EIRIK SØRBØ
University of Agder (Norway)
CATHARINA CHRISTOPHERSEN
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
December 2025
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24 (7): 139–61 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.7.139
Abstract: In this article, we explore how explicit can be a defining word of our time. Within the context of late modern society, we highlight two dimensions of the explicit. First, explicitness as a temporality of the present reflects how acceleration of technological, societal, and individual dimensions of life promotes immediacy. Second, explicitness as transparency reveals how the demand for constant transparency fosters a homogeneous, polished, and overly positive culture. These trends manifest also in music education. The increasing emphasis on explicit educational objectives and the expectation of clear, immediate applicability diminishes ambiguity, risk, and resistance in education. We argue that there is a paradox in the fact that while education increasingly empowers students with autonomy—requiring them to navigate ambiguity, risk, and unpredictability—the system itself simultaneously minimizes their exposure to these very elements by prioritizing predictability, transparency, and accountability. Explicit functions as a descriptive term, effectively pointing to important trends, patterns, and tendencies, and also functions as an active term, helping students analyze their own artistic and educational practices and expectations. Moreover, discussions provoked by the term explicit can encourage reflections on how explicit temporality, transparency, learning objectives, and applicability influence their ways of being, creating, and working.
Keywords: Music education, explicit, acceleration, transparency, prosumer, digital technology
Music education has always been immersed in and informed by the culture of its time (Barrett 2011; Lee 2023), while culture, in turn, always unfolds and evolves in close relation to technology.[1] Technologies, such as musical scores, radio, and television once reorganized and redrew musical time and space. As argued by Raymond Williams (1975), each medium is both a cultural product and a cultural producer, thus pointing to culture as a historical fabric where tools and meanings remake each other. This reciprocal relationship between technology and culture is also expressed by adam patrick bell (2024, 193): “We act on the things we use to make music, but these things act on us too,” echoing the famous phrase that “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us” (Marshall McLuhan, cited in Culkin 1967, 70).
Current digital formats, ranging from social media and networked Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) to artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools continue that legacy, mediating how we live, how we make music, and how we frame knowledge, learning, and education (bell 2015; Ben and Mullen 2025; Cayari 2023; O´Leary 2023; Talbot 2013; Waldron 2018). The development of digital technology has arguably had a profound influence on almost all aspects of human life over the last decades, with a current peak in the emergence of AI. As the digital technologies keep evolving, music scholars emphasize the need to engage in conversations that go beyond the technology and the digital tools as well as to critically discuss the human engagement within a digital world (Clements 2018; Väkevä 2025).
While we can only see the contours of the effects of AI, there are other noticeable effects of digital technology on our current culture, in which music education is situated. Some of these will be discussed in this inquiry, using the term explicit as a nexus to illuminate a set of challenges facing music education. The term explicit is commonly associated with clarity and directness, whether as a synonym to clarity, a form of language, or a description of graphic content. We point to how many facets of digital technology, in tandem with the capitalist mindset that permeates almost any aspect of today’s society, can be understood as driving forces behind many tendencies of late modernity that fosters and prioritizes the explicit in contemporary culture and education.
The piece responds to the ACT call “a word for this moment,” allowing us to reflect on the current situation in both society, education in general, and higher music education in particular through our word of choice: explicit. Our line of argument regarding why explicit is a word for our time is built on three assumptions, all of which have implications for music education: (1) that cultural content is affected by the “platform effect,” that is, how musicians align their music towards platform optimization to enhance its chance of visibility and exposure in algorithmic curation and filtering (Bucher 2012; Kiberg 2020; Morris 2020); (2) that digital platforms and social media generally represent and foster a smooth and immediate understanding of art and beauty in late modern society (Han 2015b, 2018); and (3) that digital technology in combination with a capitalist mindset accelerate temporal dimensions of culture and education in late modern society (Rosa 2013, 2019). In this inquiry, we develop the argument that explicit is a compelling descriptive term that also holds the potential to actively engage students in higher music education in reflection on their own values, expectations, and practices.
Explicit—A Word for this Moment
While our focus is on music education, an examination into “a word for this moment” must necessarily address the unique overarching technological and societal characteristics of our time, here contextualized as late modernity. Hartmut Rosa (2013) defines late modernity as the point where, in modernity, a critical threshold “beyond which the demand for societal synchronization and social integration can no longer be met” (20), attributing an unprecedented speed and acceleration. The world has become globalized, digitized, networked, and interconnected, where news and information can reach every corner of the world in seconds, not least spread through social media. Another key feature of late modernity is reflexivity (Giddens 1991), wherein norms, structures, beliefs, and practices are continually revised in the light of new available information, which also leads to a continuous state of change and uncertainty in all aspects of life. Society, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2012), has brought this state of continuous change and permeance upon itself with the quest for progress, and altered notions of knowledge as well as new technologies have emerged as a result.
Numerous publications point to how digital technology, and in particular social media, has shaped human behavior in various ways over the last decades (Lamber 2015; Mustapha et al. 2022; Ryan et al. 2017). While we suggest taking a critical stance towards digital media, technology-driven art, and current educational systems, we do not hold a pessimist view of technology or its influence on music education per se. On the contrary, this essay comes from the context of popular music education programs with a particular emphasis on utilization of emerging technologies: Sørbø is associate professor at a department of popular music, educating artists, musicians, and producers. He is currently engaged in a center of excellence for creative use of technology in music education, holds a PhD in pedagogy for laptop music students, and uses digital technology extensively in artistic practices. Christophersen is professor at a department of music teacher education and has recently led a major national project for developing music teacher education, where technology in the music classroom was in the forefront of several subprojects.
Digital technologies benefit society, artistic practices, and education in numerous ways. We are, however, concerned about how digital technologies, within the dynamics of late modern society, contribute to an explicification of educational discourse and practice. We examine the explicitness of culture, aiming for our discussions to foster critical reflection and inspire alternative approaches in artistic and educational contexts. While our approach to the explicit is critical, we want to clarify two things from the outset. First, we are not opposed to explicitness in general. Articulating and clarifying concepts, trends, and ideas is clearly valuable in many contexts, and even this inquiry represents an “explicification of the explicit.” However, when explicification becomes the overall norm, its potential side effects necessitate examination. Second, we recognize that more explicitness can benefit certain areas. For example, when students or artists engage with AI-generated content, clear articulations of copyright and authorship considerations can help navigate ethical complexities. Nevertheless, we highlight areas where explicitness may become challenging, or even counterproductive.
To argue why explicit functions as a word for this late modern moment in music education, we first derive two understandings of it: explicit as immediacy, and explicit as transparency. We thereafter discuss how these characteristics affect and challenge music education, particularly higher music education.
Two Dimensions of the Explicit: Temporality and Transparency Explicit as a Temporality of the Present
Rosa (2013) describes how technological, social, and individual dimensions of life mutually influence each other in a “feedback loop” of acceleration: technical innovations represent a powerful instigator of social change; social change represents a forceful driver to increase the pace of life; and because time becomes scarce, individuals demand new technologies that offer faster connections and shorter waiting times. One result is that the time horizon of the relevant past and future is decreasing—what Rosa (2013) terms a contraction of the present—and is subordinated the present. In consequence, the late modern subject’s will and ability to reflect deeply on the past or to commit to long-term plans for the future is reduced (Rosa 2013).
Similarly, Byung-Chul Han (2017b) argues that the absolute precedence and priority of the present is the hallmark of our current society, and that the totalization of the present destroys actions that take time, such as taking responsibility and making promises. Han contextualizes this temporality within the arts and argues that “the digital medium is a medium of presence” (19), pointing to how the temporality of digital beauty is the immediate. Unlike traditional beauty in art or nature, digital beauty appears more volatile and in a constant state of flux, possibly vanishing just as quickly as it appears. Han argues that within what he calls the digital format, understood as the affordances of the digital technology itself, beauty is commonly consumed rapidly and effortlessly, often through half-listening to background music or a quick glance on the screen before the next swipe. This fleeting engagement strips beauty of depth and reflection, transforming it into something momentary and disposable. Since the expected time of attention from online cultural consumers is now down to seconds, the message must be extremely dense and saturated with information, that is, it must be explicitly understandable and memorable within the expected span of attention, standing on its own and being self-explanatory. This digital beauty, according to Han, lacks both history and future and therefore cannot narrate, which necessarily takes time. He argues that beauty, on the contrary, is something hesitating, a latecomer. Rosa (2024) too points to how the accelerated society not only degrades the production of culture, but also the consumption of culture: “literature and music as commodities become increasingly cheap, while the time to read or to actually listen to an opera in comparison has become expensive” (124, translated by authors).
Rosa (2024) argues that this accelerated temporality affects identity formation for the late modern subject. As technologies or societal trends are quickly outdated, individuals cannot synchronize their personal rhythms with the rhythms of society, and a stable character is no longer compatible with demands of late modernity (Rosa 2024). Consequently, identities must constantly be explicitly displayed in order to update them to one’s surroundings, as they are contextual and in flux. Put differently, the contraction of the present urges explicit and transparent identities. Because identities constantly fluctuate, we are compelled to continuously optimize them, and once optimization becomes possible, it becomes an unavoidable option (Rosa 2020). When individuals must act and re-act faster, constantly optimizing identities within what Thomas Hylland Eriksen calls the “tyranny of the moment” (2001, 13), they become disconnected and desynchronized from society, which tends to create stress and can ultimately lead to burnout (Han 2015a; Rosa 2024). Further, through digital replacements of physical actions (e.g. how the phone replaces putting cash into a parking meter), disconnection occurs not only from society but also from the body. Assuming that Han’s and Rosa’s analyses make important contributions to our understanding of society, we develop the concept of the explicit to promote critical thinking about our current culture by explicitly highlighting some challenging side effects, such as the temporal consequences described above.
Explicit as a Culture of Transparency
We now turn towards the explicit understood as transparency, which entails full and immediate access to everything all the time, without concealment or exclusion. Crucially in late modernity, the scope of transparency transcends that of corruption and freedom of information, permeating various dimensions of society, including the social and individual. The transparency society is a society of exposed intimacy, where “intimate matters are put on display, and the private is made public” (Han 2017b, 8). Han (2015b) uses the pornographic as a metaphor to describe this tendency towards transparency, due to its explicit transparency and lack of ambiguity. He argues that the pornographic fundamentally differs from the erotic, where the latter implies secrecy and concealment that generates tensions and anticipation, which is impossible in the erotic where everything is on display. In the current online culture, Han (2018) contends, “all pictures are more or less pornographic” (41), in the sense that they are transparent and explicit—revealing and showing everything, with no deeper meaning beyond what one sees. The consequence of a society of transparency, Han argues, similar to the accelerated society described by Rosa (2013, 2019), is the loss of depth, lingering, and anticipation.
The imperative of transparency also generates a compulsion to conform. Han (2015b) argues that late modern society tends to eliminate negativity in favor of the confirmative and affirmative, treating the negativity of otherness as something to be avoided, thereby producing “an inferno of the same” (2). This obsession with positivity points to a general trend in society, facilitated and accelerated by social media platforms, to like. Echoing Adorno’s (1975) and Arendt’s (2006) critical objections towards mass culture, Han (2015b) contends that the contemporary ideal of beauty equals smoothness, cleanness, and perfection; beauty becomes frictionless, without cracks, ambiguity, or any form of challenge. Even emerging counter-trends in social media embracing vulnerability or failure seem to have the underlying agenda of being liked. Digital beauty, then, according to Han, is a frictionless beauty that lacks the power to shock or deeply move us, not holding the potential of profound aesthetic experiences. Han (2018) argues that “the smooth is the signature of the present time” (7). He emphasizes “without pain and injury, the same, the familiar, the habitual continue” (40).
While this tendency is hardly new—Gabriel Tarde (1903) complained about cultural homogeneity more than a century ago—digital technologies and platform optimization accelerate and amplify it. In music, an important change in this regard occurred with the “curatorial turn” of Spotify in 2013 (Eriksson et al. 2019, 74), where playlists became the prioritized format over albums or other artist-driven formats. This form of curation involves algorithms increasingly determine how well a song performs in terms of streams, downloads, or recommendations (Eriksson et al. 2019; Morgan 2019). As a consequence, artists started optimizing their music to be algorithm-friendly, not only through data optimization (such as meta-data designed to be triggered by everyday searches) or structural optimization (such as exploiting that royalties begin on Spotify after 30 seconds), but also with sonic optimization, where artists are “increasingly orienting their music making strategies toward sounds they think will succeed on the platform” (Morris 2020, 5). While these effects are also long known—Mark Katz (2010) points to the “phonograph effect,” where players and singers altered their way of performing to optimize the recording for the phonographs as early as the 1920s—the extent is unprecedented. Not only do platform metrics act as a measure of success, they create success; the ability to optimize towards various online platforms (Morris 2020) supersedes the object meant to be promoted.
The platforms’ standardization of taste degrades its content, promoting the most transparent and explicit, but often least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture. Consequently, it becomes harder to find a diverse range of aesthetic expressions, and simple metrics—the number of likes, the preexisting attention—tend to speak louder than the piece of culture itself (Chayka 2024). The promise that social media and streaming platforms should lower the threshold for independent artists to thrive generally seems to fail, as large record companies accompany even larger online distribution platforms, which mimic their gatekeeping functions, albeit with less transparency and with larger market domination (Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2018). Artists face pressure to explicitly align with the format of platforms, and ambiguous or slowly developed art often cannot cross the algorithmic threshold needed for visibility. In the vocabulary of Han (2018), these processes prioritize and promote music sharing the characteristics of the pornographic at the expense of music sharing the characteristics of the erotic. We argue that explicit is a more applicable term than pornographic as it captures the same critique while being less sexually loaded, and consequently, that the promoted content described above is best described as explicit.
Explicification in Music Education: Objectives and Applicability
Arguably, then, the explicit, understood both as a temporality of the present and a culture of transparency, connects numerous features and challenges for our moment in time. It captures the accelerating reality, in which individuals hurriedly consume culture, the prevailing algorithm-filtered, standardized pieces of smooth culture, and the regime of exposed intimacy and transparency, with its lack of resistance, concealment, ambiguity, and anticipation. Explicitness can thus be understood as a result of technological and societal developments, and it entails challenges affecting (music) education that necessitate a response. Students in higher music education (HME) are (becoming) members of a society characterized by participatory cultures (Jenkins 2009), in which they act as prosumers, being both producers and consumers of cultural content (Toffler 1980). However, as social media platforms tend to promote immediate and unambiguous content, creators must distill ideas, humor, politics, arguments, and trends into explicit, brief and quickly digestible chunks—they must be self-explanatory and transparent. These patterns obviously play a critical role in shaping the students’ identities and behaviors as prosumers also in HME, as students are not just learning music and a profession—they are entering adulthood, dealing with societal pressures, and navigating the complexities of living in an accelerated world dominated by an overwhelming flow of information that is often designed and filtered by social media platforms.
Considering these effects of digital technologies, we suggest that there has been an explicification of education. Biesta’s (2020) concept of learnification, which describes the incessant conflation of education and learning—thus blurring questions about content, purpose, and relationships, or even taking the answers to such questions for granted—inspired our concept of explicification of education. Biesta’s concept refers to a shift in educational and political discourse, blatantly focusing the learners and their learning. Explicification of education refers to how the culture of explicitness has colonized education. This change took place more silently, without accompanying political discourse, but we still consider the effects on education detrimental. In the following, we trace the influence of explicification on HME. In so doing, we point to challenges arising when the culture of explicitness permeates music education: expectation of explicit objectives and how this results in an expectation of explicit applicability.
The Challenges of Explicit Objectives
For quite a few decades, education has turned towards learning by objectives (Biesta 2006). This involves setting clear goals, defined tasks and guidance to achieve these goals, and designated indicators of success for assessment—in short, making the educational process more explicit. Educational institutions are also expected to be increasingly open about their pedagogies, thereby transforming transparency and explicitness into accountability. This makes institutions accountable to students, parents, other citizens, or society at large (Biesta 2010). While accountability could benefit students’ ownership, autonomy, and motivation, the emphasis on transparency and accountability in higher education occurs within a larger context of neoliberal educational governance and audit culture.
Inspired by neoliberal entrepreneurial theory and fronted by supra-national agencies as well as scholars from non-educational disciplines (Rohstock 2012), neoliberalism functions through education to “produce and distribute market-based values, identities and modes of agency” (Giroux 2014, 1). In a broad sense, neoliberalism has reconfigured the relationship between the state and its citizens. It has become less of a political and more of an economic relationship, whereby the state functions as a provider and “the taxpayer as a consumer of public services” (Biesta 2010, 54). The transactional nature of this relationship is evident also within higher (music) education institutions (e.g., McArthur, Szuster, and Watt 2024; Mullen 2019; Sadler 2021). Given the funding models in the university sector (at least in Norway), university revenues are directly tied to the production of credits, which depends on students achieving predetermined learning objectives. Students, in turn, expect universities to equip them with the skills necessary for employment. These expectations reinforce the neoliberal value of accountability, fostering a narrow understanding of education, in which universities prioritize security and risk-minimization. As a result, education is increasingly framed as a controlled process, displacing perspectives that emphasize communication, interruption, and resistance (Biesta 2006, 2022).
The influence of neoliberal ideologies in HME is well-documented. Scholars describe how conservatories or schools of music resemble storefronts for multinational corporations, such as instrument or technology companies (Smith 2016), and include a curricular emphasis on forms of entrepreneurship to increase employability among musicians (Moore 2016). These mechanisms also apply to non-formal learning settings, such as instrument tutorials on YouTube, which must align with the company’s market logics (O’Leary 2023). As such, educators promote adaptation to market ideologies, rather than resistance and transformation (Hess 2019) or musical forms that do not align with market expectations (Chayka 2024). According to Gareth Dylan Smith (2016), research shows that musicians are deeply invested in what they do for a living, thereby treasuring values over money. Still, with HME positioned in-between education and the “real” professional life, Smith questions “how and the extent to which HME can work as a site for developing musicians as citizens with an awareness of their place and power in the world” (65).
While not explicitly focused on education, Han’s (2017a) stark portrayals of neoliberal society and culture serve as a broader framework that reinforces Biesta’s (2006) critique of neoliberal education. The accountability required in neoliberal education could be seen as an expression of “the pornographication of society” that makes “everything a commodity and putting it on display” (Han 2017a, 48). Han (2017a) also uses tourism as an example, where individuals seek out places of history, memory, and identity but, rather than “lingering and spending time” (31), merely pass through. Rosa (2017) similarly observes that we no longer take the time to truly experience anymore, but rather take a photo (or twenty), effectively “storing” the potential experience for future reference. As a result, potential experiences accumulate into a collection of fragmented half-memories, resembling data storage rather than genuine memory.
Transferred to education, tourism becomes a compelling metaphor on how HME students might pass by educational institutions. They have all information available at their fingertips, but transforming this information into knowledge and educational growth requires the very things that first gets lost in the explicitness of education: lingering, contemplation, struggle, and time spent, as well the experience of alterity and the Other (Han 2017a). Knowledge is always selective, implicit, and normative (Han 2017b)—the way each student structures knowledge becomes part of the student’s identity. Information, on the other hand, is neutral, transparent, and explicit, always available but worthless in itself. Transparently available information is no more a part of knowledge than tourist pictures stored in the cloud are part of a person’s history. Transforming information to knowledge, however, takes time. Making that transition is therefore challenging in an accelerated and neoliberal educational system where institutions face pressure from both politicians and students to deliver explicit and measurable outcomes increasingly fast.
The Challenge of Explicit Applicability
Another tendency among HME students resulting from the explicification of education—reflecting a deliberate shift in educational policies towards prioritizing students’ ability to apply and operationalize knowledge (Cullen 2020)—is the expectation of immediate returns on educational investments, that is, explicit applicability of the outcomes from learning activities. Many HME institutions have experienced a significant diversification of prior skills, knowledge, and interests among their students (Sørbø and Røshol 2020), as technology enables a myriad of creative strategies to making music. Students—especially within technology-driven programs such as popular music or electronic music—often grow accustomed to learning what they need when they need it (bell 2014; Brown 2015; Savage 2020), and online learning platforms such as discussion forums, YouTube, or AI chat bots offer resources on virtually any topic. Additionally, large online educational platforms such as Kahn Academy or OpenCourseWare provide customizable course offerings, so that students can design their individual learning trajectories and personal learning environments (Kompen et al. 2019). These platforms offer tailored instruction for specific learning needs, accessible anytime, allowing students to develop individual, explicit, and measurable skill sets.
While this individualization of education may be both deliberate and necessary, it brings new educational challenges. One key challenge lies in designing HME programs with a shared trajectory, as this requires a common foundation of references, skills, knowledge, and interests. In individualized and customized educational settings, educators can no longer assume common ground. As a result, they must now explicitly explain concepts, references, and fundamental knowledge that were once implicitly understood, to ensure inclusivity when teaching diverse groups of students. Educators can view individual trajectories and personal learning environments as remedies for handling diversity. However, facilitating deep and rich discussions in such student groups becomes very challenging if students do not share experiences or conceptions of reality.
Further, and much like explicit learning objectives, skill development with its inherent promise of explicit applicability, is not equal to education. Rosa (2020) notes that skill development has become the goal of educational policy simply because “unlike education itself, skills can be precisely measured and to a large degree made controllable” (68). However, Rosa clarifies that while educators can control skill development, education is always partly uncontrollable, mirroring Biesta’s (2013) notion of education as something that entails risk.
Moreover, also similar to explicit objectives, the focus on immediate applicability can undermine broader educational and artistic goals, which often involves exploration, ambiguity, and delayed rewards. Savage (2020) argues that “in a desperate attempt to quantify our students’ attainment and progress, we are losing the ability to express the rich tapestry of what it means to be human, of what it means to learn” (99). Furthermore, digital media, while strengthening visual-spatial intelligence, comes hand in hand with a “new weaknesses in higher-order cognitive processes” (Greenfield 2009, 69), including reflection, critical thinking, and imagination.
HME, then, which often emphasizes such high-order cognitive processes and long-term goals and may even highlight open-ended processes as ends in themselves, can seem frustrating or irrelevant to students expecting quick mastery of explicit tasks. According to Lopéz-Iñiguez and Bennett (2021), HME students are not sufficiently aware of their learner identities and seem to lack meta-cognitive skills regarding their “learning how to learn” (136). Students expecting that lectures or activities will always result in something immediately applicable can undermine educators’ room for developing important dimensions such as conceptual understandings, awareness of lifelong learning, long-term skill development, or extra-curricular aspects. Combined with expectations of transparency and accountability in education, educators must continuously and explicitly explain and justify their pedagogical choices of both content and learning activities, rather than facilitate learning based on a confidence that the students trust their ability to make proper pedagogical decisions.
Explicit Teaching and Learning in Music Education
Fortunately, HME has seen several transformative trends in recent years, inspired by student resistance. Heightened awareness of colonialism and its oppressive practices, such as the traditional conservatoire notions of expertise with associated authoritarian pedagogical practices, have prepared the ground for more progressive approaches, exemplified by a beginning decolonization of curricula, revised staff recruitment policies, and a centering of student voice (Gaunt et al. 2021). Students, then, are increasingly seen as co-creators of education, and rightfully expect their voices to be heard and taken into consideration in their institutions. They could, in other words, be considered prosumers of education (Cullen 2020), both producing and consuming education.
However, this concept of prosumption also points to the self-exploitation that characterizes the achievement-subject as developed by Han (2015a), which has some challenging implications. He points to how the capitalist regime has turned the “should” of the Foucauldian disciplinary societies into a “can” of the achievement society. So, while it seems obvious that the tech platforms economically exploit the prosumer, who self-generates the content for consumption, Han (2017a) argues that in achievement society, rather than the neoliberal regime exploiting subjects, we self-exploit; “the exploiter is the exploited” (9). Moreover, as identities remain fluid in the accelerated late modern society and individuals must continuously and explicitly display these identities to keep them updated, the achievement-subject (including HME students) become prosumers of themselves; they self-commodify.
HME students need to wrestle with this tension throughout their careers; they do not simply sell a product; they are themselves the product. In this sense, musicians have arguably always been prosumers. However, the number of roles they can (and thus eventually should) possess increases (Nordgård 2017), and a growing tension exists regarding the question of what the product of an artist or musician should be (e.g. Manovich and Arielli 2024). If technology (AI in particular) continues to develop in its current directions, it seems probable that AI-generated content will heavily influence substantial parts of the music business such as music for commercials, movies, and gaming. Thus, musicians who can meaningfully break the musical norms and rules will stand out from what AI can generate. However, these same musicians may struggle against algorithmic promotion, which tends to favor mainstream or derivative content. While this paradox is not new, as artists and musicians have always had to balance their artistic visions with commercial potential, algorithmic filtering and AI-generated content amplify it. This tension is an important one in HME, which must develop in students both adaptability and resilience, preparing them to thrive in a landscape where originality is both more necessary and harder to sustain. Here we align with Väkevä (2020), who urges educators and students to “accept creativity as a central artistic virtue that mediates between aesthetic and commercial values” (661).
The explicit zeitgeist, marked by transparency and immediacy, where everything is on display and complexity, difficulty, and alterity are often avoided in favor of smooth goal achievement, remains unmistakable in HME. The explicit is evident both on a structural and institutional level, as pointed to earlier, but also at a very practical and individual level. As educators in this field, we experience effects of explicitness in our educational practices, and it affects our daily interactions with students in several ways. For example, students may not find it as evident as educators that resistance fosters growth, or that encountering otherness is essential for self-understanding. They may also not see that not getting one’s way is a valuable democratic experience, or that risk, uncertainty, and discomfort might be equally important to safe spaces. It affects the way students respond to feedback on their work, and therefore also affects the way we as educators provide feedback, where positivity is expected and critique—albeit constructive—must be very carefully articulated. As educators, we also observe that students increasingly focus on how institutions facilitate the achievements of predefined learning objectives, rather than reflecting on the competencies they need to develop as individuals, artists, musicians, and citizens with good lives and sustainable careers.
Traditional educational tasks, such as transmitting knowledge and culture from previous generations to the next, providing labor to society, and facilitating personal development, become less prominent when education is understood as a service to individual students. Rather, the imperative is to satisfy students’ needs and to provide a grade for them by “designing smooth, personalized learning trajectories that rush students swiftly towards the production of measurable learning outcomes” (Skregelid and Biesta 2022, 40). The marketization of education, then, requires adaptation to prosumer habits (Väkevä 2020), thereby also changing education. Further, educators often prioritize immediate gratification over struggle, which in turn tends to reconfigure teaching to help students get started with and endure tasks, and to help them sort through information and structure their own work. Consequently, educational practices thereby resemble a space that “optimizes” students, rather than genuinely engages them in thought and growth, and that reduces educator-student relationships to transactional exchanges and performance management.
Conclusion
In summary, we began our line of argument about why explicit is a useful word for this moment by highlighting how digital technology and neoliberal principles have influenced art, education, and culture in late modern society, and outlining two dimensions of this shift. First, explicitness understood as a temporality of the present reflects how the acceleration of technological, societal, and individual dimensions of life promotes immediacy. Second, explicitness understood as a culture of transparency reveals how the demand for constant transparency fosters a homogeneous, polished, and overly positive culture. In the context of music education, we identified ways that these trends manifest: The increasing emphasis on explicit educational objectives and the expectation of immediate applicability diminishes ambiguity and resistance in education, while promoting skill development and individualized learning trajectories.
Responding to these tendencies, which we understand as grave challenges to higher (music) education, students and educators must find a meaningful bridge between the culture of explicitness in which they must partake and the deeper, more reflective learning processes essential for the students’ development as musicians and individuals. The students themselves undoubtedly play an important role in this process and are given increased power, responsibility, and autonomy. However, students raised within an educational system driven by explicit objectives and pre-determined learning outcomes enter higher (music) education naturally expecting a continuation of the same educational approach they are accustomed to. The paradox, then, lies in the fact that while education increasingly empowers students with autonomy—requiring them to navigate ambiguity, risk, and unpredictability—the system itself simultaneously minimizes their exposure to these very elements. Prioritizing predictability, transparency, and accountability—making education explicit—shields students from many of the very challenges their autonomy requires them to confront.
This explicification of HME need not push us toward pessimism. Music educators can and should find ways to (re)introduce pedagogies that help music students prepare for the amazingly risky, exciting, unpredictable, rewarding, and uncontrollable life as artists and musicians they have chosen to pursue. As Biesta (2013) contends, education is indeed a “beautiful risk” (146), and we suggest re-emphasizing four broad educational principles that can serve as a counterbalance to an explicification of HME.
First, educators and students must have the courage to decelerate. In a culture that celebrates the instantaneous (temporal explicitness), slowing the tempo of learning allows hesitation, revision, and depth to flourish. This includes giving students space in their study programs, not filling every credit-point with predefined content and learning activities. Second, teaching should privilege the unfinished and complex (Christophersen 2024; Osberg and Biesta 2010), making process and ambiguity ends in themselves. For example, asking students to present works-in-progress without the pressure to perfect them can foster discussions around uncertainty, multiple interpretations, and creative dead ends as valuable components of artistic growth. A third principle involves critical reflection, inviting students both to articulate the reasoning behind their artistic choices, and to notice and question the hidden structures that shape their digital experience. A playlist on a streaming service, for example, appears less as harmless entertainment once learners see it as data-driven curation guided by commercial logics. Finally, pedagogy ought to begin with encounters rather than explicit competencies, affirming Biesta’s (2019, 2022) world-centred stance by shifting attention from personal self-realization to response-ability toward others and the planet. Collaborations with local communities, under-represented traditions or cross-disciplinary partners may help students broaden perspectives and become more sensitive to how their artistic and technological decisions influence beyond their own music.
An education following these lines may leave HME graduates not only knowledgeable but also attuned: able to discern unseen structures, give voice to something uniquely their own, and act with care toward human and more-than-human others. We argue that critically reflecting through and with the concept of the explicit can raise important discussions and pinpoint issues that are otherwise easily overlooked. Explicit functions as a descriptive term, effectively pointing to important trends, patterns, and tendencies in both society in general, and in HME and artistic practices in particular. It also functions as an active term, helping students analyze their own artistic and educational practices and expectations. This encourages reflection on how explicit temporality, transparency, learning objectives, and applicability influence their ways of being, creating, and working. Such musicians are hopefully equipped to both navigate and reshape the digitalized culture they inherit so that the explicit does not exhaust the possible.
About the Authors
Eirik Sørbø is Associate Professor at the Department of Performing Music at the University of Agder, Norway. His areas of interests revolve around pedagogical development and research, emphasizing technology and subjectivation in higher music education. These are also the topics of his doctoral thesis ” Developing practices and approaches to electronic popular music in education.” He is currently part of CreaTeME, a centre of excellence in creative use of technology in music education, and also the leader of studX—a development project on student active learning. Sørbø is also an active freelance musician.
Catharina Christophersen is Professor of Music Education at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, and the Chair of the Norwegian Forum for Research in Music Education. Previously a music teacher in compulsory schools and municipal schools of music and performing art, she is now a teacher educator. She was the principal investigator in the research project Music Teacher Education for the Future (2019–2022). Her research areas include music in schools, music teacher education, and creative partnerships. She has a particular interest in issues of educational complexity and change, educational philosophy, research ethics and social justice. Her research is frequently presented in international conferences and published in international journals and volumes.
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[1] The authors used ChatGPT-5 (OpenAI) to support language refinement and for limited idea generation. The authors are fully responsible for the content of the article.