Autonomania: Music and Music Education from Mars

Traditional aesthetic theory has posited an account of music, and the other arts, as autonomous of social meanings, relevance, and conditions. In the case of music, “absolute music” is sequestered from social and other roots that bring music into being in the first place. The typical claim, thus, is that classical music is music for its own sake, divorced from the many and highly evident social dimensions that it serves. It ignores all other genres of music, most of which are more appreciated than can be accounted for by the theory of autonomania. This aesthetic theory of music, one of many theories, is unconvincing in history, and discourse of the broader philosophy of music, and a praxial theory of music is offered here in contradiction. The implications for music education should be clear, that the autonomy of music and music education from society is a troublesome and misleading contention

Ethical implications of music education as a helping profession

As professionals, music teachers are faced with a range of ethical responsibilities that are tied to the particular benefits that the music education profession, by its very existence, promises to contribute to graduates’ musical abilities and future musical options. However, the ethical dimensions of music education are too often overlooked, both in the preparation of new teachers and in evaluating the practices of in-service teachers. This study provides a philosophical review of key aspects of normative ethics that merit being acknowledged and addressed if music education is to be most fully ethical and music teachers most productively professional. To clarify this ethical responsibility, duty, consequentialist, and virtue ethics are briefly surveyed and common grounds between them are noted in order to recommend a range of criteria for an applied professional ethics of music education. Certain teaching practices from school music and individual lessons are offered as evidence that ethical failings are often involved in many common music teaching practices and that an applied ethics can help music teachers to be most fully professional and effective. Keywords: professional teaching ethics, normative ethics, applied ethics, music education

Dando por sentado el ‘arte’ de la música: una sociología crítica de la filosofía estética de la música

Musicians and teachers are wrong to take as a guarantee of "art" the nature, function and value of music, that is, as a matter of aesthetic pleasure, metacognitive expression or great "intellectual culture." When such assumptions are identified with what music is, what it is and how good it is, we have a kind of elitism or snobbery (Lynes, 1966) that leaves the aesthetes in a socioeconomic or intellectual limbo complaining that What they enjoy and value guarantees educational and economic prominence. But if music as art were so clearly and clearly valuable to other intelligent people as to musical musicians and educators, their importance to education and society would not have to be continually defended.Los músicos y los profesores se equivocan al tomar como garantía de “arte” la naturaleza, función y valor de la música, es decir, como un asunto de placer estético, expresión metacognitiva o gran “cultura intelectual”. Cuando tales asunciones se identifican con lo que es la música, sobre lo que es ésta y sobre lo buena que es, tenemos un tipo de elitismo o esnobismo (Lynes, 1966) que deja a los estetas en un limbo socioeconómico o intelectual quejándose de que lo que ellos disfrutan y valoran garantiza la prominencia educativa y económica. Pero si la música como arte fuera tan valiosa de forma evidente y clara para otras personas inteligentes como para los músicos y educadores musicales, su importancia para la educación y la sociedad no tendría que ser continuamente defendida