Editorial

Notions of globalism, internationalism, multiculturalism, interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and localism loom large in contemporary music education. Scholarship and practice in the field is increasingly internationalized, and international organizations and networks play an important role in music education, and international perspectives influence the music educational ideas and practices within nation-states. Music educators are increasingly aware of the musical cultures within and beyond particular societies, and recognize the importance of engaging these differing musical traditions within general education. Still, notwithstanding this imperative to embrace the differences in musics around the world and at home, there are other pressures on music educators to foster nationalism and localism in service of the nation-states that challenge and contest international influences. In particular, a backlash against multiculturalism, interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and other manifestations of an inclusive approach to musical traditions at home and abroad is evident in some quarters. The architects of strident nationalism seek instead to promote a mono-cultural approach that epitomizes a unified culture that they imagine once characterized their people. They hope to preserve what they presume to be the soul of their people in the distant past, before the massive flows of immigrants into their country; they contest the desire on the part of immigrants to express the cultures of the places from which they came; they fear the loss of or change in their historic national identities and traditional customs; and they expect music educators to serve the interests of nationalism and preserve that national identity through music.

This struggle between the interests of transforming culture as different others are welcomed into it and those of preserving culture by differentiating oneself from these different others is an ancient one. Culture is dynamic and the pace of change varies from time to time and from place to place. During the past decades, these changes have seemed especially dramatic, and the struggles between the interests of such things as globalism and localism, internationalism and nationalism, and cultural monism and multiculturalism have been particularly acute. It seems imperative for music educators to reflect on these matters and decide what to do. One approach to unpacking some of the important and complex aspects of music and education is to converse philosophically about them. But how can philosophers of music education converse across the borders of our various cultures, national allegiances, ethnicities, languages, gendered, and racialized ways of being, among the host of differences that separate us? What can we learn from comparative approaches to philosophy in music education?

The word symposium is an old Latin word that derives from the Greek συμπυ´σιον. Among the ancient Greeks, it referred originally to a “drinking-party; a convivial meeting for drinking, conversation, and intellectual entertainment,” or an “account of such a meeting or the conversation at it.” More recently, it has come to mean a “meeting or conference for discussion of some subject,” or “a collection of opinions delivered, or a series of articles contributed, by a number of persons on some special topic” (“symposium,” n.” OED Online. March 2013. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/196317?redirectedFrom=symposium [accessed March 16, 2013]). The ancient idea of the symposium as a report of a convivial conversation, used by Plato in his Dialogues, allows various perspectives to coexist and points of agreement to emerge in a more formal and deliberate way than is possible in the original freewheeling conversation. The report effectively changes the original conversation by virtue of its selectivity and its being laid out as a written account. Nevertheless, it allows the ideas to be transmitted beyond the original conversation and for the arguments to be presented more cogently than may have been possible in the interplay of the original dialogue.

To this end, a group led by Lauri Väkevä expands the ideas they originally presented informally at the International Symposium on the Philosophy of Music Education in Helsinki, Finland, in June, 2010. In his introduction to the symposium entitled, “Suite: Four Pieces on Comparative Philosophy of Music Education,” Väkevä introduces articles by Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Geir Johansen, and Alexandra Kertz-Welzel. Whether it be Benedict’s concern with the power of the...