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Abstract
In this paper, I apply John Cage's wide musical embrace of sound to the field of music education and explore its curricular and practical implications. In particular, I ask music teachers to consider themselves teachers of sound, or "sound teachers." I argue that privileging sound as our chief concern leads us to reconsider the ways we speak about music, the offerings we include in our music curricula, and the ways we teach (about) sound. In particular, I suggest that application of Cage's ideas compels us to permit still more genres and styles in the classroom and curriculum, to emphasize activities that allow students to manipulate a diverse palette of sound types (for example, electronic composition), and to teach in ways that expand and diversify rather than narrow and limit students' relationships with sound. I close by considering how Cage's ideas of "purposeless play" and "purposeful purposelessness" orient our goals toward making students more attentive to and invested in the world of sound and the sound of the world.
Keywords: John Cage, sound, music curriculum, composition
Once, while I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, I received a call from a musician friend who was in town to put the finishing touches on his latest record. He invited me to come over to the house where he and his colleagues were gathered so that I could watch them work. The album had already been written, arranged, and recorded; all that remained was mixing and mastering. I listened attentively as my friend discussed important decisions with his producer. On one song, they had recorded a track of "party noise" that they hoped would add to the song's overall festive atmosphere. The producer confessed that he had lost faith in the party noise: it now seemed gimmicky and distracting and he urged my friend to consider dropping it. On another tune, they discussed the mixing of the piano track and one person insisted that it needed to move "farther back" and "to the left." Following this suggestion, one producer worked his magic at the computer, adjusting the gain and the panning accordingly-and, to my amazement, the track immediately sounded better, though I was not sure I understood exactly why.
I had completed my Bachelor of Music degree...