Editorial

How should one speak of spirituality in music education? What implications should this talk have for music education practice? In recent decades, writers have explored the intersections between spirituality, music, and education. This theme was the focus of a special thread of papers organized by Diana Harris and presented at the International Society for Music Education in Bologna, Italy, in July, 2008. In this issue, we feature a quartet of philosophical papers originally presented at that conference. Incidentally, the conversation on spirituality and music education at ISME led to the formation of an international group devoted to the investigation of matters related to spirituality and music education (SAME), and culminated in an international conference held in Birmingham, U.K., in the summer of 2010. I hope that philosophical papers from that subsequent conference might also find their way into the field’s published literature.

The specific problem our authors address in this issue concerns what is meant by spirituality in music. They clearly see spirituality differently, whether as a subset of aesthetic experience, a discrete and separate set of virtues from aesthetic or moral virtues, a language expressed musically, or an integrated and heightened state of transcendence and level of consciousness. Notwithstanding their evident differences, for them all, music education is importantly about and for the human spirit. Spiritual music education goes beyond ordinary, hum-drum, and prosaic experience to prompt imagination and feeling, a sense of wonder, and a vital engagement with music as with other aspects of lived life. In raising questions and complicating the problems surrounding spirituality and music education, they notice that much philosophical work remains in articulating the dimensions of the spiritual in music and music education and examining the specific implications of this analysis for music education practice.

Leading off this issue, Deanne Bogdan explores the respect in which music can be said to be spiritual and why this should matter for music education. Bogdan attends particularly to the spiritual experience of music construed as a sort of aesthetic experience. She is after what she figuratively expresses as the “shimmer factor” or an “active form of meditation-in-relation–between music, its performers and respondents” that is elusive, dynamic, and transformative. In her view, a state of “wonder” and an emotional, intellectual, and bodily engagement need to characterize music education in all of its forms.

Continuing a line of philosophical investigation, David Carr addresses questions related to how spiritual development might be distinguished from moral or aesthetic development and what the specifically spiritual “qualities, capacities, or dispositions” might be. Having developed a list of possible spiritual virtues, he inquires further as to which particular pieces of music might develop them.

In her response to the question, “Why is music a language of spirituality?” Iris Yob worries with the meaning of the word “spirituality.” As she notes, how one examines this question depends importantly on how one conceives of spirituality. Drawing from various philosophers of the religions, arts, and music, Yob notices the difficulty of finding the right language to speak about it. “How does music talk for the soul?” In her view, thinking of music as a spiritual language may require teachers to prompt experiences and responses that are not discursive but may have an important emotional component. Since these things cannot easily be talked about, the practical response to this dilemma may require immersion into musical experiences of various sorts.

In a further exploration of spirituality and music education, Anthony Palmer decouples religion and spirituality and argues for an integrated approach to transcendence that is predicated on physical responses and capacities while also encompassing cultural dispositions. This transcendent state moves beyond particular cultures and is characterized by a sense of the ineffable, play, and heightened states of consciousness. Palmer’s unitary approach to spirituality resists binaries such as inner and outer, general and specific, science and art, and complicates and integrates them within a musical experience.

In counterpoint with, although tangentially related to, the claims of spirituality in music education, Philip Alperson critiques the anti-aesthetic turn that he sees music education praxialism has taken in the past two decades. Building on his 1990 paper that...