Music Listening as Music Making

One of the most fundamental, ongoing debates in music education involves scholars who argue for a performance-based curriculum and those who promote a curriculum that is fundamentally aesthetic-listening based. Rather than arguing for the primacy of either performance or listening (aesthetic or otherwise) as a basis for a music education curriculum, in this article I attempt merely to raise the profile, as it were, of the musical listening process tout a fait that is, not aesthetic listening in particular, but all forms of engaged listening. With respect to curricular choices, I think it is unfair and unwise to subordinate the entire spectrum of listening on the basis of the problems associated with the traditional, admittedly anachronistic, theory of aesthetic attitude and the single, restricted mode of listening associated with that theory. First, I explore David Elliott's rationale for favoring performance over listening (not only aesthetic listening specifically) in spite of his offering some very strong support for the enterprise of music listening as well as his reasons for failing to include listening in his concept of musicing, which otherwise embraces performing, improvising, composing, and conducting. Additionally, and most importantly, in connection with Elliott's notion of musical listening as a form of musically, I examine Matthew Lipman's work on higher-order mental acts and states, and his view of thinking as performance. Here, I explore connections between listening and thinking, thinking and performing, and, ultimately, listening and performing. In the end I argue that engaged music listening is itself a form of creative activity, that it is in fact a complex and bona fide mode