Music Listening as Music Making

by Charles D. Morrison

Introduction


One of the most fundamental, ongoing debates in music education involves scholars who argue for a "performance-based" curriculum and those who promote a curriculum that is fundamentally "aesthetic-listening based." Rather than arguing for the primacy of either performance or listening (aesthetic or otherwise) as a basis for a music education curriculum, in this article I attempt merely to raise the profile, as it were, of the musical listening process tout à fait—that is, not aesthetic listening in particular, but all forms of engaged listening. With respect to curricular choices, I think it is unfair and unwise to subordinate the entire spectrum of listening on the basis of the problems associated with the traditional, admittedly anachronistic, theory of aesthetic attitude and the single, restricted mode of listening associated with that theory.