Wherefore the Musicians?

Abstract

This essay offers a critique of the dominant music education paradigm by challenging the myth of the musician as the locus of music making. Exploring the concept of the ‘musician’ through three different ways of conceptualizing the arts, the essay offers a strategy for recasting the fundamental assumptions that underlie music education as a particular cultural practice. The aim of the essay is to offer a different starting point for thinking about and envisioning the intersection of music education and social justice by considering what different views of “the musician” as a fundamentally social agent imply for music education. This critical analysis does not seek to displace but rather to affirm the role of music-making (whether by people called musicians or not) in the public sphere of a democratic society.

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