Hostname: page-component-669899f699-7tmb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-26T12:03:28.348Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Processes of alienation: Marx, Orff and Kodaly

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Cathy Benedict
Cathy Benedict*
Affiliation:
New York University, 300 W. 108th #15A, New York, NY, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Using Marx as a lens through which to interrogate music methodology, in particular those espoused by Orff and Kodaly, this article suggests that rather than the free play and creativity Orff and Kodaly intended, the implementation of these methods in a strict and unmindful manner, often alienates both teacher and student from musicking. Thus these methods have become more real than the music itself and as such, music making within them is abstracted from the use-value of musicking and consequently exchanged as a commodity. The article explains how methods become a form of production that serves to reproduce systems of domination as well as a very particular form of cultural capital. This lens also allows us to realise that, as we move farther away from the process of inquiry originally embedded in the conception and construction of these musical engagements, the educative process becomes more and more myopic. This, in turn, determines, delineates and narrows possibilities of and for meaningful learning.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Music Education , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , July 2009 , pp. 213 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

ATALLI, J. (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
BOWMAN, W. (1998) Philosophical Perspectives on Music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
BRENKERT, G. (1979) ‘Freedom and private property in Marx’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 8 (2), 122–47.Google Scholar
BRITZMAN, D. (1992) ‘Structures of feeling in curriculum and teaching’, Theory into Practice, 31 (3), 252–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BRUNER, J. (1960) The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
BUTLER, J. (1995) ‘Conscience doth make subjects of us all’, Yale French Studies, 88, Depositions: Althuser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading, 6–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CRITCHLEY, S. (2008) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York, NY: Verso.Google Scholar
DARDER, A., BALTODANO, M. & TORRES, R. (Eds). (2003) The critical pedagogy reader. New York, NY: Routledge-Falmer.Google Scholar
ELLIOTT, D. (1995) Music matters: A new philosophy of music education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
FLAGG, M. (1966) The Orff System in today's world. Music Educators Journal, 53 (4), 30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
FOUCAULT, M. (1980) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
FOUCAULT, M. (1984a) ‘Docile bodies’, in Rainbow, P. (Ed.), The Foucault reader. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
FOUCAULT, M. (1984b) ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Rainbow, P. (Ed.), The Foucault reader. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
HAMBLEN, K. (1985) ‘The issue of technocratic rationality in discipline-based art education’, Studies in Art Education, 27 (1), 43–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
HEILBRONER, R. (1980) Marxism: For and against. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
KODALY, Z. (1967) ‘Folk song in pedagogy’, Music Educators Journal, 53 (7), 59–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MARX, K. (1977) Capital (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Vintage Books Edition.Google Scholar
MARX, K. & ENGELS, F. (1978) ‘Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 (2nd edn)’, in Tucker, R. C. (Ed.), The Marx–Engels reader (pp. 66–125). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
MARX, K. (Simon, L. H., Ed.) (1994) Karl Marx: selected writings. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.Google Scholar
NODDINGS, N. (1992) The challenge to care in schools. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
OLLMAN, B. (1976) Alienation: Marx's conception of man in capitalist society (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
PESTALOZZI, J. H. (1894) How Gertrude teaches her children. Translated by Holland, L. E. and Turner, F. C.. New York, NY: Gordon Press.Google Scholar
REGELSKI, T. (January, 2005) Critical theory as a foundation for critical thinking in music education. Visions of Research in Music Education, 6, 1–25.Google Scholar
ROUSSEAU, J. (1754) ‘A discourse on a subject proposed by the Academy of Dijon: What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by natural law’. Retrieved 23 January 2009, from the Constitution Society in the Rousseau site http://www.constitution.org/jjr/ineq.htmGoogle Scholar
ROUSSEAU, J. (1956) The Emille of Jean Jacque Rousseau Selections. Translated by Boyd, W.. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
SMALL, C. (1998) Musicking: The meaning of performing and listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
WOOD, A. (2004) Karl Marx (2nd edn). New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
YOUNG, P. M. (1976) Zoltan Kodaly: a Hungarian musician. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar