A theme of the introductory class meeting for "Problems in Music Education" (1/18/06) was that knowledge does not exist as a fixed entity to be imparted by the enlightened to the ignorant, but is created only--and continually--in the process of doing, making, experiencing, and sharing among a community of people. The reception of knowledge is never passive, but ever involves participation in bringing it into being.

A prerequisite for this to occur is the willingness and ability of participants in a class such as ours to engage actively in group improvisation of both the content and the form of the class. This requires a significant measure of spontaneity on each member's part, and I hope I can do my part! One of my ongoing struggles as both musician and scholar is with the no doubt over-diagnosed malady of performance anxiety. It often seems that no sooner do I set out to play or write than a self-paralyzing mechanism is activated, impeding both my experience and my expression.

Why, then, did I choose ten years ago to pursue training in music therapy, in which immediacy and spontaneity of response is vital? Was it, to a degree, in pursuit of therapy for myself--so that I might finally and enduringly cultivate capacities for inter-responsive improvisation in my music-making, personal and professional interactions, and academic pursuits?

Charlotte Bronte's character Lucy Snowe, in her novel Villette, expresses sentiments with which I resonate in my moments of brooding:

I knew what the result of such an experiment would be. I, to whom nature had denied the impromptu faculty; who, in public, was by nature a cypher; whose time of mental activity, even when alone, was not under the meridian sun; who needed the fresh silence of morning, or the recluse peace of evening, to win from the Creative Impulse one evidence of his presence, one proof of his force; I, with whom that Impulse was the most intractable, the most capricious, the most maddening of masters...--a deity, which sometimes, under circumstances apparently propitious, would not speak when questioned, would not hear when appealed to, would not, when sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips and blank eye-balls...; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some sound,...some rushing past of an unseen stream of electricity, the irrational demon would wake unsolicited, would stir strangely alive, would rush from its pedestal...calling its votary for a sacrifice, whatever the hour--to its victim for some blood or some breath...--rousing its priest,...perhaps filling its temple with a strange hum of oracles,...yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins. And this tyrant I was to compel into bondage, and make it improvise a theme...!

(from the Penguin edition of 1979, p. 445)