ABSTRACT
According to Plato and Aristotle, the word ethos referred to whatever expressed or imitated the inner life of human beings, and music was required to reflect this ethos. Plato must have simultaneously intuited a chaos that cannot be verbalized while searching to explain why it was necessary to imitate the joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure that exist in human beings, consequently, Plato expelled artists from his Republic. Aristotle, on the other hand, defended art because he found a reason for its existence, namely, its utility as therapy. However, both adhered to art imitation theory, or so-called mimesis. In other words, art was explained by logos, which requires a reason for existence (e.g., Imada, 2012). Plato's and Aristotle's theories of art have survived through various interpretations and translations from Roman times to modern Europe. However, this European concept of mimesis isolated music from the earliest experience of it and eventually created the separation of form and content in art (e.g., Sontag, 1990). This chapter critiques the way in which this separation of form (as sonorous air) and content (storyline) actually plays out in terms of the activity of creative music making and examines its recommendations for music education, referring to a “sound project” based on the concept of “soundscape” by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer at a secondary school in Hirosaki, Japan.
