De-centering Music: A “sound education”

Abstract

Music, considered as a field of discourse, has important implications for how educators think and act within their classrooms. Based on the work of Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, Murray R. Schafer, and feminist music education scholars, this paper aims to delineate these implications and to propose “sound education” as an alternative. Instead of traditional Music-centered focuses on “appreciation” and “musicianship,” “sound education” proposes “listening” and “sound-making” as alternatives. Gaztambide-Fernandez’s notion of “cultural production” and Steven Feld’s “acoustemology” provide conceptual bases that ground these alternatives in ways which center on symbolic work and social interactions, while allowing for a broad understanding of relationality within ecologies of human and non-human entities.