To beat or not to beat? On music, violence, and education

ABSTRACT

In this article I venture the hypothesis that music confronts education with the possibility to think violence in ways that are both inherently educational and radically affirmative. Beginning with a reflection on a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which emphatically evokes the violence within the genesis of music, I then move in a different direction in the second section, which surveys how extant (music-) educational has thematized violence so far. Concluding that this thematization, notwithstanding many nuances, invariably implies a negative validation of violence, I devote the third section to a search for more affirmative concepts of educational violence. Eventually, this culminates in a return to the issue of a possibly intrinsic, positive relation between violence and music education. I first discuss this possibility more generally, connecting the discussed affirmative concepts of violence to the antipodal music-educational ideas of Plato and Nietzsche. Finally, in the last section, returning to Browning’s poem, I specify it by reclaiming the particular violence of music’s instrumental aspects for music education.

KEYWORDS:

• Music education
• music
• violence
• affirmative pedagogy
• masochism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For the full text: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43729/a-musical-instrument.

2. Cf. also Claude Debussy’s Syrinx, a famous piece for solo traverso.

3. There is even a vague sense of abduction here – ‘he brought it out of the river’ – perhaps in reference to Pan’s chase of Syrinx (cf. infra).

4. It is in The Parasite (Serres 1982, 15) that Michel Serres explicitly connects Pan’s ‘panic’ to noise, while also giving to the latter a very specific significance. For now however – within the framework of our poetic analysis – I consider the term sufficiently self-explanatory.

5. E.g. ‘splashing and paddling’, ‘hacked and hewed’, ‘his hard bleak steel’, ‘piercing sweet’, ‘as a reed with the reeds’. Significantly perhaps, it is especially the noisy, flute-like [i:] vowel which is omnipresent in the poem.

6. Cf. Giorgio Agamben’s similar observations about the musical ‘pulse’ of Pascoli’s poetry (Agamben 1999, 100).

7. These thoughts are also indebted to Robert Graves’ famous retelling of the mythology surrounding Pan; see Graves (1955, part 1), 100ff.

8. Cf. respectively: Politics VIII.5; Kant (2007, 470ff). (Lectures on Pedagogy).

9. See especially Socrates’ discussion with Protagoras on the subject of moral education: Protagoras 324a ff.; 352 c ff. Obviously, the contemporary anti-punishment discourses have a much more intricate history, which in ‘recent’ times for instance includes the major influence of Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish (Foucault [1975] 1985).

10. This obviously is a generalization, which I allow myself here for the sake of analytical brevity and clarity. In many examples one will find that the different lines of conceptualization also intersect or intertwine.

11. Also compare in all these (and following) respects to the UNESCO document Non-Violence in Education (2002), written by Jean-Marie Muller.

12. It goes without saying that Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed has also been a crucial precursor of such educational critiques of violence.

13. With regard to the strongly Foucauldian influence among these studies, it could still be noticed that the late Foucault does provide a certain opening onto a more affirmative idea of violence, with his sadomasochistically inspired ideas of ascetic exercise and ‘techniques of the self’ (cf. Allen 2014).

14. Who are generally still represented in strictly humanist (though less ‘personalizing’) terms.

15. Though I take this phrase from Willem Schinkel (2010), who does not attribute any specifically educational value to it, I believe it catches best how some educationalists have ‘ontologized’ violence in relation to education. On another note, also in the case of these perspectives, the question often remains as to how much they keep privileging human kind as the species pre-eminently responsible for this flourishing/reduction. Cf. once more Muller’s UNESCO study (2002), where it is stated that ‘violence is uniquely human, because reason is so likewise.’

16. Cf. footnote 13.

17. Interestingly, on more than one occasion Maffesoli speaks of a polyphony of violence.

18. Again, coincidentally (?), the whole book (which does not deal with Benjamin alone) is structured as a symphony with different movements (allegro, moderato etc.) – even though music hardly plays an explicit role in it.

19. E.g. when he contends that most equality and tolerance discourses are animated by just another variety of the same violent envy that has driven so many other, less extolled, human accomplishments (Žižek 2008, 140ff.).

20. Who himself gives the less provocative example of a revolution that ends up using its revolutionary violence to establish a new hegemonic regime, over and against the previous one (Benjamin [1921] 1996). (As such, this tension also reminds of Paulo Freire’s warning that the pedagogical emancipation of the oppressed should always mind to include the oppressors.) For a more critical evaluation of Benjamin, by the way, see Schinkel (2010, 84–106).

21. Which Žižek surprisingly ends up calling love (Ibid., 205).

22. To be fair, this notion of the ‘event’ is not properly Žižekian, and when it is in fact referred to in educational theory (cf. Vlieghe and Zamojski 2017), it is usually in reference to Badiou (who himself does not, however, associate it so explicitly with violence).

23. In this article, Matthew Charles discusses the educational implications of Benjamin’s ideas on violence more directly and exhaustively, issuing in a very stimulating critique of neoliberal discourses productivity and creativity.

24. Cf. parallel movements in Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense and The Logic of Sensation.

25. Which is picked up once more from Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’.

26. And Guattari of course.

27. Cf. the catatonic state typical of the worst kinds of psychotic crises (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 2004, 356).

28. Or perhaps, in these days of radical student-centeredness, the personal choice of the student.

29. In fact, it is stressed that here it always concerns at least two subjects subjecting themselves.

30. In the text, I refer solely to Plato’s dialogues on the basis of their commonly accepted section lay-out. I myself made use of the Cambridge University series of Plato’s works published by Hackett (Plato 1997).

31. In fact, also in the military sense, as Plato argues that nothing inspires a soldier with courage so effectively as music can (ref.).

32. For this reason Plato holds that ultimately the real mousikos is a purely theoretical musician, who can ‘enjoy’ the arithmetic sequences of harmonic proportions without need for empirical trial-and-error practice (Philebus 56a).

33. Cf. Louth (2012) for an educational-philosophical analysis of this notion.

34. Compare to Kant’s later comment that music has something essentially ‘inurbane’, since its noisy character does not allow to remain within the (static) bounds set by civil society (Kant 2000, 207).

35. For a broader perspective on Nietzsche’s different evaluations of violence, see Pieniążek (2019).

36. This is, to some extent, also what Nietzsche’s later critique of Wagner consists in: it has become too idealist, in the sense of imposing certain transcendent, ideological representations to contain (rather than multiply and variegate) the music’s immanent, material violence.

37. Which then again entails the very democratic thought that, in principle, any practice or material could become educational, as long as it can be made – in the given educational situation – to ‘innervate’ educands’ musical sensibilities to the point of self-conquest (Selbstüberwindung).

38. Like this article, I mainly have the situation in Western Europe in mind (though it would seem that similar tendencies are noticeable elsewhere).

39. For the sake of brevity I will not deal here with the (very pertinent) question how such a thesis relates to the (educational) practice of singing, where after all the ‘instrument’ remains fully internal to the musician.

40. Interestingly, Frédérique Montandon comes to very similar conclusions, even though she bases herself on a largely Rousseauian framework, according to which instrumental music education builds upon the experience that ‘underneath’ its cover of cultural signification, humankind is in fact naturally attracted to the resistant objectivity of things. In part, Adorno clearly speaks out against such naturalism, which he accuses of having paved the way for an uncritical and politically dangerous musical culture that is blind to the socio-historical forces which always already (co-)determine a person’s (or instrument’s) ‘natural’ musical sensibility.

41. Cf. Serres [1995] 2017, xxxvi–xxxvii), where Serres hints at the etymological relation between ‘percolation’ and ‘culture’, from the Latin colere, ‘cultivating’, which starts with the plough’s ‘turning’ and ‘sieving’ of the earth.