Lives and futures at stake: Macro-ethical reflections on music education

In this keynote I examine how music education can engage with ethical and relational ways of living and learning in a world marked by instability, inequality, and ecological crisis. The presentation will move between the immediacy of classroom practice and broader global and planetary conditions, exploring how the micro and the macro, the personal and the political, the pedagogical and the planetary, are deeply interwoven and mutually constitutive. Through examples, reflections, and theoretical perspectives, I ask what it means to teach and learn music when the ground beneath us is shifting politically, ecologically, and existentially. What follows when we take seriously the idea that education, like life itself, is relational, historical, and fragile? That every musical encounter and pedagogical decision is embedded in wider structures of power, value, and survival?

Ethics is not only a question of right action in the present, but of temporal and historical concerns: how educational practices are shaped by the pasts we inherit and the futures we make possible. Ethics, in this sense, links temporalities; it connects histories of exclusion and inequality with future possibilities for coexistence and sustainability. It also raises the question of how music education can respond to global conditions that affect not only what and how we teach, but also the very grounds of learning and living.

Rather than presenting a single, coherent argument, the presentation will move between scales and sites: from classrooms to landscapes, from moments of resonance to scenes of disruption. An important question is how music education might develop forms of attentiveness and responsibility that recognize the interdependence of social, cultural, and ecological systems, and how music education can acknowledge these connections. In this keynote I understand the concepts of listening and rehearsing as complementary ethical and epistemological orientations in music education. Listening refers to attentiveness while rehearsing points to the active, processual work of living and learning together under fragile conditions. Taken together, they frame music education as a practice through which we not only reflect on the world but continuously rehearse its possible futures.