

B. Education has an obligation to clarify the character or nature of the subjects it

includes.

C. Reimer prefers the term “description” (of salient features of music) vice “definition”

of music; a tool to think with rather than an edict to be deferred to.

Music can be described as sounds organized to create meanings inherent within the

ways and means the sounds are organized, including all manner of additional

meanings as they influence and are encompassed within that inherence. To simplify

even further: Music can be described as sounds organized to be inherently

meaningful.

The arts can be described as all the ways and means people have contrived to

organize materials to produce meanings inherent within the materials and their

organization.

*Notice that nothing is said about how good the process or product must be to qualify

as music or art; the work can be good, bad, or mediocre – it still can be considered

music or art.

Page 2: A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the … · A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision/Bennett Reimer ... John Cage 1st component (sounds): Maintained, indeed

Using the Description to Help Explain Alternative Views

❖ John Cage

➢ 1st component (sounds): Maintained, indeed he expanded the types of sounds

traditionally produced.

➢ 2nd component: Tries to bypass, but, can you really have organized randomness?

➢ 3rd component: Again, he expands the meaning of the musical experience by having

listeners be more participatory in the making of their own musical meaning.

❖ Conceptual Art (idea takes precedence over aesthetic, grew out of Surreal and Dada art)

➢ 1st component (materials): often either abandoned in favor of a verbally articulated

idea or considered insignificant as compared to the concept being expressed

➢ 2nd component: Curiously, still present. Materials, albeit often odd choices, require

some sort of formulation to exist.

➢ 3rd component: Seeming relinquished in favor of an idea, concept, or message.

▪ Examples

• Erika Rothenberg, America’s Joyous Future, 1991

• Michael Mandiberg, Shop Mandiberg, 2001

• Daniel Spoerri, Snare Picture, 1995

• Walter de Maria, Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1997

Is any or all of this “art”? Reimer doesn’t want to stipulate the correct answer to this question;

he, instead, is “very much interested in thinking about the question, and the difficult, puzzling,

fascinating issues it raises”. He goes on to say that he “retains an orientation to and a reliance

on these three dimensions of music and the arts as a useful mechanism for sorting out issues

we are presented with by important developments and deviations in the arts.”

Mu

sic

and

th

e A

rts

Sounds (materials)

Organized

To be inherently meaningful

Page 3: A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the … · A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision/Bennett Reimer ... John Cage 1st component (sounds): Maintained, indeed

II. Teaching for Musical Meaning

A. Diana Raffman quote on music education (p159)

Translation: In music, knowledge is ineffable. Music itself is the only means

of translation.

B. Music Educators are to help their students experience the meaning of music by

immersing them directly and personally in the sounds. This allows music to speak its

mysteries.

C. Language-think becomes necessary for more effective music-think in music

education.

D. Three obligations summarize the mission of music education:

1. Music education should offer artistic creating opportunities including but

going beyond those readily available in the culture. Each such opportunity

provides its particular way to bring musical meaning into existence.

Improvement in creating – in musicianship – is a basic goal of music education.

2. Music education should offer responding opportunities including but going

beyond what the culture typically provides. In as many ways as can be devised,

refinement in ability to gain musical meanings as responding particularly

provides them is a primary aim of music education.

3. The music experienced in both musicianship and listenership opportunities

should include but go beyond the generally available musics students are

involved with in their culture(s). Each particular music provides its characteristic

musical meanings. Expansion of students’ repertoire of musical meanings is a

foundational obligation of music education. (p160, bold added)

III. The Necessity of Knowing About and Knowing Why

A. “Improving, refining, and expanding the musical meanings available to students

through responding to and creating a wider variety of musics than are likely to be

experienced without us, requires language to be used as a means to the

enhancement of the quality of musical experience itself. The paradox that that

language needs to be used as a way to gain that is not available from language leads

us to clarify why and how this is so.” (p161)

Page 4: A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the … · A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision/Bennett Reimer ... John Cage 1st component (sounds): Maintained, indeed

B. Two dimensions of knowledge:

a. Plato: “Episteme”, knowledge capable of being explained in numbers and

words. General information. Conceptual.

b. Aristotle: “Phronesis”, practical wisdom grounded in understanding of

specific, concrete human experiences in all their complexity. Knowledge-as-

wisdom, flexible, subtle, and adaptable. Perceptual. Above and beyond

generalities.

C. Role of language in accomplishing these two dimensions of knowledge

a. Musical meaning is historically and contextually grounded.

b. Music has within it a number of possible interrelations among its sounds,

determined by history, culture, the individual(s) involved in its creation, etc.

Structure.

c. Music’s history, cultural setting, structure and organization of sounds and

materials are capable of being delineated by language. (chord, interval,

major, minor, chromatic, adagio, sonata, introduction, pause, fast, slow,

upward, downward, loud, soft, instrumentation, etc.) Information.

D. Many naturally assume that music contains some sort of discernable “message”

(similar to most visual art and poetry), and assume that (when the message can’t be

found) that they just don’t “get it”. Music should just “be what it is”, there’s not

always a way to explain its purpose with words.

IV. Finally, What Music Means

“All the theorizing in the world cannot, by itself, yield musical meaning. Such meaning

occurs within each individual who experiences music, of any sort, encountered in any way. Both

the music and the person engaged with it contribute to the meaning. What music means, then,

is everything a person experiences when involved with it.

Music education exists to nurture people’s potential to gain deeper, broader, more

significant meanings from musical involvements, by helping them know within and how,

assisted by knowing about and why. Sounds simple. Few undertakings in education are as

complex.” (p165)