Conference Agenda

“Shall we assume that the uneducated man is without choir-training, and the educated man fully choir-trained?” Clearly, this is a rhetorical question for Plato (Laws 654b), who, like most Ancient Greeks, takes it for granted that choir-singing forms a cornerstone of the curriculum of Ancient Greek paideia (cf. Calero, 2019). Equally, when in the 19^th century the first national systems of public education are set up in Europe, choir-singing is almost invariably and self-evidently part of school curricula, to the point of becoming the most widespread and representative practice of public music education (e.g., Geudens & De Baets, 2025). Today, however, in most European countries this situation has radically changed. If music education is still somehow present in schools at all, then hardly ever in the form of choir-singing. School choirs have become an anomaly, it would seem: a strange relic from the past.

The demise of the school choir arguably began in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, paraphrasing Theodor Adorno, it had become clear how much, and how naïvely choir practices and other forms of community music had contributed to the ideological machines of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—also through formal schooling (Kertz-Welzel, 2005; 2016). Ever since, public music education generally developed in two, very different directions: first, towards critical knowledge of musical history and music-aesthetical forms (as Adorno would have liked it); and then, slightly later, towards an emphasis on the development of personal taste and meaningful (affective) expression. Despite their many-faceted opposition, which has certainly not benefited school music education’s sustainability, these two tendencies also share something very important: a strong prioritization of the individual student, and a concomitant distrust of collective musical practices, likes choir-singing, which would discipline participants into a uniform and undemocratic corpus.

In this paper, I want to take issue with such criticism, and ‘reclaim’ the choir as a practice of public music education—if not as the most elementary practice of “school music” (as the German music-pedagogical tradition has it). I do so by resorting to Adriana Cavarero and Jean-Louis Chrétien, two authors who each in their own way (and on different levels), provide compelling philosophical arguments for a shared musical education of the human voice. Thus, taking a so-called “post-critical” stance, I do not intend to trivialize the various critiques (à la Adorno) that emerged in the past half century. Yet, counter to this critical tradition, which has moreover tried to recover choir-singing for its own purposes (e.g., Abrahams & Head, 2017), this paper aims to show that the collectivity particular to the choir can never be anti-individual or naively corporatist—as long as choir-singing is genuinely practiced as the aesthetic cultivation of a shared voice, responding to a call of the world, rather than as the vehicle of ulterior, political or personal, agendas.

In a first movement, my argument seeks inspiration from Adriana Cavarero’s notion of “voice” (or “vocal expression”), which the Arendtian feminist philosopher elaborates in explicit counterpoint to the Western, male, and philosophical obsession with logos—in its alternative manifestations of language, reason, meaning, discourse (Cavarero, 2005). Now that liberal democracy has exhausted the means of disembodied logos to stop the crumbling of its fundamental structures, Cavarero argues, the time has come to reclaim vocality as the primary “space of appearance” for the singular, embodied human being to experience, situate, and shape herself in a plural world shared with others—well ‘before’ (ontologically) entering in linguistic-discursive dialogue (cf. Parret, 2002). On the one hand, each of us is born with a singular voice, invisibly hidden in the deepest, self-affective intimacy of our bodily existence.

This contribution seeks to address the practice of speaking and the use of the voice of the teacher. Education takes place through the medium of the word: teachers speak and use their voice, quite literally. On the basis of an exploratory field study, we have mapped different forms of speaking. These forms of speaking and voice use can be analyzed according to the aim they pursue, for example giving instructions. The pedagogue Braun (1885) distinguishes forms of speaking on the basis of the subject taught. “The cheerfulness or the solemnity of the voice needed to be adjusted according to the nature of the subject” (p. 36). Mathematics and arithmetic require a dry and clear voice, whereas reading aloud calls for expressive speech.

In this study, we have primarily explored the educational-pedagogical meaning of speaking by paying attention to the voice (tone, intonation, timbre). The voice of the teacher, so we have experienced, has the ‘power’ to create attentiveness and interest. A voice can have a tremendous 'vibration'. The voice is always closely connected to the body which function as a sounding board (Meirieu, 2005). The body - and this goes beyond the teacher’s personality - gives the voice and speech their “colour”. After all, the teacher is the one who masters the art of bringing to life what is foreign to students. In contrast to 'an instructor' who acquires techniques or (learning)strategies to let them know. Or, as the French philosopher of education Philippe Meirieu argues, the teacher can transform the ‘subject’ as old and lifeless material in something that ‘matters’ (Meirieu, 2015).

If we conceive the school as a particular form of “becoming acquainted with, or being exposed to the world,” then we must pay attention to what it means ‘to speak’, and to the voice as connected to the body. This stands in contrast to dominant conceptions of education and learning in which knowledge has primarily been associated with the mind or cognition (Houterman, 2026).

In schort, in this study we do not consider speaking and the voice as effective means toward a specific (pre-determined) goal or learning outcome, but rather as a pedagogical commitment that can open time and space for an “encounter with the world or the subject matter.” The “experience of the unexpected” is inherent this educational-pedagogical practice of speaking. No class, no child is ever the same. Every act of speaking is therefore always in a sense inefficient: it requires time and attention, effort and preparation to find the right tone. One must first have been addressed by something oneself in order to be able to bring something into discussion - to bring it to speech. Furthermore, every act of speaking is also ineffective: the purpose of speaking and voice use coincides with making a beginning, namely creating time and space, opening the gaze, encountering the world, making children attentive to what has not yet been seen and, thus not yet exist. Again and again, words must be found, the right tone sought.

We often hear today that the (mental) health of students is in peril, not only throughout the world, but in Europe specifically (Cosma et al., 2023; WHO, 2025): 1 in 7 students will experience a mental health condition—ranging from (academic) burnout and ADHD to depression—that causes them to fall behind in their schoolwork and have to repeat years or switch schools (Ibid.).

In view of these developments, the policy of the European Union and its member states has been increasingly focused on making health and “wellbeing” a specific outcome of education (e.g., European Commission, 2024). While perhaps well-intentioned and necessary, this new focus is also seen to cause significant problems. Due to its overlap with the concerns and agendas of public health researchers and politicians, it has resulted in the life of students at school now being subject to a full-fledged “medicalised governance” (Navarro, 2019; Ramey, 2015). Health in schools is approached as a purely bio- and psychomedical problem that should be enforced through policy, with clear and achievable goals, methods, guidelines, support, and punishments for schools and students that do not achieve the expected levels of health (Ibid.).

To some extent, sociologically and biomedically speaking, this approach may be functional: we are treating youths with the “correct and objective” tools to prevent them from falling into worse medical conditions, with all their implications for educational performance. Yet, apart from the fact that such conditions keep growing in numbers, said approach reduces health in education entirely to a biomedical problem, while at the same time applying rather vague notions of what “health” and “wellbeing” mean to education, in a sense that seems to extend far beyond what a biomedical gaze actually provides.

Of course, there has already been ample criticism towards biomedical governance, based on the works of authors like Michel Foucault (Foucault, 1963; Hayes, 2025) and Ivan Illich (Illich, 1975; Milena, 2024), which denounces the medicalisation of education and school life as an oppressive form of political control, and instead opts for more humane and/or communal understanding of what constitutes health and “healthy education”. Furthermore, in the hands of a cynical public. However, this train of thought has often culminated into a deep, one-sided suspicion of all scientific (bio)medicine, which eventually leaves no space whatsoever for any (medical or other) norms of health in education (and society), and sometimes glorifies pain and suffering a bit too unreservedly (such as in the recent work of Byung-Chul Han [2021]). What such approaches fail to appreciate, moreover, is that, despite their “power,” many medical professionals find it very difficult today to decide exactly how to contribute to better public health (Cordey et al., 2024), especially in schools.

By contrast, our contention is that medical health itself needs to be (re-)educationalised. What is ignored in the “humanist” and “anti-medical” approaches is that – especially in tandem with the institution of school – medicine can play an important and positive role in the educational experience of health (e.g., Esposito, 2013). Conversely, what is ignored in the dominant biomedical approach, is that health and medicine are never purely biomedical concerns to begin with: they are always also social, cultural, existential, and as we will argue in this article, educational concern. In our argument, what we need to break through this stalemate is not less medical and more political thought in schools, but rather more educational thought.