The Journal of Aesthetic Education

In this essay I argue that some aspects of aesthetic philosophy of music education are compatible with multicultural proposals. To show this I first distinguish between two different aspects of multicultural advocacy: one related to sociopolitical goals and one related to the inclusion of different musical traditions and practices in our music programs. These two conceptions of multiculturalism are complementary but can be distinguished for purposes of clarifying the relationship between aesthetic and multicultural assumptions about the value of multicultural music education. I then consider how the multicultural interest for the appreciation of extramusical values can coexist with aesthetic education’s concerns for the appreciation of “music for its own sake.” In this respect I reveal how Phillip Alperson’s (2008) notion of work-in-performance can accommodate aesthetic and multiculturalist intuitions. The idea of work-in-performance tells us that sometimes we attend to two aspects of the musical presentation simultaneously: we attend to the musical content of the presentation and to the act of the performer in producing or reproducing such content. For this reason we can think of performance as a kind of musical practice characterized by a dual object of attention. This means that in some cases we need to acknowledge these two aspects of the performance in order to understand the value of the presentation. It suggests further that in order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the performance, we may need intuitions from aesthetic and multiculturalist considerations.