The Concept of Soundscape and Music Education in Japan

Re-examining the Imposition of European Musical Epistemology

Abstract

Michel Foucault (1966) says, “if we study thought as an archaeologist studies buried cities, we can see that Man was born yesterday, and that he soon may die,” (Reader, 1987: p. 7). Foucault clarifies that the Western people in the twentieth century are still “the prisoner of a determined system”(Ardagh, 1980: p. 538) of the nineteenth century, bourgeois-humanist. Post-modernism in art was begun as an antithesis to a preconceived idea of Western art including its aesthetics in the twentieth century. This movement proposes several goals, as follows: a) anti-human-centrism, b) anti-Euro-centrism, b) anti-ethno-centrism, and anti-logo-centrism, to develop a new definition of art. Traditional Western music education based on Platonic ethos and Aristotelian mimesis has also exerted great influence on Japanese music education. Today there is an urgent need to bring contemporary discourses to the clinic of Japanese music education.

In this article, I describe new types of music education in Japan to contribute to that discourse. The initial idea was carried out during a workshop in the “Exploratorium Exhibition,” at the Science and Technology Hall in Tokyo, sponsored by Science and Technology Hall, Sony Education Encouragement Foundation and Asahi Newspaper Publishing Co. It was held in August and September 1989. The workshop was based on the concept of soundscape as evolved by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer in the early seventies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.