Conducting conducts: towards a radically 'classical' reconceptualization of general music education

My research starts out from a problematization of the concept and practice of general music education, as found in relevant literature, claiming that more and more contemporary discourses—political, artistic, pedagogical—question the need and possibility of including music in general educational curricula, at least as a distinct subject matter. Having analyzed (some of) the assumptions underlying these problematizations, I then move on to a survey of the field of philosophy of music education (PME), the discipline most explicitly occupied with reflecting on fundamental concepts of music education, viz. the arguments and values pertaining to its inclusion in educational curricula and the practice of general music education in particular. As will become clear, this young discipline, having quickly branched out in diverse pedagogical and philosophical directions, is caught in a difficult dilemma today, at the risk of a complete speculative deadlock. On the one hand one finds a strong legitimizing tendency that strives to root music education in a (relatively) general human condition, unique for its aesthetic, socio-political, and/or cognitive qualities. On the other hand this tendency is countered by approaches that deliberately refrain from broader conceptualizations linking music to general education, and instead focus on the (supposedly) direct correlations between concrete procedures of educational practices and their results.

Since in both cases general music education risks either to simplify or overstep the problems which it is currently facing, I argue for an attempt at renewed conceptualization, one that starts by restating the questions emerging from today’s problems. Thus formulating and explicating three leading research questions that ask for a concept of music education which is itself dynamically generative of public-educational values, I proceed by reflecting shortly on what will all be entailed in the methodical construction of such a concept. It is after establishing this methodological framework, inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, that I start to expound the conceptual findings which my research has hitherto yielded.

The key concept, around which my research’s framework presently revolves, is that of “conduction” or “conducting conducts”. My enquiries have shown that this multivalent concept can be made to comprise at least the following three music-educationally relevant dimensions: (1) symphonic conduction, typically performed by a conductor; (2) the Ancient Greek notion of mousikē, which draws remarkably tight parallels between musical, educational, and political modes of conduct; (3) a dynamic and relational metaphysics of aesthetic experience, that overcomes the dichotomies haunting much of the philosophy of music education. As the added timeline also outlines, my future research will be directed primarily at integrating these dimensions, and showing how their differential interdependencies may concretely afford creative new perspectives on general music education. Further specifying this endeavor, my idea is to reconsider the obvious, yet ambivalent, share of Western classical music in the concept of “conduction”, so as to think of concrete, practical ways in which this tradition may originally contribute to music’s public-educational future, past strategies that incur elitism or intellectualism.