Growing donkey ears: the animal politics of music education

ABSTRACT This article problematizes the view that music education is primarily justified on account of its uniquely humanizing influence. Not only does this general humanist argument clearly fail to convince policy-makers to actually revalidate public music education, but moreover it often seems to rest on highly questionable premises. Without contesting the idea itself that music education can be a humanizing agency, we will try to show that such humanization cannot be achieved without acknowledging music’s inhuman, animal forces. While first this paradox is elaborated through a philosophical reading of the Ancient myth of Midas’s donkey ears, a second part will expand on its implications for the political bearing of music’s contemporary public-educational (ir)relevance. Ultimately, we claim that by paying closer attention to the ways in which music allows animal ‘nonsense’ to disrupt processes of collective human sense-making, we can start thinking of practices of music education that might truly engender a renewed sense of humanity.