Conducting conducts. Op zoek naar een nieuw verstaan van publieke muziekeducatie

The subject of this dissertation is public music education―the double issue of how music relates to the publicness of education, and how education can make music (more) public. It departs from the apparent given of the crisis of public music education, in Western Europe in particular. Especially in formal, viz., general education, we find―in Flanders as well as many other Western countries―that music is no longer an issue of much common or public concern; as an autonomous, general school subject it has virtually disappeared. Yet also outside of general education, in non-compulsory and non-formal practices of music education, it is becoming increasingly clear that music's public-educational significance is under threat, and that this threat relates to much broader social, cultural-political, and pedagogical developments, such as, pre-eminently, the ascendance of (educational) neoliberalism, the radical musicalization of society, and the ambivalent status of Western classical music. However, as the first part/act of this research, which is structured like an opera, tries to show, the said crisis of public music education is also less self-evident than might be suggested. What plays a big part in it is in fact a deep-seated conceptual confusion about the publicness of music education as such―if not a tendency to downplay the very relevance of any substantial thought on the topic (over and against functionalist advocacy referring to learning results and other extrinsic effects). After presenting a survey of the predominant, explicit and implicit concepts of public music education―within critical, praxialist, and aestheticist music-pedagogical traditions―the research moreover concludes that none of these really manages to disentangle the specific publicness of music education from the instrumentalizing, sociologizing, psychologizing, and aestheticizing reductions to which it is (currently) exposed, due also to the pervasive presence of certain conceptual dichotomies (tradition vs. personal expression, understanding vs. creativity, individual vs. collective, listening vs. playing). And while interesting alternative pedagogical concepts of publicness do exist, so far these rarely pay attention to the specific educational publicness generated in relation to music. Therefore, in order to become able to rethink and reclaim public music education within its contemporary, problematic situation, the dissertation argues for the development of a new conceptual framework, departing from the elusive figure of the musical conductor, whose dynamic and relational agency of conducting appears to offers interesting possibilities for articulating music education's publicness beyond the aforementioned dichotomies. First, in the second act of this 'research opera', such a framework is elaborated by way of a method of speculative-philosophical concept creation, which, inspired by four very different authors (Plato, Adorno, Deleuze, Serres), results in the crystallization of three parallel styles or 'conducts' of conducting public music education (conservative con-ducting, critical contra-ducting, and experimental vice-ducting). In the third act these major styles are subsequently refined through an ethnographic, empirical-philosophical case study―of a set of music-educational practices in a German secondary school―whereby various of the minor conducting gestures are distinguished that actualize such styles of music-educational conducting in concrete, situated practices, and in relation to diverse aspects of public music education's contemporary crisis.