Art-music-pedagogy : a view from a geopolitical cauldron

Kurzfassung/Abstract

The chapter focusses "on two case studies of important music educational projects run in the geopolitical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The authors build on the legacy of Christopher Small, his socio-political critique of the imposed passivity in our engagement with music, and his vision of music as form of engagement with multi-layered exploration and shaping of selves, relationships, experiences and contexts. This Smallean approach is complemented with Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013)'s critique of "the rhetoric of effects" (p.216) that dominates arts education. (...) Based on this framework, the authors critically analyse the music education practices of projects run by the Barenboim-Said Foundation, showing how they (re-)produce the cultural hegemony of Western Art Music, imposing normalising conceptions of music(al) consumption as a means to civility. As a counterexample to this form of "hegemonic musicking", the authors engage in an analysis of projects led by Musicians without Borders "just a stone's throuw away" from Barenboim-Said Foundation. (...)" (cited from the introduction, p.11)