# Music and Social Action - Greene Part 2

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** YaleCourses
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqr1gPD9aU
- **Дата:** 29.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 6:04
- **Просмотры:** 636

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqr1gPD9aU) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

Maxine Greene introduces a concept she calls openings, with the idea that experiences with the arts can open us to new ways of seeing the world and indeed seeing ourselves. Thinking of a young child who knows her neighborhood, the patterns of life there, the streetscapes that make up her everyday, coming to a museum for the first time to see a painting of an entirely different world, this person might find that her assumptions about the way life is, the way life can be, could fundamentally change. That experience is one of an imaginative opening to a way of life being otherwise. From this moment of an opened perspective, an individual can find herself to be, as Maxine Greene would say, on the way or not forever coinciding with how they already are. That the imagination, once opened through an experience with a painting, a play, a dance, opens us to a different set of possibilities. And then a person can gradually see themselves and their situations as filled with a greater range of possibility. She says, "I argue in part for aware engagements with the arts for everyone, so that individuals in this democracy will be less likely to confine themselves to the main text and less likely to coincide forever with what they are. " She goes on, "The arts offer opportunities for perspective, for perceiving alternative ways of transcending and of being in the world, for refusing the automaticism that overwhelms choice. " Greene, as a philosopher of education, saw aesthetic education or the learning to perceive and participate in the world of the arts as an opportunity for liberating students from the social or class barriers that prevent their full participation in society. When discussing Dewey, we talked about the ways his argument leads to the perspective that arts participation can be broadly democratic. And taking the next step in that democratization of the arts, Greene suggests that the traditional modalities or assumptions about where and how art happens need to be re-examined. She says, "Art is separated from the mass of people not only by the distance established when art is located in a preserve of some kind, but also by the distance created by commodification, by esotericisms, by false claims of realism, by artificial mystifications that excluded women, people of color, and the poor. Yes, art and aesthetic education should be education for a more informed and imaginative awareness, but it should also be education in the kinds of critical transactions that empower students to resist both elitism and objectivism, that allow them to read and to name, to write and to rewrite their own lived worlds. " I find it an appealing idea that an experience with the arts could open us, transform our ways of thinking, change our expectations about what the world is and how we fit into it. However, to think specifically about the moment in question, what kind of art might do this? Is it that I would see a painting of a scene and put myself imaginatively into that scene? See myself as a character in the play on stage? What about the much more abstract arts, the abstract painting or in fact much of classical music, which exists not to tell a particular story? Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher, responds to this in part in his text The Aesthetic Dimension by saying that by entering into the world of the aesthetic, we become helpfully estranged from our normal experience. A different logic takes hold that's simultaneously full of emotion, striving, intellect, and human spirit, but about nothing in many cases. He says, "Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from the functional existence and performance in society. It is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason. " We can assume that art brings about individual or social transformation when it invites a particular perspective grounded in real events. The protest song, the symphony about oppression or war, the play or painting that reveals a particular scene or event in the world might be examples. But Marcuse and Greene would challenge this. Marcuse says that the more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of enstrangement, the and the radical kind of transcendent goals of change.

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqr1gPD9aU&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 06:00)

And transformation doesn't mean a rejection of the world that a young person lives in, but rather hopefully a new kind of agency or license to see, to see the world as plastic, as changeable, as open to change, and open to their presence. As Maxine Greene says, "The arts will help open the situations that require interpretation, will help disrupt the walls that obscure the spaces, the spheres of freedom to which educators might someday attend. " She goes on, "None of our artistic encounters can happen without the release of imagination, the capacity to look through the windows of the actual, to bring as ifs into being as experience. " Maxine Greene's view then of the arts and their role in transformation is in their ability to change our perspective, open us to new possibilities, recognize things in our world that are unjust, and begin to see them as changeable.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/49908*