Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EditorialEstelle R. JorgensenMusic educators who seek a global perspective on music face a complex array of musical and pedagogical problems surrounding the claims of world music. Each music carries specific epistemological and ethical understandings and imperatives that need to be addressed by teachers who work within specific situations, organizations, and institutions. These practical realities raise important philosophical questions concerning how music teachers and their students should understand the musics of the world and how they should engage them in their classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces and in all the ways in which they do and undergo music education. These questions also have important social, political, religious, and other ramifications. Understanding music as encompassing worlds of belief and practice requires examining them from a broad perspective.Our writers tackle some of these complex issues in today’s educational environment and examine their implications for music education. They build on the twin premises that social perspectives on music provide useful lenses on music and music educators are obligated to provide an education in the world’s music. Fundamental to these assumptions is their shared belief that the multiplicity, complexity, and ambiguity of musics constitute compelling philosophical problems for music education. Among the questions they address are the following: How is one to treat musics that have different valences based on differing power structures that render some musics more important than others? How is one to develop musical and pedagogical strategies that cross over the boundaries between one tradition and another to attend also to those musics that historically have been marginalized or excluded from formal study? How is one to understand music education within the various philosophies of music that have helped to shape or inform musical and pedagogical traditions? How is one [End Page 1] to understand the very ambiguity of music? Each of our writers seeks to go further than examining the theoretical problems raised to posit possible applications to the practice of music education.Juliet Hess draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to suggest that a task of music education is to create “pedagogical discomfort” in thinking about and studying differing musical traditions. For her, this is an ethical imperative and a dialogical approach to music education. Genuinely engaging with others’ musics challenges one’s suppositions, beliefs, and practices. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed and Megan Boler’s views of “strange encounters,” Hess sees unsettlement as a central part of the work of education. Contrary to a proposition that education should pursue a path of growing and comfortable conviction in one’s own beliefs, she proposes a radically different path of unease, tension, and confrontation with the realities of musical and cultural differences in a global environment.Burke Stanton focuses on the realities and vestiges of colonialism in today’s musics. Since many musical traditions were or are subjugated by others, colonialism is to be found widely among the world’s musics. For Burke, music educators need to contest the binaries of theory and practice and scholarship and education and problematize them as contested spaces where power structures are very much in evidence. The embodiment of musical experience in its many manifestations constitutes, for him, a powerful reason to deconstruct these binaries and, in the process, “decolonize” music education. For music educators, decolonization requires contesting taken-for-granted authorized views of music and education and forwarding indigenous or otherwise subjugated beliefs and practices—an approach that challenges the status quo and prompts discomfort as power structures are reordered.In a world of differing philosophical positions towards music and music education, Leonard Tan continues his quest for a transcultural philosophy of music education. In this writing, he asks two compelling questions: What would such a transcultural philosophy look like? How would it compare to extant philosophies of music education? Rather than beginning with questions relating to power structures and social structures in the world’s musics that preoccupy Hess and Stanton, Tan begins with Ancient Chinese and American pragmatist philosophies to develop a philosophical perspective that seeks common ground between Eastern and Western philosophical perspectives on music education.Alternatively, referring to the writings and compositions of John Cage, Stuart Hill posits that thinking of music as...