Music Beyond the Slogan: A Critical Perspective from Philosophical MaterialismMusic

In recent years, concepts such as positive psychology, mindfulness, and neuroeducation have been incorporated with notable enthusiasm into pedagogical practices in a wide variety of fields, including music education. Under the noble aim of promoting well-being, mindfulness, or the holistic development of the student, these trends have entered classrooms accompanied by an enveloping language and promises of personal transformation. However, it would be necessary—and urgent—to subject these practices to a rigorous philosophical critique that would allow us to discern between their instrumental value and their possible doctrinal excesses.

From the perspective of philosophical materialism, I believe we could establish a solid framework to avoid reductionism, syncretism, and the confusion of categories. Thus, a materialist analysis would distinguish between three types of matter: M1 (corporeal, physical), M2 (psychic, phenomenological), and M3 (formal, objective, conceptual). This classification would allow us to place each discourse precisely in its proper domain, preventing us from confusing an emotional experience with a scientific truth or a neural correlation with a musical explanation.

Positive psychology, for instance, promotes attitudes such as optimism, resilience, or gratitude. While these dispositions can have beneficial effects on the student’s mood (M2 level), elevating them to a totalizing pedagogical framework entails a moral and ideological normativity that should not be disguised as scientific neutrality. In the musical context, this perspective risks reducing the aesthetic experience to a “happiness tool,” shifting the center of gravity from sound, form, or technique to a generic and superficial well-being. What is presented as science is, in many cases, an axiology disguised as experimental psychology.

Mindfulness, in turn, is offered as a technique of full attention. Its value as a tool for focus or emotional regulation can be useful at specific moments in musical work. Nevertheless, when accompanied by a spiritualizing rhetoric—of Buddhist or New Age roots—that promotes radical acceptance, the dissolution of the self, or the contemplation of “what is,” it may come into contradiction with the operative, technical, and projective nature of musical practice. A music pedagogy that confines itself to “flowing” risks renouncing conflict, effort, error, and expressive tension, which are, in themselves, constitutive of art.

As for neuroscience, its findings provide valuable information about the brain bases of musical perception, memory, and emotion. Yet, its application must be carefully delimited. Pedagogical neurocentrism, which seeks to justify every educational decision by means of brain images or synaptic activations, falls into an impoverishing reductionism: the brain does not compose, does not perform, does not listen. The musical subject does—and that subject is historically, bodily, and culturally formed—at levels that go beyond the purely neuronal.

Thus, from the standpoint of philosophical materialism, one could argue that music belongs to the M3 domain, that of categorical knowledge. Its teaching involves the transmission of structures, techniques, styles, and concepts that cannot be reduced either to subjective experiences or to biological processes. Positive psychology, mindfulness, and neuroscience may operate as auxiliary techniques (at the M2 and M1 levels), but not as absolute pedagogical foundations. In any case, they should be subordinated to a broader artistic and formative project, centered on sound, meaning, and human presence.

Therefore, my approach would not reject these tools but would subject them to analysis and discernment. For all these reasons, I would advocate for an embodied, critical, and artistic music education, in which emotion does not replace form, well-being does not eliminate difficulty, and attention does not turn into evasion. Because, as I maintain, music is not taught: it is transmitted. But in order to transmit it, one must have breathed it, thought it, and defended it deeply.