Music Education That Resonates
Music Education That Resonates
Music Education That Resonates
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.
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
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?
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.
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
sounds. Listening, as opposed to hearing, is to strive for meaning that is not there.
Hearing is to understand intent, listening is to interpret.
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.
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:
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.
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
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