Four Pieces on Comparative Philosophy of Music Education

The initiative to collect this suite emerged originally as an upshot of the International Society for Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) 2010 conference, hosted by Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. The ideas developed in these articles are based on the papers presented in a panel that discussed Western music education systems, ideologies, and philosophies from a comparative perspective. Specifically, the discussants focused on similarities and differences between North American and continental European cultures, developing themes related to finding oneself as a philosopher in these areas.

When planning the present effort, it was agreed that the focus would be expanded to include metaphilosophical issues while still keeping specific cultures and identity positions on the agenda. The guiding questions presented for the group of writers included the following:

• • What role can different philosophies of music education play in the globalization of music education discourse?

• • What are the bases on which philosophies of music education can or should be compared?

• • What kinds of questions should we ask in order to even have a discussion in which to exchange ideas about music education?

As a result, four pieces emerged with idiosyncratic focuses on the thematic areas of discourses, cultures, societies, and policies of music education, crossing the lines of the traditions of philosophizing. While these pieces can be read as distinct developments of the main theme of comparing cultures and political ideologies in the field, they also manifest a shared need to find out how, and on what premises, we are to construct ourselves as cosmopolitan music education scholars “in between” the traditions.

In the opening piece, Cathy Benedict examines the present state of music education in the United States, considering the narratives through which the profession constitutes its self-image. She paints a picture of music education as a modernist project, driven by a “desire for control” and a need to justify the present curriculum rather than to envisage future ones. Benedict also argues that we need to recognize how global allegiance to market capitalism forces us to consider our goals in terms of exchange value. Instead of determining itself as a justificatory discourse, music education philosophy should recognize itself as political philosophy within ”the dialectic of the established and the possible,” helping us to question the ways in which our “actions . . . serve to reify systems of production that alienate each of us from the gloriousness of musicing.”

In the second piece, Patrick Schmidt examines the dialectical ground between comparative and cosmopolitan frameworks of music education philosophy. While comparative philosophy might serve a pedagogical and political role in music education communities, it should also be placed within a cosmopolitan framework to build on “difference that remains different.” Comparative cosmopolitanism places emphasis on interaction and dialogue, avoiding both too narrow localizing and too wide universalizing perspectives. Its goal is to build creative agency that helps us to “come to understand ourselves and our constantly changing contexts in interaction with Otherness.”

Building such a creative agency would require expansion of consensus toward an interactive approach that would help music education philosophers revise rationality with the spirit of what Martha Nussbaum calls the “dignity of reason”: an ethical responsibility to promote self-understanding in relationship to each other. To develop such a stance, philosophers of music education are advised to develop “metaphoric spaces” where they can come to understand the creative possibilities in comparative and cosmopolitan thinking. Interestingly, Schmidt suggests that we can look at humor as an example of such metaphoric space: the joke opens up a simultaneously global and local discursive sphere in which abundance and error are not just tolerated, but also welcomed as creative possibilities.

In the third piece, Geir Johansen shifts the focus more specifically to the dialectical terrain of (and between) Anglo-American and continental traditions. Discussing the role of comparative studies of music education “within the globalized world,” he focuses on the general education initiative called “Didaktik and/or curriculum,” which can be taken as a meeting place for the continental and Anglo-American educational pedagogical perspectives. Johansen examines this initiative from the standpoint of three questions: What is the rationale for...