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For much of Western history, and
especially since the influential thinking of the philosopher-mathematician
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), mind, body, and feeling have generally
been considered to be separate components of human functioning.
Descartes was driven to identify an absolutely reliable basis
for knowledge, in which all doubt was dispelled. He found that
basis in the idea of pure intellect, especially pure mathematics,
in which the unreliable, confused, and imperfect senses and emotions
have, as much as possible, been eliminated so they are unable
to exert their negative influences.
The "highest" values,
then, are the values of the disembodied intellect, and the "highest"
subjects—those of most value—are the ones in which
intellectual capacities are given full opportunities to develop.
As a result, the subjects most valued in education, the "basics,"
are those that require the greatest exercise of the intellect,
or intelligence, such as mathematics, languages, and the physical
and social sciences. Subjects such as the arts, which are based
on feelings, emotions, physical sensations and actions, and certainly
not on "pure thought," are decidedly secondary in value,
according to this conception. Their values are desirable, worthy
of support after the basics have been attended to, pleasantly
supplementary to the real work of education, but not, after all,
central to or necessary for the solid foundation education is
required to build.
The belief that the intellect, or
intelligence, is separate from and of higher value than the body
or the feelings has so pervaded Western culture for so long as
to be, for most, a "given," no longer subject to examination.
So long as this belief system endures, it is highly unlikely that
music will be regarded as playing much more than a minor role
among far more important intellectual endeavors. No amount of
"advocacy," of impassioned pleading, of desperate attempts
to somehow attach music to values higher on the scale as if that
will rescue it from its lesser status, is likely to do much more
than win occasional battles for sheer survival, necessary as it
may be at present to fight such battles. Something else is needed
if music is ever to be regarded as equal in value to the basic
subjects required to be studied by all who are to be considered
"educated." That something is a sweeping shift in people's
understanding of the nature of mind, body, and feeling. That shift
is now well under way.
From a variety of scholarly
disciplines, including psychology, physiology, philosophy, neuroscience,
anthropology, sociology, and education, powerful, converging arguments
are being made for a fundamental transformation in the ways we
understand the nature of the human condition. Contrary to Descartes'
conception of a disembodied, emotionless intellect, it is rapidly
becoming clearer that human cognition, or intelligence, is (1)
demonstrated in diverse forms, (2) intimately tied to the body
and the ways it functions, and (3) pervaded throughout with feeling.
Far more complex than Descartes and his followers could have imagined,
the human capacity to know, think, feel, and act—what we
call "mind"— requires the interaction of dimensions
previously believed to have little to do with one another. The
implications for our understanding of music, both as to its nature
and its value, are profound.
1. Intelligence is demonstrated in diverse forms.
There is no single, proper, correct
form in which human thinking occurs. Instead, a variety of forms
of intelligent functioning—of ways to create and share meanings—coexist.
Different explanations of the diversity of modes of human thought
have been offered, such as Philip H. Phenix's "Realms of
Meaning" (Symbolics, Empirics, Esthetics, "Synnoetics"
[personal meanings], Ethics, and Synoptics); Howard Gardner's
"Frames of Mind" (Linguistic, Musical, Logical-Mathematical,
Spatial, Bodily Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalist,
Spiritual or Existential); and the authors in Elliot Eisner (ed.),
"Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing" (Aesthetic,
Scientific, Interpersonal, Intuitive, Narrative/ Paradigmatic,
Formal, Practical, Spiritual).14
All point to the conviction that thinking, or intelligence, is
not limited to the two forms previously conceived to be the only
ones in which it could genuinely take place—the verbal and
the mathematical.
Musical intelligences, manifested
distinctively in each musical role such as composing, performing,
improvising, and listening, require "thinking in sounds,"
the special form of human cognition fulfilled by music. Thinking
musically—creating meanings through sounds formed in ways
cultures have devised—is an act of intelligence, reason,
thoughtfulness, rationality, intellect, and mindfulness. That
these words may sound inappropriate when applied to music, as
if they somehow render music "academic," or "abstract,"
or "theoretical," is testimony to how captive we have
been to the idea that these words are limited to the linguistic
or mathematical thinking modes. Music, as much as those and other
modes, as precisely, as accurately, as powerfully, as logically,
as broadly and deeply, as genuinely, is a demonstration of the
human capacity to think—to be intelligent. Each musical
role a culture provides requires a particular way to think in
sounds, creating meanings only musically organized sounds are
capable of bringing into being. All humans are capable of thinking
in musical sounds. It is a fundamental capacity of the human mind.
2. Intelligence is intimately
tied to the body and the ways it functions.
Thinking in sounds requires the
engagement of the body, as all thinking does. The bodily basis
of human reality—the influence of our bodies on how and
what we can know and imagine—is becoming clearer through
a variety of scholarly enterprises, explained and summarized most
usefully, perhaps, in Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind:
The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.15
As Johnson explains, "Any adequate account of meaning
and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative
structures of understanding by which we grasp our world.”16
(Emphasis in original.) Imagination is the power all humans have
to perceive things and events as being connected in some way,
whether by similarity or difference. It is the power to achieve
patterned, coherent experience. Without the imaginative
capacity to make connections among what we experience, our lives
would be chaotic, completely without form. Meaning would be impossible,
as would purposeful action. Human imagination is at the core of
human thinking and doing.
In a great variety of ways, human
imagination is dependent on the realities of the human body. The
body's structure and functions give us the bases for the various
ways connections are made within and among our experiences, including
what many have regarded as "pure thought," as if human
thinking of any sort could take place elsewhere than within the
realities of our bodies. (Johnson gives detailed descriptions
of the many ways human thought is "embodied.") Music
is a prime example of thinking as being body-centered. Sounds
themselves are experienced not by some sort of isolated brain
but by the fullness of the brain's connection to the entire body.
The "dynamic" qualities of sounds, their movement/energy/vitality
characteristics as imagined by composers, performers, improvisers,
and listeners, are qualities intimately connected to the movement/energy/vitality
of life itself as experienced in and through the body.17
No wonder music "makes special," touching us, moving
us, energizing us, creating coherent, patterned sense of body-mind
experience.
3. Intelligence is pervaded
with feeling.
The picture of music's value for
creating meaning is still not complete. Human intelligence, in
addition to taking many forms beyond the verbal and numerical,
and in addition to being centered in the realities of the human
body, is pervaded throughout with feeling. Although this is not
a new idea, it is receiving important support from recent work
in neurology, the most dramatic explanation coming from brain
researcher Antonio R. Damasio's Descartes' Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain.18
Taking direct aim at Descartes' argument for the separation of
thinking and feeling, and its negative influence on science over
the centuries, Damasio argues that "contrary to traditional
scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts....
Feelings form the basis for what humans have described for millennia
as the human soul or spirit."
I see feelings as having a truly
privileged status. They are represented at many neural levels,
including the neocortical, where they are the neuroanatomical
and neurophysiological equals of whatever is appreciated by other
sensory channels. But because of their inextricable ties to the
body, they come first in development and retain a primacy that
subtly pervades our mental life. Because the brain is the body's
captive audience, feelings are winners among equals. And since
what comes first constitutes a frame of reference for what comes
after, feelings have a say on how the rest of the brain and cognition
go about their business. Their influence is immense.19
The growing recognition of the role
of feeling in human cognitive functioning—in the human capacity
to be intelligent—shifts the grounding of music's value
from the "merely pleasant" to the profound. (See the
discussion of Dimension 5)
The long-recognized special powers of music to explore, embody,
and illuminate the depths and breadths of human feeling are now
being recognized as central to human knowledge and understanding.
As a primary way in which mind,
body, and feeling are unified in acts of meaning-making, musical
endeavors represent a pinnacle of what the human condition exemplifies.
The values of music stem from its contribution of special meanings
to human life. These meanings are unavailable except through the
unified experiences of mind, body, and feeling that music affords.
Such involvements, in turn, inevitably have many positive affects
on the quality of the interrelated mental, physical, and emotional
dimensions of human life.
Since music has existed everywhere
that humans have existed it is natural to wonder what values it
has bestowed on all humans universally. Are the values of music
generic to humans despite the many differences among them (in
time, place, race, gender, age, belief system, and so forth)?
Conversely, are all musical values specific to particular times,
places, races, genders, and so on? Or are musical values entirely
individual, each human being uniquely creating and experiencing
the values music confers?
Some thinkers, interested in the
broadest, most widely shared values of music, have suggested that
many universal values of music can be identified. Among these
are the values of emotional expression; aesthetic enjoyment; the
need to structure reality; the need to share musical experiences
and meanings with others; entertainment; spiritual fulfillment;
validation and stabilizing of social norms, beliefs and institutions;
probing, challenging, and changing cultural norms; providing connection
with the vast web of humankind over the ages; expanding the meanings
humans are capable of grasping; and on and on with values transcending
particular times and settings.
Other thinkers prefer to focus on
the cultural basis of human values. They explain the values of
music as being tied to the particularities of beliefs and ways
of living in each culture and each subculture. To understand why
music is valued by humans, in this view, one must examine the
belief system—the value system—each culture has devised,
and how music contributes to the values particular to that culture.
Music, in this view, is essentially and necessarily a product
of singular communities of people, who have created their own
norms of what counts as valuable. Without understanding the particular
system of values, ideology, and politics in which music exists
it is impossible to identify or cultivate musical values, which
are always situated in the specific circumstances in which humans
live out their lives.
Still another set of ideas about
musical value focuses on individual experience. Human reality
is, at bottom, unique to each person, a function of each person's
ways of thinking, feeling, acting, making meaning, and constructing
a sense of place or context. Only individuals, after all, compose,
perform, improvise, and listen, even if they do so in cooperation
with others. "Cultures," “groups,” “families,”
“races,” “nations,” "genders,"
"religions," are all abstractions. What is real is the
specificity of the experience an individual has when undergoing
it. If music has value it must be explained in terms of each person's
particular configuration of mind, body, and feelings comprising
that person's selfhood. In acknowledging and honoring each individual's
musical values we create a mutually respectful basis for exploring
the values of other individuals and other cultures.
What can we make of these different
positions about the value of music? Each seems to have validity:
each calls attention to a persuasive set of claims. While it might
seem that a choice must be made among them, it is possible to
reconcile them with an inclusive conception—that all human
beings are, at the same time, like all other human beings, like
some other human beings, and like no other human beings.
This paradoxical condition is the
basis for many of the dilemmas humans face, as when one dimension
so dominates as to diminish or even threaten the others. If we
concentrate too heavily on universal values we may compromise
the validity of and necessity for group identification, with all
that such identification adds to the value of our lives. We may
also threaten the specialness— the uniqueness—of each
human's experience, a quality much to be treasured and protected.
However, if we focus all efforts
toward values situated within particular communities we can erect
walls that separate, implying that cross-community sharing of
values is impossible or undesirable. The bloodiest conflicts in
human history have occurred because of over-zealous identification
with particular cultural values, trampling on alternative cultures
and on individuals with alternative values.
And if we so emphasize individual
needs as to forget that every individual is also a member of the
larger human community, and of particular communities within it,
we can amplify qualities of selfishness and alienation, depriving
people of the preciousness of communal membership.
Difficult—perhaps impossible—as
it may be to perfectly balance the universality, cultural connectedness,
and individuality of the human condition, music educators must
continually recognize the validity of the values claimed within
each level. The values of all three must be represented because
music powerfully serves an essential need in each: (1) the need
to experience meanings shared by all members of the species "homo
sapiens," (2) the need to experience those meanings fashioned
by various communities with similar value orientations, and (3)
the need to experience them within the full individuality of selfhood.
A person with a healthy musical identity understands music to
be a common possession of humans, honors and delights in the distinctiveness
of the musical communities of which he or she is a member as well
as the musics of other communities that widen and enhance meaningful
musical enjoyments, and treasures the personal responsibility
to seek musical fulfillments as relevant to an internalized, self-determined
value system.
That music so powerfully fulfills
values at each level of the human condition is testament to its
necessity as a factor in the living of a humane life. It explains
why all people have had, now have, and no doubt will continue
to have music so long as humans endure as a species.
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