Nielsen's ‘Befindlichkeit’ between (the hermeneutics of) ‘Bildung’ and (the phenomenology of) Music

Abstract

Among other things, the work of Frede Nielsen gradually took the form of an analytical clarification of the integration between subject matter and pedagogy; in other words, how the reciprocal relation between musical subject matter and pedagogy can be unfolded in an inner (that is non-dualist) state of things? This issue is ascribed key importance for the realization of music pedagogy in a professional core as a distinctly separate research-based discipline, characterized by having differentiated itself from musicological or artmusical competence and general pedagogy into an autonomous synthesis. A central foundation for this program Nielsen found in Klafki’s Bildung-theoretical concept of “categorial Bildung.” However I argue that significant features in Nielsen’s music-phenomenological base (including his theory of music as a “multidimensional universe of meaning”) partially pulls his thinking and analysis beyond the Bildung-position of Klafki. In that way Nielsen’s Bildung-theoretical base (in the pedagogical dimension after Klafki) in connection with his phenomenological orientation (in the musical subject-matter dimension after Husserl) creates a tension in the latter part of his work. In sum, Heidegger’s theoretical elaboration of a synthesis between phenomenology and hermeneutics is suggested as a plausible phenomenological position that potentially is capable of resolving this tension.