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Bennett Reimer is the John W. Beattie
Professor of Music Emeritus at Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois.
Whenever and wherever humans have
existed music has existed also. Since music occurs only when people
choose to create and share it, and since they always have done
so and no doubt always will, music clearly must have important
value for people. What is that value?
 Throughout
recorded history some people have spent enormous mental effort
trying to answer that question. It is a fascinating question because
attempts to answer it force one to grapple with the nature of
humanity itself. If we can explain why humans need music we may
learn something profound about what it means to be human. We know
that humans need food, clothing, shelter, language, social interaction,
belief systems, and so forth, and that these needs help define
the human condition. But why do they also appear to require music,
which seems, on the surface, to be only remotely related to human
survival rather than central to it? As Howard
Gardner frames the issue,
Precisely because [music] is not
used for explicit communication, or for other evident survival
purposes, its continuing centrality in human experience constitutes
a challenging puzzle. The anthropologist Levi-Strauss is scarcely
alone among scientists in claiming that if we can explain music,
we may find the key for all human thought or in implying that
failure to take music seriously weakens any account of the human
condition.1
Why should music educators try to
explain why music is valued by people? Why not just get on with
our responsibility to teach it? After all, people will no doubt
continue to need music whether we or they can explain why. Is
it really necessary for music educators to have such an explanation?
The answer is emphatically "yes," for several compelling
reasons. First, professional music educators should have a convincing
rationale for why the work they have chosen to do is important.
Second, the profession as a whole needs a sense of shared aspiration
to guide its collective endeavors. Third, the people to whom music
educators are responsible —students and their communities
— must understand that their need for music is being met
by professionals aware of what that need is and competent to help
fulfill it. Fourth, teaching can only be judged effective when
it enhances cherished values: not being clear about what those
values are insures ineffectiveness. Fifth, the ongoing attempt
to define those values keeps music education on track toward maintaining
its relevance to its culture. So, difficult as it may be, the
attempt to continually clarify why humans value music is necessary
if music education is to be successful.
Back
Can the value of music be identified
as one particular contribution it makes to people's lives? Some
have thought so. Music has been claimed to be, essentially, a
force for morality, or a special way to experience the world,
or a unique way to exercise creativity, or a way to "know"
what cannot otherwise be known, or an instrumentality for political/social
change, and on and on with claims for a singular, distinctive
benefit music bestows on people.
The rationale for seeking a single,
essential value of music is that finding it will mean that the
"essence" of music will have been discovered. If that
is too much to hope for, at least the quest will get us closer
to that essence, allowing us to identify, and focus our efforts
on, values more fundamental to music than those which are peripheral.
Opposed to this orientation to musical
value is one that claims that a singular, essential value for
anything in human life, including music, does not exist, and asserting
such a claim misrepresents the diversity and complexity of human
reality. Further, trying to focus on a single musical value inevitably
causes other important values to be unjustly neglected in favor
of those a society privileges. Rather than search for some imagined
essence of music we are better advised to abandon any hopes of
locating what does not exist, and instead, include in our aspirations
for music education any values we can possibly identify. We can
then make a variety of contributions to human welfare.
A focus on diversity of values rather
than on a single, defining value has arisen over the past several
decades. Many thinkers now argue that human history demonstrates
that our lives and our beliefs cannot be reduced to singular,
ultimate solutions. For every human belief, assumption, or value,
according to this view, opposing beliefs, assumptions, and values
exist, each contending for truth. We can no longer expect definitive
answers to our questions, but only an ongoing attempt to address
old and new perplexing dilemmas, causing us to adopt an attitude
of openness to all possibilities. The search for essences, in
this view, has not only been unproductive, it has been harmful
to human welfare, by excluding competing values rather than embracing
them. What is lost in certainty, security, and faith by giving
up the quest for essences is made up for by the higher values
of inclusiveness, creative tension, and ongoing responsibility
to invent useful solutions for particular problems.2
The conflict between beliefs in
(1) reliable answers and secure values, and (2) ongoing contradictions
among answers and the relativity of values is among the most characteristic
factors in contemporary intellectual life.3
Music education is not exempt from this conflict, and we cannot
excuse ourselves from it because of our shared devotion to what
the Tanglewood Declaration called music's "integrity as an
art,"4 as if there was no dispute
about what that phrase actually means. We, as all others in the
intellectual/artistic community, must reconcile ourselves to the
difficulties of both holding significant values and being open
to their uncertainty. Estelle Jorgensen summarizes our dilemma:
Rather than attempting to bring
conflicting ideas or tendencies into reconciliation, unity, or
harmony, music educators may sometimes need to be content with
disturbance, disunity, and dissonance. Things in dialectic do
not always mesh tidily, simply, or easily. Nor necessarily ought
they. The resultant complexity, murkiness, and fuzziness of these
dialectical relationships, however, greatly complicate the task
of music educators.5
The "task of music educators"
referred to above is shared by all professions and by all humans:
to forge a meaningful basis for cooperative endeavors based on
shared values, while at the same time recognizing that values
are subject to alteration or even abandonment if they lose their
validity. The argument that there should be no commitment to beliefs
is, after all, one particular argument: the need, even the necessity,
for a consistent, foundational belief system is as forcefully
and convincingly argued for by as many as those who deny its possibility.
A healthy culture, nation, religion, profession, or person, according
to this widely held view, requires strongly held beliefs, based
on complementary values, providing a basis for effective action.6
Music educators in the United States,
along with their colleagues around the world, share many convictions
about the values of music, convictions that enable them to make
consistent choices about why and how to teach music. These convictions
need not be, indeed must not be, regarded as dogmas incapable
of criticism, change, or replacement. As in a healthy democracy,
differing viewpoints and diversity of opinions are inevitable,
exhilarating, and rejuvenating, serving an essential role in the
well-being of the larger organism. The viability of the music
education profession, at any particular period in its history
and in any particular cultural setting, may well depend on the
existence of shared values upon which effective initiatives can
be based, and acknowledgment that complete unanimity is neither
likely nor desirable. The codependence of harmony and dissonance,
after all, is something music educators know a good deal about,
and it is as relevant in the field of values as it is in music.
The following examination of dimensions
of musical value demonstrates that it is possible to identify
values widely held in common, which can provide a basis for professional
aspirations, planning, and action, and also recognizes that tensions
among and uncertainties about claimed values are inevitable, reminding
us of our continual need for individual and professional critical
self-examination.
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