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Playing With The Music: Ecologies Of Attention And Understanding In The Classical Music Education Project Of Sesame Street Or The Bird, The Worm, And The Mushroom: Three Stories Of Listening, Eden Attar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a paper about the ecologies of attention and understanding evident in and emergent from the presentation of classical music on the classic children’s television program Sesame Street. The paper is written in two chapters. The first is an analysis of context, attention, and education on the program, framed through the analogy of bird-watching. I argue that the classical music education which is presented on the program deviates from the humanitarian norm of “uplift” and absolute aesthetics—the bird’s-eye view— and instead presents an understanding of music which resonates with ideas of “listening with”—the view of the bird watcher, …