Music Education in an Age of Virtuality and Post-Truth

Book excerpt: This is a deliberately provocative book crossing many disciplinary boundaries and locating music and art education within a context of contemporary social and political problems in a time of growing disruption and authoritarianism. Intended firstly for music teacher educators, practicing music teachers, and graduate and undergraduate music education majors, the book also speaks to arts and media studies teachers, parents, or others interested in exploring how composing, performing, improvising, conducting, listening, dancing, teaching, learning, or engaging in music or education criticism are all political acts because fundamentally concerned with social values and thus inseparable from power and politics. Among the book’s central themes are the danger of democratic deconsolidation in the West and how music education can help counter that threat through the fostering of democratic citizens who are aware of music’s ubiquity in their lives and its many roles in shaping public opinion and notions of truth, and for better or for worse! The arts can obviously be used for ill, but as George Orwell demonstrated in his own work, they can also be employed in defense of democracy as modes of political thought and action affording opportunities for the revitalization of society through its re-imagining.