| dc.description.abstract | First, to reflect upon the title, ‘Music and Arts in Action’. We might, for certain
purposes, consider a coming together of art forms and disciplines. Not the
crossovers, mergers and interdisciplinary dialectical fusions we are familiar with,
but a convergence or, as the biochemist E. O. Wilson (1999) termed it, a
‘consilience’, a leaping together of different knowledge. Perhaps this is akin to the
Nobel physicist David Bohm’s ‘Dialogue – A proposal’ (Bohm, et al, 1991), in which
processes, forms and structures synthesise as a creative act?
And so we move from the co-joining action of the word ‘and’ to the dynamic
agency of ‘in’. Here we may find meaning in ‘…in Action’, the act, or intervention
that provokes and evokes a new culture, or a new society, perhaps as the artist
Joseph Beuys (1990) aimed for in his concept of ‘Social Sculpture’. Furthermore,
that notion of dynamism embedded in ‘in Action’ introduces the ideas of
movement, change and transformation – from one place to another, from one time
to another, or from one state of being to another. ‘Far from equilibrium’ (Prigogne
and Stengers, 1984), this relational interdependence may be understood as that
embodied by whole systems ecology, or the process, pattern and structure of
Music and Arts.
Here and now is where this paper starts, by considering the ways in which this
dialogue with and between Music and Arts might, in Action, create questions of
foresight and ‘ennobling questions’ (Haley, 2008) that may contribute to many
futures becoming. The key message is that environmental, social and cultural
sustainability require creative, imaginative and positive approaches, and that the
arts can contribute to these. | en_GB |
