Social Theory, and Music and Music Education as Praxis

Autor/in	Regelski, Thomas A.
Titel	Social Theory, and Music and Music Education as Praxis
Quelle	In: Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 3 (2004) 3, (52 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1545-4517
Schlagwörter	Music Education; Musicians; Music Teachers; Social Theories; Role of Education; Aesthetics; Philosophy + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Musikerziehung; Musiker; Music; Teacher; Teachers; Musiklehrer; Gesellschaftstheorie; Bildungsauftrag; Ästhetik; Philosophie
Abstract	The idea of praxis, and thus the idea of music as praxis, is not widely known in the fields of music and music education. Nonetheless, musicians and music teachers typically take for granted as sacrosanct the noble sounding, metaphysical, even spiritual profundity of music hypothesized by mainstream aesthetic philosophies. Thus accounts of music as praxis can seem too mundane or even sacrilegious, and meaningful discourse in any other "terms" than aesthetic is almost impossible. Social accounts of music as praxis, in contrast, are predicated precisely "on" the "ecology" that sustains music--as Proudfoot put it, "the circumstances" in which music is "actually created or appreciated." And this includes not just the historical context, but also present contexts of use--in other words, it focuses on the various down to earth acts of what Christopher Small has called "musicking" (Small 1998). Thus, on the basis of empirical study of such musicking, social theory accounts for the values and meaning that music affords individuals and society. This empirical grounding in "actual musical praxis," then, promotes a remarkable agreement among contemporary social theories of music and musical value. In this article, the author hopes to provide an account of music as praxis that dispels at least some of the "obscurum per obscurius" visited on the question of the value and role of music and music education by philosophers, and by theorists and musicologists who take aesthetic theory for granted. First the author surveys the idea of praxis and briefly traces the aestheticization of music; then he presents an examination of music as praxis and sketches some implications of that analysis for music education. (Contains 60 notes.) (ERIC).
Anmerkungen	MayDay Group. Brandon University School of Music, 270 18th Street, Brandon, Manitoba R7A 6A9, Canada. Tel: 204-571-8990; Fax: 204-727-7318; Web site: http://act.maydaygroup.org
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10