Many values are attached to products—the
results of human endeavors and nature's manifestations. A good
loaf of bread, automobile, pair of shoes, job, political system,
tomato, sunshiny day, forest, are each, of its kind, prized because
of its contributions to human welfare. In music, successful results
of creation, whether compositions, performances, or improvisations,
are similarly prized because they contribute to our musical welfare,
with all the resulting positive consequences for the quality of
our lives. We treasure a good song, or symphony, or solo by a
favorite jazz musician, or performance by a country fiddler or
gamelan or Beijing opera troupe or African drum ensemble, as a
source of musical satisfaction and meaning. We honor those musicians,
whether composers, performers, or improvisers, who provide us
with their products—the outcomes of their musical efforts.
In practically every culture some people are recognized to be
capable of producing outstanding musical results, and win high
esteem for doing so. Often, a musical product or body of work
deemed extraordinarily successful is regarded as a cultural treasure,
among the most precious achievements of that culture.
For most people the word "music"
refers to all products of the sort having whatever characteristics
they define as musical. Not surprisingly then, the dictionary
defines music to be a noun rather than a verb. This focus on music
as being a particular "kind of thing" reflects one major
dimension of musical value—the achievement of musical significance
as expressed in works of music.
Much of music education is devoted
to sharing with students the treasures of successful musical products.
The songs we teach in general music classes, or that are published
in collections, are chosen partly for their appropriateness for
the age and abilities of those who will sing them, but also, centrally,
for their quality as successful pieces of music. Similarly for
pieces chosen for performing groups; whatever other considerations
must be taken into account, the consideration of their musical
value is always paramount. This consideration also guides our
choice of music to be listened to. Underlying all choices of music
is the desire to share the bounties of musical experience available
from musical products.
No product, musical or otherwise
could exist without the processes that brought it into being.
Engaging people in those processes allows them to experience the
creation of the product, and therefore to understand and undergo
another essential dimension of what the product exemplifies. Experiencing
music from the process standpoint, as a creator of compositions,
performances and improvisations, and as a creative participant
in the meaning-making of listening, shifts the identity of "music"
from noun to verb. Music becomes, in addition to being a bearer
of realized musical values, a vehicle for realizing those values.
Being musically creative, in all the ways this can be accomplished,
not only fulfills the human capacity for bringing meanings into
existence as only music can do, it also deepens the perspective
on the nature of musical meanings. Seen as a particular realm
in which creative imagination is brought into play, encompassing
mind, body, and feeling, and embracing universal, cultural, and
individual levels of experience, creating music exemplifies the
human capacity to be generative— to bring meaning into existence.
Every generative musical act is
aimed toward an end—to create musical meaning. Without that
end in view the act becomes musically meaningless. Every musical
end—every result of creating music embodies the sum of the
acts of making it. Without those acts there would be no result.
Music is result (product) and act (process) interdependently;
music is both noun and verb simultaneously. The values of music
education for students of any age, but especially for young people,
lie primarily in learning how to be more skilled when they are
engaged in musical processes. It is natural, then, for music educators
to argue that what is important in music education is the process,
not the product. There is a danger in forgetting that, in music,
process cannot be separated from product. The fact is, an awareness
of process cannot occur without concurrent awareness of product;
separating the two violates the nature of music. The widespread
myth that process is what counts, not product, is examined by
art educator Elliot
Eisner as follows:
This myth, related to the one on
creativity, argues that what is educationally significant for
children is the process they undergo while making something, not
what it is that they make. It is argued further that when attention
is devoted to the product rather than to the process the child's
growth is likely to be hampered; one would be, so to speak, keeping
one's eye on the wrong target. It's not what a child makes but
how he makes it that is important. I will not take the tack that
just the opposite is true. I will not argue that the product is
what's important, not the process. I won't do this because I believe
that dichotomizing process and product is wrongheaded to begin
with. In the first place, there can be no product without some
type of process. The processes we use at whatever level of skill
shape the qualities of the product that will be realized, whether
that product is ideational or material. Similarly the product
or end-in-view that we aspire to create shapes the means we employ
and provides a criterion against which choices in the present
are made. Further, unless some of us here are mind readers we
will never be able to see the processes the child is undergoing.
What we see are the manifestations of those processes: what they
produce. It is from these products that we are able to make certain
inferences about process. To disregard what the child produces
puts us into an absolutely feckless position for making inferences
about those processes. In addition, without attention to what
is produced we have no basis for making any type of judgment regarding
the educational value of the activity in which the child is engaged.
Process and product therefore cannot be dichotomized. They are
like two sides of a coin. Processes can be improved by attending
to the product and products improved by making inferences about
the processes. To neglect one in favor of the other is to be pedagogically
naive.20
Heeding Eisner's admonition allows
music educators a balanced perspective for action and a flexibility
to emphasize process or product depending on the context. In a
professional situation, such as, say, an orchestra, the musicians
are expected to have achieved such high levels of expertise that
the barest minimum of process, in this case rehearsal, is needed
to produce what the orchestra exists to produce—the finest,
most polished realization of its repertoire for its audience to
experience. Product orientation drives the professional enterprise,
unlike the developmental learning, or process orientation driving
the educational enterprise. Of course the professional orchestral
musicians, no matter how high their level of expertise, must still
be concerned with process; hence their need to continually practice,
rehearse, expand their repertoire, and so forth. What differs
between children performing as part of their musical education,
and professional performing, is the balance of process
orientation and product orientation.
Keeping an appropriate balance is
an ongoing challenge for those responsible for helping young people
achieve the fullest possible value from music. For example, music
educators involved with performing groups, must, as part of their
responsibility, present to the public the outcomes—the products—of
their learning. The drive to present a respectable product, especially
when doing so brings a variety of coveted rewards, can so overwhelm
the need for attention to learning processes as to seriously jeopardize
the educational purposes of studying music.
An imbalance in the other direction
is just as hazardous. For example, the widespread assumption that
in music anything attempted must be, by virtue of attempting it,
considered acceptable; that "anything goes" because
there are no criteria for success or failure; that just "doing
it"—having "hands on"—is desirable
whether or not minds are on; all reduce process to the
trivial. Connecting process to the quality of the product assures
the veracity of the process, both musically and educatively.
The values of musical involvements,
embracing the specialness of musical experience, the positive
consequences of having it, the complementary values accruing to
it, and its universal, cultural, and individual dimensions, stem
from the interrelation of process and product on which the musical
enterprise depends. Achieving an appropriate balance between them
is an ongoing responsibility of music educators, no matter the
age of their students or the particular musical engagement being
pursued.
All humans have the capacity to
enjoy their lives—to revel in the immediacy of the pleasures
life affords. A great deal of time and effort go into, and have
always gone into, the pursuit of pleasurable experience—experience
that diverts, amuses, and delights. The pursuit of happiness is,
at least to some substantial degree, the pursuit of enjoyment.
Entertainment may be understood
as the attempt to provide pleasurable experience. While not all
entertainment requires music, much of it does. That is because
music has a singular capacity to arouse or elicit experiences
that are amusing, uplifting, and delightful. Musical sounds are
remarkably effective in their ability to mirror, or embody, the
inner qualities of enjoyment—its energy, vivaciousness,
zest, and elation. When music, all by itself, is experienced as
having such qualities, it entertains— it provides the value
of pleasure. When music accompanies a variety of other entertaining
activities it adds powerfully to their effectiveness. Music is
treasured as a medium whereby humans gain joyful experience.
Along with the capacity and need
for pleasure, all humans have the capacity and need to experience
life at depths below the surface of the commonplace. All cultures
have recognized and attempted to provide means for achieving experiences
of deep meaning for their members, experiences variously termed
"sacred," "holy," "soulful," "spiritual,"
or ''profound.''21 The
world's religions are, to a large extent, devoted to providing
such experiences, and many aspects of secular life also strive
to impart a sense of deep significance to our experiences. Such
experiences, it is commonly believed, are among the most precious
humans are capable of having.
Music, in its capacity to achieve
a sense of deep significance by going beyond the meanings made
available by words to meanings only sounds can bring into being,
has always been a major source of, or an important accompaniment
to, the quest for profound experience. That is why music's alliance
with the sacred is so strong and widespread, and why it is so
often regarded with reverence for having the power to deepen experience,
the power to console, heal, and restore wholeness, or wellness.
Music is an important medium whereby humans experience the spiritual.
Both the pleasurable and the profound
are experienced as qualities of "feeling." As pointed
out in Dimension 2 above,
feeling is inclusive of the mind and the body. The term "feeling"
is commonly used when discussing the quality of experience we
undergo because that term comes closest to capturing the way we
actually encounter experience—we "feel" it subjectively,
that is, as something happening within ourselves. The human capacity
to feel— to consciously experience one's self and one's
world subjectively, including sensations, emotions for which descriptive
words exist (love, fear, joy, etc.), and complex feelings for
which no words exist—is at the heart and center of the human
condition.22 In a real
sense, to feel consciously is to be human. (It is interesting,
and telling, that in much of science fiction, nonhuman creatures,
masquerading in the guise of being human, are found out as impostors
by their incapacity to feel.)
The range of music's power to embody
and display feeling is enormous, encompassing the lightest, most
fleeting diversions, the most complex and weighty profundities,
and everything in between. No point along that vast continuum
of feeling is exclusive of or entirely separate from, implications
from other points.
That is, there is significance
in the pleasurable and joy in the profound. We would not, and
could not, exist at any one level of feeling to the exclusion
of others: to do so would be to live a unidimensional life. Music
serves human needs to feel by capturing and exhibiting feeling
across the entire range of its possibilities. No single experience
of musical feeling excludes or diminishes the importance of, and
need for, any of the others.
Further, music does not simply imitate,
or reproduce, those feelings available from all the other activities
and engagements in human life. Music's ability to create feeling
and make it available for experiencing inevitably transforms feeling
into the materials and processes of which music is created —sounds
organized in culturally provided configurations. That is, feeling,
at whatever point in the continuum of its possibilities, is transformed
by music into "feeling-as-musical," just as feeling
in poetry is transformed into "feeling-as-poetic," feeling
in painting into "feeling-as-visual," and so forth for
all the arts. Musical experience, as all artistic/aesthetic experience,
both dwells in the realm of human feeling and transforms that
realm into its particular way of being.
In doing so, music is able to add
a unique dimension to the capacities of humans to feel. Music
goes beyond— makes special, or transforms—the feelings
in nonmusical life, adding another dimension to the human capacity
to feel, a dimension not available except through music. Music
is an essential way to expand, deepen, and vivify the feelings
humans are able to experience. It is among the most powerful means
humans possess to fulfill their need for an abundantly feelingful
life.
No single, particular music is more
or less capable of providing significant experiences than others.
While evidence is scant about which musics tend to cause deep
experiences of feeling, indications are that such experiences
take place "within a well-defined community of musical expectations,"23
in which familiarity and self-identification play important roles.
"Soul music”—music in which people find a sense
of identity, of selfness, reaching to the core of their personal/communal
experience of the world—is a precious, self-defining, and
self-realizing possession. While some are likely to "find
soul" in the music of the Western classical tradition, because
of their societal context, experience, and training, many find
their deepest musical satisfactions elsewhere. Fully recognizing
this reality, and legitimizing it by respecting and including
for study and experience the many musics treasured by people,
including but going beyond those of traditional Western styles,
remains a pressing agenda for the music education profession.
The need for rich and diverse feelingful
experience, so powerfully fulfilled by music, exists throughout
our lives. At every age, including infancy, a life being "well
lived" is a life being lived with the fullest possible richness
of feeling. Whatever the quality of feeling music affords, from
the amusing to the soulful, from the fleeting to the indelible,
from the frivolous to the passionate, all are precious contributions
to a central value humans seem to share—the value of life
being fully lived because it is being abundantly experienced.
At bottom, this value, with all its ramifications for and support
of the many values complementary to it and arising as consequences
of it, is likely to provide a foundation on which music educators
can build a community of belief, allowing them to act effectively
and in solidarity toward helping people benefit from the significant
values of music.
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