Picking on Elliott

This week's assignment was to "play the naysayer" to one of Elliott's main themes in chapters 2-3. As I started reading I remembered what Dr. Abril said about how we can read all sorts of contradictory philosophical works and agree with all of them because of how well the argument is presented. I started out this week's reading wondering what I could choose to "pick the naysayer" to because I didn't immediately see anything with which I had a gut-reaction disagreement.

However, in Chapter 2, as he discusses the definition of "praxis" he lists out the parts, and sums it up as basically that music is more than the sum of the parts. He demonstrates this by saying music cannot be separated out from the "social, cultural, ethical, economic"--or more commonly understood extra-musical values that are integrated into thoughtful musical education praxis.

While I agree that those extra-musical values are interwoven into a quality music education experience, he quotes Bowman on page 51 as saying "music as a social act and a social fact, instead of music as an entity [a thing] to which my relationship is aesthetic, receptive, and somehow individual in nature." He says this as if the aesthetics of musical experience is not also integrated into praxis. Aesthetics is a value or value judgment on arts, and from my own experience it is clear to me that the aesthetic value a student places on a piece of music is directly related to their motivation to learn it, or work together with others to improve it. If we do not critically educate students about how to make aesthetic judgments, they will gravitate towards that which is already familiar. And if students are not learning new things in a music classroom, only rehashing what is comfortable, why would we even need music educators to do anything beyond the techne? I would argue that the aesthetic is the value that equals more than the sum of the parts.