This essay explores the contingency of music's value, and the significant ways that contingency qualifies (or should qualify) our understandings of the utility of instructional method. More specifically, it raises the possibility that the altruistic pursuit of methodological purity may serve ends dramatically different than those espoused by practitioners. Music making, music study, and music learning may be liberating, empowering, and educational; but they may also serve precisely opposite ends. More simply put, neither music nor its study is unconditionally or (...) inherently good. The essay explores various ways nihilism may be manifest in musical/instructional practices, and advances alternatives grounded in agency, action, and the acceptance of resistance and responsibility. (shrink)

This essay explores the contingency of music's value, and the significant ways that contingency qualifies our understandings of the utility of instructional method. More specifically, it raises the possibility that the altruistic pursuit of methodological purity may serve ends dramatically different than those espoused by practitioners. Music making, music study, and music learning may be liberating, empowering, and educational; but they may also serve precisely opposite ends. More simply put, neither music nor its study is unconditionally or inherently good. The (...) essay explores various ways nihilism may be manifest in musical/instructional practices, and advances alternatives grounded in agency, action, and the acceptance of resistance and responsibility. (shrink)

The paper argues on the basis of internal textual evidence that Nietzsche's statement that Essay 3 of On the Genealogy of Morality illustrates an aphorism has hitherto been misinterpreted. The aphorism in question is Section 1 of Essay 3 (which was in fact inserted a late stage of publication); the remainder of Essay 3 is the commentary on it. Those interpreters who have taken the short epigram concerning 'wisdom as a woman' to be the aphorism on which Essay 3 is (...) the commentary have invented theories concerning what Nietzsche means by 'intepretation' that are rendered unnecessary by locating the correct aphorism. (shrink)