Ways of Revealing: Music Education Responses to Technology

Abstract

Music has a powerful connection with technology in contemporary culture. This chapter explores Heidegger’s ideas on modern technology and links these with questions of music technology. In the present day people engaged in music with technology are presented with the challenge of what Heidegger calls Ge-stell or enframing. This challenge privileges music as standing-reserve (Bestand) within the wider frame of consumer society. The chapter calls for a deeper questioning of the meanings, functions and patterns of perception that we encounter through modern technologies. From Heidegger, music technology can be redefined as ways of “revealing” (Heidegger, The question concerning technology. In: Krell D (ed) Martin Heidegger: Basic writings. Harper Collins, San Francisco, pp. 307–342, 1993: 311); as forms, cultural conditions, structures and pedagogies that bring different kinds of musical spaces, relationships and ways of being in our lives. This redefinition calls for music educators to closely question and trace the means by which they relate to the musical forms and relationships they encounter through technology, ponder how their lives are entwined with music technology, and reconsider and respond to technology in their local music cultures. The final part of the chapter deals with practical ways musicians and music educators can critically engage with new forms of technological being in music in contemporary culture.