<![CDATA[Music appreciation courses in higher education commonly assume that exposure to unfamiliar repertoire widens students’ taste, yet few studies examine how defensive judgements give way. This article examines “aesthetic shock” (Gegar Estetika), a sequence of deliberately anomalous listening encounters in a music appreciation course at Universitas Pasundan, Indonesia. Using constructivist grounded theory, researchers analysed learning plans, observations, and interviews involving the lecturer and five students. The analysis produced a four-phase process: defensive taste, anomalous encounter, mediated suspension, and re-grounded judgement. Three main findings qualify the intervention. First, students’ initial resistance took four distinct forms, only one of which strictly corresponds to elitism. Second, the shock did not independently change judgement; rather, the lecturer’s mediation—redirecting attention toward structure and source—effected the change. Third, the endpoint was not relativism, but a reflexive form of judgement where preference persisted while losing its authority as a verdict. The article argues that self-oriented appreciation operates as a revisable stance, and that disruptive pedagogy using avant-garde material risks replacing one hierarchy of taste with another]]>
Copyrights © 2026
