Music Education Commons^™

Symbolism In The Allegory: A Look At Apollo’S Lyre, Keri Meinert, Emily Keiner, Anne Bak

2019 Festscrift: Claudio Monteverdi's Orfeo

This paper analyzes the symbolic meaning within Monteverdi’s operatic version of the fable of Orpheus, a demigod who has a talent for music. When Orpheus’ bride Eurydice died suddenly from a snake bite, he decides to seek her soul in the Underworld and bring her back to the land of the living. This task does not prove to be as easy for Orpheus as he initially thinks, when he finds himself losing her twice during the course of the five acts. To show how his journey unfolds, and the meaning behind each step, we will develop the symbolic meaning in …

Forward And Up: An Exploration Of Implementations Of The Alexander Technique In Post-Secondary Music Institutions, Mei Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Music performance is a psychophysical affair. Like athletes, musicians need to be physically, mentally, and emotionally fit in order to meet the demands and challenges of training and performing. For over half a century, post-secondary music institutions have been utilizing the Alexander Technique to address young musicians’ psychophysical coordination and playing-related challenges. This unique mind-body method teaches individuals how to move efficiently and carry out activities with freedom and ease by recognizing and changing counterproductive habits. It has noted beneficial effects on posture and coordination, pain relief, and stress management, and its relevance to music performance studies is endorsed by …

A Service Of Lessons And Carols, The Ouachita Singers, The Women's Chorus, The Brass Ensemble, Jerry Westenkuehler

Student Concert Performances, Programs, and Posters

This is the program for the annual Christmas concert, "A Service of Lessons and Carols," held on December 3, 2019, featuring the Ouachita Singers, Women's Chorus, Ouachita Brass Ensemble, and Jerry Westenkuehler on the organ.

Bringing Music Back Into The Classroom And Its Benefits On Elementary School Students, Laura Alcaraz

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This project brings to light the lack of music education in elementary classrooms despite its benefits to students. There are numerous positive advantages for students learning to play an instrument or participating in a choir, for example. The education system strives to educate its students to the best of their abilities. However, this focus has pushed away music education to math, science, and language arts, and prepared students for standardized testing. This senior capstone research project examines the benefits of bringing back music into the classroom through the use of literature review and anonymous interviews with public and private school …

Preface, Randall Everett Allsup, Cathy Benedict

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

No abstract provided.

Ch. 01 - Of Dialectics, Juxtapositions, And Flexible Thinking: A Tribute To Estelle Jorgensen, Frank Heuser

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

Numerous scholars have provided philosophical perspectives to justify the inclusion of music education in public schools. The philosophical work of Jorgensen offers a framework that allows educators to move beyond singular agendas and apply eclectic approaches to meet the needs of unique teaching environments. This chapter offers commentary on her concept of dialectics and how Jorgensen’s philosophy nurtured innovative curricular approaches to music teacher preparation in a university teacher certification program.

Ch. 02 - Becoming And Being, Being And Becoming: A Necessary Balance In The Journey Of Musician Educators, Betty Anne Younker

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

In the field of music education philosophy, several contributors have significantly impacted how we think about and do music education. One such person is Estelle Jorgensen. Integral to her writing was the use of metaphor, which served as a means to present complicated concepts and ask complex questions. Her intent was less to provide answers but to instill an inquiry of pondering and imaging; it was more about the journey of seeking possibilities, and less about converging on ‘truths’ and arriving. The focus then was more on becoming and less on being’. This continuous process of pondering and imaging could …

Front Matter

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

No abstract provided.

Ch. 04 - The Pursuit Of Happiness: Music Access In 21st Century America, Carla E. Aguilar

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter describes policy mechanisms that can be revised to support “music making by all.” Aguilar starts with the normative claim that engagement in music education in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary institutions should encompass opportunities for a range of music-making experiences, especially those experiences that may be ignored or marginalized because of the traditional structure of post-secondary institutions. Broadening choices for musical engagement may provide greater relevance, as well as increased access and participation in learning music by all and for all.

Ch. 06 - Pilgrim And Quest Revisited, Iris Yob

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

In Pictures of Music Education, Estelle Jorgensen extends her analysis of the pilgrimage metaphor and its associated model of quest in music education. The purpose of the present chapter is not to refute or critique Jorgensen’s work with this metaphor but to build on it by exploring even further the possible meanings captured by the metaphor for music educators. While the notion of pilgrimage carries religious overtones from its long association with faith practices, in a secularized world our present understandings continue to be shaped by remnants of meaning from past mythologies. To that end, various notions associated with …

Ch. 03 - Is It Athene, Minerva, Or Estelle Disguised As Mentor? Or, Mentoring The Next Generation: Jorgensen As Mentor Qua Mentor, Pamela Stover

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

The work of a mentor takes many forms. There is the formal mentoring of a student or a colleague done by advisors and professors. From Homer’s Odyssey, however, comes another image in the character of “Mentor,” the trusted friend of Odysseus who was charged with the care of Odysseus’s young son, Telemachus. Although Mentor was male, there are two instances in literature wherein females—Pallus Athene and Minerva— took the form of Mentor and were successful where “Mentor” had failed. The feminine image of “Mentor in disguise” will be explored in this chapter to illustrate Jorgensen’s approach to mentoring a …

Ch. 08 - Embracing And Navigating Uncertainty: Estelle Jorgensen’S Contribution To International Wisdom, June Boyce-Tillman

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter will address the multiplicity of models and metaphors set out in Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education (2011). Boyce-Tillman will examine the concept of wisdom and its necessity for choosing a particular strategy in a particular context. Illustrations will be pulled from the author’s pedagogical experiences in and outside formal institutions like the university, school, and church. Wisdom is a necessary component of Jorgensen’s search for justice, and it builds upon an awareness of the value-systems underpinning how a Subject makes choices, particularly in the search for a common humanity. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate how …

Ch. 07 - An Aesthetico-Political Approach To Music Education: Transformation Beyond Gender, Cecilia Ferm-Almqvist

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter takes Jorgensen’s thoughts regarding how music education can contribute to a better world, developed in Transforming Music Education, as a starting-point. Based on her statements, I elaborate upon possibilities for equal music education. The picture of transformed music education, as I interpret Jorgensen’s work, is based on a dialectic approach, including mutual curiosity and respect. Through my research where I have interviewed female electric guitar playing upper secondary music students, shows though, that transformation of music education has to continue. For example, the analysis of their expressed experiences shows that they are diminished, quieted, encouraged to care, and …

Ch. 09 - The Music Educator As Cultural Worker, David Lines

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

Estelle Jorgensen’s Pictures of Music Education provides an exploration of music education through figural and literal thinking stimulated by a selection of metaphors and models. This chapter takes inspiration from Jorgensen’s approach to music education and explores how the changing idea of culture resonates with thinking about music education. It is suggested that music education and culture can be thought of together through a more politically aware stance or image of thought that music teachers can adopt: the music educator as cultural worker. By adopting this stance, the music educator enacts music and culture together, is critically informed by the …

Ch. 14 - On Jorgensen’S Dialectical Approach To Music Education: Resonances With Yin-Yang, Leonard Tan

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

In this chapter, I examine Jorgensen’s dialectical approach to music education from Chinese philosophical lenses. More specifically, I re-visit her 2001 essay entitled “A Dialectical View of Theory and Practice” and read it afresh through the lenses of yin-yang theory. I conclude by highlighting three philosophical resonances between Jorgensen’s ideas and yin-yang theory: balance, change, and space.

Ch. 12 - In Search Of Liberty: A Poststructuralist Extension Of Jorgensen's Dialectics, Lauren Kapalka Richerme

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

Against a contemporary backdrop of soundbite news stories and intransigent political divisions, music educators still have much to learn from Jorgensen’s lifelong dedication to the deep interrogation of multiple perspectives. Drawing heavily on Jorgensen’s use of dialectics in In Search of Music Education, I examine the liberatory nature of her philosophical writing. By explaining each paired term in marked depth and clarity, including its potential problems and possibilities, Jorgensen frees readers from narrow assumptions and unidirectional logic. Moreover, by refraining from championing one idea within a dialectic over the other, Jorgensen liberates readers by encouraging them to position themselves. While …

Ch. 13 - In Search Of Choral Music Education: Where Is It Now?, Patrick K. Freer

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter chronicles the influence of Jorgensen’s writing in a graduate choral music education course. Jorgensen’s book chapter, On Spheres of Musical Validity (2005), becomes the focal point for an examination of the legitimacy of five major influences on music education: family, religion, politics, the music profession, and commerce. This investigation leads to consideration of these influences in graduate students’ personal lives, classrooms, rehearsal halls, and the broader profession of choral music education.

Ch. 11 - Becoming A Story: Searching For Music Educations, Patrick Schmidt

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This short philosophical chapter borrows and diverges from Estelle Jorgensen’s In Search of Music Education. It aims to address the pertinent and defiant questions asked over two decades ago, while re-position them in light of current challenges. Following Jorgensen’s style—carefully and tactically—this chapter draws a line of flight between philosophical and policy-oriented ways of thinking, underlining some ways in which the two meet and how pertinent these encounters can be to music educators today. The chapter makes use and highlights the potential of craftly constructed epistemological familiarity and how it can engender practice. Specifically, it reminds and exemplifies to the …

Ch. 10 - Rethinking The Transgressive: A Call For “Pessimistic Activism” In Music Education, Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This essay asks the question: How are we to think of what Estelle Jorgensen has called “the transgressive” in music education today? My entry point to the question is the suggestion that the struggle against modes of music education that eulogize the status quo, against oppression and authoritarianism, against practices that exclude and intimidate students, has to take the form of “a struggle on two fronts” (Badiou). A struggle against imposed canonicities and obsolete approaches to music teaching but also a struggle against the emerging neoliberal appropriations of education, learning, and creativity. The chapter sketches a struggle-on-two-fronts perspective with regard …

Ch. 18 - In Defense Of The Work Of Art: I And Thou In Music Education, Øivind Varkøy

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

A change has been going on in both the philosophy of music education and the general philosophy of music during the last decades: a transition from a focus on music as an object or work to a focus on music as an activity and process. This certainly contrasts with the historical hegemony of the (Western) idea of music as objects. As a philosophical development this is unproblematic. However, a fundamental prerequisite for moving encounters between the human subject and music, in music education as well as in general, is the very idea of music as a work of art. This …

Ch. 15 - In Search Of Music Education And Jorgensen’S Neoclassicism, Deanne Bogdan

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

In her landmark book, In Search of Music Education (University of Illinois Press, 1997), Estelle R. Jorgensen lays the groundwork for the philosophy of music education, of which she is today’s foremost proponent. Decidedly not a “how-to” manual, her book poses difficult questions undergirding a systematic reflection on, first, the nature of education (Chapter 1); the nature of music (Chapter 2), and the dialectics and dialogics of music education (Chapter 3), reconciling the tensions and ambiguities when music and education are combined as an autonomous yet porous discipline. Jorgensen cites John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Maxine Greene, Susanne Langer, Israel …

Ch. 16 - Re-Discovering/Facilitating Intimacy In Borderscapes Of Higher Music Education, Eleni Lapidaki

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

The chapter explores intimacy as a critical site of power and resistance. More specifically, intimacy is considered as an arena in which social and political identities are negotiated, while inclusions and exclusions are continually established or disputed. I will argue for the adoption of a politics of intimacy that aims towards a more nuanced and less reductionist higher music education that can help us articulate the complexity of spaces of proximity as greatly as we live it. Such a reflection offers us opportunity to adopt a variable filter that sheds light on certain characteristics of borders, freedom, and the ways …

Ch. 17 - Traditions And The End Of Music Education, William Perrine

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter considers the question of how music educators determine the musical ends towards which their teaching is directed. Musical traditions, both “great” and “little,” as Estelle Jorgensen describes them, are inseparable from the philosophical traditions through which music educators determine consider their pedagogical ends. This chapter presents a three-part framework to describe how music educators might approach understanding their work as a socially embodied enactment of contrasting traditions. The term tradition is first defined as a means of categorizing philosophical schools of thought from which various musical practices can be understood. The liberal philosophical tradition that grew out of …

Ch. 21 - When I Grow Up, Or Just Another Love Song, Cathy Benedict

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

One’s journey is never made alone. Relationships with the other begins with the desire to live mutually and responsively. Jorgensen’s lives work has been to both broker and live these relationships with others; modeling scholarly and intellectual companionship that will reach beyond time now as it has been experienced. In this essay I frame Jorgensen’s influence through the lens of Martin Buber, the caring relationship and the creation of spaces that embrace plurality.

Ch. 20 - Cultivating Hope In An Uncertain World: Engaging With A Pedagogy Of Hope In Music Education, Marie Mccarthy

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

In this chapter, I explore ways in which a disposition of hope can sustain a music teacher’s professional career and personal well-being at a time of uncertainty and changing values and professional practices. I approach hope as a spiritual human disposition capable of motivating action, sustaining energy, and transforming positively those engaged in education. Themes addressed include: the relevance of hope in the context of schooling today, contemporary approaches to the phenomenon of hope, synergies that give rise to hope in education contexts, and ways of engaging with a pedagogy of hope with implications for music teaching and learning.

Ch. 19 - Rethinking The Good, The True, And The Beautiful For Music Education: New Visions From An Old Garden, Hanne Rinholm

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

This chapter reconsiders the notion of the good, the true, and the beautiful for music education in our time, inspired by the writings of Byung-Chul Han, Michel Foucault, Iris Murdoch, Axel Honneth, and Martin Heidegger. This classical notion is imagined as a garden in which to dwell philosophically and to be used as an inspiration for music teachers’ pursuit of happiness, authenticity, and liberty. The chapter departs from, plays with, and extends ideas from Jorgensen’s Transforming Music Education (2003).

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy In Music Education

The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen's Legacy in Music Education

A collection of essays celebrating Estelle Jorgensen's legacy in music education, edited by:Randall Everett Allsup & Cathy Benedict

Authenticity And Practicality: Evaluating And Performing Multicultural Choral Music, Jesse Noote

Dissertations

Many choral music educators believe that multicultural music is a vital part of any choral curriculum. However, the research shows that these same choral directors are reluctant to select multicultural octavos because they lack training in non-Western music, which prevents them from effectively teaching and performing this music authentically. The purpose of this dissertation is to equip choral directors with the necessary tools for bridging the gap between desiring to perform and actually performing multicultural octavos.

Six authors have provided authenticity checklists that are designed to help music educators evaluate and perform multicultural music. This research synthesizes those lists to …

Developing Musicians Out Of Instrumentalists: A Comprehensive Guide To Improve Intonation Skills In Intermediate Band, Andrew Bryant Smith

Theses

This project will focus on the fundamental skills taught in an intermediate band program and assess skills needed to enhance their musicianship. One of the primary musical components studied is the development of individual and group intonation by utilizing a more concrete focus on the development of fundamental skills associated. The final deliverable focused on the fundamental skills needed to improve intonation. The guide will also include a compilation of instrument-specific strategies and tendencies having to do with the development of the skills outlined.

Creating Alabama Music Heritage And Theory: Equipping Students With State Pride Through Effective Curriculum, Julianne Rae Mattox

Masters Theses

Across general music curricula, there is always a concern for student interest. For elementary age students, music is viewed as magical and fun. It seems that as students age, if they are not in band, music begins to lose some of its magic. With any class, student interest and involvement is key for the academic success of the curriculum. If students have to take a class that they do not want to take, they automatically lose interest. It is important for teachers to present their curriculum to students in a way that grabs their attention and allows them to enjoy …