MUSIC EDUCATION THAT

RESONATES
AN EPISTEMOLOGY AND
PEDAGOGY OF SOUND
JOSEPH ABRAMO
University of Connecticut
[email protected]

Are there qualities of sound and the experience of listening that educators can
extrapolate to inform the philosophy and practice of music education? In this
essay, I imagine a music education where sound—how it behaves and how we
experience it—serves not only as the subject of study, but generates the frame-
work of the pedagogy. A sonic music education is not automatic because ocu-
larcentrism privileges the vision and influences the listening and educational
experiences, often in unrecognized ways. I explore two qualities of sounds: they
are, first, impermanent and continually changing and, second, diffuse—seem-
ingly inside and outside our bodies. These qualities contrast with the visual
experience, which makes objects appear permanent, fixed, and separate from
our bodies. Pedagogies based on sound might present truth as impermanent
and their aims as multidirectional and might employ social constructivist epis-
temologies and democratic education. A music education based on sounds may
be a corrective to ocularcentric banking pedagogies where knowledge is fixed
and progress is unidirectionally measured.

© Philosophy of Music Education Review, 22 no. 1 (Spring 2014)

 joseph abramo 79

According to legend, Pythagoras lectured to his uninitiated students from be-

hind a screen. During a probationary period, the pupils were not permitted to
view the master while he taught so that they may attend to his ideas only through
spoken word. Because the only sense they were expected to use was listening,
these young students were called akousmatikoi, or “hearers.” In the twentieth
century, composers of musique concrète were inspired by Pythagoras’ careful at-
tention to listening. These composers created electronic music emanating from
speakers, which were often concealed behind a screen or curtain in order to pro-
vide a pure listening experience, one untainted by the non-musical visual stimuli
like performers’ movements. This acousmatic music, as they called it, invited
audiences to listen, and listen alone.1
I am somewhat puzzled and intrigued by these practices. I question why Py-
thagoras would not want a multisensory connection with his students so that he
may look them in the eyes to convey subtleties in his meaning through physical
gestures. I wonder why the modernist composers of the twentieth century would
want to eliminate the intimate connection between embodied performer and an
audience. I also admire their underlying desire to privilege the aural experience
over the visual because as a musician and music educator I am principally con-
cerned with communication through, and expression in, sound. At times I, too,
am interested becoming a listener, and listener alone.
I take this desire to live occasionally in a purely sonic world as my place of
departure. What would it mean for educators to privilege sound? What would a
musical education that resonates with rather than shows require of students and
teachers? Are there qualities of sound and the experience of listening that educa-
tors can extrapolate to inform the philosophy and practice of music education?
In this essay, I imagine a music education where sound—how it behaves and
how we experience it—serves not only as the subject of study, but generates the
framework of the curriculum.

OCULARCENTRISM
Pythagoras and the proponents of acousmatic music were aware of how vi-
sion can dominate the sensual experience. Recent empirical studies suggest that
visual stimuli effect how we interpret musical sounds.2 A musician’s physical ges-
tures and his appearance influence how listeners judge the quality of a perfor-
mance. Listeners also imagine visual imagery as they listen. Vision also plays a
part in language in ways that are both explicit and unnoticed. Positive attributes
are ocular: things are enlightening, brilliant, or illuminating. Particularly in ed-
ucation, visual language is positive. Educational writers often employ metaphors
like teachers should “have vision” and “provide insight” to students.3 Sometimes
these influences are not obvious. The German word Bildung, which comes from
80 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

Bild (picture or image), means, in part, the inculcating, engendering, or impart-

ing of an image to the learner.4 Similarly, “reflection,” a hallmark of the construc-
tivist pedagogies that have dominated educational theory over the last several
decades, is visual. To gaze upon oneself, to view one’s thinking, of course, is not
visual, but a cognitive process that may or may not involve vision. If anything,
reflection is temporal. To reflect is to look back in time to prepare for the future.5
Vision also constitutes the ontology of objects. The vision of an object is most
often equated with the object itself, while the other senses are considered second-
ary sources. An imagined scenario might reveal this privileging of vision. If our
only experience of a bird is through its song—and we never have the opportunity
to touch, smell, or see it, or to know these senses exist—then we would equate
the bird in toto with its song. The medium of sound through which the animal
is transmitted and made knowable to us would disappear and the sound of the
bird would serve not as a secondary attribute, but as the bird itself. Despite this,
although we experience things through all senses, language equates the object
with the visual sense. The sound of the bird is considered a secondary product of
the bird, not the bird itself, but the vision of the bird is not treated to a similar dis-
tinction.6 It would be somewhat odd in everyday language to say the redundancy,
“I see the vision of a bird,” but not equally as odd to say “I hear the sound of a
bird.” The “vision of the bird” is not taken as a byproduct, but as the thing itself.
Martin Jay calls this dominance of vision “ocularcentrism.” For Jay, Western
experience and philosophy has “tended to accept without question the traditional
sensual hierarchy,” where vision sits atop.7
From the shadows playing on the wall of Plato’s cave and Augustine’s praise
of the divine light to Descartes’s ideas available to a “steadfast mental gaze”
and the Enlightenment’s faith in the data of our senses, the ocular underpin-
nings of our philosophical tradition have been undeniably pervasive.8

In Western philosophy, ocular metaphors serve as the dominant descriptors of ex-

periences, provide conclusive evidence, and form truth. If vision’s pervasiveness
in experience and language influences thinking and manifests itself in unnoticed
and subtle ways, what ways, if at all, does ocularcentrism affect music listening
and pedagogy? What might a music education of and for the ear, rather than
dominated by the eye, consist of?

VISUAL AND AURAL EXPERIENCES

“Knowing the world through sound,” Bruce Smith argues, “is fundamentally
different from knowing the world through vision.”9 But what are the differences
between these ways of knowing? Comparing the aural and visual experiences of
a piano may be a good way to situate these differences. When looking at a piano,
 joseph abramo 81

its existence and properties appear to us in particular ways. First, when we gaze
upon the piano, it appears fixed and unchanging over the duration that we ob-
serve it. While the instrument may have motion—the pianist might manipulate
the keys and we might view the hammers moving—the piano comes to us as a
complete, fixed entity in the sense that its physical make-up does not morph be-
fore our eyes. As we look away, we know that the object of the piano is still present
and remains intact. Second, we know that the piano occupies a physical space.
We can literally point to it and say, “it is there.” Third, the piano appears present
and separate from us. We can touch it, but when we touch it, we know that it
is not part of our bodies. Fourth, to look at the piano is unidirectional. Another
audience member, for example, can obstruct our vision because the piano is a
point in a line of sight.
Listening to the piano, on the other hand, presents itself differently. If we
were only to hear a piano, and never see what it looks like or to feel its touch,
we might come to different conclusions about its ontology. First, because sound
is not permanent, we might assume that the piano is something that is also not
permanent, but comes and goes. As the performer plays, each note comes into
existence, only to be extinguished shortly after. Second, even within this short
duration of sound, the piano seems to be continually changing. Within each im-
permanent sound the instrument makes, there is variation. “Sounds are dynamic
events, not static qualities, and thus they are transient by nature. What charac-
terizes sounds is not being but becoming.”10 Every sound has an envelope, with a
beginning and an end, and it morphs through its attack, sustain, and decay. We
might assume the piano’s ontology is not as stable as when we view it. Third, an
aural experience of the piano suggests that it is also not present. The sound of
the piano does not take up physical space and we cannot touch it. Instead, it is
seemingly omnipresent. In these ways, we might think of the musical instrument
more as a cloud than a fixed, stable entity. While the concept of “cloud” might
be permanent, this particular cloud appears deciduous. It constitutes itself only
to dissipate again. Sound, like a cloud, is continually in a state of metamorpho-
sis—slowly, but perceptibly changing.
Fourth, when we listen to the piano, it seems simultaneously separate from,
and part of, us and we come to uncertain conclusions about what space, if at all,
it occupies. The piano emanates from a source but it envelops and permeates
our bodies. As the piano sounds, its sound waves spread in all directions at once,
much like rings radiate from a stone dropped in water. As these sound waves radi-
ate outward, they envelop other subjects and objects, such as listeners and other
musical instruments. When the sound waves reach these subjects and objects,
they in turn reverberate. In some cases, these objects take up the sound like the
sympathetic strings of the sitar—they change the timbre, volume, and resonance
82 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

of the sound, while still maintaining some resemblance to the original sound.
The location of a sound is ambiguous; it is simultaneously in one place, every-
where, and within the listener.
The visual and aural experiences contrast in two important ways: first, vision
highlights permanence and stability, but sounds emphasize impermanence and
change. This has two components: first, a sound has an envelope that marks a
beginning and an end. Second, within the temporal finitude of this envelope,
the sound continually morphs. The second contrast between vision and sound
is that sounds move in all directions at once, while vision sits in a line of sight.
This has two consequences. First, sight makes us appear separate from objects,
where sounds makes us feel that the object is simultaneously separate and part
of us because sound vibrates our bodies. Second, the visual experience requires
an object to be material and present in space, while the aural experience al-
lows an object to exist without occupying space or identified as present in this
visual sense. Where vision gives us perspective—it provides distance to orient
ourselves—sound enmeshes us within the object.
Attending to how sound differs from vision in these two ways provides a frame-
work for approaching music education pedagogy. How may the qualities of sound
and listening—namely emphasizing permanence and change and moving in all
directions at once—serve as a framework for music education?

SOUNDS AS IMPERMANENT AND CHANGING

An important distinction between seeing and hearing is that the latter is ex-
perienced in time. “[L]istening” Jean-Luc Nancy notes, “takes place at the same
time as the sonorous event, an arrangement that is clearly distinct from vision . . .
[V]isual presence is already there, available, before I see it, whereas sonorous
presence arrives.”11 Sounds happen over time; they come into fruition, only to
dissipate again. In this way, a sound is an event because we experience it within
a time frame.12 Each event of the sound is simultaneously experienced as a series
of smaller events. Within each sound, there is variety; the timbre, volume, pitch,
and other elements of a sound change. Sound unfolds, taking its time to fully
reveal itself to the listener. Conversely, to view an object is not as temporally ori-
ented, at least not as obviously so. Visions are more readily revealed “all at once”
and can come in an instant or as a “flash” in ways sounds cannot. Vision does not
appear as an event like sound, but is instead an object that the viewer encounters.
Both the viewer and the object seem to exist prior to the time they meet.
Vision and hearing, therefore, have contradictory relationships with perma-
nence and impermanence, but in different ways. Although vision happens in an
instant, objects appear permanent, unchanging, and fixed. Conversely, although
sound continually changes and morphs as it unfolds over time, it is a temporal
 joseph abramo 83

event, making it seem transient, unfixed, and impermanent. In other words, the
visual experience seems to happen in an instant, but has the appearance of un-
bounded time; the aural experience takes time, continually anticipating the next
moment, but occurs within a bounded time. As a result, objects appear perma-
nent and stable; they seem to exist prior to human engagement, as if someone
encountered or stumbled upon them as they have always been. Conversely, ob-
jects sound impermanent; they come and go and we are present each time this
sound comes into being. Within this coming and going, there is variation within
the sound and the object sounds unstable.

LISTENING AND HEARING

What might it mean to approach music with a sense of the qualities of im-
permanence, instability, continual unfolding, and deferment found in sounds?
Nancy suggests it may be in different modes of the aural experience. He distin-
guishes between the French words entendre, translated as hearing, and écouter,
or listening:

If listening is distinguished from hearing both as its opening (its attack) and as
its intensified extremity, that is, reopening beyond comprehension (of sense)
and beyond agreement or harmony (harmony [entente] or resolution in the
musical sense), that necessarily signifies that listening is listening to some-
thing other than sense in its signifying sense.13

Michael Gallope puts it more succinctly: hearing “imposes a truth on what is

heard. It suggests that we hear sonorous form as presented figures, or that we hear
internally consistent, knowable, and identifiable beings.” Listening “implies an
orientation towards something behind or aside from sound of presented beings.”
The difference between hearing and listening is a difference in the epistemolog-
ical conclusions of an aural experience. “Where entendre [hearing] implies the
closure of understanding and truth, écouter [listening], implies the openness of
negotiation, uncertainty, and exposure.”14
The difference between hearing and listening may be illustrated—albeit
rather broadly—through the linguistic and musical aural experiences. Generally,
we hear words. “Language,” Dewey notes, is a “device for communication; it is
the tool through which one individual comes to share the ideas and feelings of
others.”15 Through language, someone tries to communicate her intent. If done
correctly, in this context, language denotes an exact, unambiguous meaning. On
the other hand, we listen to music. Music cannot as readily convey intent, but
instead communicates ambiguously; at best, it can only connote. Listeners must
listen beyond the notes to a new meaning. In other words, listeners must interpret
by finding meanings that are not explicitly and unambiguously revealed in the
84 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

sounds. Listening, as opposed to hearing, is to strive for meaning that is not there.
Hearing is to understand intent, listening is to interpret.

LISTENING AND DIFFÉRANCE

While the distinction between language and music is illustrative, its practice
is more complicated. When we hear words, we listen not only for denotations
but also conations; we listen beyond the words we hear to explore and grasp the
subtleties and to form our own interpretations of what the other party means.
In fact, the ability for language to ever communicate unambiguously may not
be possible—a point I will return to shortly. Similarly, we can referentially hear
music by searching for fixed, unalterable meanings. This could happen in pro-
grammatic music or when the music is about something linguistic. An audience
member might literally try to strain towards hearing the music as signifiers of
things. One might say, for example, “that sounds like a rocket ship” or “this song
is about love.” It also may be a type of restricted musical listening based on the-
oretical terms, where aspects of the music may have fixed meanings. “This is a I
chord, these phrases are a parallel period, and this piece is in the baroque style.”
This unclear distinction between denotation and connotation is what Jacques
Derrida calls différance. Signifiers—like words or other symbols that aim to con-
note—fail in their main purpose to signify purely and objectively. This aim to
completely signify, or “transcendentally signify” as he calls it, is unsuccessful be-
cause a signifier can never entirely replace the object or idea that it represents.16
In this way, signifiers are like maps. A map is a reduction of the geographic loca-
tion it represents. It reduces or summarizes and leaves out parts of the area it sym-
bolizes. Signifiers, like maps, do not completely represent—they do not stand in
totally for that which they signify. Instead, they summarize, eliminating certain
attributes. Because of this incompleteness, they always need further explanation,
more words, or symbols to further define their exact meaning. Signifiers, then,
endlessly defer their meaning to other signifiers in the process of différance.
As an example, the word “music” is never a complete definition, and can
always be deferred to further explanation. To say, “I am listening to music,” never
completely explains what a listener is doing because music can always be further
defined. Is it classical or popular, loud or soft, good or bad? The same is true
for listening. Is listening engaged, passive, and so on? Even further, what does it
mean to be engaged or passive? The chain of words used to define these signi-
fiers never ceases; it is always deferred to another term. Words’ meanings never
transcendentally signify; they never unambiguously and completely stand in for
what they symbolize, but always defer to other words in this process of différance.
As Barry Stocker, explains, différance has a temporal aspect. “There is always
distance between sender and receiver, delay in the arrival of the message and
 joseph abramo 85

division of the message because it can be received by different addresses, or the

same receiver can interpret it in more than one way.”17 Unlike an attempt to tran-
scendentally signify, which is believed to show unambiguously what it signifies,
différance acknowledges the unfolding of meaning.
Just as words’ meanings defer and unfold, so does music. For Nancy, music
is a “deferred presence” that we can associate with différance. Music is a “pres-
ent that is not a future, but merely promised, merely present because of its an-
nouncement, its prophecy in the instant.”18 Music is not being—in other words,
already present—it is becoming, its being is never complete and always changing.
As often noted, music is not a language; it does not denote objects and ideas,
it never unambiguously refers to objects or concepts unless specified with lan-
guage, image, or any other communication that is more mimetic, as is done in
programmatic music. Music’s meaning constantly defers to another meaning,
where a long chain of meanings is enacted through interpretation and lasts as
long as interpreters can sustain the process.
To distinguish between listening and hearing, the latter is an attempt to
hear transcendental signifiers. Conversely, listening is to listen for différance. As
Nancy, notes, “[p]erhaps we never listen to anything but the non-coded, what is
not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend]
anything but the already coded, which we decode.”19 To listen is to strive beyond
signification and what is already coded for us and to reach toward new meanings.
To listen is to defer meaning and to continually strive to listen for différance
within music and sounds in general. As music’s sounds unfold to listeners, its
meaning unfolds as well.

HEARING MEANING AND LISTENING FOR SENSE

Nancy elaborates on the distinction between hearing signifiers and listen-
ing for différance by also distinguishing meaning from sense. Meaning is a fixed,
agreed-upon truth, a striving towards transcendental signifiers. Sense, conversely,
is not fixed; it is the impression one gets from something, realizing that it can
never be the true, all-encompassing meaning of something. Because of this, sense
is changing, never ending in certitude. Just because something does not have a
set meaning, however, does not mean that it does not communicate. Something
can make sense but not have a fixed meaning. In other words, sounds can speak
or make sense to somebody, but not have an agreed-upon, unchanging meaning.
In this way, sense is explicitly not signification. Signification, Dewey notes,
“involves use of a quality as a sign or index of something else. . . . The sense of a
thing, on the other hand, is an immediate and immanent meaning: it is meaning
which is itself felt or directly had.”20 Hearing is equated with meaning; it is hear-
ing what the sound signifies and to pin down and fix its meanings and make those
86 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

signifiers permanent. Conversely, a listener searches for sense. “[T]he listener . . .
is straining to end in sense (rather than straining toward, intentionality).”21 Listen-
ing for sense is to strive not for intentionality or signification, but for alternative
meanings and for différance. 22
Music often makes sense, but has no meaning. Again, music can only be
about something if linguistic or visual signifiers accompany it as in programmatic
music and the lyrics of songs. This might be attributed to music and sounds’ tem-
poral and impermanent qualities. Just as sounds slowly reveal themselves to us
because they unfold, music’s sense unfolds and we come to discover that its sense
occurs over time. Just as sounds morph and change through attack, sustain and
decay, sense—in other words each individuals’ meaning—of music also morphes
and changes.

LISTENING AND MUSIC EDUCATION

The distinctions between different aural experiences provide a guide for
music education. On one side, hearing, signifiers, and meaning render music
ocularly—as permanent and unchanging. On the other, listening, différance,
and sense render music aurally—as impermanent and continually unfolding
and changing. Music educators might want to strive towards listening and not
hearing, because the latter forecloses questioning and interpretation. Hearing
shows, while to listen is to aurally attend to impermanence and to the ambigu-
ity that sounds may reveal. As sounds’ meanings unfold to their listeners, rather
than appearing to them all at once like vision, educators can strive to let sense
unfold. Listening is a philosophical kind of aural attention because it does not
prematurely foreclose what a sound means, but listens for alternative senses. To
listen is to approach musical philosophically, where questions are more import-
ant than the answers and certainty. In this way, philosophy is coming to sense not
meaning. Conversely, hearing and meaning are dogma. When educators come
to meaning that they impart to students and it is not open up to debate, they cease
to be philosophical and become dogmatic.
While listening may open philosophical questioning, often educators’ aims
are for students to hear rather than listen. This happens when educators ask
students to identify the form, label the appropriate Roman Numeral, play the
correct rhythm and pitch, and acquire the correct interpretation based on the
composer’s intent or meaning of the work without questioning.23 Of course, it is
important to ask students to hear at times, because coming to consensus on some
ideas may start inquiry. But it is a starting place, not a destination. When hearing
fixed, identifiable, coded, signified meanings in music becomes the goal, educa-
tors highlight permanence and ask students to “see with their ears.”
 joseph abramo 87

SOUNDS MOVE IN ALL DIRECTIONS AT ONCE

How might educators create spaces where students listen for fluid sense in-
stead of hear fixed meanings? To answer this question, I return to the second
quality of sounds previously outlined through the piano example. Sounds “move
in all directions at once,” like the rings radiating from a stone dropped in water.
This is in contrast to vision, which is directional. Objects appear in a line of sight
and this separates the viewer and the object she views. The object appears to oc-
cupy a space across from the viewer, who is present with the object.
This experience of viewing something has influenced the concept of truth.
As David Levin notes, epistemology is derived “from epi, meaning ‘in front of’,
and stā, meaning ‘set down’, ‘posited’, ‘standing.’ ” Knowledge is construed as
visual contemplation; the knower comes to know by beholding an object in front
of him. This constitutes a “front and centre epistemology,” where the truth is
ocular; it is the visual conformation and contemplation of an object or idea that
is at hand.24 “To know” is derived from the ocular experience of beholding and
contemplating an object that is directly in front of the knower.
For Heidegger, this contemplation is disinterested as evident in “theory’s”
etymology:

The word “theory” stems from the Greek theõrein . . . . The verb theõrein grew
out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horaõ. Thea (c. theatre) is
the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself . . . .The sec-
ond root word in theõrein, horaõ, means: to look at something attentively, to
look it over, to view it closely . . . . In theõria transformed into contemplatio
there comes to the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of
a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes.25

The two Greek roots suggest that theory, like epistemology, is ocularly conceived.
Theorizing is a process where there is an object that shows (thea) and a subject
that sees and contemplates (horaõ). Because vision creates a strict division be-
tween the observer and the observed—I am over here and I can see that object
over there—there is a distance and “a looking-at that sunders and compartmen-
talizes”26 the subject and the object she contemplates. In other words, the visual
experience highlights the division between oneself and the object. Just as vision
implies and highlights division and separateness, theorizing is framed as a distant
and removed process. This might suggest that objectivist epistemology is ocu-
larcentric. This is apparent in the etymology of the word “objective”: the prefix
ob- means “toward, against, across, down,” and is also found in the word observer.
It is also found in object; it is something against, or across from us.27 But ocu-
larcentrism influences more than semantics. To be objective, the contemplator
88 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

takes on a position of distance and dispassion towards the object she studies, just
as the visual experience sunders subject and object.
Heidegger suggested that ocularcentrism situates Being as physical and ob-
servable. Throughout Western philosophy, “Being is that which shows itself in
the pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does
Being get discovered.”28 To understand something’s Being—in other words, its
essence and ontology—is to observe or behold something, or what he also calls
“tarrying.” But this tarrying stifles curiosity:

[C]uriosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what

is closest. Consequentially it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly,
but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and
changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the con-
stant possibility of distraction.29

Vision requires one to behold and tarry, and to dwell upon and focus on an ob-
ject in one’s environment, rather than be distracted by novelty. Often the words
“novelty” and “distraction” are negative, but when a learner is distracted by nov-
elty, she engages in wonderment rather than the one-track mindedness of focus.
Heidegger concludes that, “[c]uriosity has nothing to do with observing enti-
ties and marveling at them.” Instead of tarrying and observing, one must remain
open: “Both this not tarrying in the environment with which one concerns one-
self, and this distraction by new possibilities, are constitutive terms of curiosity
. . . . Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere.”30 This privileging of vision and tar-
rying encourages focus on what is close yet detached instead of being open to
possibilities coming from other places. Focus stifles creativity because a viewer
tunes out positive distractions, new possibilities, and the previously unknown.
While vision sunders subject and object and encourages narrowness, listen-
ing fuses the two and fosters curiosity. Where the vision of an object makes it
appear “there,” sound is present “in the sense of an ‘in presence of’ that, itself, is
not an ‘in view of’ or a ‘vis-à-vis.’”31 Sound are not physical and set down across
from us, seemingly separate from our bodies and minds. Instead, they seem to
be also within us. As a result, sound is not present in the sense of “being (at least
not in the intransitive sense, stable, consistent sense of the word), but rather a
coming and a passing, an extending and a penetrating . . . . It is a present in waves
on a swell, not in a point on a line.”32 This coming and passing requires listening
outward in all directions at once, and opening to the entire environment, rather
than a unidirectional focus on a specific object.
Because sound is seemingly everywhere and nowhere, listening encourages
the curiosity that Heidegger suggests vision suppresses. A listener does not focus
and narrow her field of attention, but expands—she listens around, rather than
 joseph abramo 89

looks at. To listen, instead of seeing or even hearing, is to become a subject who
is on the lookout for new possibilities from all sources. Listeners have a curiosity
and openness to being distracted by new meanings or senses. Educators can en-
courage curiosity from listening, which is opened and not focused like a point on
a line. This requires not only the students to listen, but also the teacher. She must
listen to her students to create instruction that is distracted by student interests
rather than the focused and predetermined.

LISTENING INWARD, LISTENING OUTWARD

When we listen outward rather than focus, what do we do with the sounds
that reach our bodies? As noted with the piano example, listeners do not pas-
sively receive these sounds, but rather the sounds resonate and reverberate within
them, only to vibrate back outward again, like a sympathetic string vibrates. In
this process, the listener changes the sound. Nancy uses the sounding of a drum
as a metaphor to explain further this process and the listening body:

Isn’t the space of the listening body, in turn just a hallow column over which
a skin is stretched, but also from which the opening of a mouth can resume
and revive resonance? A blow from the outside, clamor from within, this
sonorous, sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a “self” and
to a “world” that are both in resonance.33

The percussionist hits the drum skin to set it into vibration. The body of the
drum amplifies that sound and sends it out for others to listen to. Similarly, the
listener’s body is struck by sound from the outside, only to resonate within and
reverberate outward.
This drum metaphor serves as a way to conceptualize social constructionist
epistemologies and connect them directly to sound. Just as sound circulates from
one listening subject to another, so does truth. The blow from the outside is truth
produced from outside the self, from others. As a learner is struck by truth from
the outside, her mind and body resonate. Next, she amplifies this truth and sends
it out again. Through this resonating and amplifying process, she changes that
truth; she may elaborate on the meaning, make other connections, offer different
interpretations, or provide anecdotes or narratives that help fortify or challenge
its meanings. When other learners repeat this process, everyone adds to the truth.
They multiply it and come to collective sense.
Although resonance might seem harmonious, it need not be equated with
agreement. The truth might immediately make sense to the person, or it might
challenge her and she must wrestle with new ways of knowing the world. This
challenging may spark reflection. “Conflict is the gadfly of thought,” Dewey sug-
gested. “It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets
90 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

us at noting and contriving.”34 Rather than resonance conceived of as only agree-

ment or harmony, it also includes conflict or dissonance. Through conflicts and
disagreements, learners still proceed through the process of taking up truth and
changing its meaning. Dissonance is a form of resonance.
Nancy’s description of the listening subject as a drum equally serves as a fruit-
ful metaphor for democratic education, which is built upon social constructionist
epistemologies. Democratic education, Dewey noted, is “[m]ore than a form of
government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated
experience.”35 Through collaborative inquires, members of a community come
together to create collective sense. The “associated living” is a sonic musical res-
onance between people in a community. Subjects take up sense and it resonates
within them. This sense-making reverberates back out for others to make sense
of as well. In a democratic classroom, each member collectively becomes part
of the community through joint sense-making, while also retaining individuality
through her unique individual sense-making. In this way, a democratic class-
room might be conceived of as a drum circle. In drum circles, the instruments
simultaneously resonate together and separately. They vibrate uniquely but also
add to the collective sound of the ensemble. Learners in democratic education
similarly make their own unique and individual sense but also contribute to the
class’ collective sense. But this communication can never be conclusively closed
around a fixed meaning. Because drum circles are improvisatory, they do not rely
on a fixed meaning, but a fluid sense that changes each time a circle is formed.
This collective sense-making reaches beyond the immediate community of
the classroom and the drum circle by conversing with the past. If the resonating
truths only emanated from the students and teachers in the classroom, then the
experience would be limited. Instead, the original vibration might be derived
from a variety of sources. This allows a view of musical works and practices as
fluid and in dialogue with students. As musical works progress through time and
are performed, studied, and interpreted, persons add to the collective sense of
these works. As a performer sings her unique version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,”
versions by Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and other musicians she has heard influence
her interpretation and sense of the song. When a pianist plays Beethoven’s Wald-
stein Sonata, he not only references a score as a so-called original source, but also
various editions and famous performers’ interpretations. These senses become
attached to the composition through recordings or teachers’ instruction. These
senses are interpretive and technical. A pianist’s performance of any standard rep-
ertoire will be influenced by the interpretations of Cliburn, Horowitz, and other
performers found on recordings. Strategies for technical execution like standard
fingerings, as taught by a teacher or notated by an editor, become part of the
composition. These musical interpretative and technical considerations are not
 joseph abramo 91

permanent, but come to prominence only to be replaced by different consider-

ations as styles change. The music’s sense evolves and changes even in the most
formalized and seemingly fixed musical pieces and practices.
Despite the fluidity of sense, it seems that too often music educators do not
embrace this as a continual process of conjoint sense making, instead viewing
it as a predetermined acquisition of the composition’s meaning. Educators may
see senses added to a composition as a contamination of the composer’s intent.
The fascination with Urtexts, the manuscripts as the composer notated them,
are an attempt to clear the work of sense created by editorial markings. The so-
called period-instrument movement, where pieces are performed with historical
accuracy, similarly tries to strip collective evolving sense from work. Educators
sometimes turn the sense of “great masters” into the work’s meaning. They may
conclude, for example, that, “the work is performed this way because that’s how
Horowitz played it.”
To strip this collective sense and evolution from music is ocularcentric. When
educators treat music as a musical object they fix its meaning, making it perma-
nent, and unchanging, where meaning remains the same regardless of context.
The musical object appears the same before and after the learner encounters it,
just as objects appear unchanged by viewing them. Through this process, educa-
tors separate the musical object from their students’ everyday lives and canonize
it for disinterested contemplation. Instead, as Dewey notes, we should attend to
the artwork, rather than art object. 36 The term “artwork” emphasizes the “work,”
the act, of experience rather than the ocularly conceived “object” in an “object
of art.” This emphasis on experience in the “artwork” suggests that meaning does
not reside in the object, but that sense is derived from the audience member’s
experience of that object. Instead of finding definitive meanings within the work,
students and teachers should continually defer meaning to the next experience
while also drawing on past experiences. This act of deferment is continual un-
folding, like the unfolding of sounds.

AN ECHO
I have situated differing qualities between listening to sounds and viewing ob-
jects. Because the musical experience is primarily aural, music educators should
attend to listening more than observing. However, listening requires more than
using the sense of hearing; it carries with it implications for pedagogy and episte-
mology. To listen is to open up to new possibilities; to be curious and distracted,
rather than focused and tarrying; and to listen for the diversity and multiplicity of
différance and sense, rather than seeing or hearing the unity of signification and
meaning. To listen constitutes a democratic space, where students and teacher
take up truth, only to send it back out. In the democratic process, that truth is
92 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

added to and changed; each person’s sense of that truth adds to the community’s
collective sense through agreement and debate. This adding to sense includes
not only the individuals in immediate community, but also reaching out towards
the past, learning from how previous generations added sense to musical works
and other musical practices.
This aurally derived education stands in contrast to instruction where the
teacher treats knowledge as unaltered by herself and students. In this “banking
concept of education,” as Freire calls it, teachers deposit knowledge into students’
minds and bodies and students acquire information seemingly unchanged.37
Knowledge, in this context, is valued when teachers show knowledge to students
and students in turn show that they unambiguously received this knowledge.
This view of education as a process of uncomplicated transmission renders the
body of human knowledge, or what Dewey calls the “social consciousness” and
“the inherited resources of the race,” as fixed and permanent.38 This body of
knowledge is seen as added to the student, rather than the student adding to it
in his or her unique ways that make sense of that information. This is, perhaps,
most evident in standardized testing, which sunders and compartmentalizes the
knower and the known so that students are individually tested to see if they ac-
quired the information and are held accountable, rather than treating that knowl-
edge as constructed by the individual and the conjoint community
Standardized testing, the banking concept of education, and any other form
of music education where knowledge is considered separate from the learner
function within an ocular epistemology. They treat truth as permanent and fixed
and separate subjects from object for disinterested contemplation. If any aural
metaphor of this process were apt, it would be the echo; knowledge does not
resound within learners like a drum, but bounces back unchanged, like the echo
from the walls of a distant, removed canyon. This contrasts an aural context,
where knowledge is valued when it resonates and resounds with students as they
actively change that knowledge. Therefore, an aurally derived pedagogy may
counterbalance ocularcentric curricula of predetermined, unalterable, memo-
rizable facts. Dewey said, “[t]he conception that objects have fixed and unalter-
able values is precisely the prejudice from which art emancipates us.”39 Perhaps
this is most true with music and sound. To listen is to resist the fixed and unalter-
able, the predetermined, and the already known privileged by sight and the bank-
ing concept of education. To listen is to strive continually towards the unknown,
changing knowledge, just as the envelope of sound morphs.
Just because music education’s content is sound does not protect it from the
same ocularcentic tendencies of the banking concept of education. Music edu-
cators too often focus on the uniform meaning of music and musical works like
composers’ and famous performers’ intent and music theory’s unchanging la-
 joseph abramo 93

bels and signifiers. In music, hearing, signifiers, and meaning are easily transmit-
ted and students’ understanding is uncomplicatedly tested. However, listening,
sense, différance, and curiosity provide an ambiguity that makes its instruction
messy and measurement and evaluation difficult, if not impossible. In a climate
of ocularcentrism and standardized testing, it is easy, perhaps commonsensical,
to hear. It is convenient to render music as an object upon which students dwell,
searching for fixed meanings, separate from the listener.
Music education, then, may become a space where the aural supplements
the visual. Rather than an ocularcentric conception of pedagogy, where the
teacher disseminates knowledge with fixed meanings, the educator’s role might
be to facilitate sense, différance, and curiosity through conjoint listening and a
resulting resonance and dissonance through dialogue and musicking. Educators
perhaps have a particular obligation towards useful disagreements about sense
and interpretation or what might be called “dissonance” because they defer and
break up hegemonic and commonly held meanings. Where consonance is priv-
ileged and dissonance is suppressed, the failings of a simplistic conception of
democracy, where the majority rule at the expense of minorities, will give rise to
false sense and will subvert Dewey’s democratic ideals of “associated living” and
the “conjoint communicated experience.”40 From this perspective, the educator’s
charge is to facilitate a space where both consonance and dissonance resound in
the aim of generating continually evolving sense. While educators will always
have the ocular responsibility to show or demonstrate to students and to find
meanings that they believe to be true, they need to supplement that with the
aural necessity to explore, be distracted, and listen for sense.
To facilitate this resounding space, music educators might strive to listen
rather than show. In this shift, predetermined curricula, where the aims are de-
cided prior to listening to students’ desires and needs are recast as co-constructed
pedagogies. Objective facts transmitted from the knowing teacher to unknow-
ing students yield to joint communal making, where, by listening, the teacher
understands familiar material anew and thus learns with her pupils. Resonance
amongst individuals in conjoint musicking replaces students’ demonstrations of
individual accountability. Through these changes, educators may question the
predominant ocularcentric education and enact pedagogies where sound serves
not merely as the content studied, but also the framework of musical and educa-
tional inquiries.

NOTES
1
Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of Concrete Music, trans. John Dack and Christine North
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).
2
For a review of music and vision in empirical research, see Michael Schutz, “Seeing
94 philosophy of music education review, 22:1

Music? What Musicians Need to Know About Vision,” Empirical Musicology Review 3,
no. 3 (2008): 83–108. Also see, Chia-Jung Tsay, “Sight Over Sound in the Judgment
of Music Performance,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
Stated of America 110, no. 36 (2013): 14580–14585.
3
Karen Hammerness, “To Seek, to Strive, to Find, and Not to Yield: A Look at Cur-
rent Conceptions of Vision in Education,” in The Second International Handbook of
Educational Change, ed. Andy Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Michael Fullan and David
Hopkins (New York: Springer, 2009), 1033–1048.
4
For Bildung in music education see, Øivind Varkøy, “The Concept of ‘Bildung,’ ”
Philosophy of Music Education Review 18, no. 1 (Spring, 2010): 85–96.
5
Phil Francis Carspecken, “Ocularcentrism, Phonocentrism and the Counter En-
lightenment Problematic: Clarifying Contested Terrain in our Schools of Education,”
Teachers College Record 105, no. 6 (2003): 978–1047.
6
Casey O’Callaghan, “Sounds and Events,” in Sounds and Perception: New Philosoph-
ical Essays, ed. by Matthew Nudds and Casey O’Callaghan (London: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 26–49.
7
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 187.
8
Ibid.
9
Bruce Smith, “Tuning Into London c. 1600,” in Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Mi-
chael Bull and Les Back (New York: Berg, 2004), 129.
10
Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expres-
sion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 37.
11
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2006), 14, italics in original.
12
O’Callaghan, “Sounds and Events.”
13
Nancy, Listening, 32.
14
All quotes from Michael Gallope, “Review of Listening,” Current Musicology 86
(2008): 158.
15
John Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” in The Early Works of John Dewey, Volume 5,
1895–1898 (London: Southern Illinois University Press, [1897] 1972), 90.
16
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 20.
17
Barry Stocker, Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings (New York: Routledge, 2007),
105–106.
18
Nancy, Listening, 66.
19
Ibid., 36.
20
John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 1, 1925–1953: 1925, Experi-
ence and Nature (London: Southern Illinois University Press, [1925] 1981), 200.
21
Ibid., 26.
22
Janus points to a flaw in the English translation in this regard. He notes the translator
Charlotte Mandell’s near synonymous treatment of sense and meaning, “thus silencing
 joseph abramo 95

[sense’s] suggestions of sensual perception and movement .  .  . and unfortunately con-

form[ing] precisely to the ocularcentric tendencies that Nancy wants to overcome.” Janus,
“Listening: Jean-Luc Nancy and the ‘Anti-Ocular’ Turn,” 185, fn5.
23
For example, in the new Core Arts Standards in the United States, students are re-
quired to demonstrate that they “understand” the intent of a work.
24
David Michael Levin, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the
Closure of Metaphysics (New York: Routledge, 1989), 31.
25
Martin Heidegger “Science and Reflection” in The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977 [1954]), 163, 166.
26
Ibid.
27
Levin, The Listening Self, 31.
28
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robin-
son (New York: Harper Collins, 1962), 215.
29
Ibid., 216, italics in original.
30
Ibid., 216–217, italics in original.
31
Nancy, Listening, 13.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid., 43.
34
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New
York: The Modern Library, [1922] 1957), 275
35
Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education
(New York: Free Press, 1916).
36
Dewey, Art as Experience in The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 10, 1925–
1953: 1934, Experience and Nature (London: Southern Illinois University Press, [1934]
1987), 88.
37
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York:
Continuum, 1993).
38
Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed,” 93, 87.
39
Dewey, Art as Experience, 101.
40
Elizabeth Gould, “Devouring the Other: Democracy in Music Education,” Action,
Criticism & Theory for Music Education 7, no. 1 (2008), http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/
Gould7_1.pdf. Accessed June 20, 2013.
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