As a violinist, teacher, and thinker, I am concerned to articulate the relevance of music to the lives of my audience, my students and myself. But my concern is not merely to describe the meanings that people experience when they engage music. Rather, I am interested in constituting the musical relevance that each of us must actualize as we work to make our lives vital and meaningful.
Accordingly, in my study I articulate in philosophical, yet practical, terms, a particular attitude of musical engagement that I call meeting. Grounded in Martin Buber’s idea of human existence as I-Thou, my conception of meeting has a specific character. Each side of the meeting must meet itself in its work to constitute the adequacy of its engagement with the other as it must meet with the other in its work to constitute the adequacy of its engagement with itself. It follows that the essence of human meeting is not merely the “reality” – physical, cultural, intellectual – of people who come together. Rather, the essence is their self-critical thought that is created as they share their lives with each other. The focus, then, is not the meeting’s outcome but rather the meeting itself insofar as it constitutes mutual understanding, communication and love.
Thus, at the heart of my study, I constitute music in the same way, not as a physical or cultural “reality,” but rather as the meeting between music and musical participant that demands that each – music and participant – attend to self and other. The idea that music’s whole being is meeting has profound implications for how we conceive of music education. Accordingly, the ultimate purpose of my study is to bring my ideas of musical meeting to bear upon how we teach and learn music in the classroom.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/19248 |
| Date | 03 March 2010 |
| Creators | Whale, Mark |
| Contributors | Shand, Patricia |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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