Abstract
Megan J. Laverty’s paper focuses on rhythm or the patterned and recurrent alternation of sound and silence that we find in music and its relation to education. She considers the broader existential significance of this phenomenon using Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy. Laverty argues that if Dewey is right that (a) music exemplifies artfulness and (b) to live well is to live artfully, then an education in music—formal and informal—constitutes an education in how to live well. Artfulness, according to Dewey, involves, the intelligent harmonizing of the precarious, novel and irregular with the settled, assured and uniform. Laverty explains what Dewey means by intelligent harmonization and contrasts it with those occasions when individuals act from enforced necessity, routine or blind impulse. Laverty offers an intrinsic justification for arts education that focuses on a quality not previously highlighted by Maxine Greene and others. Clearly humanist, Laverty thereby aligns Greene with other post-humanist contributions by focusing on an iterative process constitutive of our material condition. The aim, as with so much of post-humanism, is not to control or direct this process in the interest of a telos, but to vibrate possibility.
A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I sat by the window, alternating
my first lesson in reading with
watching time pass, my introduction to
philosophy and religion.
Louise Glück
An abridged version of this chapter was presented as an invited keynote presentation at the International Philosophy of Music Education Biennial Conference, Teachers College, Columbia University, June 6, 2013. I am grateful to the participants at that conference for their comments. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the students who participated in a doctoral seminar on John Dewey’s philosophy. Conversations with Guillermo Marini and Jason Wozniak have been particularly instructive.
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Notes
- 1.
Noel Carroll argues that Dewey’s definition of an aesthetic experience is not sufficiently broad to include such works that do not possess such qualitative unity, such as John Cage’s 4’33’. I agree with David Hildebrand who argues, following Richard Shusterman, that “While contemporary artworks may be filled with ‘jarring fragmentation and incoherencies’ (or even silence), such aspects must be understood not simply in relation to the artwork as an isolated object/event, but to the ‘more complex forms of coherence’ that arise ‘within a larger coherent totality of meaning’ in the experienced situation that frames the work.” (157–158) – cited in Felicia E. Kruse, “Temporality in Musical Meaning: A Peircean/Deweyan Semiotic Approach”, The Pluralist, 6.3. (2011), p. 57.
- 2.
Copland, 27–28, cited in Felicia E., Kruse, Semiotic Approach, The Pluralist 6.3 (2011), 55.
- 3.
For a discussion of the role of repetition in marriage see Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. II, ed. And trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 138–144.
- 4.
For a related critique of consumerism that also draws on aesthetics, see René V. Arcilla (2011) Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning, New York, SUNY, Chapter Five, pp. 65–82.
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Laverty, M.J. (2015). Music as an Apprenticeship for Life: John Dewey on the Art of Living. In: Lewis, T., Laverty, M. (eds) Art's Teachings, Teaching's Art. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_9
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