Aristotelian virtue and teaching and learning in music performance Caroline Marguerite Harman ...

191 Pages·2017·1.22 MB·English

Harman-Bishop, Caroline Marguerite (2018) Aristotelian virtue and
teaching and learning in music performance. Ed.D thesis.

http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9009/

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Enlighten:Theses
http://theses.gla.ac.uk/
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Aristotelian virtue and teaching and learning
in music performance

Caroline Marguerite Harman-Bishop

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Under the supervision of Professor Penny Enslin

School of Education
College of Social Sciences
University of Glasgow

April 2018
i

Abstract

This study investigates the significance of Aristotelian virtue in teaching and
learning in music performance. In response to a number of critical issues in
professional practice, it is argued that virtue, framed within eudaimonistic
happiness, should form an integral part of teaching and learning.

Through an examination of Aristotle’s analysis of virtue, and primarily through
his Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is presented as having the hallmarks of dynamic
and responsive action and therefore as being of potential interest to teachers of
music. Having acknowledged that music performance can be a particularly
challenging arena, this study also considers why Aristotle, via his analysis in
Politics of the reasons for educating students in music, provides further
underlying reasons for its inclusion. By considering the work of one of his
students, Aristoxenus, the investigation also establishes that here in Aristotle is
a philosopher-teacher who is, we can be reassured, very much an informed
music ‘amateur’.

Noting the twofold importance that Aristotle gives to music in education, that is,
how music contributes to our development and the worthwhile nature of
understanding music for itself, the discussion explores and clarifies the notion of
music performance. A range of frameworks are analysed and, after Godlovitch,
personalism is defended as a framework. This is significant because personalism
recognises the individual as both musician and human being. Thus, the demands,
on both character and intellect, emerge strongly here as they do in Nicomachean
Ethics.

Having established that music performance is demanding, of both character and
intellect, the virtue of courage is argued as crucial. The Aristotelian notion of
courage is tested and its reaches extended, partly through the analysis of case
studies. Ultimately, it is posited that courageous action forms part of
eudaimonistic happiness. This study also considers Egan’s theory that
ii
intellectual disturbance occurs during stages of learning, thus providing further
demands. It is argued that, in responding to such disturbance, teachers’ practice
should embody characteristics of Aristotelian practical wisdom. In this way, it is
posited that teachers act as valuable role models, both to their students and to
their colleagues, including those colleagues new to the profession.

With these challenges now identified and analysed, music performance is
conceptualised as gift making. Importantly, this contributes to foregrounding the
significant aspect of pleasure that is integral to Aristotelian virtuous action. The
discussion closes by providing a defence of the position that Aristotelian virtue is
of significance to teachers and students as they navigate their daily existence
within the world of music performance.
iii

Table of contents

Abstract i
Acknowledgements v
Author’s declaration vi
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
Introductory framing 1
Perplexities of professional practice 2
Professional and personal contexts 5
Aims and methodology 7
Outline of chapters 10
Chapter 2 Aristotelian virtue 14
Positioning Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 14
The best type of life and happiness 19
Virtue 23
Virtue as function and goal 24
Aristotle’s definition of virtue 27
Virtue as skill 31
The relationship between Aristotelian happiness and virtue 37
Concluding remarks 38
Chapter 3 Aristotle and music education 39
The polis and the citizen 39
Education and the curriculum 40
Music in ancient Greece – general context 44
Aristotle’s influence in the musical world – a brief case study 45
Aristotle and the music curriculum 48
Chapter 4 The human effort of music performance 55
Introduction 55
Alternative approaches to the interpretative account 56
The interpretative account 59
An alternative view of interpretation 61
Energetics of performance 64
The skills account 68
Personalism 71
iv
The music performer and significant others 72
The Aristotelian importance of music performance as human effort 78
Chapter 5 Courage: virtue and music performance 81
What is Aristotelian courage? 81
Is courage a feature of music performance? 88
More recent conceptions of courage 97
Courage redrawn 100
Conclusion 102
Chapter 6 Disturbance and practical wisdom 104
Professional context and learning disturbance 104
Kinship of Aristotelian virtues and practical wisdom: a necessary bond 114
Consonance and dissonance 121
Interpreting issues 123
Conclusion 137
Chapter 7 Gift making: Aristotelian virtue and music performance 141
Gifts and reciprocity 142
Music performance as gift making 147
Aristotelian virtue as gift making 153
Gift making as making meaning 154
Conclusion 159
Chapter 8 Conclusion 161
Areas for consideration 162
Three underlying principles for professional practice and further implications 167
Recommendations and further research 170
Summation 171
References 172
v

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Professor Penny Enslin for her magnificent support, careful
guidance and wise humour.

Thank you to my father, Brian John Harman, and brother, Richard Harman, and
sisters Katherine Harman and Anne Share. Thank you to family and friends, and
in particular Fiona Jackson, Joan Lister and Brian Dean.

I would also like to thank Denise Porada for her steady support throughout the
course.

And I am grateful to students I have taught, colleagues and fellow students, and
librarians.

My heartfelt thanks go to my husband, Adrian Harman-Bishop.

In memoriam

Elisabeth Harman, a dear mother, and Rosalind Horsman, a dear friend.
vi

Author’s declaration

I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of
others, that this dissertation is the result of my own work and has not been
submitted for any other degree at The University of Glasgow or any other
institution.

Signature

Printed name
Caroline Marguerite Harman-Bishop
1

Chapter 1
Introduction

Introductory framing
The starting point of this defence of Aristotelian virtue in music education
begins with the question: If Aristotelian virtue is a valuable premise upon which
to take action in our lives, how can it help inform our response to challenges
faced when becoming a music performer? While this dissertation is conceptual
and philosophical in its investigation, here is a very practical issue: can
Aristotelian virtue provide a worthwhile anchoring theme? For how we act
informs what we do – and who we are.

Music performance is certainly a demanding field of endeavour requiring
intellectual and emotional stamina, love of, and respect for, music, and is likely
to be of life-long participation if not of continued formal learning to the
performer. It also requires physical stamina and awareness of self. And it may
bring happiness.

In the field of music education the focus is, necessarily, on the skills,
techniques, knowledge and understanding collectively deemed necessary for
students to acquire. A student’s music education is painstakingly built, note on
note, into a curriculum vitae of sorts in which there may be moments of ‘crisis’ –
critical passages. Where this learning takes on a different hue to many other
academic disciplines is the fact that for the student music performer sometimes
these can be particularly public.

Anyone for example who witnessed the pain of the father waiting in the stage
wings in the film Whiplash will identify with this. At a high-profile concert in
which he plays in a jazz group, the son battles both an obsessive quest for
perfection and the conductor, his reckless teacher. The teacher has demanded
perfection – at all costs. Ambition fights ambition, and the music itself becomes
a relentless partner in this quest for perfection. This scene makes for traumatic
2
viewing, partly because the viewer is made acutely aware that the father cannot
shield, or comfort, his son.

A student performer’s interaction with creating sound, their media, in very
particular ways, musical, is offered, then, to the public – however and wherever
that occurs.

Perplexities of professional practice
To illustrate some of the demands of musical learning I share the following
additional vignettes. These stem from my professional life, and continue to
perplex and astound in equal measure. These ‘critical moments’, or what I shall
refer to as ‘disturbances’ or ‘breakages’, form in no small way the impetus for
this investigation. This aspect, that of disturbance, is, I will argue, significant. I
will return to these critical moments during the dissertation. Now though I give
an initial account of the vignettes. Each vignette brings with it a different
setting and complexity. Following this, I will consider whether there is a
unifying lens through which to understand these.

A teenage cellist I am accompanying on the piano breaks down during a concert.
Her father and I confer hurriedly outside the school hall. She too. “I just want to
do the best for my child.” Happiness is inferred in this statement. Have we
pushed her too hard? Has she set her sights on perfection?

Take too the case of a musically accomplished General Certificate of Secondary
Education (GCSE) violin student who is used to carefully constructing her
interpretation of a piece ‘(a valid goal one would argue) but she may not
because she will be penalised by being given a lower mark if she deviates from
the given. But she does so, for intellectually and artistically that is how the
student is learning to be responsible for her interpretative landscape’.1 How
does this square up with her future life as a professional musician? Is this
predicament tabled for the next redevelopment of the syllabus?

1 Harman-Bishop C. (Ed.D., 2009: 11) VITAE and teacher effectiveness: the textures of power.