The praxial philosophy of music education rests on two premises.
The first premise is that the nature of music education depends on the
nature of music. The second premise is that the significance of music
education depends on the significance of music in human life.
In other words, the most reasonable way to explain the nature and
values of music education is to begin with an explanation of the nature and
significance of music.
Below are summaries (but not full explanations) of what Music
Matters proposes about the nature and values of music.
The Nature of Music
"Pieces" of music are, of course, central to what "music" is. But,
is it reasonable to assume that an explanation of the nature of musical
works will yield a comprehensive understanding of the nature and values of
music? No. Beginning with this assumption risks the possibility of
producing a narrow and implausible concept of music and, therefore, a
narrow and implausible philosophy of music education.
So, let us begin with the observation that the auditory events we
call "musical works" usually result from
the actions of people (e.g., performers performing; improvisers
improvising, and so on) who live in particular times and places and who
make musical "products" in relation to histories and standards of musical
practice (whether they know these histories and standards formally or
informally) .
In short, musical products --- performances, improvisations,
compositions, or arrangements --- are enmeshed in and derive their nature
and significance from their contexts of creation and use. Even the
structural details of musical patterns owe their characteristic features to
the reflections of music makers who work at particular times in the history
of their musical cultures. Works of music are, therefore, artistic-cultural
constructions, and our personal acts of
music listening involve
complex cognitive construction processes which also operate in relation to
our social-cultural beliefs.
Accordingly, I argue that the processes of listening to music (of
any kind) involve and yield several interconnected dimensions of
meaning: affective, interpretive, structural, expressional,
representational, social, ideological and/or personal meanings.
In this view, the auditory events we call "music" challenge our
powers of consciousness on many levels: "pieces" of music are
multidimensional challenges and, therefore, thought-and-feeling generators.
(For a full explanation of the music-affect relationship, see Chps. 4-9 in
Music Matters).
And MUSIC, considered broadly and socially, is the diverse human
practice of making sounds of particular kinds for listeners who understand
(informally or formally) how to listen for these particular kinds of
Musics (e.g., Japanese Koto music, Dixieland jazz, Donegal fiddling).
I suggest, also, that the performing art of music (which involves
acts of performing, improvising, composing, arranging and/or conducting)
depends on a multidimensional form of understanding called musicianship
which (of course) includes music-listening abilities, or "listenership."
Musicianship and listenership are two sides of the same cognitive
coin. Listenership involves the covert (mental) construction of
intramusical relationships (within works) and intermusical relationships
(between works) through the same kinds of knowing that make up
musicianship: procedural, formal, informal, impressionistic and supervisory
musical knowing. The knowings required to listen effectively for the
musical works of a given practice involve the same kinds of knowing
required to perform, improvise, compose, arrange and/or conduct the music
of that practice.
The Values of Music and Music Education
Music and music education have many values. To me, the most
important of these values occur (as the psychologist Mihalyi
Csikszentmihalyi suggests) when there is a balance between our musicianship
and the wide range of cognitive-affective challenges involved in musicing
(as performers, improvisers, composers, arrangers or conductors) and
listening intelligently for music. When our levels of musicianship match
the challenge-levels of the pieces we interact with, we achieve the central
values of musicing and listening: namely, musical enjoyment (or "flow"),
self-growth, self-knowledge (or constructive knowledge) and (through
continuous involvements with music over time) self-esteem.
In this view, musicianship is not only a rich form of thinking and
knowing, it is a unique source of one of the most important kinds of
knowledge humans can achieve: self-knowledge.
In addition to these values, musicing (of all kinds) and musical
works extend the range of our expressive and impressive powers by providing
opportunities for us to create musical expressions of emotions, musical
representations of people, places and things and musical expressions of
cultural-ideological meanings. This range of opportunities for musical
expression and creativity offers people numerous ways of giving
artistic-cultural form to their powers of feeling, thinking, knowing,
valuing, evaluating and believing which, in turn, challenge other
listeners' conscious powers and musical understandings.
I wish to emphasize, also, that musical practices are significant
because the musical works they produce play important roles as unifying
cultural artifacts: that is, cherished musical works are crucial to
establishing, defining, delineating and preserving a sense of community and
self-identity within social groups. In other words, musical pieces and
practices constitute and are constituted by their social contexts.
Additionally, teaching and learning a variety of Musics
comprehensively as music cultures is an important form of multicultural
education. Why? Because the process of learning and 'entering into'
unfamiliar Musics activates our self-examination and the personal
reconstruction of our relationships, assumptions and preferences about
other people, other cultures and other ways of thinking and valuing.
Inducting learners into unfamiliar musical practices links the central
values of music education to the broader goals of humanistic education.
Last, if music making or listening prove beneficial for the
development of students' spatial, mathematical, or scientific (or other
cognitive) abilities, then these benefits will most likely develop more
deeply and frequently to the degree that music education programs become
deeper and more available to all students.
These perspectives on the nature and significance of music provide
the basis for my praxial recommendations about what music teachers ought to
teach, and how.
