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Symposium 55 or even useful to attend to (understand, appreciate, etc.), in order to derive a potential value is a variable matter. Thus I don't need to be intimately familiar with the conventions and conditions of ballet (i.e., beyond my experience with physical movement and dance, in general) to value it; but I will certainly value it differently as a result of such experience—though not necessarily to any absolute sense of advantage. Thus, it is sometimes true that 'ordinary' (untrained) listeners enjoy (value) theirexperience ofmusic more than a trained musician—one, who, for example, may cringe at the church choir, mistaking it for a concert chorus. 1 9.Searle, 77je Construction ofSocial Reality, 40-41 . 20.The placements ofmusics on this continuum can be random or might proceed according to some descriptive range ofstatus functions (e.g., popularto fine art, entertainment to serious, mundane to profound, etc.). Such hypothesized dialectics will always be arbitrary and arguable. 21.I don't, on the other hand, go so faras to suppose that such so-called "pure," "aesthetic," or "disinterested" meanings amount to the disembodied metaphysics of Beauty or Sublimity claimed by various (and competing ) traditional aesthetic accounts and thus given lipservice by musical esthetes as testimony to their elevated sensibilities. Such 'right results' for this constituency (or "taste public," as social psychologists label it) are simply conditioned by theparticular status function invoked according to the predispositions ofthat kind ofBackgrounding. Aisthesis, then, is a process or mode ofexperience (ofintentionality, consciousness, valuing) not a certain kind of (i.e., aesthetic) product or content per se. 22.A lullaby intended or used for listening alone will also require certain other features that can occupy the interests oflisteners. As the function changes, so will the criteria. 23.Take the case of a classically trained American percussionist who had studied a certain tradition of African drumming in the US with a Master drummer. While later studying African drumming in situ, the student was asked on one occasion to leave the ensemble by the individual for whom the music was intended becausehis participation was distracting her from the ancestor invocation the music was to serve. It is important to observe in this example that "the music" was not simply an accompaniment to an otherwise non-musical social purpose; it was that purpose in toto. Furthermore, the musicking was not "for" the individual served in somemerely instrumental or contributory way; she was part of"the music," as were the rest ofthose in attendance whose role was not simply that of audience or observer, but was participatory. 24.A "good" performance ofa score by a school group will be considerably different than a "good" performance ofthe same score by professional artists. Thus the status or "goodness" ofthe value is related in part to the use and is not some strictly aesthetic or even artistic absolute. The "goodness" or excellence of school performance, then, isnotsimplydeterminedby how closely it approximates or attains to postulated ideals or conventional criteria of aesthetic or artistic excellence but is, rather, importantly related to its situation (function). Similarly, though, wedding or worship music is notjudged simply by how closely it approximates or attains such singular ideals ofexcellence ; it, too, is situated and the conditions ofexcellence that obtain in a concert hall may be inappropriate to the situatedness of a particular wedding or worship. 25.'Highest' in terms of the aforementioned aesthetic hierarchy. 26.Unfortunately, the musically unschooled make the same erroneous assumption and remain complacent with the easily gained functions that music serves in theirlives. Thus, onefunction ofmusic education can be seen as the posing and modeling ??other rewarding functions (values) for music in life; to create a statusfunction forsuch musickingthat students aspire to it and practice it as part oftheir "good life." 27.SeeClaireDetels,"SoftBoundaries: Re-Visioningthe Arts and Aesthetics" in American Education (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1999). Why Do Humans Value Music? Wayne D. Bowman As I set out to address the question before us, I was struck by the aptness ofWittgenstein's observation that "a philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness."1 Something aboutthis question sets me thinkingin preciselythe way Wittgenstein seems to havehad...

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