Re-thinking “Music” in the Context of Education

Abstract

Since the middle decades of the twentieth century, scholars have questioned traditional assumptions about the nature of music and musical meaning. This scholarship was conducted in various disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and cultural studies. Its collective findings broadened the lens through which we view music and deepened the understanding about the function of music as a human endeavor and as a sociocultural phenomenon. Beginning with the writings of Charles Seeger on music and culture (see McCarthy 1995), the inquiry was further developed by music scholars such as Alan Merriam, Christopher Small, and John Shepherd. It finally entered the discourse of music educators in the late 1970s and 1980s, beginning with the writings of Barbara Reeder Lindquist, Thomas Regelski, and Patricia Shehan Campbell, and culminating more recently in a praxial approach to music education that is advocated by numerous scholars, including Wayne Bowman (1998,2005), David Elliott (1995,2005, Estelle Jorgensen (1997,2003), and Thomas Regelski (2004).