Deine Zauber binden wieder, was die Mode streng geteilt … Conducting Beethoven’s Ninth as a Case of Public Music Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the question of what makes public music education ‘public’, and how music-educational notions of ‘publicness’ can/should relate to politics. Our starting-point is a very concrete piece of music, from a particular tradition: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Since already this musical work carries with it a highly ambivalent political aura, we investigate in which different ways one could today still make a ‘case’—in the very literal sense—for its use in public music education. Throughout our investigation we elaborate three music-pedagogical models for thinking the possibilities of contriving such a case, each of which is explained in terms of the agency of conducting. The first two models are historically the most dominant: the Platonic-inspired ‘conducting conducts’, focused on using music to fortify the harmony of the status quo; and the Adornian alternative of ‘contraducting conducts’, which approaches music education with the aim to emancipate the dissonance of music’s non-harmonizable, particular forms. With the third model, eventually, which we dub ‘viceducting conducts’, we not only try to respond to some common practical-educational concerns regarding the former two, but we also believe to propose a model that allows to relate to publicness in a more intrinsically music-educational way.