Toward a "Situated" View of the Aesthetic in Music Education

Abstract

Bennett Reimer's seminal text A Philosophy of Music Education has been described as marking culmination of the developmental period of the philosophy of in education.1 In this text and the subsequent revision published in 1989, Reimer argues that the central purpose of education is to develop the capacity for knowing in experience, a position that has been characterized as music education as (MEAE), or the aesthetic of education. This position has been the subject of considerable and at times acrimonious debate in the decade following the second edition of Reimer's text, most trenchantly in David Elliott's text Music Matters.2 Criticisms that have been leveled at the aesthetic of have focused on traditional interpretations of the concepts of aesthetic object, aesthetic perception and aesthetic (MM, 21-38). Specifically, Elliott and others have disputed (1) the exclusive focus on internal features of a musical work, that is, the musical elements or structural properties of musical works, resulting in a Eurocentric view of as autonomous object (MM, 21-38)3; (2) the emphasis on musical engagement as passive listening rather than musicking (MM, 21-38); and (3) the emphasis on verbal response to listening as the primary means of obtaining knowledge concerning children's understandings of (MM, 21-38). Elliott proposes an alternative philosophical position for education in which the aesthetic concept is abandoned, and a praxial view is embraced. Elliott uses the term praxial in the Aristotelian sense of critically reflective action in a context (MM, 3), promoting a view that engagement in experience should be reflexively thoughtful, contextually embedded, and active in the making processes of arranging, composing, conducting, improvising, and performing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.