Values and Music Education

Estelle R. Jorgensen

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253058218
• eBook ISBN: 9780253058195
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

What values should form the foundation of music education? And once we decide on those values, how do we ensure we are acting on them?

In Values and Music Education, esteemed author Estelle R. Jorgensen explores how values apply to the practice of music education. We may declare values, but they can be hard to see in action. Jorgensen examines nine quartets of related values and offers readers a roadmap for thinking constructively and critically about the values they hold. In doing so, she takes a broad view of both music and education while drawing on a wide sweep of multidisciplinary literature. Not only does Jorgensen demonstrate an analytical and dialectical philosophical approach to examining values, but she also seeks to show how theoretical and practical issues are interconnected.

An important addition to the field of music education, Values and Music Education highlights values that have been forgotten or marginalized, underscores those that seem perennial, and illustrates how values can be double-edged swords.

ONE

Culture, Humanity, Transformation, and Value

FOUR QUESTIONS LIE AT THE heart of this book: What values ought to characterize music and education? What are their contributions? What are their detractions? How might they apply to musical and educational practice? My present purpose is to unpack notions of selected values and their relationship to beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and actions in music education. I suggest that none of these values suffices when taken alone, and all have musical and educational detractions and contributions. The values I discuss undergird and shape as they also express and are affected by the aims and methods of music and education. This symbiotic interrelationship between values and musical and educational beliefs and practices underscores the critical role of values in forging theories and practices in music education and addressing philosophical questions about what music and education should be and become.

In this chapter, I focus on four central and interrelated concepts on which the following chapters are predicated: music as an aspect of culture, humanity and humane education, musical and educational transformation, and values and their intersection with music and education. In sketching the overall project, commenting on my methodological approach, and outlining the plan of this book, I emphasize ambiguities in the intersection between values and music education, distinguish concepts that are crucial in my thinking, and provide a context for the chapters to come. In so doing, I follow a time-honored educational tradition of moving rhythmically and cyclically from general to specific and back to general.¹ In the chapters to follow, I think symbolically and intuitively in quartets as I seek a solid foundation for values, beliefs, and practices in music education.

The title of this book, Values and Music Education, invokes music education in its commonly understood sense of a cross-disciplinary field at the intersection of music, education, and culture. Construing music and education problematically and ambiguously suggests that music education is a multifaceted and pluralistic enterprise.² With this in mind, I draw from various musical and educational traditions as I relate values to music and education. While musical and educational values may overlap, they are not necessarily coextensive. Music can serve as a metaphor for education just as education can serve as a metaphor for music.³ Although this idea remains implicit in the present writing, I write not only for those who think of themselves as music educators but for teachers willing to consider music as figurative of general education and musicians open to the potential of music construed as educational enterprise.

I critically examine some clusters of values with a view to determining how they may guide music and education. This enterprise extends a line of investigation in my earlier work predicated on the assumption of certain values—for example, civility, humanity, justice, freedom, inclusiveness, and equality.⁴ It is also situated in an interdisciplinary literature spanning fields of music and the arts, philosophy (aesthetics and ethics), anthropology, and education. For example, during the past two decades, Philip Alperson and his colleagues, Keith Moore Chapin and Lawrence Kramer and their colleagues, Julian Johnson, Liz Garnet, Jerrold Levinson, and Jayson Beaster-Jones have been among the philosophers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists to grapple with issues of musical value.⁵ Others, such as Thomas Regelski; Paul Woodford; Robert Walker; Randall Allsup and Heidi Westerlund; Elizabeth Gould; Hildegard Froehlich; and David Elliott, Marissa Silverman, Wayne Bowman, and their colleagues, have focused on musical values and their connections with ethics in music education.⁶ And still others, including David Carr, Joe Winston, and Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, have engaged the intersections between ethics, aesthetics, and education.⁷

Ethical issues in music and education are complex and fraught.⁸ At a time of economic, political, religious, and social polarization in the United States and abroad, the realities of human greed and scarce resources arising from human action and natural phenomena have fueled cultural polarization and exacerbated a struggle between the forces of conservatism and liberalism, nationalism and globalization. Thomas Byrne Edsall posits that it is easier to sustain democratic institutions and civil discourse in a time of expansion and plenty: when resources are scarce, unemployment is rife, and economic disparity is rampant, competition for scarce resources provides fertile ground for contention, conflict, and inhumanity.⁹ While Edsall looks to economics and politics to explain this polarization, others cite the surge of religious fundamentalism and various social reasons.¹⁰ Massive population migrations and technological changes have exacerbated these social and cultural tensions and worsened social unrest and resentment. Whatever the precise causes, it seems clear that economic, political, and religious factors are among the reasons for societal polarization. The ideological divides around the world reflect differing value sets that are as much socially forged as psychologically grounded.

Movements toward the inclusion and equality of minorities and previously marginalized groups in the latter part of the twentieth century and early part of the twenty-first century have been resisted by those with a conservative bent who fear a challenge to the established or traditional order of things. A backlash against liberal approaches to immigration; diverse cultural expressions; equality in terms of gender and gender identity and ethnic, racial, religious, and other minorities; and the claims of redressing the effects of colonization and dispossession and redistributing wealth from rich to poor has fueled a struggle in public spaces over the primacy of different value sets. Declining civil discourse, corruption, and competition for scarce resources have made it more difficult to cooperate with others who are different to solve the intractable issues in society at large at a time of increasing globalization. These realities have polarized and even paralyzed the nation’s democratic political institutions and rendered society vulnerable to extremist ideologies from within and without. Beyond the United States, other countries face similar disparities in the distribution of resources along with increasing societal and cultural rifts and fractures and possibilities for strife, revolution, and war.

Notwithstanding these challenges, the third decade of the twenty-first century constitutes a poignant moment for musicians, teachers, and students to examine and reexamine the values that should undergird and characterize music education. Around the world, racism; inequality; poverty, with its attendant problems of food insecurity, hunger, homelessness, and limited access to health care; injustice, with its related issues of policing and incarceration; corruption; violence; domestic and international terrorism; and environmental neglect and destruction are among the systemic evils exposed during the international COVID-19 pandemic. It is not surprising that national and international movements for economic, racial, social, and environmental justice have ignited here and abroad as the bill for conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, and human and environmental exploitation has come due. In some ways, music and education have been transfigured by the pandemic; in other ways, they remain the same.¹¹ Tumultuous times have appeared throughout history, and I see no reason why this should not be the case in the future.

At times like this, music educators need the humility to listen to and hear the voices of those who have been marginalized and suffered anguish, pain, and violence. Moments of distress, dislocation, awakening, and upheaval open windows to rediscover, reassess, and recommit to humane values that point toward the good and promote healing and well-being.¹² To this end, I seek musical and educational values that are timeless and widespread throughout the human family irrespective of our differences, that awaken and give musical voice to the dispossessed and marginalized, along with those who have been heard in the past but who now need to accommodate change.

What is a philosopher’s obligation in tumultuous times? I return to Friedrich Schiller’s philosophical advice to the artist: “Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work with your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.”¹³ This is a remarkable and timeless insight. I think of Herbert Read’s Education through Art, published in 1943 during the height of the Second World War but focused on the possibilities of art in bringing joy and enlightenment rather than on the chaos around him.¹⁴ Rereading him today, I find his ideas seem fresh and relevant to our time; I wonder whether writing this book focused on art was a respite for him from the tumult and trauma of the time. I return to Jacques Maritain’s Responsibility of the Artist, published in 1960, in which he reminds artists that their first obligation is to their art—a responsibility Read obviously felt during wartime.¹⁵ Maritain’s advice still feels apropos to a tumultuous time when musicians first need to take care of music. Nor can I forget Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 but still an important lesson now.¹⁶ Published six years after the end of a world conflagration and a decade after the rise of the movements she contemplated, Arendt’s groundbreaking treatise required time for her to reflect on the causes of the cataclysm that had convulsed the world. I learn from these scholars of the past that the work of philosophy cannot be hurried. As conditions change, in periods of unrest or quiet, it is incumbent on musicians and educators to take the time needed for reflection before rushing too quickly to opine on the present moment. Tumultuous events may open new possibilities, just as they may necessitate reexamination of common practices. Still, irrespective of change or continuity, a long view of music and education can help illumine what is of greatest importance for musical education, especially the values that should characterize them.

Opening spaces for dialogue about music and education requires self-reflexivity in interrogating taken-for-granted ideologies and repudiating simplistic either-or thinking; it also necessitates a disposition of generosity. Ideologies often serve as counterpoints or foils to others and are grounded in values that tend toward both good and evil. This position accords with Aristotle’s view of virtue as a “golden mean” between too much or too little of a good thing and Confucius’s belief in the importance of balancing opposing views and otherwise extreme positions in coming to wisdom.¹⁷ It also reflects my dialectical view of self, world, and whatever lies beyond. This said, my reading of history suggests that humane ideals are more fragile and the moments in which they shine brightly are fewer than those in which the forces of inhumanity reign supreme. On the one hand, there is the ever-present danger that those ideals associated with the interests of powerful establishments will win out over interests that would unsettle and challenge that power. On the other, advocates for change may overlook the power and stabilizing influence of tradition and evoke a backlash by those who feel themselves displaced from their cultural roots.

Musicians and educators are challenged to find a path in the messy ground of practical realities that offer good and evil on either hand. The fragility of humane ideals also requires special emphasis and sustenance as musicians and educators seek to create a better world. Still, it is important to conserve the best of what traditions can offer while also transforming them for the better. Dialogue concerning these important matters needs to be grounded in generosity of spirit as one seeks to grasp what others wish to say and do in ways that are respectful and empathetic. Open-mindedness and openheartedness make it possible to look beyond human limitations and inadequacies, seek to see and hear what others are trying to say, and build bridges of common understandings with those who hold to disparate ideas and practices. Rather than focusing on what is wrong with or missing from another’s point of view or practice, one needs to look beyond imperfections to seek the wisdom that might be gleaned from the other’s insights.

It may be helpful for readers to approach this book as something of a thought experiment, as a space in which to rethink values and value clusters in music education. This can be accomplished by decentering or setting aside for the moment prior allegiances and preconceptions and critically, constructively, and empathetically considering the meanings, advantages, and disadvantages of these values.¹⁸ This self-reflexive stance of examining and reexamining one’s beliefs and practices resonates with Deanne Bogdan’s notion of “situated sensibility,” in which she fuses the “disassociation/reintegration” of musical and literary sensibilities.¹⁹ In so doing, she illustrates a process whereby music educators can imaginatively see their own ideas and practices through the eyes of others, reintegrate these disparate ideas and practices into their own now wider and nuanced understandings, and imagine how their situations might be more humane. Taking the time to excavate the words that stand for conceptions and seeing them from different vantage points afford opportunities to reflect on how the particular cast I have given them reinforces or contradicts readers’ understandings, which are sometimes explicitly embraced and other times taken for granted. I do not seek to establish who is right and who is wrong but rather to unpack various values and justify and critique my position regarding them. It is necessary to sit awhile with each value and see how it suits. Akin to any experiment, this process cannot be rushed. My point is to prompt readers to contemplate their own musical and educational values and better understand, critique, and justify their commitments and those of others. In so doing, readers may become wide awake to persistent and systemic challenges that characterize music educational thought and practice and seek more expansive, practical, and humane ways by which to improve the situation.²⁰

My “this with that” dialectical approach resists either-or dichotomous thinking and postmodern mash-ups—states of dynamic flux that repudiate binaries. Situated thought and action is complicated and messy, yet for me it comes closer to the lived lives of musicians, teachers, and students than categorical and limited either-or views. As a music student and teacher, I have confronted sometimes difficult-to-resolve choices concerning such polarities as intellectuality-sensibility, receptivity-activity, freedom-control, community-individuality, literacy-orality, process-product, ecstasy-restraint, compassion-justice, spirituality-materiality, dialogue-silence, universalism-elitism, form-function, and populism-classicism. If my experience is on the mark, these and other conundrums inevitably place teachers and students in the “eye of paradox,” where polarities are both a help and a hazard.²¹

As a matter of public policy, music education requires commitments that enable concerted action in the phenomenal world. What values ought to guide policy makers as they work through the host of sometimes competing and conflicting interests among and between various subjects of study and in the ways of establishing them as aspects of general education and culture? How can policy makers forge practical approaches that take these values i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Culture, Humanity, Transformation, and Value
• 2. Artistry, Taste, Skill, and Style
• 3. Reverence, Humility, Awe, and Spirituality
• 4. Dignity, Dispassion, Restraint, and Discipline
• 5. Love, Friendship, Desire, and Devotion
• 6. Joy, Happiness, Pleasure, and Celebration
• 7. Fidelity, Persistence, Patience, and Loyalty
• 8. Curiosity, Imagination, Wonder, and Open-Mindedness
• 9. Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge, and Mastery
• 10. Justice, Equality, Fairness, and Inclusion
• 11. Commonalities, Resonances, Applications, and Decisions
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author