Music Education as Faustian Bargain: Re-Enchanting the World with Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus

Abstract

This article explores the musical motifs in Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doktor Faustus and how they relate to the novel’s particular Bildung character. We claim that the novel allows for a challenging musico-pedagogical reading, which opens up new and highly imaginative perspectives on music and music education. Going beyond interpretations that mainly discuss the element of music in light of the novel’s metaphysical or sociocritical pretentions, we believe that Adrian Leverkühn’s musical Bildung materializes a discourse that is primarily educational and affirmative. Bringing in elements of various “posthumanist” philosophical traditions, our article elaborates a musico-pedagogical concept of technology. On the one hand, this enables a wholly new and more appreciative understanding of what Leverkühn’s Faustian bargain could be about; on the other, it allows us to radically rethink the theoretical narrative(s) of musical science and education. The outcome is the call for a “pedagogy of pure instrumentality.“ By seducing students to take part in an experimental and care-ful study for immanent musical technics (rather than techniques), education allows music to re-invent itself, to keep researching the magical procedures and instruments that link together sound and meaning in diverse musical practices, beyond any teleological appropriation.