Growing donkey ears: the animal politics of music education

ABSTRACT

This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely humanizing influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without contesting the idea itself that music education can be a humanizing agency, we will try to show that such humanization cannot be achieved without acknowledging music’s inhuman, animal forces. While first this paradox is elaborated through a philosophical reading of the Ancient myth of Midas’s donkey ears, a second part will expand on its implications for the political bearing of music’s contemporary public-educational (ir)relevance. Ultimately, we claim that by paying closer attention to the ways in which music allows animal ‘nonsense’ to disrupt processes of collective human sense-making, we can start thinking of practices of music education that might truly engender a renewed sense of humanity.

KEYWORDS:

• Music education
• theriofilia
• humane education
• posthumanism and education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Onze Taal (s.d.). Iemand een oor aannaaien. Accessed on 11 January 2020, https://onzetaal.nl/taaladvies/iemand-een-oor-aannaaien/.

2. In a more famous episode, Midas asks Dionysus to grant him the faculty of transforming everything he touches into gold. Not much later Midas realizes that this ‘gift’ bars him from access to any food, and needs to ask his patron to revoke the favor.

3. As for instance Pindar’s odes attest, these contests, which often doubled as sports events, were replete with political, religious and educational significations.

4. This setting is the reprisal of another contest, between Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, who is flayed alive by his adversary after losing their bet (Metamorphoses VI.382–400).

5. In fact, it is stated that Tmolus’ judgment is accepted by all.

6. In Ovid’s formulations this pertains to both the lyre’s luxurious make-up (inlaid with gems and ivory) and the knowledgeable play (docto pollice) of the instrumentalist, who himself is styled ‘the paragon of craftmanship’ (artificis status ipse fuit).

7. With Plato’s distinctly dogmatic clarity: ‘[music] should follow the words’ (Republic III.398d).

8. Also when it concerned a wind instrument: in that case almost always a vocalist was provided. Cf. Plato’s Laws VII.670a1-3, where the legislator criticizes the virtuosic leisure of purely instrumental music.

9. Although simpler versions of the lyre and more refined ones of the flute existed just as well (West 1992, 48–80).

10. Ovid consistently names the flute by way of ‘reed’ synonyms (harundo, calamus, cannae).

11. Gloriously re-actualized in the winds-dominated music of Debussy (Après-midi d’un faune) and the early Stravinsky (Sacre du printemps); these also explicitly evoke the erotic connotations of Dionysiac music, to which Ovid’s story only refers obliquely, at the start, in noting Pan’s entertainment of some nymphs.

12. This observation, commented on by Deleuze and Guattari and Mladen Dolar (2006, 46) after them, hails back to Aristotle’s Politics (VIII.1341a). (In connection also to the previous note, West 1992, 26) remarks that the mostly female auletes often alternated their piping during banquets with the performance of fellatios, making for a double deterritorialization.)

13. Who are, noticeably, described as ‘unstable’ and ‘moving’ – not such negative traits when it comes to musical hearing?

14. Cf. Plato’s endorsement of Dionysiac rites and music in function of ‘public health’ (Laws VII.790d).

15. Satyrs were mostly depicted with the features of horses and (later on) goats.

16. By this we mean, on a more descriptive level: any form of music education that is made publicly available, and does not depend on (merely) private, individual initiatives and means (e.g. music education at school, or at the music academy). Yet as announced, it is precisely also part of this paper’s intent to refine the said description of publicness by looking into some of its more specifically musical aspects.

17. In the basic sense that everyone will recognize, to a higher or lesser extent, the extremely direct formative power that music can have on both individual and social feelings, behaviors and practices.

18. These are today the two dominant trends in the philosophy of music education, with the older aestheticist tradition strongly clinging to the sui generis formalism on which all ‘pure’ musical experience would depend; and the more recently developed praxialist tradition pleading for a more critical, embodied, pluralist educational practice of music. For a more elaborate discussion of these accounts, see Koopman (1998).

19. Cf. Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘negative dialectical’ interpretation of the story of Odysseus and the Sirens (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986, 34).

20. This view is most eloquently defended in Schopenhauer’s ‘metaphysics of music’, albeit that he still holds this musical trait to be the sole privilege of humankind, on account of its unique transcendental dignity (Schopenhauer [1844] 2010, §52).

21. Adapted from an irretrievable quote of Felix Mendelssohn, who, counter to assertions of its radically indeterminate significance, maintained that music is so determinate as to mean what it is and be what it means.

22. Which can be just as dubiously humanist in its premises and results, for instance by backing up neurodiscourses that claim proof of objectively natural causal relations between music and neuronal circuits inducing human well-being.

23. Cf. the way both Western and non-Western musical traditions mimic and process ‘natural sounds’; e.g. (within classical music) Haydn’s Schöpfung, Saint-Saëns’ Carnaval of the Animals and Messiaen’s Catalogue of Birds.

24. Arbo and Arbo list many similar examples from Ancient sources. Cf. Lucretius, who observes that most likely music and language co-originated from imitations of natural (animal) sounds.

25. Here Socrates describes how people who were so enchanted by the songs of the Muses that they forgot to eat and drink, died only so that their souls could transmigrate to the bodies of (ceaselessly musicking) cicadas.

26. The immense popularity of music festivals today still attests to this potentiality: beyond any set political agenda, they literally mobilize people into collective ‘tendencies’ affecting themselves through different, mutually imbricating musical styles of experience, agency and belonging.

27. Cf. Crocker’s analysis (2007), based on Serres and Agamben, of the ‘parasitic’ agency of noise.

28. Heller-Roazen (2005, 14ff.) indicates that children, before acquiring the definite phonetic range of its mother tongue, can experiment with vocal range to an almost infinite degree. The only moments when this phonetic potentiality is allowed to return in adulthood, are related to acts of laughing, making uncontrollable noises and singing.

29. For more information: https://opmaatorkest.be/; https://www.antwerpsymphonyorchestra.be/nl/opmaatorkest (in Dutch).

30. Cf. similarities with the argument developed in Joris Vlieghe’s assessment of the educational value of laughter (Vlieghe 2014).

31. Hence the impossibility and danger of moralizing music. Just as many of Shostakovich’s works were officially composed and performed in celebration of Stalinist Soviet ideology, they equally harbored an officious critical potentiality, often tolerated because of its elusively ‘unspoken’ voice. In terms of Midas’s story: music can always ‘play dumb’, like an animal.