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Bennett Reimer's philosophy of music education laid out in his influential A Philosophy of Music Education (1970) was born in the height of Cold War superpower confrontation but until recently its connection to Cold War politics and mentality has not been noticed and explored, in large part due to Reimer's decontextualized and depoliticized discourse. The present article, building on the findings of recent Cold War historiography and research on cultural Cold War, places Reimer's theory in the historical context and examines the entrenchment of its aesthetic foundation as well as Reimer's understanding of the relation of music education to society and politics and the developmental dynamics of the discipline in the Cold War political climate and ideology.

Hickey presents an obituary for music educator Bennett Reimer who died on Nov 18, 2013. Reimer was a prolific scholarly writer on all things philosophy and music education. In 1985, he published an article in the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education calling for a more focused and collaborative approach to research in music education. Those who knew or interacted with Reimer likely have a story to tell about what a kind person he was; a person who was always willing to help and mentor if he could.

Founded in 1941, the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) has been the primary professional organization for wind conductors for well over fifty years. Given the longstanding connection between college and university bands and music education in the public schools, it is no surprise that the same philosophies that shaped other areas of music education also affected wind bands at post-secondary institutions. This paper argues that the CBDNA, through its members, its agenda, and its professional activities, served as a catalyst and working model for the emerging philosophy of “music education as aesthetic education” (MEAE) in the decades before Bennett Reimer’s seminal text, A Philosophy of Music Education. In doing so, the CBDNA helped lay the groundwork for MEAE to become the predominant philosophy of music education in the United States.

Here, Freer discusses the 58-year partnership of Bennett Reimer and Music Educators Journal (MEJ). Reimer's first professional publication was in the June-July 1956 issue of MEJ (College Course in Supplementary Instruments), and it is fitting that his final writing offers a critical examination of the journal some 58 years later. In his article, Reimer exhorts music education, and MEJ in particular, to remain focused on scholarly approaches to thinking and teaching rather than succumb to fads and trends that undermine the profession. His contributions to MEJ spanned nearly six decades and included 22 articles, a full-length interview, and five letters to the editor. One of these letters is extraordinary, \"Music Matters.\" Six decades after his first MEJ article, Reimer's final challenge is for music educators to seek \"adjustments of and innovations to the long-established beliefs and practices of the roles of teaching and learning-conceptions with which they have become too comfortable.\"

Consistent throughout his writings on aesthetics and education, Bennett Reimer maintained the idea that music must be understood and studied as non-conceptual. Music's forms of knowing point to the subjective realms of life and operate effectively without the assistance or necessity of language. An education in the arts is an education in feelings, a claim that became untenable in an age of evidence and standardization. Critics hostile to a characterization of music as unknowable pointed to very clear concepts, locating the activity of music in both social and sonic contexts whereby extra-musical delineations could be articulated and musical conventions taught. The authors of this essay argue that music can be understood in ways that are both conceptual and non-conceptual, if by the latter one draws upon post-structural notions of the text, particularly Roland Barthes's explorations of what he called the third meaning or the third space. We leave open the idea that Reimer, in his own explorations of the non-conceptual, shared in this discovery.

This paper reviews some of the social, historical, and political forces and events that influenced the development of Bennett Reimer's early philosophy of music education in the late 1950s and continuing to his death in 2013. John Dewey's ideas about the moral and political purposes of art education are employed as critical tools for understanding the political dynamics of Reimer's career during the early Cold War as all education was conceived by government and prominent education reformers as social control rather than liberation.

With an eye toward becoming a high school band director, Mr. Reimer received a bachelor's degree in 1954 from the State University of New York at Fredonia, then a master's degree in music education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1955. In his 1970 book on the philosophy of music education, Mr. Reimer argued that music education belongs with other aesthetic arts, such as painting, and should be part of a core curriculum required of all primary education students.