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Rethinking Music Education and Social Change

Alexandra Kertz-Welzel author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:24th Mar '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Rethinking Music Education and Social Change cover

The arts, and particularly music, are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change? Rethinking Music Education and Social Change offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. At once optimistic and realistic, the book asseses music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision for music education as utopian theory and practice. As an important topic in sociology and political science, utopia offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change.

Unlike any other author, Alexandra Kertz-Welzel has a unique, distinctive way of advocating for music education as an agent of social change that, within limits, holds the potential for developing more just and imaginative societies. Embracing philosophical, sociological, and political perspectives, the insights she presents redefine music education's goals in ways that will stimulate and challenge music educators internationally. * Gary McPherson, University of Melbourne *
With this compelling, if sometimes startling, work, Alexandra Kertz-Welzel has staked her place among leading scholars internationally in calling for a reconceptualization of music education in ways that are nested in utopian thinking that is both imaginative yet honest, visionary yet realistic. It is a brilliant assessment of music's complement of social and artistic-aesthetic dimensions, and it lands squarely on an imperative for professional musician-educators to harness their utopian energies to rethink, refine and reinvent music education's societal mission. * Patricia Shehan Campbell, University of Washington *

ISBN: 9780197566282

Dimensions: 236mm x 156mm x 12mm

Weight: 290g

200 pages