A Compare/Contrast Look at Views on Music Education Featuring Reimer and Elliott

In reading passages from Music Matters by David J. Elliott, and A Philosophy of Music Education Advancing the Vision, Third Edition by Bennett Reimer both authors take the reader down the path of attempting to define not only music education, but what music fundamentally is. I will spoil this for you now.
Elliot proposes that "Fundamentally, music is something that people do." Elliott then goes on to support this philosophy with "four dimensions of Musicing." Musicing has a doer, some kind of doing, something done, and the complete context under which these happen. Elliot offers many insights that go against a more "aesthetic" philosophy for music. Elliot uses many wonderful analogies when making these comparisons. Elliot stays with the Greek idea that aesthetics suggest "sense experience", or the perception and contemplation of things rather than their creation- looking, listening, or reading rather than making."
In tying everything together, this aesthetic version of music is not complete in Elliot's eyes. He takes the four dimensions of musicing and applies it to listening. Music listening means that there is a listener, something listenable, and there is listening happening, all of this in a specific context.
After this, Elliot combines both groups of dimensions to say that the four dimensions of Musicing, and the four dimensions of listening, combine to create the idea of what MUSIC is. Elliot calls this, "MUSIC: A Diverse Human Practice." This is then taken to music education, where these are the basis for what should be taught and what experiences should be happening in education.

Bennet Reimer, in contrast to Elliot, uses the aesthetic concept of music largely to support his philosophy. Reimer states that "Aesthetic education in music attempts to enhance learnings related to the following propositions:
1. Musical sounds create and share meanings available only from such sounds.
2. Creating musical meanings and partaking of them, require an amalgam of mind, body, and feeling.
3. Musical meanings incorporate within them a great variety of universal/cultural/individual meanings transformed by musical sounds.
4. Gaining its special meanings requires direct experience with musical sounds, deepened and expanded by skills, knowledge, understandings, attitudes, and sensitivities education can cultivate.
Reimer later merges this aesthetic, sound-based learning with music as practice. I am summarizing quite extensively, but similar to Elliot, Reimer claims that music not only should be listened to, but should be created as well to be fully appreciated. This means playing, singing, composing, arranging should be mixed with listening, analyzing, and contemplating the meaning of the sounds being performed in a work of music. He takes these large concepts and attempts a synergistic "experience-based" philosophy of music education. Reimer summarizes this as:
"An experience-based philosophy of music education is inclusive of all musics and of all ways of being engaged with it because every particular kind and type of music, and every particular way music is made and received, represents a particular opportunity for musical experience."

I must say that I have pondered this question, "what is music?" many times. Usually it's when talking about my own education with others and I start talking about the contemporary aleatoric and chance music. When do we leave the theater? When is the play done? When is the work you came to see at the concert truly over and the piece is completed?
I can relate this best to Elliot's "four dimensions of Musicing." The music is done when humans are no longer performing music, or when listeners stop listening, or there is no context for any of this to be happening! While the bird outside singing it's song is repetitive and seemingly "composed", it is not attempting to perform music. Similarly, Elliot uses the analogy of the ticking of a clock. No one is listening, humans are not performing, and there is no work here that is happening. If you were to record, or use these sounds as instruments or parts of a piece or work, it would have context, musicers, music, and it would be MUSIC. Reading these author's philosophies greatly aided my own definitions in my mind.
As a music educator, and as far as music education is concerned, I lean toward Reimer in my own philosophies and advocacy. Reimer says that music should be taught in school for music's sake. I agree with this completely. We do not learn other practices such as Science or Math so that our Reading scores go up. We study them for the sake of their individual practice. While there may be benefits that reach beyond that practice, this is not a justification for delving into those practices or any of the arts.
I also agree with Reimer that music should be experienced in all of it's facets. It does not do the subject justice to only have experience listening to music, or playing, or singing. All facets of music should be experienced to gain the full value of music education.

On a side note, I was surprised how many times the authors quoted each other. I read Elliot first, and he would devote entire half-pages to quoting Reimer. This happens multiple times and it was an interesting experience reading Reimer after already viewing so many bits of his writing. Reimer returns the favor in the same way, if not a little more discretely. I definitely got the sense that Elliot was directly challenging Reimer's philosophy more than the opposite. It was something interesting that I felt as I read the two authors. This makes sense I suppose, since Reimer's first edition was in 1970, and Elliot's book was written 1995. Also, Reimer had his second edition out in 1989, so Reimer would definitely be one of Elliot's predecessors.

Hopefully reading these two authors in conjunction can aid you in your own philosophy as much as it did mine! There is a lot of discussion that is far from one-sided. Elliot in particular attempts to devote as much of the book to views that he does not agree with as views he does. This is what is means to be a philosopher I suppose.