"This-with-That": A Dialectical Approach to Teaching for Musical Imagination

Abstract

Among the various approaches to music education, my dialectical and epistemological view offers a way of thinking about music and education and deciding how to go forward in teaching and learning music. In this article I show how this particular philosophical perspective can play out in teaching for the development of musical imagination in a particular musical piece, in particular, Johannes Brahms's Intermezzo, op. 118, no. 2. Three questions lie at the center of this analysis: What is meant by my dialectical approach? How is musical imagination implicated, for example, in a performer's reading of this Intermezzo? How ought one to teach for the development of musical imagination?