De-sacralizing the European: music appreciation (then) and music listening (now)

ABSTRACT

Common approaches to teaching music listening emphasise ‘attentive listening’ and ‘active listening’ (Campbell, Patricia Shehan. 2005. “Deep Listening to the Musical World.” Music Educators Journal 92 (1): 30–36. doi:10.2307/3400224) and minimise explorations of everyday music listening practices (Madsen, Clifford, and John Geringer. 2001. “A Focus of Attention Model for Meaningful Listening.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 1 (147): 103–108) The US music appreciation movement of the early twentieth century provides a window into the development of this state of affairs. Early on, movement advocates sacralized the music of the European classical tradition, hailing it intellectually, morally, and spiritually superior to other types of music – call this the ‘stylistic hierarchy.’ Later, textbook authors began sacralizing listener engagements instead of the music itself, e.g. ‘concert/attentive listening’ was deemed superior to ‘everyday/background listening.’ The rhetoric of the new ‘engagement hierarchy’ allowed authors to abandon explicit claims of European classical music's superiority. However, I argue that the engagement hierarchy actually maintains the superiority of the tradition and enables unwitting music educators to maintain its superiority even today. A complete de-sacralization of the European tradition thus requires music education professionals to dismantle both the ‘stylistic hierarchy’ and the ‘engagement hierarchy.’ I propose the incorporation of musical hermeneutics into the music classroom as one way to do so.

KEYWORDS:

• Music education
• music listening
• music appreciation
• praxialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rebecca Rinsema, PhD, is author of the book Listening in Action: Teaching Music in the Digital Age (Ashgate/Routledge, 2017) and forthcoming chapter on hermeneutics and popular music education in Coming of Age: Popular Music in Academia (Maize, 2017). Her research relates to music listening technology and experience, enactive perception, popular music, and pedagogy. As a singer, she specialises in performing early music. Rinsema is Lecturer of Music in General Studies at Northern Arizona University.

Notes

1 See Westerlund (2002) and Rinsema (2017) for more on the place of music listening in these polemics.

2 See for example Newman and Scholes (1950) who argue that music appreciation in the United States can be traced to the writings of Englishman James Burney of the eighteenth century who sought to provide the lay person with the means to understand music works.

3 For more on Kramer's hermeneutic windows and his theory more generally see Kramer (1990), Kramer (2011), and Kramer (2002).

4 See Rinsema (2017) for an example of what hermeneutic exploration can look like in a classroom context.

5 Hendrix's Woodstock performance of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ is a rich site for hermeneutic exploration. Here I use it to simply convey the concept of allusion in music without going into the full complexities of the possible meanings of the use of ‘Taps’ or the other allusions within this performance.

6 Empirical support for this particular adaptation comes from Rinsema (2017).

7 Also see Miller (2012, 10–11) for more on the importance of rooting musical interpretations in performance and practice.