The Ignatius Brady Lecture (Nov. 2021)

Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, 2016

2023

Ethical Musicality addresses the crossroads between music and ethics, combining philosophical knowledge, theoretical reflection, and practical understanding. When tied together, music and ethics link profoundly, offering real-life perspectives that would otherwise be inaccessible to us. The first part elucidates music and ethics through some influential and selected scholars ranging from Antiquity via modern philosophy to contemporary voices. In the second part, different roles and arenas are illustrated and explored through various music practices in real-life encounters for the musician, the music educator, the music therapist, the musicologist, the 'lay' musician, and the music researcher. The third part unfolds an ethical musicality focusing on the body, relationship, time, and space. Following these fundamental existentials, ethical musicality expands our lifeworld, including context, involvement, power, responsibility, sustainability, and hope. Such an ethical musicality meets us with a calling to humanity-offering hope of a 'good life'.

Yale Journal of Music & Religion, 2023

Music and Letters, 2013

Music and Letters, 94/2 (May 2013), 375-377

Music and Letters, 2015

Jeff R. Warren Music and Ethical Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-04394-7. 205 pages.

Urban History, 2002

This discussion seeks to provide a context for the emergence of so-called`urban musicology', both within nineteenth-century antiquarian endeavour and in response to scholarly trends in the 1970s and 1980s. The strengths, weaknesses and possible future directions of`urban musicology' are also identi®ed. A most solemn Mass was sung, and during the Gloria and Credo, Signor Claudio Monteverde, the maestro di cappella and glory of our age, had the singing unite with the trombe squarciate with exquisite and marvellous harmony. * I have bene®ted from participants' responses at the conferences Musik und Urbanita Èt: Internationale Tagung der Fachgruppe fu È r Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Musik (Berlin-Schmo È kwitz, November 1999) and Mu  sica y cultura urbana en la edad moderna (University of Valencia, May 2000), from discussions with Annegret Fauser and Susan J. Smith, whosè Beyond geography's visible worlds: a cultural politics of music', Progress in Human Geography, 21 (1997), 502±29, offers a wealth of interdisciplinary possibilities. Some of these ideas can be found in my`From the outside looking in: musicology and the Renaissance', Bulletin for the Society for Renaissance Studies, 16, 2 (May 1999), 1±7, and in my review in Italian Studies, 43 (1988), 147±50. 1 The celebration is discussed in J.H. Moore,`Venezia favorita da Maria: music for the Madonna Nicopeia and Santa Maria della Salute', Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), 299±355.

in *New Sound* No. 40, 2013. PDF via link.

The indelible yet nearly unbearable relationship we carry with ethics is central to philosophical and educational engagements. This relationship is perhaps the ever-pressing element in our lives, for it marks our engagements with that which we cannot predict, plan, or ordain. There is nothing else but a becoming in ethics, and this transience, this timetimelessness is in consonance with music, as music and ethics share a praxis that relates not to a mere doing, but to what Aristotle called eudaimonia, or flourishing.

This paper proposes that educative and ethical music making and teaching, which is based on a praxial philosophy of music education (Elliott and Silverman, 2015), can be carried out in a variety of ways that create places and spaces, in schools and community settings, for a variety of human values or “goods” that include, but go beyond, making and listening to classical instrumental music, or any other kind of music, for “the music itself.” One premise of this philosophical discussion is that music does not have one value; music has numerous values, depending on the ways in which it is conceived, used, and taught by people who engage in specific musical styles. For example, when music education is ethically guided—when we teach people not only in and about music, but also through music—we achieve what Aristotle and many other philosophers consider the highest human value—eudaimonia—which is a multidimensional term we explain the body of this paper. Following an examination of three community music settings that exemplify educative and ethical musical interactions, the paper provides a brief explanation of the nature of personhood that draws from embodied, enactive, empathetic, and ecological concepts put forth by several contemporary cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind nature. This sections leads to an examination to main constituents of eudaimonia: happiness and well- being as conceived by various scholars during the last 2500 years. The discussion ends by integrated the above themes with a discussion of a praxial philosophy of music education and its implications for school and community music education.

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 2022

Review of Theology, Music, and Modernity: Struggles for Freedom, edited by Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K.L. Chua, and Markus Rathey