Music education, professionalism, and ecopolitics project´s kick-off online seminar was arranged on September 30, 2021, at 9.30 - 10.45 am (EEST)

The keynote lecturer was Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor, Institute of Education, University of London.

Music education amid ecological crises: some awkward notes

Adorno was wont to ask whether it was possible to write poetry following the Holocaust. In the realm of music, should we not also be asking if it is legitimate to listen to music in the midst of ecological crises? There are, therefore, awkward notes sounding in the presence of music education. Even that term ‘education’ has to be placed in scare quotes for it has to become a problematic category. Redemption has to lie in coming to be – to live and to act – in an awareness of one’s ecological entanglements, the ways in which music is intertwined with ecosystems of the economy, knowledge, learning, culture, one’s identity, social institutions, the polity and, indeed, the natural environment. Such an eco-political pedagogy will amount to a transdisciplinary critique of musical professionalism and is liable to add to one’s initial disturbance. But yet such a pedagogy may just provide additional resources even for humanity to live with the Armageddon possibly in front of it.