Living Powers(RLE Edu K) by Abbs Peter;

Author:Abbs, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Section II

Music in the Aesthetic Field

The perceptive reader will have noticed the omission of two publications of major significance for music education both of which appeared in the seventies. I have left a discussion of these until now because I believe that together with other related material they constitute the most significant landmarks in the current direction of music education.

In asserting that music education must be aesthetic education Bennett Reimer's A Philosophy of Music Education55 was based on the fundamental premise that the nature and value of music education are determined by the nature and value of the art of music itself. This book, which was to have a profound influence on the thinking of the seventies and eighties, was written from Reimer's concern at the desperate lack of a fundamental philosophical understanding by music educators of what they were really about. A basis for music education, he said, would begin by affirming the nature of music as music while recognizing the relation of music to life. It would confirm that the experience of music is related to the experience of life at the deepest levels of life's significance, and manifest the major function of music, as of ail art, as making ‘objective, and therefore conceivable, the subjective realm of human responsiveness’.56 For education consists largely in the development of people's power to share meanings about man and his world, and the arts are the means by which humans can explore and understand subjective reality through the presentation of a sense of feeling in the creation and experiencing of an art-work. Therefore music education is the education of human feeling through the development of responsiveness to the aesthetic qualities of sound. ‘The deepest value of music education is the same as the deepest value of all aesthetic education: the enrichment of the quality of people's lives through enriching their insights into the nature of human feeling.’57

Reimer introduced the ordinary music teacher hitherto unused to reflecting on deeper issues to the thinking of aestheticians such as Dewey, Leonard Meyer and Susanne Langer and to the notion of the symbolic nature of music. He also made the point that they should concentrate on teaching what is teachable — aesthetic perception — in contexts which encourage creative reactions to that which is being perceived, a point which Swanwick was to elaborate nine years later. Reimer suggested that listening was the essential mode of musical experiencing supported by the concomitant activities of composition and performance. Also indispensable were the conceptual tools — the skills, techniques and a language in which to communicate — but these were secondary to the main thrust and purpose of an aesthetic education through the active experience of music.

An even more significant publication for music in the school curriculum appeared in 1979. This was A Basis for Music Education by Keith Swanwick of the University of London Institute of Education.58 Appointed to the first chair of music education in Britain, Professor Swanwick brought to this book the distillation of years of work and experience in the field.

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