Music Education and the Sensorial: Historicizing the Instrumentalization of Sound Encounters as Developing Desired "Attitudes"

• In Event: Constructing the (Ab)Normal: Development, Affect, and Sensory Experience in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

1. Objectives or purposes
The Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project (MMCP) of the 1960s and 1970s was a national research project often conceptualized as a site of emergence for many reforms within 21st-century music education (Moon, 2014; Mark, 2007). This paper engages with the documentary report of the MMCP to consider how these reforms which have come to define much of contemporary practice, such as student-centered education, developed historically as well as how such histories leave residues upon contemporary practice. The paper makes visible how the MMCP’s approach to music education was not simply developed through ideas surrounding music or student-centered teaching. Rather, it produced developmental norms and instrumentalized designed sensorial encounters as a mode of intervening upon and reorienting the “attitude” of the child.

2. Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
As a way of developing such understandings, this paper treats music curriculum as alchemy (Popkewitz & Gustafson, 2002). Informed by such an approach, it seeks to understand how ideas that have little to do with subject areas become embodied within curriculum as they shift educational practice, produce forms of difference, and create new modes of intervention and governance.

3. Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
To so, the paper engages in a genealogical approach concerned with the history of the present (Foucault, 1978) which traces the historical production of the MMCP’s modes of thought and action. Further, the project connects such histories to the condition of contemporary schooling and music classrooms throughout the U.S.

4. Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
The paper draws primarily from the documentary report of the MMCP which offers curriculum plans, objectives, methodologies, and justifications for the project’s work. This paper supplements such materials with the history of the MMCP developed by those such as Moon (2004; 2006). It reads these documents in relation to the history of psychology in order to understand how they become embodied within the MMCP’s curriculum and research.

5. Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
The paper demonstrates the influence of post-war psychology upon what come to be understood as inclusive, progressive reforms. Specifically, the paper traces how the MMCP’s developmental standards fabricated new norms and differences within music education. Further, the paper demonstrates how such differences were intervened upon through psychologized notions of sensorial experience which prioritized access to the child through designed sound encounters and the consequent shifting of their “attitude” toward idealized states. Doing so allows an understanding of how, despite inclusionary desires, curriculum and research have often produced and instrumentalized notions of difference and intervention.

6. Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
The paper contributes to curriculum studies, the history of education, and music education as it connects notions of development, sensorial experience, and psychology to the production of what come to be understood as inclusive, equitable reforms in schools. Further, the paper allows for a questioning and rethinking of contemporary classroom practices that have resonances with such approaches and their epistemic foundations.

Author

• Noah Karvelis, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author