For many reasons, different perspectives on music and the arts are of great importance to the field of music education. For example essential both to aesthetical education research, and to music and art teachers everyday work, because it can improve teaching and learning qualities and contribute to knowledge in society at large. The aim is to discuss various actors’ constructions of music and art by examining the handling of ontology in different texts. The ambition is to problematize and discuss the consequences of these constructions related to research and to musical praxis. The theoretical approach is founded in social constructionism and poststructuralism, and a combination of discourse psychology and discourse theory is used as a methodological framework. Four excerpts have been chosen for the analysis, two research articles and two interviews with professionals from two contexts of practice; the opera and the community school of music and art. The result shows that the ontology of music and art is continually being redefined. Ontological perspectives with epistemological claims are on the battlefield with more relativized perspectives. A critical discussion is made where the ontology of music and art is related to everyday praxis and research.
Title in English: The fuzzy position – Analysis and discussion of perspectives of ontology in music and art