Beyond Music: Why Sound, Not Music, Should Guide Education
Unseating “music” from the center of learning
Students in music education programs around the world are routinely required to present end-of-year concerts or performances. These events are supposed to showcase progress and prove that teachers can transform learners into skilled performers capable of taking the stage. The expectations of administrators, parents, students, and teachers themselves are shaped by what they understand as the line between “music” and “noise.”
These boundaries are far from fixed and depend heavily on context: what a conservatory of avant-garde composers calls music might be dismissed as noise in an elementary school. Discrepancies like these arise because the term “music” cannot be detached from its social settings and particular uses. As Gary Tomlinson wrote, music is “not an ideologically neutral, cross-cultural array of sounding phenomena, but rather a [recent and local] constructed cultural category.”
Though some scholars argue that every culture around the world possesses something called “music,” the term is often applied uncritically, without considering the weight of its Eurocentric origins. Many cultures have their own words for sonic practices—sangita (Sanskrit), ngoma (Kikuyu), takiy (Quechua)—each carrying distinct history and meaning. The ethnomusicologist Klaus Wachsman reflected on this problem:
I could say to myself that those phenomena outside my own immediate culture to which I now attach the label “music” because I recognize and acknowledge them to be music, are merely so labeled because, rightly or wrongly, they seem to me to resemble the phenomena that I am in the habit of calling music in my home ground.
Does the Eurocentric ancestry of “music” and its widespread application to the world’s sound practices make the concept useless or inappropriate for educators who want to include diverse traditions? Not necessarily. But recognizing the term’s particularity—and how it is politically deployed—is, I argue, essential.
The word “music” operates as a discourse in the Foucauldian sense: a way of forming knowledge, shaping subjectivity, and structuring power relationships. This discourse prescribes what is possible in Western-oriented music classrooms. Everyday terms like talent, musical, musicianship, and appreciation are used by teachers to make decisions, justify them, and understand their outcomes. It seems crucial to examine these concepts and see whether they serve educators’ aims or actually undermine them. Music education scholars have long called for critical scrutiny of terms like aesthetics, gender, race, democracy, citizenship, sexuality, and even education. But the word “music” itself has not received similar treatment. That gap needs to be closed.
My aim here is to question the role of “music” in music education and to propose an alternative focus on sound. This is not to claim that framing cultural practices as music is inherently counterproductive to an emancipatory education, nor that adopting the word “sound” will automatically fix everything. But I want to highlight the unintended consequences and missed opportunities that come from using “music” uncritically. Sound could provide a way to de-center music, so that while music in its many forms still has a place in the classroom, it no longer sits at the center of gravity. A focus on sound blurs the music/noise dualism, unsettling music’s hegemonic position.
I avoid prescribing specific scenarios or fixed guidelines for “sound education.” Below I have collected a few examples from educators already working in ways I would describe as sound education, but I have left the concept deliberately open so that teachers who find this reflection useful can adapt it to their own contexts.
Placing “music” above other kinds of sounding does a real disservice to both students and teachers. I am building this argument on Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez’s critique of the arts (2013) and on the ideas of R. Murray Schafer, whose work in schools challenged boundaries between music and noise through listening and sound-making practices. This article proceeds by examining Gaztambide-Fernandez’s “rhetoric of effects” to show how arts discourses constrain decolonizing, emancipatory pedagogies. Then it unpacks music itself as a discourse, turning to sound as an alternative framework. Finally, it explores listening and sound-making as the two pillars of what sound education might look like.
Music and the “rhetoric of effects”
Before examining the term “music,” it is useful to see how the word is deployed in Western-centric societies for specific purposes. It is not ideologically neutral. Viewing it as a politically active discourse reveals how it functions and what consequences it produces. One of Gaztambide-Fernandez’s (2013) key contributions is showing how notions like “the arts” are used in practice through what he calls a “rhetoric of effects” (214). This kind of discourse pervades end-of-year recitals: a music class is expected to perform something that can be heard as music, and this invocation brings a host of related ideas—aesthetics, beauty, pleasure—along with it.
The “rhetoric of effects” rests on the assumption that injecting the arts into schooling—like a tangible substance—produces measurable, positive outcomes on academic and non-academic aspects of education. The first problem with this instrumentalist argument is that defining “the arts” is notoriously difficult, leaving the enterprise reliant on imposing someone’s definition. If one defines the arts a priori as involving certain “mental habits,” concluding that arts in the classroom produce creativity amounts to a tautology. Moreover, experiences with the arts that do not match the idealized claims of advocacy are quietly ignored, flattening real complexity.
The second argument is the “intrinsic” one: art for art’s sake. Proponents such as Howard (2012) and Reimer (1989) claim that measuring the arts against math scores is pointless because the arts are valuable in themselves. But Gaztambide-Fernandez points out that the liberal humanities and the arts have historically been used to signal social distinction and justify exclusion. Music education literature has documented how the field skewed toward elite bourgeois culture while excluding women, racialized people, and LGBTQ individuals. Furthermore, the arts—especially music—were central to European colonizing and evangelizing projects. The notion that the arts require no justification leans on an assumed Eurocentric hierarchy of taste and helps reproduce social inequality.
These two arguments and their critiques show that “the arts” constitute a discourse mobilized by people in particular contexts for particular ends. The effects depend on who is championing the term, where, and why. Those debates are always embedded in a matrix of power that decides whose discourses and goals matter most. The arts—and music along with them—are not neutral. They operate in a social and political field marked by uneven power hierarchies. Even worse, the language of the arts, and the groups and institutions that command it, tends to neutralize the political effects of cultural expressions that push against the status quo. Philosopher Jacques Ranciere (2010) reminds us that aesthetic framing suspends cause-and-effect logic inside a space where political content is evacuated.
The trouble with “music”
Music education philosophy has long wrestled with what music means, how it means, and why it matters. Two major philosophies prevail in North America: aesthetic (Reimer 1989; 2003) and praxial (Elliott 1995; 2005). The aesthetic camp stresses appreciation of formal aspects and expressive emotional content within musical works. The praxial camp centers on musicianship and “knowledge-in-action,” emphasizing context and process.
Many scholars have challenged assumptions lurking inside both approaches and pointed out biases against marginalized populations. Roberta Lamb (1994) argued that feminism as critique questions basic assumptions and concepts—and that such critiques must be multiple to challenge claims of universality or absolute truth. “So long as one critical position is assumed, basic categories within music—music itself—would remain unchallenged,” she wrote. Yet despite this invitation, music education literature has lacked a substantial critical examination of music as a discourse and its impact on the philosophy and practice of educators.
Music is not politically neutral, nor is it a universal category (Tomlinson 1999, 344). The term summons notions of beauty and emotion—a European construction with roots in the eighteenth century. Those ideas are totally interwoven with the discourse of aesthetics, which Robin James (2013) argues is “organized by white heteropatriarchy, and one of its instruments for organization” (109). Scholars tracing the origins of philosophical aesthetics have found its shared roots with racist and sexist discourses, found, for instance, in Kant’s work. Whether those entanglements invalidate aesthetics as a discipline or not, their relationship needs to be unearthed and problematized—something already underway among music education scholars (Bradley 2012; Kertz-Welzel 2008; Regelski 2011). For music educators specifically, Deborah Wong (2014) states that “the bedrock structures of music [institutions] rely on [an] interconstitutive relationship between music and aesthetics” (348). In other words, invoking music means invoking an episteme that is, from the start, Eurocentric, racist, heteronormative, and patriarchal. Anyone seeking to address oppressive structures must confront this history.
Even though the definition of music has expanded over time to include non-Western and popular sound practices, this inclusion consistently works in favor of hegemonic and Eurocentric institutions, selectively and marginally benefiting those who join its discourse. For over a century, ethnomusicology—including its earlier proto forms—operated on an extractionist model: a European scholar collected instruments, stories, field recordings, and returned home to generate economic, social, and cultural capital. Only recently have ethnomusicologists begun questioning this model’s injustices (e.g., Feld 2000).
Western popular music, particularly African American styles and their offshoots, were grudgingly admitted into the realm of “music” only when such music became too commercially valuable to ignore. Ragtime, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and hip hop were initially rejected as noise by bourgeois societies, then later accepted as marketable products—and eventually elevated to “classical” status through discursive appropriation by elite commentators. This elevation has always been selective. Institutions and networks outside the cultures that produced those styles decide which performers and styles are authentic and deserving of praise and resources.
Music education has followed the same trajectory, first rejecting anything deemed unmusical to the project of raising “good citizens.” In nineteenth-century North America, the good/bad child-citizen divide was coded in racialized terms, associating white Protestantism with the ideal, and black and working-class white populations with low status. The “appropriate” music schools accept today follows similar racialized patterns. African American styles are accepted mainly when no longer current in working-class Black communities (like jazz or folk songs). Other Non-Western styles integrated into school music are often heavily sanitized—salsa, Native American, or Mexican music, for example—or stripped to instrumental versions that are easy to dissociate from possibly uncomfortable contexts, as often happens with West African drumming, Gamelan, or North Indian instrumental music.
Is there an alternative framework? Scholars in other fields—especially visual culture studies—have argued for moving away from “the arts” language (Tavin 2003). Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013) proposes a “rhetoric of cultural production” instead of a rhetoric of effects or arts-centered discourses. This rhetoric views the arts as a form of cultural practice in which culture is defined as what people do, as opposed to culture doing something to people. It recognizes that “it is actual people, under real social circumstances in particular cultural contexts and within specific material and symbolic relations that have experiences involving symbolic materials and forms of cultural production” (226). This perspective treats cultural experiences as neither good nor bad, but complex and unpredictable (225). It is less concerned with whether outcomes qualify as “artistic” and more involved with the kinds of interactions and relationship qualities enacted through symbolic creative practice (229). This echoes Christopher Small’s notion ofmusicking, but that term suffers from assuming the pre-existence of “music” itself—therefore failing to question the very concept of music.
Sound
The distinction between music and noise has been questioned for at least half a century. John Cage famously challenged this boundary with 4’33”, premiered at a venue in the middle of a forest. When Cage sat down, opened the piano lid, and remained motionless for four and a half minutes, the sounds of the forest would have filled the audience’s attentive listening. What made those sounds music? One might argue that Cage intended to show that all sounds become musical when properly attended to. But regardless of intention, it was the sociocultural framework — a music festival, a concert hall, a recognized composer — that shaped the audience’s disposition to listen for something musical. What they heard were birds and trees. What made those sounds musical was not inherent in the sounds themselves but in the listeners’ disposition, enabled by an elaborate cultural and material context. Similarly, contemporary composers straddle this line with an avant-garde attitude, challenging audiences and transgressing borders. What makes their sounds music is, again, not something inside the sounds but the complex social, economic, and cultural frameworks that surround these events and foster a “musical” willingness to hear those sounds in those particular settings as music.
As recording and mechanical reproduction technologies became more accessible and open to manipulation, Black and Latino youth in U.S. inner cities began experimenting with scratching, sampling, and other techniques of sonic manipulation. They combined these with rhythmic poetic speech into what is now known as hip-hop. This style of sonic expression was not accepted as music by the music industry until it became commercially profitable. Eventually academics, critics, and cultural institutions followed suit. Like contemporary composers, hip-hop artists frequently incorporate “noise” into their work: speech, radio broadcasts, gunshots, sirens, and other sounds. Many practitioners conceive of hip-hop as a multimodal form encompassing kinesthetic, sonic, linguistic, visual, and economic dimensions; some refuse to regard it as “just music.” Music educators have struggled to incorporate both contemporary Western art music and hip-hop into classrooms, likely because these styles blur the boundaries between music and noise. Although musicologists have analyzed both genres extensively, many have done so aiming to legitimize and integrate them into the realm of “real music.” The interdisciplinary field of sound studies, lacking this legitimizing agenda, is better positioned to challenge the categories of music and noise.
Music education has only recently begun engaging with sound studies (Abramo 2014; Chapman Hill 2018; Thibeault 2017), though the field has become an increasingly important and transformative influence on music-related disciplines like musicology and ethnomusicology. This is somewhat ironic, given that a key pioneer of sound studies in the 1970s was R. Murray Schafer, a Canadian composer who taught extensively about music education and first theorized the soundscape. While innovative and groundbreaking, Schafer’s music education, in my experience, instrumentalized sound as a pathway into music, thereby reinforcing a dualistic thinking that privileges music over sound and noise (Schafer 1988; Chapman Hill 2018). Others have construed sound, listening, and hearing in opposition to image, seeing, and watching (Abramo 2014), perpetuating what Jonathan Sterne (2012) calls the “audiovisual litany.”
Sound studies differs from music studies by taking all sounding phenomena — including music, recording technologies, and music itself — as its domain (Eidsheim 2015; Erlmann 2004; Pilzer 2012). Musicologists’ and music educators’ reluctance to engage with sounds that do not qualify as music — a problematic definition, as we have seen — has revealed a significant void in scholarly inquiry, eagerly filled by sound studies. Many music scholars, particularly ethnomusicologists, have begun taking sound studies seriously, sometimes even abandoning the category of “music” for the broader field of “sound” (Wong 2014). I believe music education could benefit from adopting this more expansive view of sound and de-centering music.
My aim with “sound education” is not to instrumentalize sound as a means to reach the “serious” business of music,
nor to privilege listening and sound-making over other ways of sensing and acting in the world. Rather, the goal is to question the hegemony of music over sound and noise — and perhaps more importantly — to question the distinction itself: What makes music not-just-sound, and what makes sound not-quite-music? I consider that exercises in books like Schafer’s HearSing (2005) and Sound Education (1992), as well as Douglas Friesen’s noisetown (2017), straddle the line between music and noise, challenge the hierarchy dividing them, and choose to dwell in the in-between space. These exercises are exploratory and collaborative, deliberately blurring the boundaries between teacher and student roles, and encouraging creative questioning of categories and limits.
Listening
Rather than emphasizing appreciation, Schafer stresses listening throughout his work. His exercises and writings reveal an understanding of listening as a skill to be developed and refined, fundamental — in his view — to developing a musical imagination (Schafer 1986; 1992). He continually blurs the line between musical and non-musical listening by exploring space, movement, materiality, and the soundscape. In contrast, definitions of listening within traditional music education are, for obvious reasons, always understood in relation to music. Whether framed as a skill set enabling “aesthetic experiences” (Reimer 1989) or as a constructed, context-specific cognitive “process” (Elliott 1995), listening is always conceived as a musical practice. What these approaches lack — including Schafer’s — is a more historical and nuanced definition of listening as a particular discourse within specific “auditory cultures” (Erlmann 2010; Ochoa Gautier 2014; Rinsema 2018). Listening, from a cultural production perspective, demands critical awareness of auditory cultures and openness to diverse modes of acoustic attending.
For education, an epistemology of sound is necessary to consider the aims and possibilities of listening. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2015) theorized this by conjoining acoustics and epistemology — “acoustemology” — described as a different kind of knowing-in-action. This concept starts from “the assumption that life is shared with others-in-relation, with numerous sources of action […] that are variously human, non-human, living, non-living, organic, or technological” (15). This relational ontology aligns with a cultural production approach and expands its focus toward the non-human and non-living. Acoustemology works similarly to Schafer’s “acoustic ecology” and “soundscape,” but from a specific understanding of positionality and historicity. Feld states, “unlike acoustic ecology, acoustemology is about the experience and agency in listening histories, understood as relational and contingent, situated and reflexive” (15). The benefits of an acoustemological understanding for a cultural production approach to music education should be clear: “Knowing through relations insists that one does not simply ‘acquire’ knowledge but, rather, that one knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection” (14).
An acoustemological orientation allows for inclusion of everyday listening practices, whether related to music or not. Music listening is a human practice and a tool of sociality; we build, maintain, and contest relationships through listening (DeNora 2000; Bickford 2017). Non-musical listening practices also structure much of our lives: voices of parents and siblings, sounds of everyday chores, sounds of plants, animals, non-living beings like oceans and rivers. These sounds greatly shape how we understand others and ourselves in-relation. Yet all this valuable information, and the skills enabling this “ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection,” remain excluded from music-centered classrooms. This doesn’t have to persist: music educator Douglas Friesen (2017) asks students questions such as “What was the earliest sound you remember hearing?” and “What sounds from your life are now lost?” (25). These questions are intensely personal and affective, enacting what Elizabeth Gould (2009) calls a “music education of connections […] in terms of desire” (51). An acoustemological, cultural production approach to music education centers such questions and the possibilities of connection and desire they generate.
By listening indiscriminately to sounds — whether music or not — we may open the classroom to include, explore, analyze, and creatively manipulate the sounds most significant to students’ lives: the voice of a deceased relative, sounds of a house pet, music from a TV ad, or a parent’s favorite song. The point of listening in a “sound education” class would be to learn how to pay attention to relevant sounds, analyze, describe, and appropriate them, in order to produce meaningful cultural objects (e.g., performances, compositions, installations, recordings). When the focus shifts to these kinds of sounds, decisions about relevant, authentic, or culturally appropriate repertoire become unimportant. Relevance is determined by whatever sounds are available in the school, neighborhood, city, or students’ and teachers’ homes. By de-centering music, students and teachers may question the category itself and how it is constructed: Why is this sound considered music and not that? Why is this type of sound more “musical” than another? What are the social, economic, political, and cultural conditions enabling these distinctions to be made?
Sound-Making
David Elliott’s praxial philosophy of music education emphasizes sound-making and focuses on the practical, embodied practices of “musicing” (Elliott 1995): performance, composition, and improvisation. His approach centers on musicianship — a term encompassing practical and technical skills along with listening abilities, auditory frameworks of understanding, and habits of listening and (re)sounding that are always local and “practice-specific.” Like “appreciation,” however, “musicianship” is thoroughly oriented around music, to the exclusion of any sounds or practices not deemed musical. Privileging music-making over other forms of sound-making implicitly creates an uneven playing field where some sounds are considered more musical than others, where certain cultural capital holds more currency.
I find this centering on music problematic for the reasons already discussed. But there are practical reasons to avoid music-centered education in some settings. North American public school music education tends to prioritize instrumental performance, a demanding endeavor requiring substantial labor and resources. Achieving proficiency on orchestral instruments demands diligent dedication, concentration, and individual practice. The cost of these instruments, along with the time and energy needed to reach basic competency, are luxuries many children lack.
The living conditions of many families — especially in high-density urban areas — makes daily practice with an orchestral instrument like a trombone practically impossible. Beyond impracticality, instrumental practice is not necessarily the best use of a school-aged child’s time. As Gaztambide-Fernandez (2010) states, “in the narrow, individualistic sense we have come to conceptualize it in modern music training, [practice] is a selfish, egotistic, paranoiac, defenseless, waste of time” (65). Practice demands isolation, expensive equipment, and adequate space. From a “sound education” perspective, practice diverts opportunities to collectively work with sound within an ecology of relationships: peer-to-peer, student-to-teacher, human-to-non-human.
Admittedly, there are other music-making practices such as group singing (choral or not) that require no special equipment. There are also experiences with found objects or self-built instruments that are affordable and easier to play. Many prominent researchers have advocated for informal and socialized music learning. These practices avoid many pitfalls of traditional band and orchestral ensembles. However, I argue that as long as music educators invoke the concept of music, we conjure a hierarchical field where Western art music and its traditional ensembles sit at the center while these “alternatives” are marginalized. This hierarchy is not just a social construct; it is materially embedded in the institutional structures and cultures of conservatoires, universities, and concert halls. What happens when a student goes through a non-traditional music education and seeks professional status? Which conservatory or university will accept a student who builds invented instruments, composes digital music, and beatboxes, but does not play an orchestral instrument or read Western notation?
I’m not arguing that a sound-education paradigm alone would change these conditions or solve these problems. But I do believe that de-centering musicianship in favor of sound-making could help music educators transcend some limitations of music-centered approaches. Sound-making rejects the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds, allowing a more equal field where students as sound-makers can explore parameters of sound, their combinations, practices of coordination, contrast, and the like. Though these inquiries are already part of music instruction, when it doesn’t matter whether the sounds produced are musical or not, the threshold becomes lower
and the scope widens. Consider Schafer’s (1994) exercise number 74 from Sound Education, using a sheet of paper: “How many different sounds can you make with it? Tapping, waving, shaking, snapping, tearing, wrinkling, rolling, striking, crushing” (105). This exploration could become a “composition” featuring rhythm, pitch (with different paper weights), lyrics, form, dynamics, and traditional or invented notation. It might also lead to a “sound installation” or “performance piece.” These end products could be classified as music or artistic depending on who is classifying and in what context. But each could also remain an interesting sensory experience. By removing the expectation to make musical sounds, teachers create space for more exploration and experimentation. Consequently, a “sound education” classroom might circumvent the music/noise dualism itself. Within this framework, sound materials could combine recorded radio ads, spoken word, sounds of coat zippers, and a violin player to explore expressive possibilities and create meaningful works from available sound materials.
Sound-making is an everyday practice; by virtue of being alive, all living entities produce sound. Even non-living entities create sound: rocks crash, rivers flow, wind blows, thunder roars. An acoustemological approach to sound-making treats sounds produced by humans as part of an already-sounding, living soundscape. It requires engagement with relationality, understood as “both a routine condition of dwelling and one that produces consciousness of modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presence” (Feld 2015, 15). While music tends to isolate itself in concert halls where only sounds considered music are allowed, an acoustemological disposition views human sound-making as part of and in relation with all other sound-making entities: human and non-human, living and non-living. The Kaluli people of the Bosavi forest in Papua New Guinea consider the melodies of their vocal genre gisalo to be given by the muni bird (Feld 1990). R. Murray Schafer’s “Patria” cycle consists of works meant to be performed at dawn or dusk, inside a forest or by a lake, incorporating environmental sounds and the rising sun or a particular constellation (Schafer 2002). Educator Douglas Friesen (2017) suggests, “play traffic sounds back at the traffic” (16). These activities might sound like music to some, but from a “sound education” perspective it doesn’t matter whether such interactions resemble music or not.
Notions like talent, musicianship, or appreciation would be irrelevant to participating in creating and manipulating a local soundscape.
Within a cultural production framework, practice and musicianship become secondary to engagement with everyday symbolic materials (Gaztambide-Fernandez 2013). This perspective prioritizes the symbolic exchanges and social relationships arising from creative processes over aesthetics and technical skill. Sounds—whether musical or not, pleasant or unpleasant, or anything in between—derive their value not from the proficiency required to produce them but from how they are creatively employed for meaning-making relevant to individual lives. A “sound education” approach need not focus solely on “sounds” instead of “music.” In this framework, both musical and non-musical sounds constitute cultural resources available for attention, analysis, discussion, reproduction, repurposing, or recombination. Distinctions between art and popular culture, Western and non-Western, music and noise become irrelevant; all sound phenomena are eligible. Decentering music in this way might help educators move beyond hierarchies that rank sounds as more or less “musical,” sidestepping problematic prerequisites of traditional music education: the cultural capital needed for full participation and the economic resources for instruments and practice space.
[“Conclusion” is not used here.] Decentering Music as a discursive mechanism poses significant challenges to a music education practice committed to anti-oppression, social justice, anti-racism, or decolonization. The term “music” has roots in European modernism and its colonial legacy, shaping how it helps white heteropatriarchy sort sounds into “music” and “non-music” bins (Koza 2010) aligned with racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. Decentering Music in classrooms could open possibilities for delinking from these oppressive structures. Following Gaztambide-Fernandez’s call, reframing “music education” as “sound education” might offer liberating alternatives. A focus on listening and sound-making would not require abandoning music, only decentering it alongside practices like “appreciation” and “musicianship.” The “rhetoric of effects” used to advocate for arts in education relies on “instrumental” and “intrinsic” arguments to justify music in schools (Gaztambide-Fernandez 2013). Yet its flawed logic and unfounded assertions reveal how counterproductive such notions can be for an emancipatory educational project.
Sound education, by discarding the term Music of the article ?, would not automatically solve these problems. But combined with concepts like cultural production and acoustemology, it could offer interesting alternatives and detours from traditional music education. “Cultural production” emphasizes students' everyday symbolic materials and practices, centering on relationships and symbolic work. “Acoustemology” frames listening and sound-making in ways that deemphasize the human, focusing instead on an ecology of relationships encompassing human and non-human, living and non-living entities. Whether we continue using Music | in education or decide to “do away” with it, rethinking fundamental assumptions in our work seems crucial. It is no longer possible to consider Music, and thus music education, as something “good” or even “neutral.” Perhaps for now we can at least discourse, discard Music. So let’s “burn the bridges and never look back!” As we listen, the sound of crackling fire might inspire a new song.
About the Author Matias Recharte is a musician and educator based in Toronto, Canada, pursuing a PhD in Music Education at the University of Toronto. He holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from York University and a Bachelor of Music from the Rotterdam Conservatorium in the Netherlands. His research focuses on the sociology of higher music education in Latin American contexts. He also works as an independent musician and percussionist for Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra.
References Abramo, Joseph. 2014. “Music Education that Resonates: An Epistemology and Pedagogy of Sound.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22 (1): 78–95.
Allsup, Randall E., and Cathy Benedict. 2008. “The Problems of Band: An Inquiry into the Future of Instrumental Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16 (2): 156–73.
Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baker, Geoffrey. 2008. Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco. Durham: Duke University Press.
Baker, Geoffrey. 2014. El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela's Youth. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bickford, Tyler. 2017. Schooling New Media: Music, Language, and Technology in Children's Culture.
Blacking, John. 1973. How Musical is Man? Washington: University of Washington Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Randal Johnson. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bradley, Deborah. 2012. “Good for What, Good for Whom?: Decolonizing Music Education Philosophies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Music Education, edited by Wayne Bowman and Ana Lucia Frega, 409–33.
Bradley, Deborah. 2015. “Hidden in Plain Sight: Race and Racism in Music Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, edited by Cathy Benedict et al., 190–203.
Burton, Judith M., Robert Horowitz, and Hal Abeles. 2000. “Learning in and Through the Arts: The Question of Transfer.” Studies in Art Education 41 (3): 228.
Chapman Hill, Stuart. 2018. “A ‘Sound’ Approach: John Cage and Music Education.” Philosophy of Education Review (1): 46–62.
DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge University Press.
Elliott, David J. 1995. Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Elliott, David J., ed. 2005. Praxial Music Education: Reflections and Dialogues.
Eidsheim, Nina S. 2015. Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice. Duke University Press.
Erlmann, Veit. 2004. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity. Oxford: Berg.
Feld, Steven. 1990. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12 (1): 145–71.
Feld, Steven. 2015. “Acoustemology.” In Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, 19–30.
Friesen, Doug. 2017. Noisetown. Toronto: Author.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. 2008. “The Artist in Society: Understandings, Expectations, and Curriculum Implications.” Curriculum Inquiry 38 (3): 233–65.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. 2010. “Wherefore the Musicians?” Philosophy of Music Education Review (1): 65–84.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. 2013. “Why the Arts Don't Do Anything: Toward a New Vision for Cultural Production in Education.” Harvard Educational Review 83 (1): 211–37.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén. 2016a. “For What Purpose the Arts?” Arts Education Policy Review (1): 29–42.
Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén, and Alexandra Arráiz Matute. 2015. “Creation as Participation/Participation as Creation.” Curriculum Inquiry (1): 1–9.
Gould, Elizabeth. 2010. “Dis-orientations of Desire: Music Education Queer.” In Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, 59–71.
Gould, Elizabeth. 2013. “Companion-able Species: A Queer Pedagogy for Music Education.” 197: 63–75.
Gould, Elizabeth. 2016. “Ecstatic Abundance: Queer Temporalities in LGBTQ Studies.” 207–208: 123–38.
Gustafson, Ruth I. 2009. Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Howard, Vernon A. 2012. “Must Music Have an Aim?” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Education Philosophy, edited by Wayne Bowman and Ana Frega.
James, Robin. 2013. “Oppression, Privilege and Aesthetics.” Philosophy Compass (2): 110–16.
Kertz-Welzel, Andrea. 2008. “Mendelssohn's Last Wish or Case Studies about Aesthetics in Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16 (2): 193–207.
KRS-One. 2003. “9 Elements.” On Krystiles.
Koza, Julia. 2010. “Listening for Whiteness.” In Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates.
Lamb, Roberta. 1994. “Feminism as Critique in Philosophy of Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2 (2): 59–74.
Lamb, Roberta, and Niyati Dhokai. 2015. “Disjunctured Feminisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, edited by Cathy Benedict et al., 122–39.
Ochoa Gautier, Ana M. 2014. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press.
O'Toole, Patricia. 2000. “Music Matters: Why I Don't Feel Included.” 144: 28–39.
Pilzer, Joshua D. 2012. Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women.”
Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum.
Reimer, Bennett. 1989. A Philosophy of Music Education. Prentice-Hall.
Reimer, Bennett. 2003. A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision. Prentice-Hall.
Regelski, Thomas. 2011. “Praxialism and ‘Aesthetic This, Aesthetic That, Aesthetic Whatever.’” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 10 (2).
Rinsema, Rebeca M. 2018. “De-sacralizing the European : Music Appreciation (Then) and Music Listening (Now).” Music Education Research (4): 480–89.
Roelofs, Monique. 2009. “Introduction.” Contemporary Aesthetics Special Issue 2: Aesthetics and Race.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1969. The New Soundscape. BMI Canada.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1986. The Thinking Ear. Arcana Editions.
Schafer, R. Murray. 1992. A Sound Education: 100 Exercises in Listening and Sound-Making. Arcana Editions.
Schafer, R. Murray. 2002. Patria: The Complete Cycle. Coach House Books.
Schafer, R. Murray. 2005. HearSing: 75 Exercises in Listening and Creating Music. Arcana Editions.
Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking. University Press of New England.
Sterne, Jonathan, ed. 2012. Sound Studies Reader. Routledge.
Tavin, Kevin. 2003. “Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts.” Studies in Art Education 44 (3): 197–213.
Thibeault, Matthew D. 2017. “Sound Studies and Music Education.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 51 (1): 69–83.
Tomlinson, Gary. 1999. “Vico's Songs: Detours at the Origins of (Ethno) musicology.” The Musical Quarterly 83 (3): 344–77.
Vaugeois, Lise C. 2014. Colonization and the Institutionalization of Hierarchies of the Human through Music Education. PhD Thesis, University of Toronto.
Wachsmann, Klaus. 1971. “Universal Perspectives in Music.” Ethnomusicology (3): 381–84.
Weedon, Chris. 1987. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Blackwell.
Willis, Paul E. 1990. Common Culture. Open University Press.
Wong, Deborah. 2014. “Sound, Silence, Music: Power.” Ethnomusicology 58 (2): 347–53.
Notes 1. In this essay, I use the form Music of the article oppressions to specifically reference the discourse that organizes perceptions of sonic forms through Eurocentric aesthetics. Although any mention of music often invokes this discourse, expanded definitions escape these trappings. I differentiate between Music in this narrow definition and music in its broader sense, though I recognize these are entangled in practice, reinforcing hierarchies of aesthetic, racial, and gender privilege.
2. On “transfer,” see Burton, Horowitz, and Abeles, 2000.
3. For many, especially music education institutions, this is still unresolved.
4. KRS-One (2003) identified the nine elements of hip hop: breaking, emceeing, graffiti, deejaying, beatboxing, street fashion, street knowledge, and street entrepreneurialism.
5. The “audiovisual litany” includes dualisms like “hearing is spherical; vision is directional” (Sterne 2012, 9).
6. This “knowing-in-action” parallels Elliott’s (1995) concept of musicianship.
7. See also Allsup and Benedict 2008.