“What Does This Artwork Ask of Me?” Using Challenging Music To Teach Empathy and Empowerment

Abstract

The exploration of music and other art forms can serve as a springboard for students to develop curiosity about themselves, one another, and their ethical relationship to the world. This article demonstrates how encountering aesthetically challenging new music can promote empathy, engagement, and empowerment. Students were encouraged to think about discomfort—their own and others’—and to embrace certain uncomfortable experiences as potential sites for expanding their empathetic awareness. I then detail a multi-week close listening assignment and the various ways this assignment helps students think about closely engaging with many disparate aspects of the world and their own lives, encouraging them to trust their own interpretive skills. Finally, I discuss the ways I use music and art to challenge the students’ value systems as they often appreciate artworks primarily in terms of how much money they made and/or how much technical skill they took to produce. By contrast, I urge students to identify, articulate, and build upon their own instinctive responses to works of art, and to develop what Timothy Taylor calls “other regimes of value†than the merely economic. This is fundamentally an act of self-empowerment; rather than identifying all value in market terms—which displaces the assignment of value onto an invisible outside process—students must challenge themselves to look inward, and think about artistic, social, and political value in other terms. By helping students conceptualize other ways of understanding and valuing art, I try to empower them to find their own thoughts interesting, and to take an active approach to building knowledge.