Response to Bennett Reimer, "Once More with Feeling: Reconciling Discrepant Accounts of Musical Affect"

In A Philosophy of Music Education, Bennett Reimer reminds us that "the starting point is always an examination of values linked to the question, 'Why and for what purpose should we educate?" But because, as he puts it, the nature of pluralism in multicultural societies makes consensus about the purpose of education impossible, he suggests looking for the answer within the subject itself. For this reason, he returns to the debate about the relationship between inherent and delineative meaning in music. One of his objectives is to caution music educators against constructing "artificial" lessons that define musical feeling as exclusively manifest in either inherent or delineative meaning. Charlene Morton, believes that this caution is warranted: contrived or superficial lessons can be miseducative and disappointing. She is less inclined to go the step further to investigate Reimer's position that "it is the complex middle-where both dimensions of music's power help shape and reshape musical reception-that poses the provocative dilemmas" because, although she acknowledges that sound stimulates psycho-physiological reactions, she is more sympathetic with Tia DeNora's observation that we need to think more about "an interactionist conception of musical affect that moves beyond conundrums concerning whether music's affect is "immanent" or "attributed."