Music Education Publications
"Reading" Methods
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
3-2016
Journal
Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints
First Page
347
Last Page
367
Abstract
Using Louis Althusser’s question, “What is it to read?” this chapter suggests that through multiple re-engagements with a text, readers can find “new-born the experience of a reading.” For Althusser, this newly born experience is the catalyst that urges readers to continue with a second reading, a guilty reading, which will nudge them further and deeper into contemplation and reflection. To be guilty of reading Methods, one must have a better understanding both of how the “principles that guide its implementation” came to be chosen among all others and what it is that Methods does to us. To read Methods as text is to read them as ideological, products of historical discourses that have been entered and understood differently at various times. It is to struggle to break free of structures that oppress both teacher/student and teaching/learning and to situate and challenge their historical conception as simple arrival and expansion.