For Diana Lipscomb, who asked me
about this once:
So, I
teach music at a university. In some circles, this is a bit of a guilty
admission; a detachment from praxis, a surfeit of health insurance, and an
over-reliance on obscure vocabulary are among the greatest sins of such
apostasy against music as an art form separate from the university system. For
me, teaching at the university is a tremendous opportunity to work with
fascinating colleagues from across many disciplines, and equally it is a
substantial responsibility: for majority of my students, their time at university
is the closing theme of their formal education in music. If the study of
music can contribute to the project of a critical education, this is its last
chance to do so. I believe that music can and does contribute, and that
this educational point, the university experience, is the moment at which that
contribution can be the most systematic, far-reaching, and transformative.
P eter
Bürger, in The Decline of Modernism, highlights two features
of this lecture: according to Habermas, for Enlightenment scholars the aesthetic
realm is Ideal, an autonomous domain which runs on its own and creates and
changes according to its own internal logic and force. For 18th century
thinkers, an “enlightened” experience of art is one where the aesthetic
judgment is based on “disinterest,” when the individual can put aside human
concerns and cares, and enter into a transcendent or elevated state of
perception. Once the individual self has entered this transcendent realm,
he or she naturally and purely comes back into the world “risen up,” a more
cultivated person. (Bürger, 4) How this
transformation from the aesthetic universal to particular happens is somewhat
vague, perhaps due to the lack of a discussion of individual music making and
its contribution to cultural domain.
Music
in the university suffers from a discourse deficit. Perhaps from its late entry into the academy
in the last quarter of the 19th century, perhaps due to the lingering idea of
music as a special “universal language,” or perhaps from the massive shift in
the mechanics of musical production (and consumption) in the 20th century,
musicians at universities face a challenge of communicating with colleagues and
administrators, talking with them about what we do and most importantly, how
what we do is different from what they think we do. Shifts in the
scholarly enterprise in the last decades have helped tremendously, but we
continue to play catch-up ball.
This situation is of particular significance when we interact with administrations,
and when we hope to contribute to the long-term, large-scale plans of the
institutions in which we work. Often, we don't know how to articulate the
value that we offer in a manner that makes sense to the economic and
ideological infrastructure of higher education. This infrastructure
exerts significant pressures on the administration of universities as well as
the students: both are pushed to view education in transactional and
(sometimes) naively utilitarian terms.
Music
fails most of the basic utilitarian tests of education, especially when
considering the archetypical 1-on-1 private performance lesson. Even if a
student were to find employment in the field, life-time earnings pale in
comparison to other choices they might make. These programs are by their
nature expensive and space hungry. Liberal arts schools are perhaps a
kinder environment for a non-vocational approach to music and the other arts,
but they are no safe haven; and there such critiques leveled on the liberal arts
institution as a whole.
The
substantial changes in the musicological and theoretical scholarly discourse of
the last two decades has help translate our project for administrators and
colleagues as connections to and parallels with other fields continue to
develop. This little essay draws pretty heavily on thinkers in other
fields, especially philosophy and hermeneutics, which is both a personal
proclivity and a byproduct of such changes. I hope here to connect the
pedagogical and paideic concerns and challenges of a musical education to the project
of a liberal, “classical” education, and so reveal that the supposed
supplementarity of individual instruction is in fact the core of the project of
a humanist education.
Performance
study, specifically individual and non-preprofessional study, will be the
starting point and focus of my conversation as insurance of the centrality of
musical praxis to the conversation. I will focus on performance
lessons not only because of the frequency of my conversations about them with
my administrators (good people that they are), but also because of the fact that
the questions that surface map onto many aspects of music in the university.
In
the following discussion, we'll look at aesthetic autonomy and related
ideology, the interplay of incommensurate imaginaries at the
university, the hermeneutic and transubjective character of musical
instruction, and the role of technics in the cultivation of the self.
My hope is that music here can be the terrain on which we interrogate
questions that are truly general, if not universal to education.
Part I
listening, appreciating, performing, attending
Universities
have a great deal of systemry, (committees, HR processes, committees, course
numbers, committees, assessment protocols, committees, etc); it's a
reasonable assertion that universities are actually great big piles of
systemry. These structures inherit ways of being and modes of thought
that over time drift towards uninterrogated assumptions; the contexts of our
practices have shifted from cultural truisms to topics of tremendous flux.
Any bureaucratic network resists change, and the forces with which they
push back can reveal much about the shape and texture of their underlying
ideology. In a mirror shape, the interplay of critique and defense can
tells us about what we do and how we do it; that tension fills in
our discourse with the actual rather than the self-mythologized.
The
criticisms, in my experience, are quite clear cut even when couched in
more delicate terms. Individual music lessons are at worst an indulgence,
likely irrelevant, and at best in the minds of many, a supplement to university
education. They are more an 'activity' than a course, and lack rigor in
grading, assessment, and critical thinking. In short, they represent a
poor return on investment for the students and the university.
Here
at GWU, we are extremely fortunate that colleagues in other departments and upper
level administrators have been quite supportive of the arts, and in doing so
they often provide their own experience in music as an undergraduate as their
bona fides. What they are supporting, however, might not quite be what we
are doing now; the field has gone through some drastic changes in the last two
and a half decades, to the extent that the views of those supporters might (surprisingly)
actually be received as somewhat conservative.
Support
around performance study often runs something like this: 'we feel that
students should be able to take clarinet lessons, because it makes them better
people, because it is 'cultivating' (code, I think, that the student will, when
they grow up, support the arts as donors and audience members), and/or because
music will bring them joy (a respite from the dreariness of the modern life of
work). In short, that an 'appreciation' of music will make them 'better'
in some general way.
This
ethos echoes a long tradition of cultivation and of the building of the self
through cultural practice. Gadamer's monumental Truth and Method is
perhaps the pithiest and best consideration of the implications of this
approach that I've read. The term Bildung refers to the German tradition
of self-cultivation, a linking of personal and cultural growth. Calling
'bildung' one of the guiding concepts of humanism, Gadamer places it at the
very center of culture and of the educational project:
[A] previous investigation gives us a fine overview of the history of the word: its origin in medieval mysticism, its continuance in the mysticism of the baroque, its religious spiritualization in Klopstock's Messiah...and finally the basic definition of Herder gives it: "rising up to humanity through culture." The cult of Bildung in the nineteenth century preserved the profounder dimension of the word, and our notion of Bildung is determined by it. (Gadamer, 9)
Gadamer
sees and works over the main difficulty of linking humanity to culture through
education, which is its lack of a theoretical frame. How will this
improvement manifest? How would the quality or character of life be improved by
this cultivation? How can such a "rising up" be achieved?
Is intuitive exposure sufficient? There is a risk in all this
generalized support in music, for example, that the experience of the art might
become an impenetrable 'black box,' a special realm in which students
(vocational or non-vocational) interact, and are bettered through some
mysterious epiphanous process. This question of the relationship between
the self in the context of cultural cultivation and experience, and the self in
the context of the every day remains operative.
The
development of music appreciation curricula at the secondary and tertiary levels
is an example of this question. The music appreciation project rose hand
in glove with the rise of recorded music and a general, seemingly apodeictic
decline in the live performance of music by amateurs. The idea that
'appreciation' can be achieved for the average citizen while detached from the
acts of making music was something that was only made practical in a wide
spread way by Edison's invention, and immediately was subject to ferocious
critique. In a congressional hearing in 1906, CP Sousa lamented the
situation and its inevitable (for him) outcome:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
This
quote has been popularized by L. Lessig as an argument against the copyright
system (Lawrence Lessig, 2008, Remix: making art and commerce thrive in the
hybrid economy, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Chapter 1). Such a critique,
I think, misses the deeper implications. A pedagogical approach focused
on a reception of music completely detached from the production of music
has roots in ideas much older than Edison's device. Going back to the 18th
century, we see deeper foundations of thinking about music and aesthetics which
still cloud thinking about music education today, and which are ill
equipped to address the pluralism and globalization of the 21st century, occluding both the decline of institutions of
art and the rise of modern structures of entertainment.
The
gap between an aesthetic realm and the everyday practice of musicking can be
seen in the basic ideas of the Enlightenment and Kantian aesthetic theory.
Habermas's Adorno Prize Lecture explores the relationship of Enlightenment
aesthetic autonomy to what has come to be referred to as the post-aesthetic
situation:
"…the idea of the modern world project in the 18th century by the philosophers of the Enlightenment consist of their efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, each according to its own inner logic. At the same time, this project intends to release the cognitive potentials of each of these domains to set them free from their esoteric forms."
Since
Habermas, this question of accessing the autonomous aesthetic realm and its
impact on artistic experience and production in daily life has been raised by a
number of thinkers, most notably in the work of Lyotard, Dante, and Ranciere.
In music, the rise of an aesthetic Modernism with its fragmentation of
inherited styles and idioms, and the reception of those changes, has problematized
the ‘inner logic’ of the aesthetic Habermas points out. Also significant are the post-modern disruption
of modes of production engendered by the growing primacy of recordings as the
primary medium of art, the new instrumentality of electronic and computer music,
and other experimental practices that blur the line between music and other
artistic practices and production.
As
the experience of music shifted from the 18th and 19th century concert hall models,
this ideal of a transcendent aesthetic autonomy (and the associated belief that
such autonomy naturally sublimates into and informs the everyday) falls
apart. Sousa's lamentation that “these talking machines” are undermining
performance unserscores this shift. Both Sousa and Habermas dance around
the core issue - the loss of a sensus communis, a “common sense” of aesthetic
experience and judgment (even an illusory one) and the new and growing
undeniability of pluralism.
As
an example: I am a composer, and so do often advocate for support of my
particular musical aesthetics and practice. I know, however, that an
effort to turn all listeners in the culture on to my particular expression will
fail, likely spectacularly; there is no longer a single, general aesthetic
sense. My music was not built to be heard like other musics
proliferating in the culture, and the same could be said of any current
pluralistic music expression. A singer
in a club during the Jazz Age, a singer-songwriter at a coffee-shop or U2 playing
at an arena, or a work of mine in a recital hall have very different contexts; the technical characteristics of sound are
different, and the semiotic network of reception is different. Modern aesthetic
responses are similarly conditional; for the 21st century student on
our campus, who arrives with a diversity of musical experiences, their
aesthetic judgments cannot be easily generalized. Often with there are
few or no experiences overlapping with the student to their left or right.
For this reason, plugging music into a
generalized model of appreciation doesn't really work, philosophically,
pedagogically, and practically. We have
moved from an Ideal abstract universal aesthetic regime to a positional aesthetics,
an aesthetics concerned with the location of the self within historical and cultural
matrices.
So,
if not 'appreciation' of a universal
aesthetic ideal and not pre-professionalism, then what do music departments DO
at a university? If we aspire to a model of the 'cultivation of the self'
(an idea built into a non-utilitarian, liberal arts and broadly humanistic idea
of education) then we need a working theory of the arts, or at least a model by
which we can understand that process of 'rising.'
This
line of questions establishes a few essential characteristics of musical
education at a modern university. A critical model of musical paideia
would engage with the aesthetic conditions of modernity, and would require the
student and the teacher to wrestle with the heritage of aesthetic autonomy; the
curriculum would require stances relating to music as cultural practice
and as lived experience. As we will see, the performative and creative
aspect of musical instruction has this capacity built into their structures,
the very structures that render them administratively vulnerable.
Of
primary importance for a modern classical structure of musical education is a
critical understanding of the historicity of contemporary life, of ideology's
role in shaping experience and society, and most significantly, of the
transductive construction of the self through this interplay of individual,
ideology, subjectivity, and agency. This 'bildung' can not come from an
individual students' sensuous experience of music, or the immediate qualia of
listening, or the simple fact of performance - if it were, then the
'appreciation' model would work just great, and we could all retire happily and
in the near future. What is needed is attending - careful critique and
assessment of those experiences. A commitment to attending does not
devalue an aesthetic 'anspruch' and its transportation of the self outside the
everyday. Attending is the basis not of 'listening' but of 'musicking.'
(The discussion continues here.)
(The discussion continues here.)