As a music educator I have learned to be thrilled by the ability of music to evade boxes, definitions, categorizations and labels.  I have not always been as content with such conclusion.  In fact, it has taken me some time to yield to such an understanding.  Yet, I now happily believe – and the recent neuro-scientific research provides evidence – that such a condition derives from the very nature of music as a multi-sensory form of human inventive capacity to deal with sounds and to perceive and structure them in various culturally developed forms.

I will discuss below, adhering to a recent study by Agamben (2009) ‘on method’, the question of object and subjec to bring to the fore some alternative pedgogical ideas about what makes sense and seems sensible in the contexts of arts –  and in particular, music –  education.  I wish to argue that if the very elements of arts are adhered to, the task needs to be extended beyond the practical – the art of making music, which as such is most necessary and valuable –   to that of imagining (e.g., Greene 1995).

Education as a social process contains various controlling and enabling moments which together constitute a field containing elements of freedom and surveillance and punishment.  As an arts educator working at the upper secondary level, I feel that I am both privileged and challenged to explore this field with extra care.  If curricular goals – among which the knowledge of culture has been stipulated to be a transcending theme in the national framework in Finland (2003) – are not taken for granted, but rather as pragmatist challenges for ‘doing philosophy’ (Greene 1995, 1978).

A pedagogical point of view – in reference to the call of the conference and challenge of dealing with the diversity – is that through music we can engage ourselves in moments ‘of arising’ and be engaged in movements of imagination (Agamben 2009).  Through such moments the sensual, emotional, intellectual as well as social, cultural and political space in class may be opened both toward the past while being at the same time projected into the future: the past thus “will have been when the archaeologist’s gesture (or the power of the imaginary) has cleared away the ghosts of the unconscious and the tight-knit fabric of tradition which block access to history” (Agamben 2009, 107).

As various examples of music also suggest, such understanding will provide the means by which the threat of the present educational stasis can, perhaps, be overcome.  Using examples of classroom practice, I will discuss the ethical challenge of dealing with some of the complex relations of subject/ivity and object/ivity in a classroom situation when one works in an area and with a subject of such plasticity and complexity as music, adhering to the critique of the distinction of epistemology and ontology. 

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