# Music and Social Action - Dewey

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** YaleCourses
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qYUSUXHYKc
- **Дата:** 29.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 7:47
- **Просмотры:** 629
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/49910

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

John Dewey starts his landmark 1934 book Art as Experience by defining the difficulty of creating a theory of art. In order to understand what art is, he says we need to look beyond the very places with which we most associate it, museums, concert halls, etc. for two reasons. One is by thinking of art as insular or removed from our everyday lives, we forget that art comes very much from this everyday essential human experience. And the second, that the motivations for art museums and opera houses are so often external to the art itself. Museums are built to show off a collection, the large arts institutions have a pride or even nationalistic impulse as their core motivation. He talks about the European capitals each needing their own museum of painting and sculpture devoted to showing off their great artistic or cultural past, and this is why nations build opera houses and galleries, etc. But returning to the primary problem for Dewey, he defines his work and that of later generations of artists and educators and others of us concerned with broad participation in the arts, he defines this as needing to restore continuity between art and everyday life. He recognized a problem that I don't think we've resolved more than 80 years later, which is that many people assume that art and music and theater have nothing to do with our daily lives and problems, and that they're therefore activities for those with the time and sophistication to participate. His project to restore community, uh continuity rather, between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are recognized to constitute experience. Another aspect of the problem, he says, is that when artworks become classics, we lose touch with them. We forget that these works were created by living, breathing human beings living in their own chaotic lives, and also that the art has anything to do with our daily lives. He says when an art product attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being, and from the human consequences it engenders in our actual life experience. Dewey sets off to describe the essential qualities of what he calls experience, the effect we all share when we feel a life event or a moment to have had a full emotional, intellectual, maybe even spiritual completeness, positive or negative. When we leave a great meal with friends, for instance, or we leave a football game that was very exciting and our heart is still racing, or we might finish a harrowing journey, we might look back and say, "That was an experience. " And it's this notion of memorable experience, significant experience, that Dewey's focused on when he says Art as Experience. A recent psychologist, a contemporary psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi, uh had this notion of flow, and I think this is helpful to understand Dewey's experience. Csikszentmihalyi studied people in their work activities to understand the psychology of what he calls optimal experience. He found that the experience of being in flow with the material, where time fades away, the past and present seem inconsequential, that the task in front of you is all there is, this leads to the most focused, enjoyable life experiences. And he describes this in this way, "In these moments, concentration is so intense that there's no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears and the sense of time becomes distorted. " Dewey says this kind of experience is available to all of us as humans, right? And uses the example of a dog to illustrate how in many ways the question is rooted in our very biology. A dog who, when hungry, is restless for a satisfaction of his hunger, experiences a kind of friction or tension between its needs and the environment. When it's fed, there's a temporary order and satisfaction, an alignment of the needs and environment. And much of the time, we as humans are also restless and unfocused, that our needs and the environment are in some sort of tension, and that our life questions far outnumber the answers. Dewey says that in finding the order, in becoming momentarily clear where the past and the present fade away, and when we're in flow with an experience, that's where we find greatest meaning. And this is part of the rhythm of being human.

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 07:00) [5:00]

human. And he characterizes the moments of order where there is sort of a beauty in the lived experience and a sense of order as aesthetic. His introduction to the term in this way, to aesthetic experience, I find this very democratic, right? He's saying aesthetic experience suggests that these experiences are part of being human and not specialized to the practice of making or perceiving art. And in some ways, I find this radical, that the very quality we cherish as special about art it is available to all of us because of our humanness and not because of any particular training in art, music, history, etc. He claims, Dewey claims that all art comes from living, breathing human experience, and that the ways we deal with the world around us to bring about moments of order, understanding, and beauty really come from this. And so, he says, "Because experience, like we just described, is the fulfillment of an organism in its struggles and achievements in a world of things, it is art in germ. Even in its rudimentary forms, it contains the promise of that delightful perception, which is aesthetic experience. " So, in this way, Dewey, in this succinct argument, opens the idea that the impulse for art comes from our common humanity. Although I think his intention is to show that the impulse for creating art begins there, and that's something to which we can all relate, he also leads us to the opposite, that the art product itself, the painting, the play, the quartet, etc., can also be broadly understood. If we follow Dewey's argument that the true impulse for art can be best understood by looking at common experiences and not the concert halls and museums, I think he opens this idea of a democratic platform for arts participation. Maxine Greene advocates for aesthetic education for everyone, or in other words, an education in perceiving, listening, attending to works of art because of their broad importance to people, and Dewey's project is consistent with this. Restoring continuity with the impulses of daily life suggests that all of us, not only the cultural elite, can access and relate to the arts. For the purposes of this course and the inquiry that we're going to dive into, Dewey's experiences, Dewey's ideas are vital, and they're a vital starting place to think about the accessibility of arts, and also their relevance and potential to address important issues of the world.