Abstract
Music has a powerful connection with technology in contemporary culture. This chapter explores Heidegger’s ideas on modern technology and links these with questions of music technology. In the present day people engaged in music with technology are presented with the challenge of what Heidegger calls Ge-stell or enframing. This challenge privileges music as standing-reserve (Bestand) within the wider frame of consumer society. The chapter calls for a deeper questioning of the meanings, functions and patterns of perception that we encounter through modern technologies. From Heidegger, music technology can be redefined as ways of “revealing” (Heidegger, The question concerning technology. In: Krell D (ed) Martin Heidegger: Basic writings. Harper Collins, San Francisco, pp. 307–342, 1993: 311); as forms, cultural conditions, structures and pedagogies that bring different kinds of musical spaces, relationships and ways of being in our lives. This redefinition calls for music educators to closely question and trace the means by which they relate to the musical forms and relationships they encounter through technology, ponder how their lives are entwined with music technology, and reconsider and respond to technology in their local music cultures. The final part of the chapter deals with practical ways musicians and music educators can critically engage with new forms of technological being in music in contemporary culture.
We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it.
(Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology)
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- 1.
Michael Peters who was supervised by Prof Jim Marshall in his PhD has gone on to publish over 65 books and many other journal articles on a wide range of scholarly topics on educational philosophy, theory and policy with a particular interest in poststructuralism and Continental Philosophy relating to the philosophy of education. Jim Marshall has written extensively on Foucault and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 37:3 (2005) is a journal issue devoted to his work and influence.
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Note ‘instrumental’ in this sense does not refer to musical instruments specifically.
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Tom Regelski (2002) discusses the notion of technicism in relation to “teaching as a kind of assembly line technology.”
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Anahid Kassabian (2013) provides a very interesting account of a present day condition she calls “ubiquitous listening” in her book by the same name. It refers to the phenomenon of widespread access and exposure to recorded musics and the resulting impact of “distributed subjectivity.”
- 5.
Thanks to the editors of this book for their helpful comments in the shaping of this chapter.
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Lines, D. (2015). Ways of Revealing: Music Education Responses to Music Technology. In: Pio, F., Varkøy, Ø. (eds) Philosophy of Music Education Challenged: Heideggerian Inspirations. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9319-3_4
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