3. STRUCTURAL DECONSTRUCTION OF REIMER’S MUSIC EDUCATION:
3.2. Individualism in Reimer’s theory
3.2.5. Reimer on culture
Reimer’s individualistic view defends universalism at least as an ideal if not as a reality of life. The problem with universalism is, as examined in Chapter 2.4.3., how do we know whether something is universal or cultural. It seems that it is easy to think one’s own culture as universal and someone else’s culture as cultural. For instance, in 1972 Reimer writes:
A large body of music exists that can be regarded as unconnected to any particular place, any particular time, any particular ethnic group, or any particular race. This is the important literature of Western art music, which is characterized by its universality, its timelessness, its “color-blindness”. Of course, every piece of music originated in a particular place at a particular time as the creation of a particular person who was a particular color. But to the extent a composition is successful, to the extent its
536 Reimer 1995b, 12, orig. italics.
537 Ibid., 13.
538 Reimer 1997b, 9.
539 Reimer 1989a, 56.
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musical events capture a sense of human feeling below the surface of everyday life, the composition is liberated from its place of origin, the time of its creation, the physical characteristics of its creator.540
This notion of universality characterizes Reimer’s work. Music as an aesthetic object is contextless.
However, Reimer takes up the question of culture more seriously in his later articles.
He argues that in order to understand the cultural distinctiveness of a particular musical practice, we need to examine both the cultural context of music and how the sounds are organized541. Moreover, Reimer moves from the individually experienced inward moment to a contextual experience and from the purely aesthetic and musical to the multiplicity of meanings in a musical event when arguing: “the act of awareness itself must be understood to be contextually embedded. That is, one cannot simply add contextual information to a piece being experienced as if it was contextless.”542 He also argues that “[w]hile all music is musical, all music is also culturally conditioned and must be construed as such if it is to be understood”543. The nature of musical experience is “both intensely personal and intensely social and contextual”544. Since musical experience is cultural, there is a certain kind of otherness in it for those who are not members of the particular culture545. All music in any culture or setting can be assessed according to pertinent musical and cultural criteria, and these criteria can be learned and applied by those unfamiliar with the musical culture546.
In spite of his interest in cultural differences in musical awareness and practices547, Reimer still avoids the hard “social” and “cultural” work in music education. The personal and social are not intertwined as in Dewey’s thinking, but rather that the inner interaction of the sounds and the person fi xes the ultimate reality of music.
Reimer explains:
We cannot suddenly be members of a foreign culture, experiencing music as natives of that culture can, but we can share something of what they are experiencing while
540 Reimer 1972, 145, my italics.
541 Reimer 1991d, 9.
542 Ibid., 10.
543 Ibid.
544 Ibid., 4.
545 Ibid., 10.
546 Reimer 1993b, 25.
547 See also, Reimer 1995a, 30.
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at the same time retaining our own reality as persons548. That is true for all the many musics with which we come into contact and with which we bring our students into contact. In all cases, what they know of the “why” of music and what they know
“about” music will be transformed by their own personhood into what may be termed
“knowing within” music—the unique internalization of this special and unique human being at this particular moment in which the experience is taking place.549
We can agree that musical practices are often not completely strange to people from another culture. It is possible to enjoy music that does not follow “our” rules. It is also not the purpose of education to build up cultural barriers by overemphasizing differences. However, Reimer’s view seems to have a deeper meaning.
This passive attitude towards intentional cultural change is more obvious in Reimer’s article “The Experience of Profundity in Music”. By using various examples from research literature, Reimer argues that people have a universal capacity to experience music on a profound level but that according to reports, profound experiences seem to be more likely to occur in a cultural context that is familiar. This, according to Reimer, is important to know since “music education should do all it can to encourage profound musical experiences to take place”550. The practical implication of this view is that music educators should concentrate on teaching popular music since at least in most western and even non-western contexts popular music seems to be the musical area that is best known to the students. I am not sure, however, that this is what Reimer means. Moreover, even if we agree that profound experiences occur more often within a familiar musical surrounding, it is a completely different issue to say that therefore we should not even try to widen our familiar world. One of the tasks of education is to widen the meanings in life and enhance interest in non-familiar realms of life. Reimer’s attitude refl ects his need to defend the profundity of the subjective and solipsistic experience.
In his 1994 article, “Can We Understand the Music of Foreign Cultures”, while testing different views of the culture, Reimer seems to think that western music is less contextual than, for example, Kaluli music. He fi rst analyses the different purposes of non-western and western musical cultures:
Western music is composed by individuals whose main purpose is to express inner, personal experience as embodied in aesthetic object. These objects, separate from
548 Reimer 1993b, 25.
549 Ibid., 25-26.
550 Reimer 1995b, 6.
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and having little to do with the natural world, form a world of their own—a world connecting it to the daily lives of those composing it, performing it, or listening to it. The music of the Kaluli arises naturally and spontaneously from their functions of everyday life. – – Western music – – is ‘artefactual’ in every sense, consisting of separate, composed pieces. It requires an elaborate notation system in order to capture the sounds, rendering this music dependent on visual storage and transmission rather than on aural storage and transmission.551
As was shown in earlier chapters, Dewey did not see art as separate from the natural world. It can be shown, for example, that changes in the material world tend to affect composing practices rather quickly. Moreover, the very need to express so-called inner experiences, as explained in Chapter 3.1.2. can be seen as related to various changes in western society. As Goehr explains, music in western context serves certain political needs and purposes552. More importantly, Reimer seems to think that there is an ontological difference between western music and Kaluli music. By further referring to Hall’s conceptions of ‘low context culture’ versus ‘high context culture’, Reimer argues that western music represents a low context culture and using his example, Kaluli music a high context culture. Western music represents “a culture in which particular contexts of particular pieces are far less important than the qualities of the pieces themselves” whereas “[t]he music of the Kaluli represents an extremely ‘high context culture’, closely tied to the particularities of place and time”553.
In order to defend his earlier views Reimer ends up turning Hall’s argument upside down. Hall argues that meaning and context are always tied together. Context and meaning are different aspects of a single event554. Moreover, there is a continuum between high and low context so that one needs to increase the awareness of the selective process when moving to the high context end of the scale555. Hall holds that American culture in general is toward the lower end of the scale when it comes to the amount of contexting needed in everyday life. However, according to Hall, low-context communication has never been an art form. He argues: “Good art is always high-context; bad art, low context. This is one reason why good art persists and art that releases its message all at once does not.”556
551 Reimer 1994a, 229, [my italics].
552 Goehr 1994.
553 Reimer 1994a, 229.
554 Hall 2000, 36.
555 Ibid., 34.
556 Ibid., 37.
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Reimer’s purpose seems to point out that the meaning in western music is “in”musical forms and that the perception of these forms excludes the actual social context. However, he goes even further by suggesting that it is easier for westerners to approach different musics. Quoting Reimer: “People in a low context culture can easily understand and enjoy musical objects from different historical periods and in a variety of styles, that is, out of their contexts, so long as the pieces follow the conventions to which they have become accustomed”557. Reimer seems to suggest that it is diffi cult for Kaluli people to understand and enjoy music in a variety of styles and that western musical conventions are not part of the context and culture that western people are accustomed to and socialized in.
How can we understand this view without imposing a superior western tone on to it?
There is a certain difference between music that gains its form and function in the social situation and that which does not, as in most western classical music which most often is well-defi ned and pre-composed. Western musical pieces have in many cases had a long history of use, which affects the meaning as generic traits (see Chapter 2.2.3.). Music that demands listeners act as participants and get involved in the actual musical form is much more demanding in terms of sensitivity to the situation and is, in this sense, ‘high context music’. In western concert practice there is no visible involvement needed, so in this sense western music does not require knowledge that would be ‘high contextual’. We realize, however, that this view does not imply that there would not be an enormous source of meanings involved in western musical pieces, meanings that infl uence the event. It does not entail that there would not be other kinds of intellectual and emotional challenges, other than in Kaluli music, in the consumption of western music.
Nevertheless, Reimer’s discussion continues by developing a hypothesis that western views are actually culturally determined rather than universal and that “Western constructs of music are equally the products of a particular cultural context”558. He argues, contrary to his earlier writings, that music is as functional in the west as it is anywhere else559. “[N]o music exists unattached to the expectation system of its cultural setting”560. However, he then hesitates and concludes that “[a] culture does, of course, give a particular character to its music, but music always transcends the
557 Reimer 1994a, 229.
558 Ibid., 231.
559 Ibid., 235.
560 Ibid., 237.
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limitations of that character because it also shares universal, musically determined properties, independent of this or that musical culture”561. What these universally determined properties are is not clear. One can ask, what is common to Bomfunk MC’s techno-rap, Bartok’s String Quartet, a mother’s song to her child, or Kaluli music, if examined as experience? They all involve different meanings and an anticipation of very different experiences. They all seem to transform experience in a very different way in their use of sounds.
After exploring the cultural and universal perspective, Reimer returns to the personal level of experience. In agreement with Dewey’s views he argues: “[E]very human being can own the entire world of music”562. However, as with Dewey’s pragmatism, this vertical perspective, our unique personal musical life, is developed in and through the social world, for Reimer “[m]usic, then, is, to a large degree, independent from its social context. It has a life of its own”.563 Reimer writes that “[i]t is safe to say, therefore, that all human beings, no matter their culture, ‘will respond to all music at least at some level based on Gestalt empirical data”564. Even if we agree with this, from a Deweyan orientation, yet experience is never merely connections with raw sense data, as explained in Chapter 2.2.4. Instead the very signifi cance of musical events in the temporal perceptual fl ow depends on the meaningful continuity of connections and relations that are formulated in and through the context. As Blacking writes in How Musical is Man?:
When the Gestalt school insists that musical talent is more than a set of specifi c attributes dependent upon sensory capacities, it is right; but only partly right, because its whole does not extend into the culture of which the music is a part. When opponents of the Gestalt school attach prime importance to sensory capacities, they are also right, because without certain specifi c capacities music could neither be perceived nor performed. – – Paradoxically, their laudable aim to be context-free and objective fails precisely because they minimize the importance of cultural experience in the selection and development of sensory capacities.565
It is the task of music education to expand the range of meanings and help students to construct a signifi cant relationship with various kinds of musics and not merely to offer empirical musical data. In this work a music teacher can sometimes face even those heavily rooted cultural expectations that need to be reconstructed.
561 Ibid.
562 Ibid., 240.
563 Ibid., 237.
564 Ibid.
565 Blacking 1973, 5.