Music Education. A Reflection from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Mexico

Thought about music education in the countries listed in the title stem from their educational traditions and the characteristics of their sociocultural contexts. Since there is no philosophy of education in Mexico, many questions come to mind: What means to think philosophically about music education? How do the people who engage in these thinking path conceptualize philosophy, music, and education? What are the results of their endeavors? What defines its importance for those involved in musical activities?

Musical education is present in different environments: in school, defined by the general education systems of a country; in the community, which, traditionally and spontaneously, happens in a specific social circle, with or without institutional support; and as a profession, which is related to the preparation for the practice of music in conservatories and universities.

In the United States and Canada, reflection on music education has its own space in a disciplinary area called “Philosophy in Music Education” (PME). In Germany, that reflection is carried out, among other subdisciplines of pedagogy, in Musikdidaktik (MD), also known as music didactics. Since 2004, two seminars have been incorporated into UNAM’s graduate program in music: philosophy in music education and music didactics. In the following lines, I will describe the particular characteristics of the previously mentioned philosophical reflections. I warn the reader that presenting these different traditions of reflection on music education in a dissemination article is complicated; however, I hope to be able to present each one’s main characteristics, citing some of their most representative authors.

PHILOSOPHY IN MUSIC EDUCATION IN NORTH AMERICA
The PME is a relatively new discipline. Nevertheless, international symposia have been held regularly since 1990, and the Philosophy of Music Education Review was created in 1993. Furthermore, in other Anglophone countries, many universities offer Philosophy in Music Education courses. The fact that the PME was cultivated mainly in the United States and Canada is reflected in the fact that 17 out of 26 authors of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (Bowman and Frega, 2012) are academics of universities from those countries.

Two of the most influential philosophers of the PME for the last decades, Bennet Reimer and Wayne Bowman, coincide in emphasizing etymology: the word philosophy, of Greek origin, means “love of wisdom.” Bowman (1998) highlights that philosophical research is moved by a passion for truth, comprehension, and knowledge. For Reimer (2003), that love of wisdom emerges when we think carefully and thoroughly about something. Bowman states that music education must be profoundly dependent on music philosophy in order to get a fundamental direction since, without adequate comprehension of music philosophy, constructing an applied philosophy of the profession becomes a precarious task. For him: “music assumes too many forms, serves too many diverse functions, and is too deeply embedded in the dynamic flux and mutation of sociocultural life to be exhaustively explained by theoretical undertakings that are not similarly dynamic, diverse, and fluid” (p. 9). Although philosophy does not have the same characteristics as the PME, searching for more appropriate answers is their primary task, so the author characterizes philosophy as a process.

Elliot (1995), another influential philosopher in this field, defines some of the characteristics of philosophical research: it deals with a whole image as a means and as an end. Although philosophical thought includes particular reflections on actions, situations, individuals, and objects, philosophy deals with matters that cannot be addressed through observation, description, or experimentation. Moreover, the products of correctly philosophizing are not new facts but new perspectives on suppositions, beliefs, meanings, and definitions of our thoughts and actions.

Reimer’s PME, known as Aesthetic Education (AE), which predominated for more than three decades in this discipline, pursues, among other goals, both to be philosophically convincing and useful in the full spectrum of music teaching and learning applications, uniting theory and practice. It also seeks that music education be considered applicable to all children in schools, not just those who excel in high musical competence, and that a valuable and valid music curriculum includes all kinds of activities related to music, i.e., listening, performing, composing, and others, as well as all ways of thinking about music.

The AE foundation is aesthetics and music aesthetics, so Reimer focuses on one of the functions and dimensions of music, forgetting about others like the anthropological dimension or the socio-economical dimension; furthermore, he only deals marginally with the other participants of the education process: students, authors, and professors, as well as the relationship between these. For this reason, AE has been largely criticized.

Praxial philosophy, as Elliot called his philosophy in music education, maintains that music has many essential values. He asserts that the events we call musical works result from the actions of people, who live in particular times and places and who produce works of various kinds: written compositions, improvised songs, etc. These products are linked to diverse stories and standards of musical practice, no matter whether musicians, professors, and music students clearly know them.

Accordingly, intelligent hearing of any kind of music implies considering various dimensions intertwined with meanings: the affective, interpretative, structural, expressive, representative, social, and personal dimensions.

According to Elliot, one of the most critical categories of musical values emerges when there is a balance and correspondence between our musicality and the ample range of affective and cognitive challenges implied in hearing and making music (as performers, improvisers, composers, arrangers, or group conductors). Through this balance, we can reach the central values of making and listening to music, like enjoying music, personal growth, self-awareness, and self-esteem, so a multicultural education is conceived. One of the main characteristics of philosophy, which in my opinion is convenient to apply to music and music education, is that it is characterized as a process of reflection in which the person who practices it wishes to approach a better understanding of something and of the activities that are carried out around them, like musical performance in its diversity, composition, improvisation, education, and research about music from any discipline.

Dialogues among philosophers with different points of view give life and enrich the PME. To that effect, articles in the Philosophy of Music Education Review and the books The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education (Bowman and Frega, 2012) and Praxial Music Education: Reflections and Dialogues (Elliot, 2005)—the latter contains answers from many philosophers in music education—can show a bigger and more profound picture of what PME is.

MUSIC DIDACTICS OR MUSIKDIDAKTIK
The word didactics comes from the Greek verb didáskein (διδασκειν), “to teach,” which at the same time is related to the noun didaché (διδαχη), “teaching,” “instruction”, or “doctrine.” Other possible translations of this verb in its active voice are ‘”to instruct,” “to inform,” “to explain,” “to rehearse,” or “to perform (a chorus or a drama).”
In connection with how the concept of Bildung has been used throughout history, the concept of Musikalische Bildung is used in the sense of forming and shaping the human inner self through music (Vogt, 2018). Music has been associated with ethical formation, especially when it contains a text, that is, when it is sung. Just like what happens with the concept of Bildung, ideological characteristics have been attributed to Musikalische Bildung at specific points in the history of education in Germany. It has sometimes been criticized; however, despite these criticisms, it has given rise to different pedagogical, philosophical, and scientific perspectives based on this concept. In music education, despite its vagueness, it remains attractive.

In Germany, a distinction is made between didactics that apply to education in general within the elementary educational cycles and specific didactics that deal with particular disciplines. For music education, there is a specific kind of didactics, Musikdidaktik (MD), which deals with didactic conceptions, i.e., possible answers to the fundamental questions of music education. General educational theories and conceptions have been a fundamental part of its construction, along with the nature of music and the wide variety of its practices.

According to Kaiser and Nolte (2003), the MD answers the questions: What is a musical learning field? How are the objectives of the music class constructed? What fundamentals determine the selection of situations as contents of a music class? What is it to behave musically? What characterizes a method? These questions and their answers are frequently found in the MD publications. Yet, the answers are multiple and variable.

The contents of the MD emerge from different conceptions of music pedagogy. The MD presents teaching models and means to reflect on educational processes, but the reflection contained in the MD and actual musical-pedagogical practice do not coincide; that is, the MD does not discuss specific music classes, but its main objective is to contribute to changes in the reality of the classroom.

Instead of presenting one concept of music didactics, Kaiser and Nolte present several concepts from different authors in order to introduce readers to various examples of didactic reflection. Likewise, the MD does not give specific answers, such as which theory works or which authors should be included in a class, nor does it indicate to what extent examples of popular music should be included or whether only those examples of music from the classical and romantic periods should be included, since deciding on these matters will depend on specific students, situations, and contexts.

The MD deals with the components of didactics, such as objectives, contents and methods, and the theoretical relationship between them, always associating them with musical activities. Besides using the elements of general didactics, its relations and links with music, it includes musical actions designated as ways of interacting with music. One of the most important classifications of ways of interacting with music is Venus’s classification, which distinguishes between five basic ways (cited from Kaiser and Nolte, 2003, p. 33):

1. Musical production, which can be composition or improvisation.
2. Musical playing, instrumental or vocal, as soloists or in groups, live or through recordings.
3. Musical reception of the music performed by oneself or others.
4. Transposition of music, for example, with movements or dances, but also with oral, written, or graphical representations.
5. Reflection on music.

The objective of including the MD in school music (Schulmusik) curricula is to contribute to the consolidation of future teachers’ reflection and argumentation criteria and abilities.

TRADITIONS OF DIDAKTIK, CURRICULUM, AND ITS ENCOUNTER
Westbury, a North American specialist in education, accidentally got to know the concept of Didaktik in the last decades of the 20^th century. This led to a great interest that resulted in several international meetings and publications he promoted with Stefan Hopmann (Norway) and Kurt Riquarts (Germany).

They are of the opinion, among other things, that educational sciences in the United States separate curriculum studies from pedagogy, which completely opposes the holistic approach of Didaktik, and that the fragmentation occurring in the United States is detrimental to curriculum studies and pedagogy. Furthermore, they think that public control of schools through the curriculum developed for the school and the school system implies that teachers are seen as laborers and are expected to implement it according to government procedures and rules. In that sense, the curriculum is prescriptive.

In their view, the teaching of Didaktik is centered on ways of reasoning about teaching for basic education teachers, who are conceived as autonomous professionals, free to develop their own approaches to the discipline inside the structure of the learning plan.

DIDACTICS AND MUSIC DIDACTICS IN MEXICO
It is important to state that conditions in Mexico are particular. Some experts in teaching from the Institute for University and Education Research, among them Ángel Díaz Barriga, consider that, unfortunately, didactics has been little cultivated in our country and that a certain despise for this educational field is felt. Music teaching in the national education system has received little attention, even though since 1937, Lázaro Cárdenas decreed the incorporation of choral singing in basic education. Some years later, Luis Sandi pointed out that Mexico lacked a tradition of musical education in the national educational system. More recently, since the end of the 90s, art teaching was included, and their programs were modified every presidential term. It seemed that this panorama was going to change with the reform of Article 3 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States and Article 30 of the General Law of Education. Even though those documents grant an extracurricular space for music teaching, this caused great discontent in the community of teachers of all levels, since the priority was to form orchestras and groups of students. Still, they didn’t mention how music education in the school space would reach and include all students.

The response to the widespread dissatisfaction of specialists (see Estrada et al., 2019) and the uncertainty of how music education would be implemented in the national education system motivated the publication by UNAM’s Faculty of Music of the book La Educación Musical en el nivel básico en México (Music Education at the Elementary School in Mexico; Estrada, Gutiérrez and Sastré, 2021) as a response in which 17 academics from various institutions participated. This book includes philosophical exercises carried out by participants of UNAM’s graduate music program and has open access.

CONCLUSIONS
Both PME and MD are reflections with philosophical characteristics; that is, they use philosophical procedures like concept analysis, definitions, language use, logical reasoning, and theoretical principles, and they promote the argumentation abilities of their followers. However, their specific topics are different. PME focuses on the nature of music and education, in the ethical behaviors of education actors, like professors, and their relationships with their students and the sociocultural environments, among other things. MD encompasses topics that refer to the components of didactics, like objectives, contents, methods, and ways of interacting with music, while focusing on the students’ learning. It is important to stress that neither in PME nor in DM can we find consensus, but rather a variety of different perspectives, so discussing a comparison between these disciplines is a complex task since they overlap and, in some cases, complement each other. In the national context, it is difficult to solve the lack of experts in the philosophy of music education and music didactics, and, unfortunately, our country is far from having a national education system that includes music education for all students. From this point of view, including seminars dedicated to these two topics of music education in the graduate program in music has been appropriate; its graduates have already produced some theses and contributions in publications dealing with these topics.

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