Introduction to the Special Issue: Posthuman Perspectives for Music Education

Introduction

It has been an honour and privilege to work on this special issue for Music Education Research in the year that the journal celebrates its 25th birthday. The issue’s call for papers came in response to an emergent strand of research presentations at the RiME conference in April 2023 that worked with ideas from posthuman, postqualitative research paradigms.

The assembled papers in the issue convey the perspectives for music education research from posthumanism at this moment in music education research’s chronology. The assemblage proposes ideas and approaches to research that look beyond the human towards a multispecies storying of music as part of the world’s ongoing materialisation. Following the intention of Issue 1 of this volume, I hope this second special issue will continue ‘to generate ripples of new thinking and research’ (Stakelum and Tarrant 2024) for music education research.

The articles are grouped around four themes: Voices and voicing; Towards posthuman research for music education; Considering music teaching; and Early childhood music education.

Content

Voices, and voicing

Dave Camlin’s study with community choir participants explores singing for health and the measurable factors that contribute to health and wellbeing impacts of singing for humans. He acknowledges though that these individual causes are entwined irreducibly to contribute to transcendent ‘group experiences’ . His previous work on entrainment is brought into play to suggest that any matter that oscillates can be included in the experience of singing-with. He studied the participants’ perceptions of the impact of the more-than-human natural world on the human experience of singing. Connections with nature and a sense of honouring the outdoor place and ‘making a stand with Mother Earth’ led to a non-religious spiritual sense amongst participants who experienced singing with and/or singing for the earth. There are suggestions for future research into interspecies limbic regulation to understand agency of the more-than-human and human.

Samantha Dieckmann reads Rochelle Chadwick’s posthuman voice analytical framework, with musicological voice studies through an ethnographic study of a community choir. The article takes participants’ experiences of singing in and with a professional recording studio in the making of a recording of their voices to be played in a train station. The breathy embodiment of voice becoming a controllable digitised waveform to be played to unknown Others for their judgement. Dieckmann’s adoption of a posthuman lens has enabled the recording studio to be seen as a location for vibrant matter to play with the bodily production of voice and socio-affective-material factors that together shape a music learning experience.

Florence Brady works with the Natural Voice Network and their diverse, individual rights-based approaches to choral singing. She plays with posthuman materialist notions of the voice as unstable and contingent, emerging together with the spaces in which it sounds. Brady takes her attendance at a participatory performance of Little Amal’s (the 3.5 m puppet) ‘Acts of Welcome’ walk where the voiceless puppet was invited to sing. Through the complementary exploration of voice-as-gesture, she finds that voice is always plural and active. Amal’s ‘voice’ was a becoming-with the cane and carbon fibre of her construction, her gestures, the bodies of the puppeteers and the voices singing to and with her. The posthumanities offer Brady the opportunity to consider the voice as not just about the human subject but as an assemblage of multivalent human and non-human components playing with communal effects.

Towards posthuman research for music education

Several papers address the epistemological and ontological questions raised by posthumanism as a research approach. Onto-epistemology, put forward by Karen Barad (2007) as a knowing-being state is the focus for some, others utilise diffraction as a physical, philosophical, and/or methodological approach for postqualitative research.

Pamela Burnard and Nathalie Koebli reimagine music education research as an active process of making with non-human matter, bodies and the materialisation of music. Working with Deluzo-Guatarrian cartography as research method (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) they work with examples of children’s engagement with sound making in museum spaces to propose that music education is an in-the-making embodiment, dependent on connections. They acknowledge the impenetrable language of posthumanism, ending with some clear practical implications and pointers for music education research and practice.

Mari Fjeldstad’s paper ‘Evaluating the quality of posthuman music education research’ arises from her experience of the physical and musical phenomenon of diffraction in sound making in her work as a violin teacher. Diffraction is the intersection of waves of light/sound/water or other matter that leads to the creation of new patterns. In the case of music this can be a change to the quality of the sound. Fjeldstad works with Barad’s ideas of diffraction as she considers the diffractive patterns made when qualitative quality criteria for research are diffracted through posthuman ideas of response-ability. It is a careful unpicking of the consonances and dissonances emergent in this diffractive process that leads Fjeldstad to propose that posthuman, postqualitative research entails an attentiveness to what is enabled and/or restricted by the research, asking what kinds of world/s or future/s might our research bring forth?

The account of three scholars’ process of becoming feminist posthuman music education researchers is a testament to their sense of kinship. Mari Fjeldstad, Synnøve Kvile and Runa Hester Jenssen play with the figuration of the ‘voice’ to present stories of stretching and being stretched as they encountered posthuman ideas for the first time. They use an image of the theories that they think with become the dwelling place for their academic habitation. Their turn to posthumanism called for reconstructions or extensions to their academic ‘homes’ in order for their voices to find space to fully resonate. The stories they tell include a ‘Cracking’ event, where their researcher voices have been under stress or threat in the process of be(com)ing posthumanist. The researchers are established in the field of Western music education, although finding it flexible and accommodating they have been led towards other disciplines of research to help their understanding about who or what might be missing from the music education research/practice space. They conclude by explaining how there is a ‘voice’ change for the becoming posthuman researcher that takes time to learn how to use effectively.

Considering music teaching

Victoria Kinsella, Martin Fautley and Adam Whittaker apply a posthuman lens to a pre-existing study that examined a partnership project between secondary schools in UK, music teachers, music leaders and music organisations. In this paper they turn their attention to the various bodies: human and non-human that intersect and affect the learning-teaching space. Policy, pedagogies, instruments and spatial elements are all included in a desire to emphasise intricate interconnections among all involved. Music education policy and neoliberal discourse position the music teacher as an object in a system predicated on observations, grading and marks. Taking a diffractive approach the classroom can be seen as an assemblage of materials, artefacts and spatial elements to impact learning. Iterative diffractions with fieldnotes led to the emergence of the questions of what counts as effective practice and assessment for children at risk of exclusion because of various learning needs? The more open fluid spaces opened-up opportunities for deep intra-action. The posthuman lens afforded the chance to illuminate alternative ways of knowing that enables educators to celebrate students’ diverse musical expressions, seeing them as active participants in their own learning.

Carolyn Cooke takes the concept of sound in educational spaces. She argues that recent educational policy in UK contexts positions talk between humans as the currency for learning. Notions of ‘correct’ sounds for listening and playing are discussed in connection with the concept of a reified fixed product that is abstracted and detached from the environment. She proposes that sound be thought of as an ‘active participant’ in dialogic pedagogy and uses this notion in her study with pre-service music teachers as they explore the idea of teaching as an improvisatory act. The posthumanist lens allows Cooke to challenge conceptions of sound within the music classroom. She attends to what sounds ‘do’ rather than what they ‘are’ and invites the creation of learning spaces with conditions for sonic play experimentation. She found this a mode within music education for becoming conscious of the ‘intra-animation’ with materials, environment and humans that heightens our attention to the affect of sound on and with human bodies.

Ryan Lewis’s theoretical paper presents an onto-epistemological shift in thinking about the identity of musician-teachers such that the musician-teacher is inseparable from the world, coming to being through a relational ontology. Lewis considers the dichotomy of musician-teacher identities, applying posthuman ideas he embraces the messiness of the topic when eschewing binary thinking of personal and professional selves as either musician and/or teacher. Lewis has suggestions for identity research in music education that locates the researcher in an entangled becoming-with position with participants. In this way, he suggests, it is possible to meet the musician-teacher at the interstitial point where their agency and personal/professional selves are entangled and porous.

Early childhood music education

Four papers are collected here:

My own paper plays with the non-animal, non-plant system of fungi and the mycelium to propose an ecological framing for music education research. Orienting the gaze away from the human at the centre of an ecological system it is possible to become aware of non-human materials as active participants in music making. Playing with a diffractive methodological approach concepts from Friedrich Froebel are read through with posthuman writings, and notions from the mycelium in an analysis of a young child’s musical play event with an adult. Sound was found to be highly intra-active and hyphal in its ability to cross boundaries and connect with other matter. Music can be known in bodies as well as minds. The mycelial approach to research locates the researcher as entangled – affecting and affected by the data. The challenge for researchers and practitioners is to ‘be’ in the learners’-time-space in an authentically entangled state.

Ursula Crickmay takes Covid-19 as a ruption – rather than a disruption - she frames the pandemic as an eruption or point of emergence. The article reports an early years music project with a class of children aged two to four years old, their teachers, musicians and project manager. All the musical activities had to take place in the online space. Music making as ‘usual’ was not possible. The posthuman lens allowed Crickmay to think differently about listening, and the body in which music learning takes place. The zoom world created a space for seeing and listening differently to young children. What she wanted to hear was not possible in this space, so ‘emergent listening’ became more useful. Working with the screen and the Heterotopia (time control) of Zoom she discovered that the online space was to be far from a neutral mediator in the music learning events.

Alison Harmer puts forward a view from the flattened ontological thinking of Graham Harman, Object Oriented Ontology. This philosophical approach counters Baradian concepts of intra-action and entangled materiality towards the being of things, such as a song, as finite with independence from humans, repertoire and its utility.

She posits that it is the ‘allure’ of musical play that explains how objects are drawn into being together. Allure includes charm, the bewitching quality of musical play activities. Playing with ‘Ring O Roses’ she explores these ideas to speculate about the realities of song-game-activity. Her piece positions young children’s musical play as an alluring, vast space to ‘vibe differently’. The musical play space, she suggests, is only accidentally useful but absolutely magical.

Karen Wickett takes on ideas from posthumanism to discuss the less tangible aspects of collaborations and project working that typifies a lot of music work in early childhood in UK. She reports a workforce development project with an early childhood studies department lecturer and an early childhood music-arts organisation project lead-musician. Methods included the use of arts materials to iteratively think-with about their joint working. Through this process it was possible to revisit the project and become aware of the significance of their values and beliefs. They both acted in resistance to neoliberal forces and were able to perceive that the fleeting nature of learning opportunities presented through the project-model of short-term opportunity for students can nonetheless allow for deep play and learning.

Conclusion

In conclusion I draw together some of the strands from this diverse group of articles and their lines of flight. The adoption of posthuman lenses for research of music education have altered the gaze in research so that the materials, environment and non-human participants come more clearly into view as vibrant, active and interconnected in the teaching-learning of music. Understandings have been possible for collaborations in music education, online music teaching-learning, the voice, musician-teacher identity, quality and response-ability, the song as an entity and models of practice. For me, ripples generated by this assemblage have highlighted the dense language and concepts and hard-to-grapple-with terms that must be overcome in order to work with the ideas of posthumanism. Also present is the ongoing impact of neoliberalism - part of the era of the Capitalocene (Haraway 2016) that considers the huge impact of my and possibly your ‘ongoing daily assent in practice to this thing called capitalism’ (50) which has affected the world in multiple and diverse disastrous ways since the industrial age of the nineteenth century. Similarly, I have been struck by the attention given to the Earth as a matter of concern, pointing me towards Haraway’s statement that ‘We are at stake to each other’ (Haraway 2016, 55) (the ‘each other’ being every form of matter on earth).

Reading and entwining with this selection of articles, the issues they raise and the thinking arising from those points has filled me with hope and curiosity for future lines of inquiry and experiments with posthuman frames for music education research.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.