Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life

Steve Dillon

Mar 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

Music, Meaning and Transformation: meaningful music making for life, examines the musical experiences that students find meaningful and the ways in which teachers, parents and community music leaders might provide access to meaningful music education. This is particularly relevant today because school music often fails to provide sustainable access to music making for life, health and wellbeing beyond school. This book seeks to reframe the focus of music education within a pragmatist philosophy and provide a framework that is culturally and chronologically inclusive.

The approach involves an intensely personal music teachers’ journey that privilege the voices of students and teachers of a music making community and sets these against rigorous long termed qualitative methodologies.

Music education is shifting focus away from music as an object and process towards the meaning experienced by the student personally, socially and culturally. This is an important and fundamental issue for the development of philosophy for pre-service and practicing music teachers and community music project leaders. The focus now needs to be upon the 98% who could have music as a significant expressive force in their lives as a means of facilitating social inclusion, for mental health and well being and to have access to the sense of belonging that community music making can bring as a lifelong activity. The book aims to provide a comprehensive guide to music education that leads to a music education for all for life. This book emphasises the maker in context examining: the student as maker, the teacher as builder and designer and the school as village.

The relationship between music making, education and health and well being has been and is the subject of many research projects and national and international reviews. Seldom though in these studies has there been any attempt to identify the qualities of successful and sustainable interactions with music making, the qualities of good teaching and good teaching practice. The focus of this book is to provide simple but effective tools for evaluating and testing the meaning evident in a music-making context, identify the modes of engagement and establish the unique expressive music making needs of twenty first century communities.

For further information see http://savetodisc.net

About the author

Steve Dillon is a senior lecturer in Music and Sound at Queensland University of Technology Faculty of Creative Industry. Steve’s research focuses upon meaningful engagement with music-making in schools and communities. He is director of the save to DISC (Documenting Innovation in Sound Communities) http://www.savetodisc.net/ research project which examines and documents the qualities and relationships between music, meaning, health and well being.