Musical spirituality: Reflections on identity and the ethics of embodied aesthetic experience in/and the academy

Journal of Aesthetic Education

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 80-98

  Bogdan, Deanne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949619423     PISSN: 00218510     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3527457     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. A pontifical high mass is one which is celebrated by a cardinal or archbishop
2. "Unlike causality, synchronicity is affective, not intellectual." Within Jungian theory, synchronicity "is not ordinary chance or meaningless coincidence, but closely allied to the archetypes." Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 226, 223
3. Linda Hutcheon writes of being Italian-Canadian and of "passing" in the 1970s "as an English teacher in the ethnic sense," her married name "Hutcheon" acting as "a form of protective coloration" from "Bortolotti" within the profession; "Crypto-Ethnicity," Publications of the Modern language Association of America, 113, no. 1 (1998): 31. My own married name is for me a double displacement of nominal identity, "Bogdan" often being mistaken as having Irish or Anglo-Saxon roots. Ironically, as a first generation Hungarian, my husband is even closer to his European ethnicity than I am to my Italian one
4. Marianna de Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1996), 41-42
5. Virginia I. Purvis-Smith, "Ideological Becoming: Mikhail Bakhtin, Feminine Ecriture and Julia Kristeva," in A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin, ed. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 50. Purvis-Smith, an ordained Presbyterian minister, gives an affecting analysis of the patriarchal elements of a liturgical service in which she participated
6. See especially Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990)
7. Jane Roland Martin, "The Ideal of an Educated Person," Educational Theory 31, no. 2 (Spring 1981): 97-102
8. and Jane Roland Martin, Changing the Educational Landscape: Philosophy, Women, and Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1994)
9. The viscera or materiality of the soul is the counterpart to the spiritual nature of the body. "The more we recognize the nonmateriality of the body, of nature, the more conscious it becomes"; Woodman and Dickson, Dancing in the Flurries, 222
10. See Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader: Julia Kristeva (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)
11. Carl G. Jung, quoted in Peter Michael Hamel, Through Music to the Self: How to Appreciate and Experience Music Anew, trans. Peter Lemesurier (Longhead, Shaftsbury, Dorset: UK: Element Books, 1978), 10
12. De Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway, ix
13. See also Jane Miller, Seductions: Studies in Reading and Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991)
14. and Marianna de Marco Torgovnick, School for Women (London: Virago, 1996)
15. See Deanne Bogdan, "Musical Performance as Embodied Dialogism," Philosophy of Music Education Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 3-22, for an analysis of whether and how there can be "transfer value" from dialogical musical processes to learning processes as meeting the other on the other's own terms
16. Donna Marie Wulff, "On Practicing Religiously: Music as Sacred in India," in Sacred Sound: Music in Religious Thought and Practice, ed. Joyce Irwin, Journal of the American Academy of Religion Studies vol. 50, no. 1 (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1983), 150
17. For the contestability of this idea within Western culture, see especially Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (University of California Press, 1993)
18. Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and. Sexuality (Minnesota, Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
19. John Shepherd, "Music and Male Hegemony," in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
20. and John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
21. See Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambala, 1996), 3, 27, 29, 53, 110, and 126
22. See Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990) for a conception of music and musical experience grounded in solely the materials of music itself
23. Samuel Blair, A Discourse on Psalmody (Philadelphia: John McCulloch, Evans 21695, 1789), 19-20
24. quoted in Stephen A. Marini, "Rehearsal for Revival: Sacred Singing and the Great Awakening in America," in Irwin, Sacred Sound, 86
25. See Plato, Republic, Books II, III, and X, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. And trans. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961, 1980)
26. Iris Yob, "Religious Music and Multicultural Education," Philosophy of Music Education Review 3, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 79
27. Also, Jim Garrison has argued why listening, with all its risks, dangers, and vulnerabilities, must be accorded its rightful place within an ontology of liberal democratic education if that education is to cease reinscribing dominance. See Jim Garrison, "A Deweyan Theory of Democratic Listening," Educational Theory 46, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 429-51
28. See Barbara Applebaum and Dwight Boyd, "The Meaning of Dominance, the Dominance of Meaning, and the Morality of the Matter," in Education, Culture, and Values Education, Vol. IV: Moral. Education and Pluralism, ed. Mal Leicester, Celia Modgil, and Sohan Modgil (London: Falmer Press, 2000), 32-46
29. Dwight Boyd, "Dominance Concealed through Diversity: Implications of Inadequate Perspectives on Cultural Pluralism," Harvard Educational Review 66, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 609-30
30. and Dwight Boyd, "The Place of Locating Oneself(Ves)/Myself(ves) in Doing Philosophy of Education," in Philosophy of Education 1997, ed. Susan Laird (Urbana, IL: Philosophy of Education Society, 1998), 1-19
31. Estelle R. Jorgensen concurs with the spirit of these definitions. See Estelle R. Jorgensen, In Search of Music Education (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 48-51
32. Anthony J. Palmer, "Music Education and Spirituality: A Philosophical Exploration," Philosophy of Music Education Review, 3, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 92-93
33. Martin Heidegger, What Are Poets For? Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 98
34. Terry Eagleton, as quoted in Maryse Souchard, "On the Concept of the Aesthetic/An Interview with Terry Eagleton," Recherches Semiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 10 (1990): 165, emphasis added
35. See note 7
36. Aristotle, "On the Art of Poetry," in T.S. Dorsch, ed., Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967), 43-44
37. Maxine Greene, "Toward Possibility: Expanding the Range of Literacy," English Education 18 (1986): 240
38. In Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), Greene extends aesthetic experience to education and schooling by arguing that providing aesthetic experiences - releasing the imagination - creates a space for breaking through the mundane to think the unthought and thus attain both individual freedom and respect for the differences of others
39. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 31. I acknowledge that these examples are specific and relative to Western conceptions of the aesthetic and the spiritual
40. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, quoted in Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 55-56
41. Palmer, "Music Education and Spirituality," 99, 103
42. For a view of the aesthetics and ethics of ordinary existence in which human lives are construed as works of art, see Michel Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence," interview by Allesandro Fontano, Panorama, July 1984, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence E. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47-53
43. The performance practice I describe in "Musical Performance as Embodied Listening," Philosophy of Music Education Review 9, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 3-22, shares two "fundamental characteristics" of the "basic consciousness" in Nel Nodding's theory of caring: engrossment in the other and the flow of "our motive energy toward the other."
44. Dialogue also figures prominently in Noddings's work. Nel Noddings, "The Caring Professional," in Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, ed. Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 161
45. In contrast to studies correlating the raising of SAT scores through music and the arts, see D.G. Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit (New York: Avon, 1997)
46. For a critique of the justification of music education on the basis of its instrumental rationality see Charlene Morton, "The 'Status' Problem: The Feminization of School Music and the Burden of Justification"
47. See also Eleanor V. Stubley, "Being in the Body, Being in the Sound: A Tale of Modulating Identities and Lost Potential," Journal of Aesthetic Education 32, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 93-105, for her argument that learning to perform music is ultimately a matter of learning to experience the self as an identity in the making of learning to reach out and create a playful space in which the self is open to the possibilities of an other
48. See Megan Boler, "Review Essay: Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethic by Seyla Benhabib; Re-Educating the Imagination: Toward a Poetics, Politics, and Pedagogy of Literary Engagement by Deanne Bogdan," Hypatia, 10, no. 4: (Fall 1995): 130-42
49. and Deanne Bogdan, E. James Cunningham, and Hilary E. Davis, "Reintegrating Sensibility: Situated Knowledges and Embodied Readers," New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 31, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 477-507
50. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2, 10
51. See also Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
52. Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory: The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990)
53. Stanley Fish, There's no Such Thing as Free Speech - and it's a Good Thing, Too (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
54. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
55. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
56. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: Norton, 1992)
57. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1992.)
58. bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Black Intellectual Life. (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991)
59. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989)
60. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997)
61. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)
62. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Crichlow, eds., Race, Identity, and Representation in Education (New York: Routledge, 1993)
63. Gary Nelson, Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (New York: New York University Press, 1997)
64. Gaytri C. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993). As well, the Bulletin put out by Association of Departments of English of the Modern Language Association and their annual publication Profession regularly call into question prevailing assumptions about what is might mean to "profess literature."
65. See especially Leppert, McClary, and Shepherd; also Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994)
66. Lucy Green, Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, and Education (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988)
67. Lawrence Kramer, "The Shape of Post Classical Music," Critical Inquiry 6 (1979): 144-52
68. Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
69. Christopher Norris, ed., Music and the Politics of Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989)
70. Ruth Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
71. and Ruth Rosengard Subotnik, Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)
72. See especially Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The Third Ear: On Listening to the World, foreword Yehudi Menuhin (Longmead, Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK: Element Books, 1988)
73. Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The World is Sound: Nada Brahma, Music and the Landscape of Consciousness, foreword Fritjof Capra (Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 1983)
74. Jocelyn Godwin, Music, Mysticism, and Magic: A Source Book (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986)
75. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: From Antiquity to the Avante-Garde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987)
76. Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Music of Life (New Lebanon, N. Y.: Omega, 1983, 1988)
77. The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Sufi Teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan (Boston: Shambala, 1996)
78. and Dane Rudhyar, The Rebirth of Hindu Music (Adyar, Madras, India: Theosophical Publishing House, 1928)
79. Kurt Spellmeyer, "After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World," College English 58, no. 8 (December 1996): 893-913
80. Northrop Frye, "The Journey as Metaphor," in Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye: Myth and Metaphor, Selected Essays, 1974-1988 (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 221
81. Michael Holquist, "Introduction: The Architectonics of Answerability," in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. and notes Vadim Liapunov; suppl. trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), xvi
82. See especially Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Post-modernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992)
83. Himani Bannerji, "But Who Speaks for Us? Experience and Agency in Conventional Feminist Paradigms," in Unsettling Relations: The University as a Site of Feminist Struggles, ed. Himani Bannerji, Linda Carty, Kari Dehli, Susan Heald, and Kate McKenna (Toronto: Women's Press, 1991), 67-108
84. Linda Carty, "Black Women In America: A Statement from the Periphery," in Bannerji et al., Unsettling Relations, 13-44
85. bell hooks, "Black and Female: Reflections on Graduate School," in bell hooks, Talking Back (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 55-61
86. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1984)
87. and Iris Marion Young, "The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference," in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 300-22
88. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 259-60
89. Richard Shusterman, "Somaesthetics: A Disciplinary Proposal," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 299-313
90. See Richard Shusterman, Practising Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life: New York: Routledge, 1997)
91. and Richard Shusterman, Performing Live: Soma, Media, and the Ends of Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 2000
92. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 33
93. According to anthropologist Victor Turner, liminal space is both a phase and stage of seclusion in which the novice is neither one thing nor another, neither this nor that, but both/and. It is this both/and aspect of holding the tension between opposites that characterizes the postmodernist concept of contradiction and the spiritual one of paradox. See "Liminal to Liminoid," in Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 20-60
94. Elin Diamond, "Mimesis, Mimicry, and the 'True-Real,'" in Acting Out, ed. Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 377
95. See Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation; Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, gen. ed. Daryl Sharp (Toronto: Inner City Books; 1985), 33-58, 123-24, 154-55, 175-84
96. De Marco Torgovnik, Crossing Ocean Parkway, 38
97. Bakhtin writes: "I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life"; Art and Answerability, 1
98. Woodman and Dickson, Dancing in the Flames, 229-30. At the end of their book these authors appropriate the "anguish of the feminine" of Edvard Munch's Madonna by reading the painting upside down. Here the slasher story of the violation becomes the wisdom that the shift to being grounded in somatic reality must take place before vulnerability and divine fire can coexist as the conjoining of sexuality with spirituality
99. Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education, 6, 132, distinguishes between "inherent" musical meanings or meanings that "arise from the conventional interrelationships of musical materials" but which are "free of symbolic content and "delineated" musical meanings, meanings which are linked with "sets of values and relations which exist outside, and beyond the musical sounds themselves." She argues that under patriarchy delineated meanings project patriarchal definitions of femininity in the music and the lives of women who perform and/or compose music
100. Green, Music, Gender, Education, 15, defines musical patriarchy as "the division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere" within Western culture and around the world
101. See Speilmeyer, "After Theory."
102. Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge), 7
103. Paula M. Salvio, "The Teacher/Scholar as Melancholic: Excavating Scholarly and Pedagogic (S)crypts in Fugitive Pieces," Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 14, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 17
104. See also Deanne Bogdan, "When is a Singing School (Not) a Chorus?" The Emancipatory Agenda in Feminist Pedagogy and Literature Education," in The Education Feminism Reader, ed. Lynda Stone, The Education Feminism Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 349-58
105. See Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, 34-66, for a discussion of the binary between self and other within the structure of Western art music and in relation to the feminine otherness of music
106. See Jorgensen, x
107. In this book Jorgensen articulates a complex dialectical theory of music education. For my review of her book, see Philosophy of Music Education Review 6, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 71-73