Wherein Apocalypse: The Time Being in Music Education

Abstract

In this editorial essay, I bring forth the Derridian concept of time and its spectral relationship to music education to do the labour of the anti- work in the field. I ask three questions specifically: what does time have to do with anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-discriminatory work? What does time have to do with music education? And does time, and in this case, the contemporary historical moment, make the field of music education obsolete or all the more necessary? To put it differently and bluntly, what is the fate of music education? Considering the field’s place in the current historical moment, I ponder the field from an alternate position: that music education is not good for anything, nor is it transformative, or an agent of social change. By taking that burden away and taking itself less seriously, one is faced with a slate uninhibited by righteous urgency without yielding to a felt experience of time constraint, and instead can finally breathe and be. It is in this temporal space of being and “out-of-jointness of time” that the authors of this special issue enter and leave their mark and do the anti- work, not because it is necessary or relevant or timely, but because they feel committed to doing this work out of a felt sense of collective responsibility. I invite the readers to pause, take a moment of hesitation, and contemplate the questions posed in this essay and by the authors of this special issue, which leave behind the convention of crisis-management or the urgency-oriented actions and reactive responses to human and environmental crises. I conclude that perhaps it is time to shift from the better world discursive practices to a let’s “unleash overflowing” constancy.