Music, Education, and Religion

Intersections and Entanglements

Alexis Anja Kallio, Philip Alperson, Heidi Westerlund, Alexis Anja Kallio, Philip Alperson, Heidi Westerlund

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780253043726
• eBook ISBN: 9780253043733
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Essays examining the role of religion in music education from a variety of perspectives. Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements explores the critical role that religion can play in formal and informal music education. As in broader educational studies, research in music education has tended to sidestep the religious dimensions of teaching and learning, often reflecting common assumptions of secularity in contemporary schooling in many parts of the world. This book considers the ways in which the forces of religion and belief construct and complicate the values and practices of music education—including teacher education, curriculum texts, and teaching repertoires. The contributors to this volume embrace a range of perspectives from a variety of disciplines, examining religious, agnostic, skeptical, and atheistic points of view. Music, Education, and Religion is a valuable resource for all music teachers and scholars in related fields, interrogating the sociocultural and epistemological underpinnings of music repertoires and global educational practices. "The book serves as a study volume for all those who are active in this field and provides both systematic reflections and useful empirical studies. A further impressive feature is the regional and religious breadth of the content presented and examined." —Wolfgang W. Müller, Reading Religion

Part 1

Tensions and Negotiations

1 | On the Role of Religion in Music Education

Estelle R. Jorgensen

Something is amiss in general education at all levels, where the study of the humanities and the world’s musical traditions are diminished and marginalized. Much is lost when intellectual, inspirational, imaginative, spiritual, and humane experiences are devalued in education. Bypassing education in the sense of the search for wisdom—what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1929, 14) termed “religious” education—through literalist thinking devoid of artistic soul creates a myopic focus on the mastery of technical skills and prosaic vocational information. In the United States, notwithstanding calls during the past decades for a broader view of musical study within a wider societal and cultural context,¹ academic curricula in music education remain comparatively narrow, technical, and vocational. Elementary and secondary school music programs are pervasively populist and performative and place less emphasis on the study of esoteric musical traditions that require a musical education within the context of the humanities. Constitutional prohibitions against the establishment of religion have lately been read by the courts to require exclusion of religious music, or any course or program whose title smacks of religious music, from publicly supported music study and performance in schools (Perrine 2013, 2016, 2017). Although the earliest school music textbooks included sacred songs and hymns, the use of religious music and texts has declined to the point where today’s textbooks are manifestly secular (Keene 2009; Mark and Gary 2007). The study of religious music in publicly supported universities and colleges is justified mainly on aesthetic, artistic, and vocational rather than religious grounds.

Rich possibilities exist for engaging religions, emphasizing the importance of music and the humanities in music curricula, and recognizing the power of intellectual, sensual, inspirational, imaginative, spiritual, and humane experiences in music among the other arts and humanities. As I explore some of the contributions and pitfalls of teaching music as a humanity and critically engaging religions in music education from an internationalist perspective, but situated in the United States, my focus in this chapter is on three questions that are central to an examination of the role of religion in music education. They are: Why should music education broadly construed critically engage religions? What conceptual challenges arise for music education when it engages religions? How can music educators navigate practically the intersections of music, education, and religion?² I approach these questions as a citizen of the world and resident in the United States, with an international perspective gleaned in my native Australia, during sojourns in Canada and England, and from travels in Europe and Asia.

Although the languages and means by which one expresses oneself musically, educationally, and religiously differ in important ways, and the questions they address are distinctive, these symbolic systems also share important commonalities. Human expressions of felt life—emotional, physical, and intellectual—are done and undergone, holistic and atomistic, literal and figurative, conscious and unconscious, enacted and ideational, theoretical and practical, sensual and spiritual, traditional and transformative. Straddling these disparate polarities, they encompass what philosophers of education Israel Scheffler (1991) and Iris Yob (1997) have termed cognitive emotions and emotional cognitions, respectively—that is, feeling in the service of thought, and thought in the service of feeling. Practically speaking, in navigating this territory, I find myself in what philosopher of education Deanne Bogdan (1998, 73) has characterized as “the eye of paradox.” Music, education, and religions dwell in realms of imaginative, intuitive, and figurative thought and action.³ As musician educator June Boyce-Tillman (2000) has observed, musical, educational, and religious ways of thinking and doing have been subjugated in the West (and in some other parts of the world), and they are fragile, vulnerable, and susceptible to being rendered lifeless. The animating, enriching, and ennobling qualities of their dynamic thought and practice can be literalized, systematized, strangled, desiccated, and destroyed. Because of these possibilities, music and religious educators, and protagonists of the other arts and humanities need to remain watchful and ensure that music, education, and religion thrive. With these considerations in mind, I turn to the questions at the heart of this chapter.

Why Should Music Education Critically Engage Religions?

Among the possible responses to this question, I focus on the following: the relationship between religion and spirituality, the interrelationship of music with other aspects of culture, the presence of explicit religious connections within music, the importance of critiquing the values that underlie religious beliefs and practices, the challenges to religious power structures and institutional resistance to critique, and the importance of resisting fundamentalism and dogmatism. Religion has often been associated particularly with spirituality, but this is not always the case.⁴ Spirituality can also be experienced through the arts, myths, rituals, and the like. To borrow US philosopher Susanne Langer’s (1957) approach, there is Spirituality with a capital S and spiritualities, some of which may be religious and others artistic or musical. A study of religion is not necessary for students to experience spirituality; they may also know spirituality through such subjects as music and the other arts, literature, science, and mathematics. Still, when music educators engage religions, students may access a broader array of spiritual experiences than they may know through a secularized music education. Teachers can prompt such experiences and evoke a sense of reverence, wonder, and awe in the face of beliefs and practices that may at once be musical and religious. As they critique and construct these experiences, teachers and their students can gain a deeper insight into themselves, the world around them, and whatever lies beyond. Yob (2011) argues for the importance of spiritual experience in education, which she sees as accessible through the arts as well as through religion. Her argument shares much with Langer’s approach of distinguishing between Art with a capital A and the arts, of which music is one. Briefly put, although religions and the arts share elements, they also have their distinctive interests and features.

Coming to know music is a matter of grasping its interconnectedness with the other arts, the humanities, the institutions, and the sociocultural contexts within which it is experienced. During the past few decades, researchers such as Alperson (1987), Clayton, Herbert, and Middleton (2003), DeNora (2003), Scott (2002), and Shepherd (1991b) have compellingly made the case for the interconnectedness between music, society, and culture. Music is variously regarded as subject and object; structure and function; process; a distinctive art form with its own beliefs, practices, and norms; and a holistic enterprise that involves ritual, dance, the visual arts, storytelling, drama, song, speech, and instrumental music making. Often music is strictly codified and sometimes carries religious and mythical significance. Over time, music has become a specialized art form, and classical traditions have evolved independently from the vernacular traditions from which they draw inspiration and to which they contribute. The distinctiveness and esotericism of these classical traditions have set them apart from ordinary musical practices and other art forms. As they have become institutionalized, they have taken on a life of their own in a preoccupation with the mastery of their own beliefs, values, and practices that are intellectualized, specialized, reified, and objectified. This self-absorption is in tension with the cultural, societal, and institutional elements that make them possible and support, undermine, or otherwise affect them.

While the case for these tensions in classical traditions may be especially clear, other musical traditions also have devotees for whom musical practices remain separated from everyday life. I think, for example, of a young Hmong singer, instrumentalist, and dancer, the son of the village shaman in a Laotian village, whose exquisite performance of his traditional music, as I witnessed, could be thought about and intellectualized, specialized, and reified.⁵ As I reflected on the singer’s performance, it seemed important to dignify the artistry of his unforgettable musical performance. His performance evidenced the same devotion, intensity, fidelity, spirituality, power, and artistry as have some outstanding performances in the classical traditions that I have witnessed.⁶

Notwithstanding the clearly articulated links between music, the other arts and humanities, and the wider societal and cultural context, the process of coming to know music intimately and in practical terms often tends to become focused on the music itself, as if it were something apart from the rest of lived life. This need not be the case. Within the Western classical tradition, watching Anu Tali conducting the Sarasota Orchestra in a performance of Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 1 and Sibelius’s Symphony no. 2 (Rife 2014; Williams 2014), I was struck by what this Estonian conductor brought to these performances that reflected her own grasp of Nordic culture and the traditional music of Finland, Russia, and the Baltic states. During rehearsals of this music, the musicians’ attention was undoubtedly on their ability to collectively express the scores, and their rehearsals were no doubt driven by the urgency of preparing a performance within a limited time. Still, their performance expressed these cultures and constituted a window into them. Where performances are augmented with a wider systematic study of the cultures of which they are a part, music is better understood as part of a social and cultural experience.

The varieties of music of the world are also shot through with religious references and elements. Composer Arvo Pärt is quoted as describing the role of his faith as an Eastern Orthodox Christian on his composition as follows: “Religion guides all the processes in our lives, without us even knowing it. . . . It is true that religion has a very important role in my composition, but how it really works, I am not able to describe” (Robin 2014).⁷ A vast part of the Western classical choral repertoire especially consists of music written explicitly for liturgical purposes. Much US country music is affected by Christian belief and interrelated with gospel music, and one better understands jazz as one grasps the power of blending traditional African and Christian beliefs and practices in jazz performances. In the East, as I witnessed the performance of a Chinese orchestra in Singapore with its interplay of Western and Eastern elements and tunings, I began to grasp the power of Chinese mythology and storytelling and the important theatrical role in music making. A brilliant water-puppet performance accompanied by traditional instrumentalists and singers who doubled as narrators, which I attended in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, was likewise evocative of animistic and mythic thought. These examples illustrate the seeming impossibility of coming to a rich knowledge of music without also understanding the myths and religions that shape, contribute to, and are influenced by musical beliefs and practices.

Regarding music as an interrelated part of the wider culture also requires understanding the values that ground beliefs and practices and, as I have suggested in earlier writings, a systematic transformation (Jorgensen 2003, for example). The need for critical perspectives on music, education, and religion that are the premise of this book arises from the importance of interrogating the values that underlie them. One’s practices express the beliefs, ideas, and ideals by which one lives and that one prizes and loves. When widely held, these beliefs become a common means of adjudicating music, educational practices, and religions. They may be so deeply and commonly held as to be unconscious. Tiryakian (1973, 199) uses the term “assumptive frames of reference” to connote these commonplaces. Gendered ways of musical, educational, and religious expressions are among such underlying, perhaps unquestioned, values. Throughout history, women and girls have been less able to receive educational opportunities or contribute to musical and religious formal practices.⁸ The claims of contributive and distributive justice require that these practices be interrogated (Jorgensen 2015). If practices arise from belief systems as they also contribute to them, this interrogation requires a critique of the values that are expressed musically, educationally, and religiously. One may also speak musically of the alternative scale systems, tunings, and instruments that undergird sonic expectations and come to be cultural commonplaces. Challenging these systems and musical expectations likewise requires critiquing the values that give rise to them, often rooted in social and cultural beliefs and practices of which religion may be a part. It also means unsettling the taken-for-granted order of things in music as in wider society—a process that has ethical as well as musical repercussions.

This critique challenges the power structures underlying musical, educational, and religious institutions. Viewed organically, institutions form around shared beliefs, values, and practices that are manifested in social structures, functions, and processes. Self-interest in growth and survival propels institutions to resist and contest those beliefs, values, and practices that run counter to their own and to seek, where possible, to expand or maintain the sphere of their influence. Whether they be musical, educational, or religious, matters of power and influence are critical for the order they seek to maintain. Critiquing a musical tradition, educational system, or religion inevitably prompts institutional resistance to such criticism. Philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of Western history in terms of the quest for power and the inevitable contest of ideas and practices that follow it suggests that this human predicament is inescapable, and that critique is not without risk.⁹

Institutions and the belief systems with which they are associated are also subject to fundamentalism. Where beliefs—be they musical, educational, or religious—are held narrowly, uncritically, literally, and rigidly, adherents may be unable or unwilling to see the value in alternative perspectives or to view the world more broadly in terms of “multiplicities and pluralities” (Greene 1988, especially chap. 4). As Scheffler (1991) notes, dogmatism, a sense of conviction, and the unwillingness to be surprised provide a sense of security. Although it can prompt a broader view of music and music education, too often fear of difference and of uncertainty fosters fundamentalist imaginations and contributes to narrow and rigid thought and practice. In the absence of a robust education in the humanities and public spaces in which ideas and practices can be debated, people do not develop the critical capacity to interrogate fundamentalisms wherever they appear or to think creatively, broadly, generously, and inclusively about different others. Even though critique carries a significant risk of the displeasure of those with vested interests in the status quo, ensuring a humane and civil society requires such interrogations. Critique is imperative as a means of contesting fundamentalist imaginations and opening public spaces for all human beings to participate fully in society and its cultural ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1. Tensions and Negotiations
• Part 2. Identity and Community
• Part 3. Navigating New Worlds
• Part 4. Emancipation, Regulation, and the Social Order
• Part 5. Agency and Social Change
• Music, Education, and Religion: An Invitation
• Index