There is a mystery about music. On one hand, music making and music listening have occupied a prominent place in every culture since the dawn of recorded history and people everywhere continue to engage in a variety of musical experiences as part of their daily lives. Yet questions about the nature and value of music and its importance as a subject of education remain perplexing to many thinkers and are still hotly debated, even today. As a result, while music has b… More >>
I’m currently a PhD student in music education (and, also, a Band director). I’ve been required to read several books on the Foundations of Music Education for my course requirements. Compared to the others I’ve studied so far by Mark, Abeles, Reimer, and Swanwick, Music Matters is by far the most intelligent and comprehensive. It’s more challenging to read than any of the others, but it’s worth the effort.
Rating: 5 / 5
Elliott deserves huge credit for having the guts and smarts to expose the fuzzy nonsense handed out to us for years by the old aesthetic ed establishment. Even more, Elliott’s philosophy makes perfect sense to real teachers who have to put the National Standards into practice because Elliott’s book tells us why and how to make the Standards happen.
Rating: 5 / 5
It is exciting to finally see American educators recognize the brilliance of Canadian scholars like David J. Elliott. I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Elliott speak at the Canadian Music Educators’Conference Research Forum back in 1991 and his ideas as well as others like Harold Fiske and Robert Walker were a refreshing change from the long-held music education philosophies of American Bennett Reimer and Englishman Keith Swanwick. Elliott was just formulating his ideas back then but he was most inspirational. As a music specialist, I have created a curriculum based on teaching multiculturalism through composition in my elementary program. I’m glad to finally see a multicultural philosophy for the arts that offers an alternative to the Eurocentric Aesthetic viewpoint.
Rating: 5 / 5
David Elliot certainly has done much to help those of us in music education embrace the kinds of “musicing” that were absent from the traditional American music curriculum. Approaching music as a verb rather than a noun changes our process dramatically and for the better. However, the book would be more effective if it were better edited. It reads as if Elliot simply transcribed audio recordings of lectures in his doctoral level philosophy classes. The work contains many long elaborate lists, invented words, and sentences with confusing syntax which at best confuse and at worst insult the reader. (A particular glaring example from the first chapter: “When discussing music education, twelve things immediately come to mind. We will discuss four of them. “) In addition to this need for editing, Elliot seems to be carrying a very large chip on his shoulder for his former graduate advisor and apparent nemesis, Bennett Reimer. Many readers, myself included, may find his confrontational tone counter-productive to his professed cause of furthering the profession. Readers may also take issue with his refusal to acknowledge the fact that no thought, however radical and new, is created in a vacuum, but rather is built upon the foundation of the thought from which it precedes. It is certain that Elliot would vehemently deny any influence of Reimer’s philosophical though on his own work, but the facts of time and circumstance point otherwise. His work would have been impossible to create had it not been for the philosophical foundations laid by Reimer.
Rating: 3 / 5
Elliott’s bold and brilliant book is far, far ahead of anything else in the field. While the American MENC and its cheerleaders in the so-called Standards movement remain stuck in the vapid “old-think” of Reimer’s 19th-century notions, Elliott’s book offers exceedingly clear, logical, comprehensive, and practical explanations of music and music education based his own thinking and the best research by today’s leading scholars. Thus, this book is a classic in the field. I wish my colleagues in the UK would read this book carefully and soon; if not, we’ll be stuck forever with the insular and very poor thinking of “our old Swanwick,” and the rest of the world will pass us by.
Rating: 5 / 5