Professor of Music (Music Education)
As a teacher of graduate courses in the foundations of music education, Estelle Jorgensen also serves as editor for Philosophy of Music Education Review, general editor for the Counterpoints: Music and Education series at Indiana University Press, is the founding chair of the Philosophy SRIG of MENC, and is the founding co-chair of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education. She is the author of In Search of Music Education (University of Illinois Press, 1997), Transforming Music Education (Indiana University Press, 2003), The Art of Teaching Music (Indiana University Press, 2008), the forthcoming Pictures of Music Education (Indiana University Press, 2011), and is a frequent contributor to leading research journals in music education internationally. She is an author and speaker on a broad array of themes in the philosophy of music education.
We asked Estelle to share her thoughts with us on the following questions.
IU PRESS/JOURNALS: What is it about music education philosophy that energizes you the most as a scholar?
ESTELLE: I love to think about important normative questions that lie at the bottom of the myriad ways in which people come to know music. For me, notions of why things should be so are intriguing, and it is important to ask whether the things that are done are the best that might be done, the right things to do under the circumstances, or there might be better ways of going about teaching and learning music. Right now, as I prepare to write my next book, Music Education and the Republic, I am thinking through ethical questions about music education and developing clusters of values to which I am committed and about which I will write.
IU PRESS/JOURNALS: Why do you think the journal Philosophy of Music Education (PMER) is an important contribution to the body of scholarly research in your field? What difference does it make?
ESTELLE: PMER is the only journal internationally in the field of music education devoted exclusively to the examination of philosophical questions in music education. Such questions are of enormous consequence for a field that addresses public policy matters relating to cultural development. Music, among the other arts, is a crucial aspect of culture and recognized internationally as an essential component of public education. Given its importance to identity formation, both individually and socially, normative questions about its place in general education as well as in the more specialized education of professionals and the ways in which music education should be conducted are of significance. Philosophy is presently a vibrant and growing field of music educational scholarship, and the questions addressed by philosophers contribute potentially to music education research and practice.
PMER is widely regarded as one of the premier scholarly journals in music education. Its contributors over the years have been some of the leading thought leaders in music education internationally. Ideas are treated critically and dispassionately. As writers examine ideas and practices relevant to music education, readers are afforded the opportunity to reflect on taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, and practices and wonder how things might be different or better in the future. From time to time, writers from outside music education address matters of importance to music teachers and their students, and this cross-fertilization of music specialties enriches music education thought and practice. For example, in the Spring 2010 issue, some of North America’s foremost classical composers wrote on or were in conversation with music educators concerning their views of music education.
IU PRESS/JOURNALS: Is there anything else you would like to say to students in music education that would entice them to explore the articles in the journal you publish?
ESTELLE: As music teachers and teachers-to-be, we are often in too much of a hurry to deal with the urgent practical problems that we face in our day-to-day work. We may not take the time (or even feel that we have the time) to reflect on the merits of the assumptions that lie beneath our theories and practices. Thinking philosophically about music education allows us to excavate these ideas and practices, critically examine their merits, and think through imaginatively how they might be improved or envisaged differently. Learning to love the questions that everywhere confront the music teacher and student can be fostered by reading the writings of others who have already thought about them and reflecting on the practices that we see and experience. PMER is one forum where writers work through philosophical questions and demonstrate not only their own answers to these questions but how such answers might be derived.
In “Women Working in Music Education: The War Machine,” Elizabeth Gould describes the implications for university women when they challenge the prevailing beliefs and practices of academe. Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, in “Philosophy of Music Education and the Burnout Syndrome: Female Viewpoints on a Male School World,” considers the issue of female fatigue in a male-dominated environment and its resultant loss of teachers.
Other articles in the issue include Sondra Wieland Howe on “A Historical View of Women in Music Education Careers,” an examination of the invisibility of women in the historical record; and June Boyce-Tillman on “The Transformative Qualities of a Limited Space Created by Musicking,” an analysis of the transformative power of luminal spaces in musicking. Closing the issue is Mary J. Reichling’s review of Robert E. Innis’ Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, which was published in 2009 by Indiana University Press, a review of particular significance to this issue of PMER because Langer’s philosophy concerning feeling is considered by some of her critics as “soft” and beneath serious philosophical notice.
November's READ FOR FREE selections include this piece from the recent issue of the journal Philosophy of Music Education Review 16.1.
In the introduction Matti Huttunen writes, “Music is historical through and through.” This well-known phrase of Theodor W. Adorno characterizes our attitude to music to a great extent. We consider the established composers, works, styles, and genres essentially historical not only in the sense that they form the core of the historiography of music but also in the sense that they are regarded as historical in everyday discussion on music. History does not only give us a way of looking at music impartially; it is also a way of justifying the music we consider important. We speak of the ‘apology’ of avant-garde music, for instance, with which many composers and writers have been occupied during the past fifty or sixty years.
© Philosophy of Music Education Review, 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008)
The article deals with various aspects of justifying music historically. In Matti Huttunen’s opinion Western music culture has been strongly historical since the nineteenth century. The article attempts to elucidate the historical nature of music, as well as the canon of music, the selective nature of music history, and the influence of aesthetic conceptions in our views on history. According to the article, the canon contains not only musical works but also other facts of music history. Aesthetic conceptions do not affect only our evaluations and analyses of particular works of music but also our ways of organizing history, including our ideas on causal connections in music history. The only way of escaping prevailing conceptions of music is to go deeper into them; in other words, it requires proper self-reflection.
Other READ FOR FREE selections for this month include:
José Martínez Delgado, Maimonides in the Context of Andalusian Hebrew Lexicography. Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism Jan 2008, (8): 15–40.
Lorraine Sim, “[A] background to our daily existence”: War and Everyday Life in Frances Partridge's A Pacifist's War. Journal of Modern Literature Jun 2008, Vol. 31, No. 4: 1–17.
Martin Munro, Avenging History in the Former French Colonies. Transition: An International Review Jul 2008, (99): 18–40.
