Thoughts about Aesthetic Music Education Philosophy

Bennett Riemer, leading music education philosopher on aesthetic music education, posits that, “An experience-based philosophy of music education is one that focuses on and cherishes all the many ways music can be experienced and all the many musics offering the special experience music provides.” (1) Reimer further states, “All our musical experiences, no matter what sort, ‘educate’ our inner, felt life, refining, clarifying, broadening, and deepening our feelings in a way analogous to how language does the same for our conceptual reasonings.” (2) While emphasizing music’s, or sound’s, affect on feeling and emotion as central to aesthetic music education, Reimer includes various creative, multi-dimensional approaches for music learning. Music students are given opportunity to explore the aesthetic value of music through inclusion of seven areas of music that include, among them, composition, performing, listening and music theory. (3)
Highlighting inclusion for both the general music student and the professional music student, aesthetic music education philosophy emphasizes individual feeling and a more comprehensive understanding of the role of feelings in the music listener and performer as listener. This positive impact of inclusion of all types of music students permits a broad-based learning environment for diverse music programs and groups. Reimer further reiterates his desire for inclusion of all individuals in music education as he states, “ Music education should help individuals achieve whatever potentials they have to be musically intelligent – able to more fully experience musical satisfactions – in whatever ways they choose.” (4)Further acknowledging the impact of a performance-based system of learning, Reimer suggests that singling out one aspect of music can limit the number of ways music can be enjoyed, and discovered, and thereby limiting one’s overall musical experience. (5)
It can be understood that challenges to an aesthetic music education philosophy can arise from the actual limitation of scope created by the music educator. Upon his revisions to his initial A Philosophy of Music Education, Reimer rewrote it to expand his philosophy for a broader cultural and intellectual inclusion. Without this important inclusion, aesthetic music education philosophy would not be able to adhere to the declarations made from the Tanglewood Symposium (1967) that submitted that current music education philosophy could not adequately present the teaching and learning of non-Western music.
A second challenge to aesthetic music education philosophy again submits to the actions of the individual educator: If one does not fully understand the basis of aesthetic education, and merely intakes a superficial gleaning of the ideas therein of “perceiving, reacting, producing, conceptualizing, analyzing, evaluating, and valuing,”(6) then a music program could conceivably result in students that perform quantitatively, however lack quality of performance skill. This perhaps led to David Elliott’s statement that with aesthetic music education philosophy, “It fails to acquit the art of music.” (7) Such was the problematic issue that began to surface in American schools in the late 1960s. Music educators wanted to purport a vogue aesthetic music philosophy without much individual research and subsequent application into curriculum design. This then resulted in music educators stressing performance rather than artistic human experience as seen in the rise of more performance oriented programs.
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1. Bennett Reimer, A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003), 69.
2. Ibid., 135.
3. Ibid., 199.
4. Ibid., 199.
5. Ibid., 69.
6. Richard Colwell, “Music and Aesthetic Education: A Collegial Relationship.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 20:4 (1986): 36.
7. David J. Elliot, “Music as Knowledge” Journal of Aesthetic Education 25: 3 (1991): 23.