{"title":"Values and Music Education by Estelle R. Jorgensen (review)","authors":"Øivind Varkøy","doi":"10.2979/pme.2023.a885192","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/pme.2023.a885192","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Inspired by Estelle Jorgensen’s book Values and Music Education (Indiana University Press, 2021), the author of this Book Review Essay, from a Scandinavian perspective, discusses the concept of value, the struggles of values, and the tension between universal values and relativism, as well as the fact that there is no such thing as a neutral position to speak from. Among thinkers and philosophers who have inspired these reflections are Charles Taylor, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Frith and Frede V. Nielsen.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools by Geoffrey Baker (review)","authors":"Kim Boeskov","doi":"10.2979/pme.2023.a885194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/pme.2023.a885194","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools by Geoffrey Baker Kim Boeskov Geoffrey Baker: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021) If indeed there exists, as Geir Johansen has proposed,1 a self-critical movement within the field of music education, Geoffrey Baker is undoubtedly one of its leading figures. According to Johansen, the self-critical turn is characterized by an increasing number of music educators directing criticism toward music education itself by denouncing overly romantic visions of “the power of music” and scrutinizing how music educational practices are implicated in the propulsion of problematic social forces of inequality, oppression, and injustice. Baker’s widely read book from 2014, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,2 thoroughly denounced the globally acclaimed Venezuelan ‘musical miracle’ as a myth. Based on extensive field work in Venezuela, Baker painstakingly dissected El Sistema as an archaic, morally, and pedagogically flawed model of music education veiled in the empty rhetoric of music as a tool of social redemption and documented how such models are ripe with opportunities for abuse, in every sad sense of the word. The continuation of Baker’s critical project is published in the form of a four-hundred-page book, entitled Rethinking Social Action Through Music. Baker presents the text as “a ‘post-El Sistema’ project”3 as it constitutes a departure [End Page 92] from his preoccupation with ‘The System’ toward potential alternatives to the Venezuelan model. He finds such an alternative in the Red (Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín), a network of music schools in the Colombian city of Medellín, which figures as the center of attention in Baker’s institutional ethnography. However, even as the Colombian institution is invoked as a counterexample to its Venezuelan sibling, the Red is not held up for its ability to enact social change or display of innovative pedagogical principles. What Baker finds exemplary and worthy of investigation is the willingness he locates within the administrative layer of the Red to continuously engage in reflective work with regards to the tensions, conflicts, and pitfalls, as well as potentials of musical-social work. Particularly, Baker’s attention is directed to the decision-making processes and discussions among the leaders of the institution; how senior staff members adopt self-critical stances, how needs for institutional change are recognized, the recurring frictions between musical staff and members of the institution’s social team, and tensions between public statements expressing confidence in the program’s efficacy and internal conversations full of ambivalence and doubt. It is with reference to the reflexive processes of the Red that Baker conducts insightful and well-informed ","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman (review)","authors":"Renato Cardoso","doi":"10.2979/pme.2023.a885193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/pme.2023.a885193","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article, I present a five-part critique of the main aspects of the second edition of Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman. This edition further develops their praxial philosophy, comprising topics on the nature and value of music education from a normative perspective, which in turn is developed to suit all musical education contexts. My analysis is organized in five main arguments concerning, first, an absence of historicity; second, the adoption of universalist premises; third, the inconsistency between the concepts of personhood and musical value; fourth, the adoption of a normative philosophy; and fifth, the relation between synthesis and content in the chapters. I argue that the book is constructed from a universalistic perspective and that its premises have epistemological inconsistencies. I offer a critical analysis of this extensive work for the purpose of engaging in a dialogue about themes which are relevant to the further development of philosophical thought in music education.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Queer Futurity and Afrofuturism: Enacting Emancipatory Utopias in Music Education","authors":"Brent C. Talbot, Donald M. Taylor","doi":"10.2979/pme.2023.a885191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/pme.2023.a885191","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being—offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education and contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"201 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lauren Kapalka Richerme, Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020)","authors":"Nasim Niknafs","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43557964","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Metal Bildung","authors":"Ketil Thorgersen, Thomas von Wachenfeldt","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article is based on results from research that addressed the ways young Black Metal musicians construct their musical learning and socialization. In this article we will focus on one of the strands in that study; a trace of a classic ideal from Bildung theory. Using Bildung theory, we explore similarities between the ideals and concepts in the expressed informal music education from Black Metal musicians and contemporary institutionalized music education. In this article the German and Nordic 18th century concept of Bildung will be interpreted as the component that binds and contextualizes knowledge by a dialectic process with already inherited or internalized knowledge. Exploring, identifying, and comparing links between the educative process found within Black Metal and Bildung might at first sight seem to be both a pointless task and potentially reifying of problematic elements found within Black Metal. However, as we discuss, common features of Bildung and Black Metal, such as enlightenment through criticism of the taken-for-granted, a sublime Gesamtkunstwerk and a nihilist striving to become an image of God, help to reveal those ways Black Metal learning processes can be understood inthe light of Bildung theories. We do so in order to present tools for furthering the critical discussion of hegemonic music educational discourses.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"183 - 201"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41612977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resisting Neoliberal Subjectivities: Friendship Groups in Popular Music","authors":"C. Benedict","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The pedagogical strategy of students choosing their own friends with whom to work in classroom contexts (under the guise of democratic participation) because this is how popular musicians learn, has mostly gone uninterrogated in the literature. Approaching the question of how to create a common world through a critical examination of the unexamined assumptions that underpin emerging celebratory discourses on friendship, I consider the ways in which the words friends and friendship are indiscriminately used without acknowledging that the soundness of this pedagogical choice is based on data collected from people (‘real life’ popular musicians) who are in, more often than not, instrumental relations of utility. In doing so I call for a rereading of friendship groups in order to resist the neoliberal injunction of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and unchecked individualism. To that end I question the ways in which friendship groups in popular music groupings have become sites for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"132 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43968571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ambiguous Musical Practice: Rethinking Social Analysis of Music Educational Practice","authors":"Kim Boeskov","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Music education holds an ambiguous relationship to social justice and social change; it is both complicit in perpetuating relations of inequality and a potential force for positive change. There is a need to turn the ambiguity of music’s social function—the simultaneous production of transformative and reproductive social processes—into the foundational premise of social analysis of music educational practice. Based on a discussion of ideas derived from social theory, feminist philosophy, and critical musicology concerning the performative constitution of agency and sociality, the notion of ambiguous musical practice is put forward as an analytical lens suited for exploring music’s social significance. The notion points to three interlocking dimensions of musical practice: bidirectionality (how music making may at once lead to destabilization and consolidation of social norms); multiplicity of social meanings (how music making produces multiple social meanings and therefore also may produce [contradictory] social effects on different levels of sociality); and in-betweenness (how music making may place participants in a state ‘in-between,’ understood as a social space where multiple identities, relations, and meanings can be both performed and imposed in ways that render them indeterminate). Inthis way, the notion of ambiguous musical practice may inform critical social analyses of music educational practice.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"163 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48949427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Countering Reverse Détournement: Subversive vs. Subsumptive Creativity","authors":"Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper argues that the neoliberal (mis)appropriation of artistic creativity that begins to have a serious impact on music education can be seen as the result of a reverse détournement, whereby the very terms that used to play a pivotal role in describing the anti-systemic, anti-commercial, unsettling, emancipatory qualities of artistic creativity are being used to legitimize a thoroughly economized conception of creativity. It is suggested that this reverse détournement shapes a notion of creativity that can be referred to as subsumptive, a term that denotes the thorough instrumentalization of creativity that leads to a managerial approach to creative processes and practices. The paper identifies some of the main terms that have been sacrificed in the process of the neoliberal colonization of creativity, suggesting that we actively resist subsumptive creativity by molding a counter-hegemonic language that offers an alternative conceptual apparatus that might permit a conceptualization of creativity as subversive. Thus, it is suggested that instead of drawing on notions of flexibility and adaptability we explore the notion of nondeterminist plasticity of minds; instead of emphasizing uncertainty and risk-taking we choose to cultivate fearless exploration; in the place of notions of collaboration (that easily slips to networking) we emphasize dis-identification; instead of celebrating independence we engage with the notion of collectivity; instead of emphasizing learning how to anticipate future needs we choose to explore the merits of (temporary) withdrawal; instead of celebrating innovation we choose to explore practices of dismeasure; and instead of seeking ways to boost confidence, we explore the subversive potential of vulnerability.","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":"30 1","pages":"145 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45741258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Juliet Hess, Music Education for Social Change–Constructing an Activist Music Education (New York, Routledge, 2019)","authors":"M. Berger","doi":"10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/philmusieducrevi.30.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43479,"journal":{"name":"Philosophy of Music Education Review","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48191970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}