The question of why humans value
music has eluded all efforts to answer it conclusively despite
many attempts throughout history. However, useful explanations
have accumulated over time, serving well to provide enough agreement,
or persuasiveness, to allow communities of people, such as music
educators, to feel that they share a common belief system upon
which they can build cooperative actions.
One significant orientation to
the values of music has been toward its role in enhancing the
depth, quality, scope, and intensity of inner human experience
in ways particular to how music operates; ways that distinguish
music from other human endeavors. This orientation has preoccupied
philosophers of music, whose interests tend to be directed toward
understanding the "nature" of music—its particularity
as a human creation and the values it serves as such. Taking
a philosophical stance, two characteristics of music may be
suggested as bases for its values in human life.
1. Music makes human experience
"special." It aims to achieve a level of experience
different from the commonplace. Music makes ordinary experience
extraordinary, or insignificant experience significant. Music
creates an alternative to the reality of the everyday; an alternative
to the ordinary way of being.
2. Music, unlike all the other
arts, depends on the use of sounds, organized in ways various
cultures sanction, to create the sense of specialness it adds
to human experience. Music is unique in its use of ordered sounds
as the basic material by which it accomplishes its "transformation"
(passing over from one form to another) of experience.
Five dimensions of musical value
may be identified as related to its distinctive nature.
1. All the various ways to be engaged
in musical experiences—such as composing, performing,
improvising and listening—enable both the creation of
musical meanings and the sharing of musical meanings with
others. The value of doing so is in making available an endless
source of significant experiences uniquely gained through
music. To seek the meaningful satisfactions of musical creating
and sharing is to pursue musical value as an end. This end
of musically meaningful experience has been sought by humans
throughout history.
2. Many positive consequences grow
out of the pursuit of musical meaning as an end. To be human
is to make meaning and seek meaning. A life full of meaning,
including musical meaning, is a life fulfilled in one of its
primary needs. The consequences of such fulfillment are a
sense of wholeness, wellness, and satisfaction. Effects on
individuals' physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual
health are profound. These effects radiate outward to the
health of families, communities, nations, and cultures, all
of which depend, ultimately, on the well-being of their members.
3. Many values not dependent
on the uniqueness of musical experiencing are believed to be
gained as a result of involvements with music. When the pursuit
of these values requires that musical experiences and learnings
be diluted in order to achieve them, music is being used as
a means. In most cases the achievement of these values does
not require any change from the pursuit of musical values as
an end. Such values may then be considered complementary to
musical ones, and can be regarded as welcome, positive contributions
of programs devoted to musical learnings. Music educators may
choose to promote such values to gain additional support for
music study.
1. The long-standing idea that "thinking"
is the supreme capacity of the human mind, and that thinking
is separate and distinct from the body and the feelings, is
giving way to the recognition that thinking, knowing, and
understanding—what is generally called "intelligence"—takes
place in a variety of forms and necessarily includes involvements
of the body and feelings.
2. Human intelligence occurs in multiple
forms beyond its traditional association with verbal and mathematical
thinking. Musical ways of thinking demonstrate intelligence
in the fullest sense of that word—the mind functioning
in a reasoned way to create meaning. The capacity to think
musically is inborn in human beings.
3. Intelligence requires the involvement
of the body, and the body-centered imaginative power to form
connections among experiences. Musically intelligent functioning
is grounded in the body's capacity to undergo the dynamic
qualities of sound and their interconnections as imagined
by composers, performers, improvisers, and listeners. Sound
is a particularly powerful medium for engaging the body in
acts of creating meaning.
4. Human intelligence,
in addition to taking many forms beyond the verbal and numerical,
and in addition to being centered within the realities of the
human body, is saturated with feelings that vivify and color
life. Musical meaning arises from the feelings music allows
us to create and share. The unification of mind, body, and feeling
in the creation of musical meaning adds an indispensable source
of value to human life.
1. At one level, musical meaning is
universally sought by all humans and is cherished universally
for the values it adds to life. Music can be conceived, at
this level, as a generic possession of the human species.
2. At another level, music can be regarded
as a phenomenon particular to the culture in which it exists,
both reflecting and creating the values and ways of being
in that culture.
3. At still another level the values
of music can be understood as the possession of individuals.
Only individuals create and respond to music, even if cooperatively.
"Universals," or "cultures," are only
abstractions from individual experience.
4. These three dimensions
of musical value need not be conceived as contradictory. All
humans are, at the same time, like all other humans, like some
other humans, and like no other humans. All three levels of
the human condition must be acknowledged as contributing to
the values of musical experience: an awareness of all three
adds immeasurably to the depth and quality of musical valuing.
That music fulfills values at all three levels helps account
for its indispensable contribution to the quality of human life.
1. Successful musical products, whether
compositions, performances of them, or improvisations, are
precious for the benefits they offer to people as sources
of significant meanings. Often a particularly excellent musical
product or body of work is considered a cultural treasure,
representing the highest achievement of which humans in that
culture are capable. Much of music education is devoted to
sharing with students the bounties of musical meaning embodied
in successful musical products.
2. No product, musical or otherwise,
can come into being without the processes that create it.
Acts of creative musical imagination, involving mind, body,
and feeling, and encompassing universal, cultural, and individual
dimensions of experience, engage musical intelligence deeply
and powerfully in generating meanings. The experience of musical
creativity profoundly satisfies the human need to be generative.
3. Music as process
and as product are interdependent: one cannot exist without
the other and the values of each depend on the values of the
other.
An overemphasis of either,
at the expense of the other, weakens musical experience and
diminishes its value. Effective education in music continually
aims toward a balanced representation of both product and process.
1. At one level, music is an essential
source of pleasurable experience, either by itself or as allied
with a variety of other pursuits of enjoyment. The capacity
of music to express the energy, zest, and elation of pleasure
is endless, causing music to be treasured as a means for gaining
the values of life experienced as joyful.
2. At another level, music serves the
need for experience below the surface of the commonplace,
in which deep meanings are uncovered—meanings often
called sacred, or profound. Such experiences of soulfulness,
of spiritual significance, are commonly believed to be among
the most precious of which humans are capable. Music's alliance
with this level of experience has been acknowledged throughout
history as adding a profound realm of value to human life.
3. Music creates
possibilities of feeling available only from music. It does
not simply imitate or reproduce joyful or profound experiences
available in other ways. No single kind or style of music has
sole possession of this capacity; all musics can serve and have
served the values of significant experience. The need for such
experience exists for all humans, at every time of life from
early childhood to old age.
Music education exists to make
musical values more widely and deeply shared. While no single
explanation can completely and ultimately define music's values,
sufficient agreement to provide a basis for communal action
is possible and desirable. At this time in history, a viable
belief system for music educators may be achieved if an attitude
emphasizing inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness is taken.
In this paper an attempt has been made to explain that musical
values can be regarded as both end and complementary means;
as encompassing the mind, body, and feelings; as being universal,
culturally specific, and individual; as deriving from musical
products and processes; and as embracing experiences across
the entire spectrum of human feeling as made available by the
entire array of the world's musics. Each music educator has
the responsibility to forge a persuasive professional position
from this and other attempts to solve the age-old puzzle of
why humans value music.
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