Neville Austin Graduate Colloquium Series | Marissa Silverman (Montclair State University)

Room 130, Edward Johnson Building

Listening as Loving: Considerations for Music Teaching and Learning This presentation examines and centers “love” and asks: How can a feminist ethic promote love for music teaching and learning? And, in what ways can music making and music listening exhibit and embody love-as-action? Given the phenomenology of music—e.g., enactive listening, enactive world building—music teachers can teach students that music education be understood as an avenue of and vehicle for connection, care, compassion, and concern (Hamington, 2015; Noddings, 2010; Tronto, 2013, 2015), or, stated differently, love (hooks, 2000). Fundamentally, to be a feminist is to choose love (hooks, 1984; 2000; 2015); to choose a global revolution of freedom, justice, and peace that respects and values each person’s autonomy and vulnerability. Thus, when music teaching and learning are framed through feminist ethics, a musical education, too, can become love-as-action. This presentation considers “love” as a method of knowledge generation (Toye, 2018) through vulnerability (Butler, 1997, 2004). Additionally, by framing love as caring-for oneself and others and collectively being with and for oneself and others through musical engagements, love as “affective energy” (Toye, 2018) is positioned to be both intimate and activistic/artivistic; shared on both a narrow scale and a much wider scale, depending on its reach and context. In pursuing love as affective energy, the presenter acknowledges the decolonizing work of Dawn Rae Davis (2006). Davis’ willingness to love through “not knowing” suggests that curious, engaged listening is the starting point for music making, which furthers “knowing and not knowing, proximity and distance, intimacy and inaccessibility” (p. 267; Irigaray, 1996). The main argument of this presentation places Luce Irigaray’s understanding of “love” as a core aim for music teaching and learning, specifically, and potentially, for care ethics, more broadly.