In the theoretical literature on education one can find numerous examples of the importance of teachers and educationists being equipped with some kind of educational sensibility, an openness for the unpredictable, and an ability to listen to that which is not epistemologically graspable (c.f., Biesta, 2014; Todd, 2003, Säfström, 2005, von Wright, 2000). This sensibility is connected with an ability and a willingness to wait for a concrete other to make an appearance or to bring something new into the world (Arendt, 2003). If there is such a domain of subjectification, i.e., an educational domain where new and unpredictable things are allowed to happen and where unique subjects can enter into the world, there must be teachers with an ability to attend to events of subjectification, making them not only possible but also actual.

Educational subjectification is the event where the student who, under the axiom of equality, claims or is given a space in an educational situation. Rancière (2006) places the event of subjectification in an aesthetical/political realm where that which at first makes sense is reordered in order for new ways of thinking, acting, and saying to appear. By framing the event of subjectification aesthetically, it seems as if teachers with the sensibility for this event to happen, have some special educational sensibility.

In this paper I will attend to the notion of educational musicality, as an attempt to explore the event of subjectification in educational encounters. I will connect this musicality to the teacher's ability to navigate in an ethical space that comes to life through the sonorous resonance between its inhabitants. Space is, according to Bucht (2009), the lifeform of man. Her upright position inserts her into a three-dimensional coordinate system that is defined by three perpendicular axis. The up/down axis is what defines man’s predicament. She is bound to have her feet on the ground and her head pointing towards the sky. But the other axis introduce a dynamic element for human living: humans can walk, travel and move in any direction on the surface of the earth. Teaching, as does music, bears with it a sonorous form that can communicate itself when encountering a listener. As such it does not enter into a common space as much as it creates a space. This space is set up through the music's sonorous allusions to spatial dimensions such as scale, distance, materiality, and motion.

In the paper I use the term acousmatic experience as an exploratory device in order to examine the educational event of subjectification. In the genre acousmatic music listeners are challenged to distinguish sounds by their sonic quality. Acousmatic music calls for the listener to perceive sound with a reduced sensibility to the sound's identity. The attention of the listener is instead drawn towards the abstract and timbral aspects of the sound. (Cox & Warner, 2006). Music carries with it a space that is framed by the musical allusions that we cannot avoid to experience when we are confronted with it (Bucht, 2009). Or, as Velasco-Pufleau (2019) states: “In fact, listening can be considered as a deliberate activity that constructs the subject in relation to its sound environment. As a process, it is at the heart of political relationships between individuals.” The experience of listening to music is a sonorous experience, rather than an auditive experience. Music consists of vibrations that meet the human body and musicality can be described as human’s attention to these vibrations and the expectations and surprises that these vibrations bring with them. The acousmatic experience is a way of approaching the notion of ethical listening, a listening without understanding, an attentive waiting. According to Velasco-Pufleau, musical listening can be approached as a construction of the commons as it functions as an inscription in a common space. In recent years, an interest in Rancière’s relation to music, and especially the sonorous qualities of his aesthetics, has resulted in several papers and books, the amount of which, is sign enough that there is in fact a musical element in his work (Cachopo, Nickleson, & Stover, 2020). Especially his notion of the sensorium, the sensible realm where we experience political events, becomes interesting, because it invites one to think about the meaning of listening in relation to ethics, materiality and otherness (Moreno & Steingo, 2013).

The musicality of teaching, I claim, is closely connected to the notion of listening as a non-epistemic response to the other. Listening can be a way of opening up for the other without establishing a relation, it is letting the other come forward through otherness rather than through the suppressing of otherness (Todd, 2003). This kind of listening attends to the emergence of an educational space, which gives meaning and direction to human life. Humans decide to move because they have certain goals, ideas and purposes, but they can also move just for the sake of moving or for the sake of experiencing the shifting of terrain and landscapes (Masschelein, 2010). Art is to Rancière a way of entering into or inviting people into a pre-politic space through a constant questioning of the foundations on which our presumptions about the world are resting. As such art can work as an invitation to partake in an attentive reordering of the sensible realm. Art summons our attention, by pushing us towards a radical exteriority of the linguistic order. Music, as a specific form or articulation of art, can be described as a sonorous and acousmatic space in motion that invites us to experience the non-epistemic dimensions of the sensible realm. When exposed to music, humans encounter an artificial but real (material/sonorous) terrain that resonates with their senses and sensibility in ways that never can be fully predicted. Sometimes they shy away and sometimes they start to dance. The sensibility for this sonorous space is connected to a certain attending to attending, or an awakening to the presence of the other. In other words, it is connected to an educational musicality.

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