(This discussion starts here.)
(The prior post is here.)
Imaginaries and Intersections
The discussion above is both a critique and validation of the peculiarly unique teacher/student relationship that private musical instruction can produce. This relationship enjoys a privileged role in musical culture, and is part of an elaborate web of mythologization - mythologies around a particular teacher, The Repertoire, G/genius, tradition, and virtuosity, which themselves can serve as a mixture of empowerment and hinderance in the instructional context. The love of a teacher or a piece or a particular performer, for example, is often what first gets students to engage in a project of musical production (as opposed to consumption); as such, it has a clear and strong use-value, as long as it is placed in a critical context.
(The prior post is here.)
Imaginaries and Intersections
But the presence and persistence of these myths demonstrate the extent to which the structures of music making and music instruction operate within a symbolic network. Charles Taylor's Modern Social Imaginaries is one of the best known and readable formulations of this idea; drawing from Taylor, we can see these networks as the 'imaginaries' in which musical practices operate. In GWU’s curriculum, we encourage students to interrogate the boundaries of their received imaginary and those of their colleagues and teachers; ideally, the university experience is one of the few places in the culture when all of these diverse practices and imaginaries operating under the term 'musicking interact with one another, and the one where (potentially) students have the greatest freedom to consider other imaginaries, both as potential emigrants, and as potential agents of transformation of the imaginary in which they have been operating.
Two examples come to mind, each with different challenges for the university project; young singers and young technologists.
Singers often arrive with less technical (reading/theoretical) background than instrumental students, and also often with a deep attachment to themselves as performers - their mindset is less instrumental (in the positivist sense) and more embodied; there self and body are in the performance. A particular program or department, then must make decisions about how this vocality relates to the imaginaries of its own operation. Does this vocality live in a 'music theater' domain, with different goals and expectations than the 'classical program' (with its strong commitment to notation as the primary mediator)? Is this vocality a bad habit that must be broken, or should the students who fail or fail to be willing to divest themselves of this weltanschauung simply be weeded from the program? Difficult questions, and critical instructional intersections.
Similarly, the wave of self identified 'composers of electronic music' arriving at universities presents an even starker contrast between operative musical imaginaries. In my experience these students often have vanishingly small experience in and very limited skills at what we call 'music fundamentals.' At the same time, these students often have a great deal of experience with the technologies that mediate our culture’s experience of music. I once had a lengthy tutoring session with a student having trouble on excerpt ID quizzes in a history class, and what became clear to me was that for him, sonic characteristics of the recordings were a primary locus of his attention, such that similarities and difference of decay rates or degrees of reflectivity would make him misidentify examples (especially 'mystery' examples) because what 'trained' ears heard as trivial he heard as primary. He had come to hear these features as actorializing, and so to deactorialize them is to ask him, in a very real way, to change what listening is, and so what music is. This was not a deficiency, but an alterity.
In both of these examples, we see a basic, metonymic problem of music - 'Music' as an experience is a field of action larger than any one individual's experience, and the term music is used to hide the gap between the abundance of musicking writ large and the limits of our ability to experience that abundance. Students rely on established language-of-experience to understand and catalog their own experience; these narratives are 'inherited' as, indeed, all such narratives are. The project of education risks replacing one imaginary with another, but also has a tremendous opportunity to serve as a catalyst for an internal consideration of lived-experience in relation to the numerous models and imaginaries across the culture.
This is especially important in introductory classes, where students are being introduced not only to music but to a discourse around music; to weed out or minimize students' lived experience of music denies them the tools needed to engage in the valuable, paedeic project of contextualization of inherited and adopted imaginaries. It also runs the risk of keeping departments and disciplines isolated in the fragile autonomy of the aesthetic that we saw earlier; students' detachment from the traditions and imaginaries in which we operate can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy on the irrelevance of that music, and of the structure of music in higher education as perceived by the student.
This intersection of imaginaries is a powerful opportunity for the university to think about and to work on its relationship to contemporary culture (popular and otherwise). It is also a point at which students might (might) have an excellent vantage from which to consider the relationship between their individual experience, the experience of other individuals, and to the larger social constructions in which they operate.
It is that critical consideration of the relationship of self to other and self to context which is the foundation of a liberal arts education. Certainly, this does not happen all the time; mythologies can simply rewrite or reinforce previous mythologies, but there is an opportunity here for a highly nuanced and individual interrogation OF the student BY the student.