Abstract
This historical study explores John Dewey’s ideas regarding music and music education through primary sources (his published writings, correspondence, and transcriptions of class lectures) and secondary sources (biographies and related scholarly literature). Dewey’s belief that he was unmusical is presented, including via a consideration of his novel conception of rhythm absent musical examples. Despite this belief, this study posits a case for a musical Dewey. This is presented through examples in his work that, while scattered, demonstrate several themes: that music is rooted in ritual and social experience, that it is embodied with regard both to creation and perception, and that it has important connections to everyday life. Dewey’s dislike of jazz is interpreted as a resistance to commercialized and commoditized mass culture. The progressive music program at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School that Dewey established exemplifies his commitment to music education, and new research connects that progressive program to Hull House and Jane Addams through the shared employment of music teacher Eleanor Smith. The discussion considers how Dewey’s musical ideas complement his painterly aesthetics and also calls for a resistance to unmusicality as a conception, instead turning toward music as innate to all humans.
Sometimes, when we think we are rediscovering the mighty dead, we are just inventing imaginary playmates.
Dewey’s Art as Experience opens with “By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them.” 2 This article deals with a different ironic perversity, namely, how Dewey’s aesthetics have obstructed the application of his ideas to music education. This is primarily because Dewey—a philosopher of foundational importance to music education—considered himself unmusical. Not slightly unmusical but deeply so, an unmusicality he confessed to friends and students and one for which he apologized. This unmusicality has been an obstruction with music education philosophers, who sometimes address it briefly, “While Dewey did not write much about music education, his philosophy offers tools for reframing the philosophy of music education to account for the significance of music in human life,” and other times obscure it with statements such as “Dewey had a lot to say about the arts.” 3 Biographers, by contrast, are direct: “his uninterest in music was pretty conclusive.” 4
The central argument of this article is that Dewey engaged with music enough—across his books, articles, correspondence, and teaching—that a cursory conclusion that he was unmusical concedes too much. While respecting his right to self-identify as unmusical, the present analysis shows that Dewey’s specific ideas about music and music education merit a place of value for music educators. Moreover, these ideas hold importance in that they allow us to supplement his aesthetic theory with regard to musical experience and because of the continued attention by music education scholars with his overall, nonmusical work. 5
Music educators began engaging Dewey’s ideas during his lifetime. Key early works include Mursell and Glenn’s 1931 psychology of music textbook, McMurry’s 1958 chapter on Deweyan pragmatism, and the attention given to aesthetics in the first graduate foundations music education text. 6 McCarthy and Goble list only four thinkers as the principal influences for the emergence of music education philosophy in the mid-twentieth century: John Dewey, Suzanne Langer, Leonard Meyer, and James Mursell. 7 Dewey remains of central importance with philosophers of music education, including in recent books by Allsup and Woodford, a journal special issue devoted to Dewey and Mursell, and dissertations by Blanken-Webb and Tan. 8 Notable international engagements with Dewey’s ideas include the aforementioned works by Woodford, from Canada, and Vakeva, from Finland, as well as through renewed attention to Dewey’s time in China and in work by Tan that contrasts Confucious’s impact on Eastern philosophy with Dewey as a key figure representative of Western thinking. 9
The present article is an historical assemblage and exploration of Dewey’s musical experiences and writings on music and music education. The study originated during a research trip to the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale to work with staff in accessing their searchable electronic editions of Dewey’s works and correspondence. The center staff shared a subject-oriented list of publications about Dewey, including an index of music-related publications that was invaluable. In addition, the center made available drafts of the “lecture notes”— produced when a stenographer paid by Dewey’s students transcribed both his lectures and class discussions. 10 The electronic editions of Dewey’s work allowed me to expand on existing scholarly accounts by uncovering previously obscure and isolated mentions of musical terms across all of Dewey’s work. To do this, I searched through these digitized works using a variety of musical terms, composer names, and musical styles and genres, printing out all results for further analysis. I also examined secondary sources that included biographies of Dewey and music education scholarship related to his ideas. At first, my focus was on merely documenting the lack of music in Dewey’s work. However, my examination shifted as more musical references came to light. 11 I began to see that the corpus of fragments taken as a whole was significant. I thus began anew a process of reading and organizing Dewey’s musical ideas, looking for areas of repetition or sufficient depth to reach tentative confirmation or disconfirmation. I also returned to several of his key works that discuss the arts. From this work, three themes emerged and are reflected in the present structure of article: “Dewey’s Unmusicality,” “A Musical Dewey?,” and “Dewey’s Connections to Music Education.” The manageable number of instances where Dewey discusses music across his works, correspondence, and lectures allowed for an immersive historical methodology. 12 Every attempt was made to identify, review, and analyze all extant material related to Dewey’s connections to music and music education, with findings analyzed and organized topically rather than statistically, given the small corpus of musical material in Dewey’s works.
The study is organized around two research questions: (1) What written documentation exists of music and its significance, or lack of significance, in Dewey’s life? and (2) What ideas regarding music education can be discerned through Dewey’s work and writings? The answers to these initial questions led to the consideration of two secondary questions, more speculative and thus taken up in the discussion: (1) How might music educators contend with the fragmented nature of Dewey’s ideas with regard to the philosophy of music education? and (2) How might music educators critically engage with notions of unmusicality?
Dewey’s Unmusicality
A Painterly Aesthetics
Writing about aesthetics in general, Berger notes a common problem: One speaks of Art, rather than concrete specific arts, even though more often than not one actually does have one specific art, and not Art in general, in the back of one’s mind. (Thus, when Dewey speaks about art, he usually means painting, just as Heidegger usually means poetry.)
13
How did Dewey come to develop his sense of art through experiences with painting and, to a lesser extent, poetry?
Writing poems, which he enjoyed throughout his career, is the only art-making Dewey is known to have engaged in. These were intensely private, including erotic poems, all of which he threw away only to have them secretly retrieved from the trash by an archivist, eventually leading to their publication posthumously. 14
While Dewey did not paint, he included consideration of painting as early as the late 1800s, when he taught The Philosophy of Beauty as a young professor at the University of Michigan. 15 The main development of Dewey’s aesthetic theory happened during the 1920s, propelled by an ongoing friendship with the wealthy businessman Albert Barnes, whom Martin notes, “paid Dewey’s expenses to accompany him to European churches and art museums during several summer excursions.” 16 Barnes dedicated his book The Art in Painting to Dewey, and Martin argues that learning about painting later in life sharpened Dewey’s analytical thinking about art. Dewey served as the “founding director of education” for the Barnes Foundation, helping with Barnes’s collection of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings. 17 Dewey also had the opportunity to understand the process of painting by observing Matisse, from whom Barnes had commissioned a large mural. Dewey watched Matisse paint and even sat for a portrait. 18 In appreciation, Dewey’s Art as Experience was dedicated to Barnes.
Dewey’s aesthetics, grounded in painting and poetry, certainly serve as an asset to music educators. But consideration of these ideas as if they were drawn equally from all the arts, including music, may have resulted in music educators creating the kind of imaginary playmate suggested in this article’s epigraph. Rectifying this requires, first, understanding Dewey’s sense of his lack of musical abilities.
Dewey’s Musical Allergy
This article’s title is drawn from a characterization of Dewey by one of his students: “He was allergic to music.”
19
That statement, and much of what we know about Dewey’s unmusicality, came about during posthumous attempts to authenticate the authorship of his discarded poems, a process that included writing to former students to ask about their knowledge of Dewey’s love of the arts.
20
These replies often mention music: It may be that Dewey tried writing poetry in connection with his book Art as Experience. He has some important things to say on poetry in that book. Possibly he was trying out the act of creation in the only medium possible for him; so far as I know, he was untrained in music except as a listener, and there is no evidence that he could draw or paint.
21
Another student wrote, “As everyone knows he was most interested in the fine arts. But I distinctly remember his telling me once that he did not have a capacity for appreciating music.”
22
Dewey’s inability to appreciate music included live music: At a concert in Carnegie Hall, to which Dewey had invited a few of us, I noticed that he took little interest in the concert. He told me that he regretted being tone deaf and being unable to enjoy music. And he added that the only arts that were really of serious concern to him were painting and poetry.
23
Dewey had previously written about music to his wife Alice, who had studied music at college. He articulated his vision of what musical enjoyment might consist of while attending a concert: Abby sent us Tickets for their box Friday [afternoon] to the Thomas concert—I realized what an Auditorium was; I should think the room for such a purpose about perfect. . . . Part of my difficulty in getting hold of music has always been the inability to get rid of the instruments, [the room etc., and] the result was always a kind of close, restricted feeling—I haven’t got an ‘ear’ yet, but Friday was the first time I ever felt the music as pure expansion which could take possession of its environment.
24
Most often, when Dewey wrote of attending a concert, he typically did so without musical comment: “Last night, Schneider, Caldwell & I went down to a ‘Summer evening’ concert at Battery D.” 25 Hearing a lecture by an unnamed Russian composer, he wrote, “I have not heard his music and am not musical enough to judge even if I did hear.” 26 On rare occasions, he said just a bit more, as after a concert in Boston: “You know how unmusical I am, but Koussevitzky could stir even me.” 27 Dewey also wrote of musical experiences in Asia. From Japan, he wrote admiringly of a koto performance that evoked nature, “so I think perhaps my ears are made to fit the Japanese scale—or lack of it.” 28 While in China he heard Buddhist chants in a temple in Nanjing, writing, “it’s more hypnotic than Catholic Mass, more soothing to the nerves; if I were near I’d go in every day.” 29
Late in his life, Dewey still wrote of his lack of an ear for music: It is quite true that in my book on art I do better with the arts with a tangible medium—but that is not a matter of principle, but in part because I lack what is called “an ear for music” and in part because by the accident of my acquaintance with Barnes I have made a study of paintings as I have no other art—my spontaneous feeling about poetry is not that it isn’t worth such careful attention but that it is a kind of sacrilege to subject it to intellectual examination of a critical sort—if one likes it, and if one doesn’t why bother at all?
30
Perhaps speaking from experience, Dewey also spoke in a lecture of those who lack an appreciation for music: Music is evidently a very direct sensation and emotional type of tones. . . . To people who do not have aesthetic appreciation, the thing comes to them in chunks, an isolated thing without this radiation, this reverberation, all through the organism.
31
Rhythm without Music
A case for a lack of musical knowledge as an advantage can be made in considering Dewey’s extensive discussions of rhythm, which he did wholly without recourse to music in Art as Experience, particularly in chapter six, “The Natural History of Form,” and chapter seven, “The Organization of Energies.”
32
In this instance, a lack of musical knowledge allowed him to uncover fresh ideas within a concept typically rooted in or limited to music. Dewey located rhythm as fundamental to artistic form, drawn from life and art: The first characteristic of the environing world that makes possible the existence of artistic form is rhythm. There is rhythm in nature before poetry, painting, architecture and music exist. . . . Dawn and sunset, day and night, rain and sunshine, are in their alternation factors that directly concern human beings.
33
Rhythm was located by Dewey throughout the world but also through an individual’s perceiving of the world, the rhythms of beholding: “There is a rhythm of surrender and reflection. We interrupt our yielding to the object to ask where it is leading and how it is leading there.” 34 For Dewey, the harmonizing of the world through rhythmic perception was key: “Only as these rhythms, even if embodied in an outer object that is itself a product of art, become a rhythm in experience itself are they esthetic.” 35
Dewey was fundamentally interested in transcending notions of rhythm as only regular ordered patterns, which he called: “a false notion of rhythm that has, somehow, seriously infected esthetic theory.” 36 He located rhythms in perception across the senses: “In fact denial of rhythm to pictures and building obstructs perception of qualities that are absolutely inseparable in their esthetic effect.” 37
Rhythm, by necessity, did involve recurrence, but “esthetic recurrence is that of relationships that sum up and carry forward. . . . Thus the parts vitally serve in the construction of an expanded whole.”
38
And these rhythms could flow from mechanical or regular patterns, as in his memorable example of organic rhythms of perception that overlie the regularity of a checkerboard or a clock—his one brief example referencing sound: As the eye moves it takes in new and reinforcing surfaces, and careful observation will show that new patterns are almost automatically constructed. The squares run now vertically, now horizontally, now in one diagonal, now in the other; and the smaller squares construct not only larger squares but also rectangles and figures having stair-like outlines. The organic demand for variety is such that it is enforced in experience, even without much external occasion. Even the tick-tock of the clock as it is heard varies, because what is heard is an interaction of the physical event with changing pulsations of organic response.
39
Without the obvious clichés of music and the abundant examples that might anchor an author in musical conceptions, Dewey broadened his horizon to extraordinary abstraction, stating, “Rhythm is rationality among qualities.” 40 Dewey even regarded it as a critical component of aesthetic greatness: “But the objective measure of greatness is precisely the variety and scope of factors which, in being rhythmic each to each, still cumulatively conserve and promote one another in building up the actual experience.” 41 A lack of standard musical understanding may have fostered Dewey’s fresher, more holistic notion of rhythm, an originality that grew productively from his unmusicality. 42
A Musical Dewey?
Dewey did, at least metaphorically, once make music. He wrote a note to himself, lamenting the weak response to his critiques of epistemology: “I have piped my own song, and few have listened, and fewer yet have found a melodic theme. There seems to be little belief in the need of any new musical mode.” 43 In this section, I present an attempt to listen to the musical ideas scattered across Dewey’s works—enough, perhaps, to hear a musical Dewey. 44
I first address some overall minor aspects of Dewey’s writings concerning music, then present four more substantial ideas as subsections: first, music-making and perception as embodied; second, music and ritual; third, music and the everyday; and, fourth, Dewey’s disdain for jazz.
Predictably, many engagements with music in Dewey’s writings are superficial. The word music often occurs in lists: “Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, drama and romance were handmaidens of religion” or “This enhancement of the qualities which make any ordinary experience appealing . . . constitutes the prime function of literature, music, drawing, painting, etc.” 45 Dewey rarely mentions or discusses specific compositions, most often pulling in a well-known work to make a generic point briefly and without elaboration—for example, “in listening to Beethoven’s major theme in the ‘Fifth Symphony’ to come to it with a clear conception of what force is and is not in the arts.” 46 No extended engagement with particular composers or works was found in any of Dewey’s work.
While lecturing in Japan, Dewey spoke of ensembles, namely, the symphony orchestra as a model for the state.
47
He had been inspired by an essay of Kallen’s, and Westbrook notes that Dewey wrote Kallen: I quite agree with your orchestra idea, but upon [the] condition we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously. I never did care for the melting pot metaphor, but genuine assimilation to one another—not to Anglosaxondom—seems to be essential to an America. That each cultural section should maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions seems to me most desirable, but in order that it might have more to contribute to others.
48
Music-Making and Perception as Embodied
Dewey’s central concern for the embodied nature of experience led him to associate a variety of activities alongside art-making, noting that “a surgeon, golfer, ball player, dancer, painter, or violin-player has at hand and under command certain motor sets of the body. Without them, no complex skilled act can be performed” or “How delicate, prompt, sure and varied are the movements of a violin player or an engraver! How unerringly they phrase every shade of emotion and every turn of idea!”
49
Dewey knew that these embodied skills were also involved in perception: A skilled surgeon is the one who appreciates the artistry of another surgeon’s performance; he follows it sympathetically, though not overtly, in his own body. The one who knows something about the relation of the movements of the piano-player to the production of music from the piano will hear something the mere layman does not perceive—just as the expert performer ‘fingers’ music while engaged in reading a score.
50
Music and Ritual
Dewey located the origins of aesthetic experience in everyday life, such as tending a fire, and he referred to the origins of music in early rituals: Musical art abounded in the fingering of the stretched string, the beating of the taut skin, the blowing with reeds. . . . But the arts of the drama, music, painting, and architecture thus exemplified had no peculiar connection with theaters, galleries, museums. They were part of the significant life of an organized community. . . . Music and song were intimate parts of the rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of group life was consummated.
51
Lecturing on logic, Dewey also turned to music as an exemplar of the community and ritual side of the arts: One other point, perhaps more important than what I have mentioned, is more or less a commonplace and yet neglected. That is the social character of the arts, even the fine arts at the time when the fine arts really flourish. Music is an obvious example. Of course you have select work but the community singing, the chorus work in the schools, there is a certain good, certain element of fusion that tends to be a result of music, making up certain emotional values and principles.
52
Music and the Everyday
Dewey discussed “drawing and music” as “the culmination, the idealization, the highest point of refinement,” but he located this greatness in situations where art was still connected to common experience: The art of the Renaissance was great because it grew out of the manual arts of life. It did not spring up in a separate atmosphere, however ideal, but carried on to their spiritual meaning processes found in homely and everyday forms of life. The school should observe this relationship. The merely artisan side is narrow, but the mere art, taken by itself, and grafted on from talent, tends to become forced, empty, sentimental.
53
This desire to retain transaction between art and the life of the community continued throughout his life, such as when he lauded the WPA projects in a radio address, stating his dream that the arts should “come forth from museums to which they have retired, [so that they might] become a living part of the walk and conversation of the average man.” 54
Dewey’s Disdain for Jazz
Given Dewey’s appreciation for community and democracy, along with his pragmatic approach and the importance he accorded to everyday experience, it can be jarring for today’s reader to reckon with his negative opinion of jazz, which he often included in lists such as this: The arts which today have the most vitality for the average person are things he does not take to be arts: for instance, the movie, jazzed music, the comic strip, and, too frequently, newspaper accounts of love-nests, murders, and exploits of bandits.
55
That particular list appears as part of an argument against a museum conception of the arts. Dewey believed that putting art on a pedestal and elitism led people to seek aesthetic appreciation elsewhere: “When, because of their remoteness, the objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of fine art seem anemic to the mass of people, esthetic hunger is likely to seek the cheap and the vulgar.” 56
For Dewey, the cheap and vulgar could be countered through educational betterment, a position that paralleled work on media and education by Leavis.
57
Dewey wrote of the need for society to improve the taste of consumers through education: Above all, it is education to which we must look for improvement in standards of art, literature, and recreation. Legislation may prevent some of those practices of commercial recreation, and commercial art and literature, which are most shocking to morality. But it cannot insure a more healthful state. In this field, as distinguished from that of the automobile, the greater profit seems to lie in the worse products. The moving pictures, the jazz music, the comic strips, and various other forms of popular entertainment, are not an object of pride to those who have learned to know good art, good music, and good literature. A civilization, in which the average man spends his day in a factory and his evening at a movie, has still a long way to go.
58
Might Dewey’s dislike of jazz be racist or classist? With so few musical examples in Dewey’s work, it is troubling that African American music is presented negatively while European classical examples are lauded. Of course, Dewey was a founder of the NAACP, worked on behalf of racial equality, and stated in an address that “there is no inferior race.” 59 Despite this, his stance on racism was not thorough, and recent scholarship continues to examine how Dewey’s ideas fall short of today’s ideals. 60 As for class, Fesmire discusses jazz in Dewey’s writings: “This raises a red flag about possible classist biases, yet his aesthetic theory is on the whole refreshingly antielitist without being populist.” 61
Among these multiple competing readings, Dewey’s disdain for jazz is most convincingly understood as directed toward popular music and popular culture. Note the limits he ascribes to commercial and mass media: Art serves for the greatest number of people today by intensifying experience which has become jaded and mechanized. This includes the movie, the popular fiction and drama, the radio, which cannot give enough aesthetic emotion to become integrated with the significant facts of modern life, and thus are temporary and apart from the good life.
62
Czitrom explores media in work Dewey undertook with two of his students, Cooley and Park, concluding that they thought media could restore a political consensus that had “been threatened by the wrenching disruptions of the nineteenth century: industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.” 63 Czitrom’s analysis is that, on one hand, media had “the great potential of modern communication to extend what Dewey termed ‘organized intelligence’ to the public” but that Dewey and his students also “recoiled from the new popular culture engendered by modern media, treating it only insofar as they perceived it adding to the superficiality and strain of modern life.” 64 For Dewey, what made jazz cheap and vulgar was not swing rhythm but its conveyance via mass culture and commoditization. 65
Dewey’s Connections to Music Education
Despite Dewey’s personal disinterest in music, he held a lifelong belief in its unique importance in education, writing, “To sing with another involves a contagious sympathy, in perhaps a higher degree than is the case with any other art.”
66
This statement came during a time of close association between Dewey and music education as he helped to oversee the Laboratory School in Chicago. Menand writes, It was in Chicago that Dewey did the work that made him famous around the world and among people who are not philosophers. This was his work on the school. What Dewey accomplished helped to change the way children are taught, and it gave him a reputation as a great educator.
67
Dewey wrote of music as a critical component of education as early as 1899: If I do not spend a large amount of time in speaking of the music and art work, it is not because they are not considered valuable and important—certainly as much so as any other work done in the school, not only in the development of the child’s moral and æsthetic nature, but also from a strictly intellectual point of view. I know of no work in the school that better develops the power of attention, the habit of observation and of consecutiveness, of seeing parts in relation to a whole.
68
The progressive program at the Laboratory School was outlined in two first-hand accounts by May Root Kern, a teacher at what is typically referred to as The Dewey School. She wrote: Song-singing as a cultural means is the chief element in the music work of the school. From the kindergarten to the oldest class, carefully chosen songs with piano accompaniment are taught to the children by rote. . . . Songs learned in group work are sung in chorus practice, which occurs each week for one half-hour period.
69
Shiraishi drew on Kern’s accounts to produce an analysis of music education at the Laboratory School, dividing the activities in five categories: “ear training, rhythm, sight-reading or notation, singing songs, and composition.” 70 While singing songs by rote was the most prevalent activity, it is notable that several progressive approaches were present, including improvisation and song composition. 71 Shiraishi attributes the inclusion of creative work to Calvin Brainerd Cady, the Laboratory School’s first director of music. 72 Shiraishi regards the inclusion of creative activities as significant given that “American music educators had paid little attention to creative activities until the 1920s.” 73 Russell similarly locates the music program’s harmony with the larger context of Dewey’s valuing of imagination in education. 74
Dewey’s attention to this progressive music program is clear in a 1902 lecture: “I have been very much interested from a psychological standpoint in watching the change which has come into the teaching of music in Chicago, during the last ten years.”
75
Conversations with music teachers may also have inspired a critique Dewey presented, against learning overly focused on technique: The same thing often happens in music and singing. The pupil is so much drilled in the technic, apart from the music or the song which completes the musical whole, that by the time he has practiced long enough to attain musical efficiency, he is no longer interested in playing anything. His musical feelings have been killed outright, unless he has much genius.
76
A limitation of the previously cited research into music education at the Laboratory School is the total reliance on Kern because her publications predate the association between the Laboratory School and Hull House through their shared employment of the progressive music educator Eleanor Smith. Menand considers Dewey’s association with Hull House, an innovative center for social reform, and its co-founder Jane Addams as one of three key drivers of Dewey’s overall interest in education, alongside the raising of his children and the inspiration he took in moving to Chicago. 77 Dewey’s connection to Hull House and his friendship with Addams provided deep intellectual and practical inspiration, and Smith provides a link between the music education programs at Hull House and the Laboratory School.
Vaillant’s history of progressive music in Chicago includes a chapter on Smith’s approach to music education at Hull House.
78
Both Smith and Addams considered “music as an instrument of outreach and reform.”
79
Vaillant describes the basic progressive approach that formed there: During the 1890s a community of musical activists coalesced at Hull House. These reformers believed that wider access to high-quality music education for the immigrant, ethnic, and working poor, exposure to uplifting classical concert performances, and efforts to supply visitors with affordable alternatives to commercial musical amusements could dramatically enhance the welfare of the urban population and promote civic engagement. Music outreach programs ranged from instructional opportunities in classical music at the Hull House Music School and a Sunday classical concert series to more casual men’s, women’s, and children’s choruses, along with folk music and social clubs and dancing at the settlement.
80
Dewey’s regular visits to Hull House likely connected him to Smith, who had arrived there in 1890, where she was present for the founding of its Music School and eventually became its head.
81
From the start, there arose a tension between music, typically classical, for societal betterment as opposed to music, typically folk or popular, for enjoyment and connection. Vaillant describes the productive tension: The disagreement between Eleanor Smith, a classically trained musician and educator, and Jane Addams, who lacked formal training in music, underscored a central tension in the ideology of musical progressivism. Professional music critics of the cultured generation, like George Upton; conductors, such as Theodore Thomas and Johnny Hand; and professional music educators, like Smith, placed their faith in the innate properties of compositions that their technical and aesthetic training taught them to label “good” music. To them, aesthetics, program selectivity, and technical execution were essential traits of any musical reform exercise. By Contrast, Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, whose financial largesse helped keep Hull House and its music school afloat, perceived music more practically as one tool among many in the arts for engaging the spirits of the urban poor and fostering positive communal experiences.
82
A concert program from the Laboratory School featuring K–4 students singing or performing provides a window into the program, perhaps more aligned with Smith than Addams. It includes among the performances “Come Ye Thankful People Come”; “Canticle”; “Hurrah Boys”; “Wake Viol and Flute,” a march when “the little children go out carrying the chairs”; “Games by kindergarten and 1st Grade . . . Indian Games 2nd Grade”; and finally, “PARTY: Over the Hills.” 83
Dewey’s 1902 Fight for Music Education
That Dewey was aware of music education and supportive of Smith’s curriculum is evident in a fascinating moment uncovered in Dewey’s correspondence as he took direct action to defend the music program at the Laboratory School from the chopping block. William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago, held the figurative axe in a letter to Dewey: The deficit on the School of Education is about $15,000. This, of course, is three times as much as we thought it would be. I do not think it wise to spend so much money as $2130 for Music. . . . When a larger number of students come we ought to be able to do more things, but with a hundred students, it seems quite impossible to appropriate as much as $2130 for their instruction in Music, considering how small an amount of music they have. I shall be glad to have you think the matter over.
84
Dewey replied to Harper two weeks later: The music is the weakest point in the professional instruction of the school. Miss Eleanor Smith, as you probably know, is a very remarkable musician and teacher, and will add both strength and dignity to the school. As a matter of general policy in the future, it seems to me that it may be wise to provide especially for those lines of instruction not provided for regularly in the colleges (the manual and fine arts, pedagogy, etc.).
85
Harper’s reply backed down, resorting to the all-too-familiar move—trying to spread the cost by making the music teacher itinerant: I agree with you that the music is a very important element and I take it that Miss Smith is the best woman we can secure, but it is a very necessary thing to reduce the expenses of the school in certain directions. . . . I am quite anxious to have the music thoroughly developed. I am wondering whether Miss Smith cannot for the sum named do some work also in connection with the South Side Academy.
86
In the end, Dewey prevailed, and Miss Smith worked with the Laboratory School until 1904, the year Dewey moved to New York city to join the faculty at Columbia.
Dewey’s belief in the importance of music education was still in evidence more than thirty years after his work at the Laboratory School, when he squared off against H. L. Mencken in a point-counterpoint article regarding educational “frills”: It is proposed to eliminate from the schools such things as health service, work with wood, metal, tools, domestic arts, music, drawing, and dramatics, on the ground that they are ‘frills’ and costly frills at that. . . . I deny absolutely that saving money at the expense of the lives of young people, now and in the future, is economy. . . . It is as heartless and as foolish to starve the minds and characters of the young as it is to starve the bodies of their parents.
87
Discussion: Unmusicality and the Philosophy of Music Education
The musical Dewey assembled in this article points the way toward an aesthetics he likely could not have worked out for himself. Dewey did not have a full philosophy of music education, but he was far from devoid of musical ideas, and music educators can benefit by engaging with this work. Here, I summarize Dewey’s central concerns and suggest some lines along which to begin this engagement with Dewey’s musical ideas and then turn to consideration of how our profession might contend with discourses of unmusicality.
Writers ought to engage in Dewey’s work with the arts as they relate to education but should proceed with a sense of the enormity of the task. Jackson notes, “I think that Dewey may have chosen not to discuss the educational implications of his theory of arts chiefly because he had not yet thought them through to his own satisfaction.” 88 And yet, perhaps only those in music education can fill in the harmonies that underlie Dewey’s sketched themes. The reticence Dewey had might also have related to his lack of musical experience. Rorty memorably characterized Dewey in contrast with Whitman: “Dewey might have approved of the rock-and-roll culture in a guarded and deliberate way, but Whitman would have thrown himself into it wholeheartedly.” 89 Those who want to harmonize Dewey’s musical ideas, then, will need to possess both the arrogance to go beyond what Dewey said and also a humility to help keep us from turning Dewey into an imaginary playmate.
Berger, quoted previously, regarded Dewey as committing the sin of writing of art in general while, in fact, painting was foremost in his mind. If others act as if Dewey’s painterly aesthetics speak directly to music, his purported sin can be compounded, but we can also retune Dewey’s aesthetics both by keeping his painterly tendencies in mind and supplementing those aesthetics with the material he wrote regarding music and music education. For example, when one reads chapter three of Art as Experience, “Having an Experience,” one can supplement ideas from his other works, such as the example of the violinist and surgeon. One could also add consideration of the social character of the arts through the example of community singing, which he wrote about as providing “a certain good, certain element of fusion that tends to be a result of music, making up certain emotional values and principles.” 90 Dewey’s own generous and perceptive statements regarding music can serve to counterbalance the overly individualistic and contemplative aesthetics of Art as Experience.
Art teachers today laud examples from comics, movies, and jazz—three art forms that drew Dewey’s disdain. The fact that educators may today wish to include the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Kendrick Lamar or Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan is a testament to substantial change in society’s aesthetic values. And yet, Dewey’s sentiment that not all musical experiences are created equal can be considered relevant as well as his desire for educators to play a critical role in curating and cultivating musical experience. His concern regarding commercial culture seems particularly pertinent in helping critique the present moment of digitization, streaming music, and the positive and negative aspects of new forms of musical creation and sharing. Educators should also aspire to navigate between two problematic ends of a spectrum Dewey identified: on one side, the overly commercial or vulgar and, on the other side, “mere art” that is unmoored or remote from everyday experience. Dewey called for the arts to come forward from museums and in that same address relayed a question, “How can a finished citizen be made in an artless town?” 91 Music can also come forward from concert halls, which might represent at times a retreat from the everyday, and educators can wrestle with questions of what it might mean to come forward, to place music again within diverse communities, and to see their work in a civic context.
It is notable the extent to which Dewey worked to maintain the music program at his Laboratory School. The students who sang songs together under Ms. Smith and others were involved in a progressive program, built on rote singing but also including composition and improvisation. One could speculate as to what Dewey would consider the progressive vanguard of music education today, but it is heartening to acknowledge that he would likely have wanted students of his school to spend time experiencing this vanguard. And educators can also aspire to enact in their programs the “genuine assimilation to one another—not to Anglosaxondom” that Dewey hoped would maintain the “distinctive literary and artistic traditions” so different cultures would be able to enrich one another. 92
That our profession has not engaged with the depth of Dewey’s musical thinking may be related to the conclusion, made by himself and others, that he was unmusical. I have shown in this article that music was present in Dewey’s life: in ideas, through attending concerts, and in his robust support for music education. Within Dewey’s supposed unmusicality there exist fascinating thoughts about music, enough to call to question the very idea of unmusicality. Specifically, how might music educators critically engage with notions of unmusicality?
To begin with, it is important to recognize that both biology and culture are at work when one calls oneself unmusical. Had Dewey lived today, he probably would have found, or been offered, the term congenital amusia, a label that can apply when one differs “from ordinary people [in] their difficulty with recognizing a familiar tune without the aid of the lyrics, and their inability to detect when someone sings out of tune, including themselves,” and that is estimated to occur in approximately 1.5 percent of the population. 93
But biological and neurological realities become consequential largely in the ways that culture makes them consequential. McDermott and Varenne discuss a period of time 200 years ago when those on Martha’s Vineyard experienced a high rate of deafness. They note, “Although it was definitely the case that the Vineyard deaf could not hear, it is also the case that they had the means to turn not hearing into something that everyone in the community could easily work with, work around, and turn into a strength.”
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In fact, deafness was so well accepted that not all members could recall who among them had been deaf when asked by researchers. The authors continue: The case of the Vineyard deaf raises questions about the nature of disability, questions that go beyond etiology to function and circumstance: When does a physical difference count, under what conditions, and in what ways, and for what reasons? When, how, and why: these are, of course, deeply cultural issues, and depending on how a physical difference is noticed, identified, and made consequential, the lives of those unable to do something can be either enabled or disabled by those around them.
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Unlike the deaf who were supported on Martha’s Vineyard, Dewey and Jane Addams grew up during a time in which historians note a “decline of the amateur” as professional musicians shone on tour and in broadcast, leaving amateurs in the shadows and allowing others more opportunity to feel themselves unmusical. An 1894 article in The Atlantic noted that the term amateur had become “almost a term of opprobrium. The work of an amateur, the touch of the amateur, a mere amateur, amateurish, amateurishness,—these are different current expressions which all mean the same thing, bad work.”
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Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward imagined our present day as one when nearly everyone would be eclipsed by professionals. A character from our own time reports back, Of course, we all sing nowadays as a matter of course in the training of the voice, and some learn to play instruments for their private amusement; but the professional music is so much grander and more perfect than any performance of ours, and so easily commanded when we wish to hear it, that we don’t think of calling our singing or playing music at all.
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The rise of musical specialization, extraordinary advances in training, and the ability to digitally edit audio place listeners in constant contact with extraordinary sounds most cannot perform, a reality that could encourage more people to surrender themselves as unmusical. Blacking questioned the inevitability of this framing: “Must the majority be made ‘unmusical’ so that a few may be made more ‘musical’?” 98 How indeed can music be framed such that sonic wonders are celebrated without discouraging others from feeling that they are not musical? Could we create conceptions that would support those like Dewey turning toward music through more inclusive discourses that, as with the Vineyard deaf, turn supposed weaknesses into strengths? How might a music classroom be created in which students do not remember which among them might otherwise be known as unmusical?
Conversations and considerations in our profession can do more to challenge cultural discourses of unmusicality. Instead of binaries such as musical/unmusical or talented/untalented, we can celebrate the inherent musicality of all humans. Some of this might draw on other educational research into positive mind-set, for instance, the work to ensure that everyone identifies as a “math person.” 99 Ruddock provides perhaps the deepest exploration of the conceptual opportunities that await those who wish to reject notions of unmusicality and talent, embracing instead musicality as inherent in all people. 100 In her work, she attends to those who feel themselves to be nonmusical or unmusical, proposing to reject these discourses to focus on musicality as innately human. The continued exploration and promotion of discourses such as these will require broad participation and continued efforts across the profession.
The historical case of Dewey’s unmusicality contains resources in our efforts to resist notions of unmusicality. We may return to his writings for a reminder that musical richness is available even in those whose musicality has been dismissed. We can remember that the scholarly literature of music education has benefitted deeply from one who thought himself unmusical. Furthermore, Dewey’s writings about rhythm can not only enlighten us but also encourage us to place musical ideas and terms into contexts that extend beyond disciplinary boundaries. And his recognition of the fusion that music makes possible can encourage us to involve all students in this fusion as he made sure happened in defending music education again and again across his career. We can also hear Dewey’s call for the arts to watch against an elitism that might leave music as mere art by considering the work of today’s scholars of community music and Turino’s conception of participatory music. 101 Dewey’s life is a concrete reminder to our profession that those who feel themselves to be unmusical always have musical aspects to their lives. Considering this, we can work to reframe and rethink what we do as music educators to help more students to feel themselves welcome and valued in our classes as we strive to provide meaningful opportunities for musical learning, growth, and experience.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: An initial visit to the Center for Dewey Studies was funded by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Access to the electronic edition of Dewey’s writings, correspondence, and lectures was funded by the Education University of Hong Kong.
