Towards an ethical music education? Looking through the lens of Levinas

Abstract

What happens when pupils encounter unfamiliar musical expressions in the music classroom? What responsibility do we have towards those whose music we ‘use’? Underlying these concerns is the need for an ethical underpinning for music education. Drawing on a year-long ethnographically informed case study of music-making in the lives of a class of 13 and 14 year olds, this article begins to explore an ethical orientation towards music education, conceptualised as a means of encounter with the Other. Strands of just one pupil's everyday experiences and perspectives are examined in the light of the work of French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for whom ‘the Other’ suggests an absolute difference, a stranger whom we encounter face-to-face and who calls from us a profound ethical response. Themes emerging from this exploration have implications for music educators as existing models of what it means to come to know in the music classroom are broken open. The curriculum is one way in which the relation to the Other can be realised, but is a site in which this obligation and responsibility to the Other is ‘commonly, casually, systematically denied’ (Standish, P. 2008. Levinas and the language of the curriculum. In Levinas and education: At the intersection of faith and reason, ed. Denise Egéa-Kuehne, 61. New York: Routledge).

Keywords:

• music in secondary school
• Levinas
• ethical orientation
• the Other
• performativity
• curriculum
• music as encounte

Notes

1. Levinas was not always unambiguous in his use of lower or upper case; ‘Other’ however tends to be used to indicate a personal other, encountered face to face, wheras ‘other’ tends to be used more as a general term for otherness or alterity.

2. Levinas deliberately employs terms used in the writings of Heidegger, whose pupil Levinas was but whose thinking he turned against when Heidegger's philosophy became associated with Nazi ideology. Levinas sought to ‘go beyond’ Heidegger's thinking in order to reorient Western philosophy.

3. Alterity refers to the state or quality of being other, of otherness.

4. I am reminded of Stanford's a capella setting of Mary Coleridge's poem;

The Blue bird

The lake lay blue below the hill.

O'er it, as I looked, there flew

Across the waters, cold and still,

A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,

The sky beneath me blue in blue.

A moment, ere the bird had passed,

It caught his image as he flew.

5. See Paul Standish (2008) for a clear account of the two directions the philosophical spirit can take, from Levinas' ‘Philosophy and the idea of infinity’, 1957.

6. ‘The presence of the Other, or expression, source of all signification, is not contemplated as an intelligible essence, but is heard as language, and thereby is effectuated exteriorly’ (Levinas 1969, 297).

7. Learning and teaching Scotland (1991, 1992, 2008);QCA (1999, 2002, 2007, 2008).