ABSTRACT
The aims and achievements of Jane Addams’s Hull House and Hull House Music School provide the springboard for Marissa Silverman’s examination of the actual and potential relationships that can be created among music, social ethics, politics, and citizenship. After probing several dimensions of Addams’s achievements, her work is considered next to the writings of John Dewey (who was largely influenced by Addams) and several of today’s leading feminist theorists. The work of these feminist scholars is especially important in building a more nuanced and balanced understanding of the “ethics of care” that underpinned Addams’s musical-communal-ethical work and, today, points us toward a robust concept of democratic school and community music education.
