Individual transformation as a solemn end in itself

Similarly for both Dewey and Reimer, music is an experience. However, if Dewey examined experience as a subject’s transactions with objects within and through a social environment, for Reimer musical experience is defi ned in terms of an experiencing subject and the artistic object, which is the cause of the experience.

Reimer then defi nes what kind of mental approach is required for the subject in order for the musical experience to be an aesthetic experience. In my reading of Dewey’s theory, aesthetic experience is an extension of his general pragmatist understanding of experience.

As Richmond explained, Reimer’s view on the aesthetic shares with Dewey the notion of unity. Unity is linked to the understanding of art as experience. Music becomes a work of art through what the acoustic product, the object, does. A work of art is active and experienced, whereas the product is physical and potential.⁴⁵⁷ However, the difference between a pragmatist understanding and Reimer’s notion of experience can be identifi ed here. According to Reimer, in order to become unifi ed, aesthetic experience needs to be intrinsic, disinterested, and distanced⁴⁵⁸. By an experience being intrinsic Reimer means that the experience is valuable in itself. It is disinterested in the sense that is must be removed from practical and “utilitarian”

concerns. Utilitarian functions, such as intersubjective ones, draw us to the “surface”

of music⁴⁵⁹. The person who experiences must be distanced, physically removed from any practical involvement in order to “lose himself” in the immediate power of the experience itself⁴⁶⁰. Music as art then has no function beyond itself. It is the subjective individual experience, the deep basis that becomes crucial. Although Dewey made

457 Dewey 1934, 162.

458 Reimer 1989a, 103.

459 Ibid., 122.

460 Ibid., 103.

116

an effort to describe the unity of experience⁴⁶¹, according to my reading of his work, there is no need to search for one particular kind of description on how and in what kind of position the individual should face the musical product in her temporal-spatial experience and learning. There is no need to disregard the aspects of the subjective experience that belong to the shared social world. As Mitchell writes, Dewey’s aesthetic “does not signify a particular sort of pleasure but more generally the characteristics of any experience that is immediately enjoyed”⁴⁶². Reimer’s description seems therefore to have more resemblance to the Kantian experiencing subject than with Dewey’s subject who always experiences in and through the temporal situation, and where the aesthetic is a name for the complex and multilayered process in experience with “felt” intensity and quality⁴⁶³.

For Reimer, functional uses of music, like intersubjective ones, are referential, referring to symbols that exist outside of the music. In referential use, music stimulates mental activity that is not related to what is actually going on in the given music.⁴⁶⁴ Individual cognition should be focused on expressive qualities in the music and not on something that is not there, on something external to the music and the artistic. The purpose of aesthetic education is “to develop the ability of people to perceive the embodied, expressive qualities of things and to react to the intrinsic signifi cance of those qualities”⁴⁶⁵. The focus should be on what goes on in the musical object and not on what goes on outside of it. The aesthetic component of musical sounds presents an experience that can be shared by those who perceive and react aesthetically⁴⁶⁶. What is perceived is “perceived as expressive”⁴⁶⁷. Reimer thus transfers the educational focus from understanding how musical sounds are used in various societies to bring about unifying experiences in favour of a view that focuses on sounds as such.

How are sounds as music then shared? According to Reimer, musical sounds embody a feeling and people share this feeling since “all people share in the common human condition”⁴⁶⁸. He maintains:

461 See, e.g., Dewey 1934, Chapter VIII.

462 Mitchell 1989, 478-479.

463 Also, ibid, 480. I shall return to Dewey’s notion of aesthetic in Chapter 4.4.

464 Reimer 1989a, 123.

465 Ibid., 106.

466 Ibid., 106-107.

467 Ibid., 107, orig. italics.

468 Reimer 1989a, 108.

117

Fundamentally all art spring from the same source in the common human condition of sentience—of being conscious of one’s self in a world of others and of being capable of exploring the shared experience of being a self among others through humanly created, perceptible forms⁴⁶⁹.

It is not clear, however, that everyone understands or enjoys everyone’s art because of the universal condition of being human.

Therefore, Reimer explains further. The shared experience is related to musical forms. Art “gives perceptible form to our personal and collective subjectivities”⁴⁷⁰. Form embodies something that is shared. Reimer does not mean, however, that all people have the same experiences or that experiences between different people would be identical. Reimer fi xes the perspective of the shared on the individual and the object of music when writing:

As we work on the quality of the object (the artistic materials), we are also working directly and substantively on the quality of the inner process it objectifi es. As our melody improves our feeling improves.⁴⁷¹ – – Creating art and experiencing art deepen our subjectivity. We are able to probe beneath the surface of our feelings.⁴⁷²

The self internalizes feelings within musical sounds. Feelings become “part of the inner subjective structure” so that they characterize the person’s selfhood⁴⁷³. What is shared is inward and subjective. Reimer explains:

Music comes to its resting place within us when it includes our sense of its universality as a phenomenon, includes our understanding of its particular cultural setting, and transcends both. It then becomes a unique experience, combining the uniqueness of these particular sounds and the uniqueness of who we are as particular persons experiencing these sounds. This inner interaction, of these sounds with this person at this moment in time, is where the reality of music ultimately exists.⁴⁷⁴

What seems to be lacking in Reimer’s theory, is at the heart of Dewey’s philosophy.

Reimer does not acknowledge that individual thinking employs shared ideas and that experiencing and ‘making sense’ is done in certain contexts of shared practice.

Musical practice is always social and not subjective. If the above description is supposed to describe general conditions of aesthetic experience, then Reimer distances himself from Dewey’s notion. Although musical experience needs to be

469 Reimer 1991d, 8, my italics.

470 Reimer 1991b, 89.

471 Reimer 1989a, 35, my italics.

472 Ibid., 36, orig. italics.

473 Ibid., 37, my italics.

474 Reimer 1993b, 25, my italics.

118

signifi cant for the experiencing subject herself in a here-and-now temporal situation, this here-and-now situation is, as was explained in Chapter 2.2., not transcending its social-cultural context but gets its content by being learned, shared, having meaning in a wider social context. In Dewey’s pragmatism, these are overlapping perspectives so that the latter is a general condition for the former.

This view of an experiencing subject in, but yet not through the social world, forms the centre of Reimer’s conception of the human being and her experience. The shared aspect in music is the general fact that all people experience musical forms in the same way, as inward. Aesthetic experience and quality are Kantian universals, constituted by the nature of our humane cognition rather than by social action within the contexts of practices, rules, principles, traditions and the like. Music educates the life of feeling that is situated in subjectivity but so that the “objectifi ed feeling” is universal.

Subsequently, Reimer’s approach also does not appreciate a view in which musical forms are used to create and transform shared musical situations that can further be related to other life-goals than directly to so-called musical goals, such as intersubjective or ethical-moral goals. Reimer poses the question of music in terms of a musical object and an experiencing lonely subject among other such subjects.

What is musical is meaningful for the individual rather than for the growth and transformation of the community. Community, as Reimer sees it, is the sense of sharing the same inner feeling that is embedded in the sounds. Music as embodying inner subjectivity by objectifying it is evidence of our being in a community since we all share this human condition of subjectivity⁴⁷⁵.

The purpose of Reimer’s focus is not only to point out the importance of subjective experience, the vertical perspective of the learner—which is important in Dewey’s approach as well—but entails also a strong normative stance towards various positions of our engagements with musical sounds. Solipsistic experience becomes the ideal over and against all possible social engagements. Reimer does acknowledge that music is often concretely a group activity—which is not the only aspect of the social as explained in Chapter 2.2.—but argues that the individual experience of the arts is “far more profound” than a group activity⁴⁷⁶. Reimer also confi rms his attitude

475 Reimer 1989a, 68.

476 Ibid., my italics.

119

towards the social values of music and music education: “The social nature of music activities, involving people in a common endeavour, is surely socializing also, but literally hundreds of equally social activities exist: we don’t need music or art for that, pleasant as it is.”⁴⁷⁷ For Reimer, there is no difference between any kind of social activity and a one that is also musical. Music is not for creating or improving social situations. Subsequently, individual subjectivity is the end in view in aesthetic transformation as in Kant’s philosophy.⁴⁷⁸

We can compare Reimer’s focus with Dewey’s holistic view. Dewey wrote:

Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unifi ed collective life. But they are also marvellous aids in the creation of such a life. The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confi ned to the artist and to a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its offi ce, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity.⁴⁷⁹

Musical thinking and learning requires an enjoyment of the interaction and this enjoyment can be cumulative and consequential in social terms. In my reading of Dewey, art particularly can create such enjoyment.

Even if we stay in Reimer’s setting of the experiencing subject and the musical object embodying feelings, there are questions that arise: are inner feelings the same independent of the culture? Are those musical practices, which aim explicitly and intentionally at actual interaction between participants and thus at social transformation, less musical and non-aesthetic?

Reimer partly answers these questions when admitting that musical perception happens within a musical style and that one can have diffi culties in responding to sounds made in an unknown style. Then no “sharing” takes place and the music is meaningless to the person who perceives it⁴⁸⁰. If culture conditions our perception then where does the universal dimension exist? Reimer answers: “Truly, the ‘universality’

477 Ibid., my italics.

478 Reimer has later tried to correct the picture that A Philosophy of Music Education gives but it is easy to identify his basic analytic need to demarcate artistic and non-artistic, musical and non-musical, aesthetic and non-aesthetic. See, e.g., “Justifying Music Education”, in which Reimer answers to Phillips who makes the same point as I have made here, writing that he never intended to separate music from reality or art from life (Reimer 1993a, 14).

479 Dewey 1934, 81, my italics.

480 Reimer 1989a, 132.

120

of musical sharing is more a fond hope than a reality”⁴⁸¹. One more question remains:

how can cultural transformation take place in education if education does not start from reality, if the cultural and thus the social are transparent and the focus is on the ideal? Is Reimer separating theory and philosophy of music education from practice?

If so, then his approach has already distanced itself from Dewey’s ideas. Although Dewey may have hoped for universal meanings he, however, wrote: “[T]he idea of perfecting an ‘inner’ personality is a sure sign of social divisions. What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others—which is not capable of free and full communication.”⁴⁸² And communication, for Dewey, was the precondition for growth and education.

In document Bridging experience, action, and culture in music education (sivua 113-118)