A “Sound” Approach: John Cage and Music Education

In this paper, I apply John Cage’s wide musical embrace of sound to the field of music education and explore its curricular and practical implications. In particular, I ask music teachers to consider themselves teachers of sound, or “sound teachers.” I argue that privileging sound as our chief concern leads us to reconsider the ways we speak about music, the offerings we include in our music curricula, and the ways we teach (about) sound. In particular, I suggest that application of Cage’s ideas compels us to permit still more genres and styles in the classroom and curriculum, to emphasize activities that allow students to manipulate a diverse palette of sound types (for example, electronic composition), and to teach in ways that expand and diversify rather than narrow and limit students’ relationships with sound. I close by considering how Cage’s ideas of “purposeless play” and “purposeful purposelessness” orient our goals toward making students more attentive to and invested in the world of sound and the sound of the world.