THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH. A REFLECTION ON MUSICAL

EXPERIENCE

Øivind Varkøy

Introduction

Harald Jørgensen: MUSIC-education, music-EDUCATION, or MUSIC-EDUCATION

Frede V. Nielsen: Music education research must also be put on the content that is to be taught; music

1. The role of theories of musicology in music education research.

2. A focus on “musical experience” – as the basis of reflection for music education research. I choose in particular to focus musical experience as existential experience.

1. The role of musicological theorisations in music education research

Four main aspects in music education research: the human being, music, teaching/learning and society.

Music education as a scientific subject is a multidisciplinary discipline. Music education researchers relates to a lot of “hyphend-sciences” or sub-disciplines, taken from both education/pedagogy as a scientific subject and from music as a subject of science.

Musicology

Historic musicology - and systematic musicology Ingmar Bengtsson: a) Works with emphasis on musical objects, documents and

sources. Included in this category are instrument research, notation research, music iconographic research and bibliographical and documentation research.

b) Works that centre on sound, sound progressions, and reactions to sound. Included in this category are research on music acoustics, research on the physiology of hearing, research on the physiology of vocal production and instrumental musicality, and research on audio perception

c) Works with emphasis on the relation between music and human beings, society and ideas. Included in this area are music anthropology, music philosophy, music aesthetics, music education and music therapy.

d) Works with focus on music as expression and/or structure. Included is research on audio and tone-system, musical grammar, musical rules and composition techniques, style analytical research, research on behavioural practice, and composition-descriptive and composition-interpretive work.

”New musicology” = c)

Christopher Small: Musicking

"(...) if we think about music primarily as action rather than as thing and about the action as concerned with relationships, then we see that whatever meaning a musical work has lies in the relationships that are brought into existence when the piece is performed. These relationships are of two kinds: those between the sounds that are made in response to the instructions given in the score and those between the participants in the performance. These two sets of relationships (...) are themselves related, in complex and always interesting second-order ways." (Small 1998, p. 138- 139)

“During musical performance, any musical performance anywhere and at any time, desired relationships are brought into virtual existence so that those taking part are enabled to experience them as if they really did exist.” (Small 1998, p. 183).

Sten Dahlstedt: Form och funktion

Two musicological terms, form and function, as centre points. Music education in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed as an

expression for a particular intellectual and modernist aesthetic, where form is in the centre of the aesthetic interest.

The notion function broke through in the 1960s, and this anthropological and sociological notion played an important role for the liberation of music forms other than the traditional Western art music. The artistic avant garde, media industry and the new political left shared a desire for a new culture concept that should counteract ideas about the autonomy of art and abstract form thinking.

Digression on “musicology with music education profile/direction”…

a) focus on music education research’s link to the subject of the music education activity; music and its research subject musicology

b) focus on the connection between the Music Academy’s artistic activity and music’s research subject musicology

2. Musical experience

The first factor I will take as my starting point is linked to the debate about the actual notion of music and the interest in the functions of music for the individual and society. Here music anthropological perspectives are linked to the area of music aesthetics and philosophy.

A central point is how Christopher Small gives the notion “musicking” clear existential overtones.

The other factor I will take as a starting point in the second part is linked to what Frede V. Nielsen talks about as “music’s multi-faceted life-world”.

A layer division in music that focuses on the acoustic layer, structural layer, bodily layer, tension layer, emotional layer and spiritual/existential layer.

These layers of meaning correspond to comparative layers of human consciousness.

Nielsen suggests that the music education focus is not always as clear when it comes to communication between all of music’s layers of meaning and the human consciousness. There is an inclination to look away from the profound perspective that can be found in musical objects, and a lot of educational activity appears to concentrate on bringing pupils in contact with the “outside of music”; that which can be described technically and manageably.

It is legitimate to ask whether the “existential layer” is a suppressed discussion, a silent voice, marginalised…

Arne Johan Vetlesen

Hegel and Gadamer as bearing points A story about meeting between music – which can affect, and

people – who allow themselves to be affected Gadamer: “The real experience is the one where a person

becomes aware of his/her own finiteness” (1972, p. 340) Every single “experience” becomes a kind of “painful

experience” The (painful) experience, shows that it “only apparently is such

that everything can be repeated over and over again, that there will be time for everything, and that everything returns.” (Ibid, p.340)

These basic conditions, or existential problems, are about aspects such as dependency, vulnerability, mortality, the fragility of relations and existential loneliness

Vetlesen argues that today’s culture does not want to know anything about these foundational terms

What we can still experience in the musical experience as existential experience involves putting aside this usual tendency in our culture of concealing the problematic human basic conditions

This is about experiencing a meeting with something where something happens to me without me planning it or being able to control it

The moment I am jerked away from what is usual, controlled and controllable, chosen and planned, I become aware of my own vulnerability and littleness in the world; and therefore also aware of my own general dependency and mortality, my loneliness and the fragility of my relationships.

The dimensions of being a human subject that I meet in a musical existential experience is about something that largely evades language.

It is this that is science (?): to aspire to putting into language and making the unconscious, unacknowledged, non-verbalised areas conscious, and simultaneously exercising humbleness for the problematic in this project.

Frederik Pio: “About the unheard. Contribution to musicality-formation phenomenology”

I believe that there is both a general educational and a culture political tendency towards reductionism concerning the musical experience, a reductionism that seems to exclude the phenomenon of existential experience.

And a lack of focus in music educational research on this tendency to assess musical experiences first and foremost, or exclusively, as harmonising and “edifying” experiences.

Immanuel Kant: One can make aesthetic convictions of both “the beautiful” and “the sublime”. The experience of the beautiful is a comfortable and harmonising experience. The experience of the sublime however, is not an entirely comfortable affair; it is about being overwhelmed by that which is great – and therefore in a way frightening.

When both the educational political and cultural political discourses are permeated with stories and ideas about the harmonising effect of art – about the effects of “the beautiful”, then there is not much place for “the sublime”, to relate to art’s disturbing and shaking potential, in other words; the existential experience.

An existential experience is a relation. It appears in certain moments as a disturbing meeting with something “completely different”. Such experiences have throughout time been given religious, metaphysical, psychological, social, cultural, philosophical and aesthetic interpretations.

It is precisely this multi- facetedness in possible interpretations of the musical experience that is very important to highlight – and to take care of also in music education research.

Music education research must turn to the music experience as wide as possible, with all the conscious, willpower and rational aspects, but also with the sensual, emotional, personal, and existential aspects and qualities.

I think we are obliged to look after this multi-facetedness – if we really want to focus on the music – as a multi-faceted life-world.