Belief Systems and Their Influence on Musical Experience
The aesthetic education movement of the last three decades has led many music educators to inquire about the nature of musical experience and the ways in which music education can enhance that experience for students. The present study examines some existing sociological literature on belief in order to draw implications for aesthetic education. Its central purpose is to examine some theoretical foundations for belief systems, and to consider how belief systems may affect the ways in which people interact with and experience musical events.
To investigate these issues, this study draws on the sociology of belief as explained by Borhek and Curtis, in which belief systems are defined as cultural, rather than individual, phenomena. That is, beliefs are thought to exist and persist in society because a group of people subscribe to them. Such belief systems take on an energy and direction of their own that is not affected by the entrances and exits of individual believers. The following aspects of culturally grounded belief systems are addressed by Borhek and Curtis and are used to investigate the general concerns of this study: (1) the structure and components of belief systems; (2) the cultural and semantical contexts in which belief systems exist; and (3) the processes by which people commit to and validate belief systems.
The theoretical constructs of Borhek and Curtis are related to the sociology of knowledge and the social construction of reality as understood by Berger and Luckmann, and to relativism, a philosophical position which argues for the existence of multiple, independent paradigms of reality. After the theoretical foundations of the study have been established, a group interview of graduate students in opera performance is conducted to explore their beliefs about opera, the cultural and semantical contexts in which those beliefs exists, and processes by which the students validate and commit to their musical beliefs. Conclusions and implications for theory, practice, and research in music education are drawn from the interview data.