Sound, Sensation, and Difference: Troubling Sonic Governance in Music Education

• In Event: Exploring the Sonic in Music Teaching & Learning

Abstract

Sound and sensation are continually offered as tools for music educators to utilize as they develop students into idealized ways of being. For instance, in a textbook for future music teachers, the reader is told that through a student-centered, exploratory approach that features activities such as dancing with scarves and feeling the sensations of sound in their bodies, “sounds combine in some way…to produce an internal response” (Huhtinen-Hildén & Pitt, 2018, p. 9), enabling music teachers to create the kind of young child who is creative and confident, ultimately able to foster “a good life for all” (Huhtinen-Hildén & Pitt, 2018, p. 9).

Similarly, in Orff-Schulwerk, students explore and improvise through a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the utilization of sound, body, and sensation to create a “new kind of person” who is creative (Orff & Keetman, 1993, p. 32) and is considered necessary for future national stability and prosperity. Elsewhere, student-led forms of popular music education that allow students to explore as they experience music and sound are often considered open, democratic, and liberatory. These practices have been linked to goals of cultivating “artistic citizenship” and the secure, prosperous future it is assumed such idealized kinds of children will enact (Smith, Warren, & Kenrick, 2019).

This paper is interested in denaturalizing notions of creating idealized kinds of child-citizens through sound and sensation in music education. I ask: how do sound and sensation become taken-for-granted as technologies for creating desired kinds of people?

In response, I develop a historical epistemology (Daston & Galison, 2007) that traces the modes of thought and history through which sound and sensation became mobilized as technologies for creating desired kinds of people in music education. I engage closely with a key project that allows entry into the epistemologies and histories music education engaged with as it assembled sound and sensation as tools for creating desired kinds of people: the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Program. I read along the archival grain (Stoler, 2016) of Manhattanville’s documentary report, paying close attention to the fears, hopes, and ideas embedded within the document as Manhattanville’s researchers connected sound, psychology, and pedagogy to redesign U.S. music education in the Cold War Era to facilitate “encounters” with sound that, it was hoped, would govern the “cognition” and “attitude” of children, particularly those in “inner cities” who were positioned as un-creative Others through racialized cultural imaginaries.

My interest in doing so is not to tell a history. Instead, I utilize Manhattanville as an empirical object to understand the ways sound and sensation became mobilized to govern populations constructed as different. I then trace how these ideas have not disappeared and instead continue to impact well-intentioned, contemporary efforts in music education.

The goal of such an effort is twofold: 1. To understand the ideas, histories, and practices through which sound has become a technology for governing in music education. 2. To clear the space necessary for imagining and materializing new engagements with sound that resist these epistemologies and their materializations in curriculum, pedagogy, and classrooms.

Author

• Noah Karvelis, Northern Arizona University