Supervisor: Nina Power  

Most modern philosophies of Music Education acknowledge that both improvisation and composition are important pedagogical tools; that said, my research proposes a novel educational approach to these invaluable crafts. My key argument is that improvisation and composition can indeed become self-improving procedures, provided that learners and teachers continually search for radically new musicalities and remain indifferent to the legislation of established musicianships. Music-makers must uncompromisingly strive to produce singular musical subjectivities in and for each local musical situation: only when this takes place, music practices attain their subject-empowering and-therefore-truly educational capacity.  Grounded in Alain Badiou's philosophical doctrines of truth and subjectivity, the aim is to reach out toward Paulo Freire's critical-pedagogical framework: could these thinkers' seemingly disparate ideas be (1) correlated in order to harmonise their conceptual dissonances? (2) translated to universal musical categories, accessible to all practitioners? (3) transformed into practical musical tools to be qualitatively assessed in workshops and performances?   The overall outcome of these theoretico-practical enquiries would be the formulation of a Freirean critical-conscious music education system reconfigured through Badiou's militant philosophy. As such, it will promote a dynamics wherein students can indeed become "critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher" (Freire 2005)-all the while remaining faithful to the Badiouan prescription that "the only education is an education by truths" (Badiou 2005b).   Moreover, I will argue that such teacher/student dialectics becomes resistant to the current doxa of a privatised education policy which objectifies learners by treating them as passive consumers of established knowledge. Drawing on the aforementioned critical theories, as well as on modern approaches to Community Music praxes, this research will unpack the conceptual foundations of a Music Education philosophy designed to re-subjectivise the processes of learning, creating, listening and spectating music-most of which is today under the oppressive rule of money.