W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Luc Nancy, and the Aesthetic Education offered by Music

This paper will explore the aesthetic experience that can occur with music, and the potentially transformativeexistential education that can unfold from that experience. First and foremost, the paper explores the ways W.E.BDu Bois engages with music in The Souls of Black Folk. Drawing on the African-American tradition of thespirituals, but also European symphonic music, Du Bois shows the different ways music can captivate a listener.But Du Bois also complicates what is meant by "listening" to music. This can happen when music is used as aliterary device, symbolically as a way of setting the mood for the reader, but also when it is "heard" as arrivingfrom the future. Secondly, this paper turns to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose writing on listening, music and philosophyhas captured the attention of musicologists, literary theorists, educators, and, of course, philosophers. For Nancy,listening includes both the embodied experience of hearing and processing sound, as well as the hermeneutics oflistening to the sound of ideas. Thinking is musical, music is philosophical, and the distinction between the two isnot always entirely clear. Together, Du Bois and Nancy help us to gain a deeper appreciation and understandingfor the diverse ways that "music" and "listening" can be experienced.