Dewey and Coltrane: A Study on Rhythm and Growth

Music, μουσική, mousike: an art of the muses, an expression of inspiration from on high, from the Gods. In popular culture, we identify the muses primarily with the creative arts: poetry, music, and so on. If an artist finds themselves lacking inspiration, they seek out a “muse,” calling out to invoke the presence of one of these elusive goddesses. And yet, this process by which the muse provides “inspiration” remains vague (unsurprisingly, given its mythic explanation). What can we say of this inspiration? What is this strange gift bestowed upon the artist? Is it willpower, the motivation to struggle onward in the face of inadequacy? Is it a vision of “the beautiful”? Or is it knowledge? If knowledge, what type? Does the muse come bearing episteme or techne? Remember that the muses governed not just the arts but also the sciences; or perhaps better to say that the Greeks made much less distinction between these two (science and art) than is common today. What happens to music (the still popular domain of inspiration) as it moves closer to the “quest for knowledge” (that has lost the touch of the muses)? Even more interestingly, what happens to the quest for knowledge when it moves closer to music? Is there still room for a muse in the work of the intellect? Do we as educators need to consider the muse more seriously in our “knowledge” work? If so, what wisdom can we draw from the musical world — how do we get back in touch with the muse of wisdom? In this essay, I will use the work of John Dewey to consider the intersection of music and education. I will put forward two thematic elements that I believe best highlight this intersection: (1) rhythm and (2) growth. These particular thematic threads are not unique to this essay, of course. They appear in various forms throughout the history of philosophy: identity and difference, same and other, home and alien, Apollonian and Dionysian, stasis and phusis, and so on. Given the fundamental nature of these concepts, then, it should not be surprising that we might find them present in both music and education. And yet, there is something constitutive about rhythm and growth for both music and education. The goal of the essay, then, is to see if we can reclaim a more robust sense of both music and education, a sense that might have held for the Greeks yet seems counterintuitive today. Put differently, the goal of this essay is to understand the “rhythm” of intelligent inquiry through the analogy of musical rhythm and also (to a lesser extent) to understand the “growth” of music through the analogy of education. If John Dewey will provide the theoretical framework on which I will “hang” this essay, then another “John” will provide my practical frame: John Coltrane. Through their work I hope to emphasize the importance of both rhythm and growth in both music and education, thus bringing music and education into a closer (and hopefully fruitful) proximity. The Dangers in ObjecTifying grOwTh When it is said that education is development, everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is