Music and sustainability education – a contradiction?

Abstract

Sustainability education is an interdisciplinary endeavor and should thus include music as well. In this paper, I explore the under-researched field of music and sustainability education. My central thesis is that music and attentive listening have a potential of strengthening students’ aesthetic experience and world bonding, two essential elements of their sustainability engagement. The paper consists of a review of research on art, music and sustainability education, an elaboration on eco-acoustics and efforts to apply music to the sonic world, and a discussion of the training of music-sustainability competencies. In the existing research on music and sustainability education, I find a latent tension between those who regard music as a means for teaching for sustainability, and those who view music as genuine knowledge that there is need of in sustainability education. Perhaps the greatest fallacy is to reduce music to a mere tool to reach sustainability goals. Then music’s aesthetic and creative potential is lost. We need fresh and unconventional ideas to cope with the present situation in a desirable future direction. Listening as world engagement, I discuss in relation to the skills of doing music: listening to music, performing music, and making music. I argue that there is much to learn from soundscape artists when it comes to refining students’ ears for the environment’s sonic expressions. Such a refinement presupposes, however, an interdisciplinary commitment in school of practicing the skill of listening, also in other subjects than music.