Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education 0253021324, 9780253021328

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
1 Toward Open Encounters
2 Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise
3 Learning in Laboratories
4 Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

R E M I X I NG the C L A S SRO OM

COUNTERPOINTS: MUSIC AND EDUCATION Estelle R. Jorgensen, editor

R E M I X I NG th e C L A S SRO OM Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education

Randall Everett Allsup

Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA iupress.indiana.edu © 2016 by Randall Everett Allsup All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Allsup, Randall Everett, author. Title: Remixing the classroom : toward an open philosophy of music education / Randall Everett Allsup. Other titles: Counterpoints (Bloomington, Ind.) Description: Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2016. | 2016 | Series: Counterpoints : music and education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016008082 (print) | LCCN 2016009337 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253021328 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780253021427 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780253021533 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Instruction and study. Classification: LCC MT1 .A5 2016 (print) | LCC MT1 (ebook) | DDC 780.71—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008082 1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16

For my students, past and present

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Preface 1 Toward Open Encounters

ix 1

2 Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

36

3 Learning in Laboratories

66

4 Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings Notes Bibliography Index

106 143 163 177

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

To attend to music today is to find ourselves pushing back the boundaries of what we have thought of as beautiful music. I still wonder at how unaware I was of so many frequencies; and I wonder how many remain unheard. —Maxine Greene

I

call attention to a tone of longing and melancholy in the quotation above. Greene speaks about an awareness of the unseen and unheard, about expanding the horizons of perception and thought, about finding openings in the closed and categorical. Though she passed away during the writing of this book, when I read the passage above, I can still hear her voice: her Brooklyn accent, the timbre of which my Midwestern ears found exotic when, a quarter of a century ago, I first attended her classes on aesthetics and education. She spoke forcefully about the shock of a new awareness and the way new frequencies of thought and experience unsettle the comforts of everyday life. My search for new forms of school and university music education comes out of such a passion, which was enlarged and then funded by Greene’s teachings and, later, further influenced by John Dewey’s and others. This longing has given form to my music classrooms. Sometimes I shape it purposefully in designing an assignment or modeling a teaching event. But often I simply feel it intuitively as I muddle toward an educational objective just out of mind’s reach. What would it mean to teach from this tonal palate? What would it mean to look beyond the known and knowable, to listen for new frequencies, to suspend the categorical in favor of the unfinished? I want to consider a way of teaching in which outcomes are as unpredictable as they are (currently) certain. I want to be more open in helping students design experiences that fund their needs and wishes. I want to explore what it means to create the irreducible classroom, to profit from a teacher’s unrepeatable moment in time and the confluence of these students with you and me at this place and this time. I hope to assemble a sense of how life and art can lead both teachers and students to explore larger and richer arenas of meaning and experience. I share with Greene the idea that teachers are at their best when they are on the edge between knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning. I share with Dewey the idea that growth is its own reward, that our capacities as teachers are idiosyncratically motivated, and that the enlargement and enrichment of these capacities, when combined with others, are

ix

x

|

Preface

pleasures in themselves. I want to recapture a sense of wonder and surprise that has been trained out of too many university music majors. Music education in this vision is profoundly nonstandard. “I still wonder at how unaware I was of so many frequencies; and I wonder how many remain unheard.” It would be unkind to call attention to the age at which Greene made this reflection, except to say that Greene’s longings represent the kind of education that continues across lifespans and life histories; it certainly doesn’t end upon the completion of a university degree, one’s promotion from apprentice to Master, or the passage of one generation of musician-teachers to the next. This insistent appeal for open encounters in art and in life is a major theme of this book. So is the passage of time, as I call attention to the points at which today’s musicians and music educators have been inserted by history and circumstance. I compel the reader to move beyond the comfortable. Still, I suppose few teachers can be blamed for wanting to freeze time in its tracks, to tune out the unlovely and surprising, to quiet the buzzing of twentyfirst-century life, and to limit the endless voices that demand our empathy. The world is as unstable as ever, and so is teaching. There may be a great longing by many for the closed and categorical. With so much at stake—a world upended by capitalism; the everydayness of violence, austerity, and need; a global obsession with measurement and assessment—what use do we have for an educational platform that is unapologetically difficult and unsafe? Does the world need an argument for openness, especially when the structures of life and living appear inhospitable to an empowered citizenry? We live in an era of great contradiction. Globalization and moving data are just as likely to serve the forces of order, surveillance, and standardization as they do adventure. Public schools and universities, meanwhile, are newly outcomedriven; the observable and measureable are privileged. For many, the red-brick public school has become a dead place, drained of promise and hope, a dream deferred. Teachers need monitoring, we are told, and students need a common core of testable facts. Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the Facts!

This, of course, is headmaster Gradgrind as introduced in Charles Dickens’s novel of privation and inequity, Hard Times. The speaker could represent any number of contemporary education administrators, charter school founders, or editorial columnists from around the world. (However, it’s worth noting that

Preface

|

xi

today’s children of today’s policymakers are allowed education that goes beyond Facts. Facts and nonnegotiables—disguised as twenty-first-century life and work skills—are what underprivileged children get.) Facts conform easily to the closed and categorical: “Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder.” I humbly take company with a long line of wanderers (and wonderers) who have sought to unsettle the reasonable categories of life and learning, influences like W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry David Thoreau, Michel de Montaigne, Socrates, and Confucius. I bring to these classic thinkers a world of new preoccupations, and I seek out their help. Some are introduced to iconoclasts like Jacques Attali, John Cage, and Elizabeth Gould. I have made purposeful use of some odd pairings, as when I move intuitively between the writings of Roland Barthes, Maxine Greene, and John Dewey. I’m not afraid of dissonance (or even contradiction). What does this unruly mash-up have to say about our closed-up world, about the for-profit testing industry and a worldwide obsession with efficiency and productivity? Or about a global education reform movement that seeks the deauthorization and deprofessionalization of the teacher? Can these thinkers speak to my fears about the loss of the arts and humanities in the public school (we’re sorry, but there’s just no time) and now in the university (they aren’t good for getting a job), and to the fear that no one will miss the music classroom when it’s gone? Three concerns preoccupy me: (1) the music teacher as subject, an agent in the care of herself and others, one who refuses the mantle of the Master; (2) the institution as enabler of human growth and adventure, a malleable space that can continually renew and expand; and (3) the aesthetic forms in which artisteducators can find, if they choose to look, an overflow of meaning. Throughout this book, I explore their intersections, searching for alternative ways to address university music-teacher education and the practice of teaching music. I acknowledge that writing about aesthetic form has fallen out of favor within our professional field. Yet I want to travel its borders, conjecturing that its study might remake and (re)form aspects of the work we do. I believe that an investigation into the aesthetic properties of what I call closed and open forms (the Work and the text) may shed new light on possibilities for teachers and the educational institutions in which we work. I believe that musicians and music-teacher educators are insufficiently attentive to the relationships that constitute a musical form’s inherent logic (its conditions, practices, properties, intensities, discourses, relationships, codes, norms, contexts, and felt meanings) and to the pedagogies and practices that bring its inert capacities to life. It stands to reason that those musical forms whose aesthetic logic is tightly structured necessarily enact a different set of human and sonic relationships than those forms that are open and evolving, or those forms that are made open and evolving. Learning in a closed form, for example, may require a long

xii

|

Preface

apprenticeship with a Master, abetted in most cases by the structure of school and university training. A form that is open (or made open), in which events and relationships are understood as irreducible, locally governed, and unfinished, may inaugurate a very different set of learning conditions, especially when compared with those forms in which there is general consensus about what is good and what is bad. Too much of institutional music education has seen the teacher as the primary stakeholder, a CEO-type director or performance Master who envisions his job as the upholder of historically coded practices. This hierarchical ethos is congruent with what I believe are the worst excesses of today’s publicschool reforms, in which standardization is mistaken for independence. Caring for others, in this instance, is teaching the novice about preapproved rights and wrongs, a form of functional literacy that the music profession has traditionally called “musicianship” and what global reformers refer to as readiness for college and work. I contend that this starting point is insufficiently enriching for both the student and the teacher. I believe that the pedagogy of closed forms—like so many economic systems around the world—is unsustainable and demands too many resources, not the least of which are time and money. And so it remains that “so much of the world is closed,” as my graduate assistant, Chiao-Wei Liu, reminded me one afternoon when I shared with her my doubts. Gender, race, age, relationships, work—“It isn’t just music education that is closed,” she said. I want to explore the texture of these forms and their tonal qualities. I want to explore the way that working within their structuring conditions advances or impedes human satisfaction and agency. By way of illustration, this book spends a great deal of time outside the discursive field of music and music education proper, outside “town.” Here is Henry David Thoreau, who speaks for the kind of purposeful muddling that brings intense satisfaction to life and living: It commonly chances that I make my most interesting botanical discoveries when I am in a thrilled and expectant mood, perhaps wading through some remote swamp where I have just found something novel and feel more than usually remote from town. Or some rare plant which for some reason has occupied a strangely prominent place in my thoughts for some time will present itself. My expectation ripens to discovery. I am prepared for strange things.

Metaphors and stories are important, and many of the richest disclosures I have uncovered have come by way of new frequencies, those sudden modulations that bring me to new territories of life and experience. Estelle Jorgensen has patiently pushed our profession to open up our forms of research, to move beyond the rosy case studies and explanatory frameworks that continue to dominate our inquiries, and to welcome the dissonant and strange. Inspired by Jorgensen, I look broadly for my own discoveries, and my method is not limited to closed forms of research; I prefer to emphasize the recursive prefix in research as is emphasized

Preface

|

xiii

in the French verb rechercher. I appeal to this common prefix as a way to refuse and re-fuse the fallacious completeness that is offered when Mastery is evoked, or when unnamed authority makes me afraid to explore the swamp, to shift keys in search of new frequencies. Inspired as I am by the collage form, I refuse to apologize—now and later—for mashing up my metaphors. “I am prepared for strange things.” Can we keep that perspective in mind, each time we start a new class, rehearse a new song, or come home to a familiar friend or lover? This is not easy to do. The preoccupations of living and the routines of work have a way of closing us up and closing us off. The best we can do is make an unholy muddle of it. Life is more like a swamp than a well-worn path, I think, and we have drained too many wetlands (another unholy metaphor) for the sake of comfort and control. Be off, reader! Attend to new frequencies and new pleasures.

This page intentionally left blank

R E M I X I NG t h e C L A S SRO OM

This page intentionally left blank



Toward Open Encounters

I don’t care how you’re gonna take it to your people and flip it and dip it and serve it. —Snoop Dogg

T

he form of the question was gotcha. In an interview published in the New York Times Magazine, writer Jon Caramanica asked Snoop Dogg, the producer, rapper, and musician, what he thought about “this suburban streak in hip-hop, like Iggy Azalea and Macklemore.” The provocation, I think, was supposed to expose a fault line around issues of race and authenticity, or maybe the question was meant to elicit some kind of codgerly reproach from rap’s old-school Doggfather. “Rap is supposed to grow,” Snoop responded. “One thing about Iggy and Macklemore: They got soul. They’re inspired by hip-hop. I don’t care how you’re gonna take it to your people and flip it and dip it and serve it.” This chapter is about generosity and the laws of musical practice. It’s also about flipping and dipping and serving, an option that music educators may too infrequently employ when teaching others. What characterizes an open music education? What principles define its ends? My inquiry starts with the rule of Law. Who gets to make it? Who gets to break it? I return, over and again, to the twin themes of border control and border crossings in an appeal to a more venturesome vision of music teaching. A breach, a general failure to act in required ways, is taking place in the field of music education. Tired of closed forms of life and living, we want to break free—we are longing for openings.

Making and Breaking the Law I start my telling of open and closed forms in a way that music-education scholar Estelle Jorgensen, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, and rapper Snoop Dogg might approve of, mashing up metaphors and strange illustrations with personal insights that together deal with possibility, access, and control. I begin with the story of Dapper Dan, Harlem’s underground haberdasher who repurposed hip-hop fashion in the late 1980s in ways that anticipated today’s DIY aesthetics. After this, I turn to a Kafka tale that finds figure in a great Master teacher called Goldmann. Then, the Japanese sushi Master Jiro Ono, the titular subject

2 |

Remixing the Classroom

of the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, becomes an example of an agent who opens a closed form but then closes it again, deciding context and codes for another generation. Dapper Dan, a Lawbreaker; Goldmann, the Law personified; and Jiro Ono, a Lawbreaker turned Lawmaker: all are subjects of their lives, and their lived choices speak to profound ways of operating within differing aesthetic structures. In my hands, their stories become contemporary parables of possibility and control in which the construction and performance of an aesthetic form is just as important as what the form does to and for its practitioners. We are more than the objects we make, they warn us; we are made by the objects we make. And as the Law concerns issues of power and authority, we implicate others in the objects we make. These parables provide points of comparison for the inquiry that concludes this chapter. In the spirit of an ongoing and unfinished tale, I start with Dapper Dan.

Dapper Dan, a Prophet of Open Forms Today, on the corner of 125th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City sits a new experiment in public schooling, the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy. This shiny-new brightly colored building is an exemplar of one of several chains of charter schools that operate using private, philanthropic, and public money in an explicit effort to disrupt the entrenched interests that prevent neighboring public schools from achieving excellence. The Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy is organized according to an exacting business model, operating from a top-down structure that makes no excuses when it comes to success and achievement. All children are expected to meet certain benchmarks at certain grades, and they can be pressured to leave if they do not. Students are tested and compared at every stage of learning. We are told that they learn grit and self-control, presumably because they come to school lacking self-concern. Externally mandated examinations, created and administered by for-profit testing companies like Pearson, drive curricula and afterschool activities. The African American founder and CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, Geoffrey Canada, is said to be a fundraiser, visionary, consultant, philanthropist, and celebrity. His performance, the success of his school, and the evaluation of his teachers are based on whether his young, mostly African American students can outperform their peers on the basis of comparative scored learning outcomes with neighboring public schools. In this high-stakes arena, predictability is a premium, and little is left to chance. In the context of contemporary American public schooling, this kind of strategy is known as “reform.” But in 1988, before it was condemned and demolished, there stood on this very same plot of land a different kind of social and aesthetic experiment, a different kind of “reform.” Here was Dapper Dan’s Boutique, a locally owned

Toward Open Encounters

|

3

haberdashery that catered to the tastes of the burgeoning hip-hop community. At this moment in New York City history, there was very little philanthropic interest or private investment in the Harlem community. There were no chain stores or chain schools on the famous 125th Street thoroughfare. Some shops were blackowned, but most were not. It was here, in the neighborhoods of central Harlem (institutionally neglected but rich in history) and the Bronx (cloven into fragments by the expressway-obsessed urban planner Robert Moses) that a certain socio-aesthetic mutation was occurring, a break from fixed categories in life and art. Black youth were resisting the assimilationist discourses of commercial popular culture, with its appeals to and portrayals of a “rising” black middle class (recall Michael Jackson’s We Are the World campaign, The Cosby Show, and the media-safe Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls). In opposition to the dominant codes of what black America should be, uptown youth began reconstructing and reasserting a local identity, one that refused and repurposed the inevitability of a melting pot America. Here begins the story of Dapper Dan’s Boutique as remembered by locals and as told by Kelefa Sanneh in “Harlem Chic: How a HipHop Legend Remixed Name-Brand Fashion.” And so here stand two moments in Harlem history: the (re)forming of American fashion and the “reforming” of the American public school. The story of Daniel Day, a.k.a. Dapper Dan, is the story of an appropriation artist, a fashion bricoleur, a master of pastiche and reinvention. Something of a career hustler, Dapper Dan muddled in and out of many jobs until, without formal training or apprenticeship as a tailor, he began designing original fashion for rappers, hip-hop artists, black celebrities, and athletes in uptown Manhattan. Working out of an acquisitioned fur and leather workshop, he created madeto-order luxury goods, mixing pieces from brands like Gucci, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton and their counterfeits with whatever materials he had on hand. “One of his favorite tricks,” Sanneh writes, “was to use designer-leather trim to turn a generic garment—even a generic mink coat—into a name brand one.” Say a rapper wanted a Gucci parka with a Fendi hood, lined and cuffed with mink, with large inside pockets: a one-of-a-kind piece would be designed and assembled on-site, made to fit. “Part of his success had to do with the way his clothes fit. Because he knew his customers’ bodies and preferences, he could create jackets and trousers that were baggy without being oversized. . . . And, by creating flamboyant pieces that were both glamorous and streetwise, Day [Dapper Dan] helped lay the groundwork for the modern hip-hop aesthetic, in which the distinction between onstage and offstage is always blurred.” Like Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and the punk movement of the 1970s, ordinary manufactured objects were reconfigured as a kind of cultural antidote to bourgeois hegemony. Duchamp’s famous urinal was art because he said it was art, in an effort to move art’s relationship away from the sublime and serious and toward a new,

4

|

Remixing the Classroom

typically modernist, “grammar” of art. Punk was likewise a revolutionary project that sought to bring about a rupture in English and American middle class values. I position Dapper Dan’s work closer to the punk aesthetic, as decidedly postmodern in intent and (re)formational, not revolutionary. The making of early hip-hop is the story of a methodological field in which the production of activity was paragrammatical, “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages . . . antecedent and contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony.” Politics in early hip-hop were likewise contradictory, both embracing and contesting the symbols of capitalism and stereotypes of race and gender. Trafficking in the status that brands like Fendi signify, yet aware that European fashion houses were averse to associations with black culture, Day repositioned and repurposed the very language of fashion (not its grammar, but its language) in such a way that it communicated an overflow of meaning, layering new intensities over original intentions. The job of traditional fashion is to clarify the primary relationship between a sign and its signification (e.g., Gucci = money). Instead, Day jammed its frequencies, amplifying certain bounded relationships (class, race, power, wealth) and garnished them with second-order signifiers that were more slippery (black youth culture, street credibility, assumed criminality, sexuality and empowerment). The resulting incongruities confused once-stable relationships between high and low, effectively redistributing power and access. “The Louis Vuitton logo pattern, which looked sensible on a valise, seemed surreal on a knee-length coat,” writes Sanneh. “For Day, that was part of the excitement—he wanted to improve venerable brands by hijacking them. ‘I Africanized it,’ he says. ‘Took it away from that, like, Madison Avenue look.’” Audaciously, when Day discovered “that Bally, another of his favorite brands, didn’t have a sufficiently regal crest, he went to the New York Public Library to research the families of its owner, so he could supply one,” a presumably more sumptuous and grand regal crest. The proponents of early hip-hop didn’t seek out a cohesive or stable aesthetic, preferring to repurpose a language rather than invent a new grammar. For Sanneh, Dapper Dan’s approach reflected “two contradictory impulses, both essential to hip-hop: a desire to claim traditional status symbols and a desire to remake and redefine those symbols—to ‘Africanize’ them, perhaps, or to sample them, the way hip-hop producers sample their favorite records.” We are talking about appropriation, sampling, and the power of (re)fusing and (re)forming filial terms. We are also talking about opening closed forms of communication. The question that Day’s aesthetic provokes for the music educator may be this: for the purposes of self-expression and the assumption of an alternative political identity, when and how can a community violate establishment norms and contexts? What are our obligations to traditional norms if they

Toward Open Encounters

|

5

are embedded with meanings that contradict local or even broader humanist values? High fashion—let’s be clear—is not democratic. It communicates through closed terms. This form of broadcast is its currency. Control of who wears what, on what occasion, and for what purpose is meant to distinguish one category of people from another. What is remarkable about Dapper Dan is that he broke open a system that had no use for his neighbors and his neighborhood. Rather than participate in a closed hierarchical field, where a singular creative genius from a faraway place makes a lasting work of fine and elevated taste, where elite connoisseurs consume said work with appreciation, and where boutiques are expected to take and sell, not remake and rematerial, Day repositioned those external standards and norms that were at odds with his community, and kept the ones he liked. A bricoleur, a bandit, a master at regifting, he riffed on the rules that did apply, changed the ones that did not, and created something irreducible, something that was right for one place, at one moment in time, never to be repeated. Marjorie Perloff might call Day’s method “unoriginal genius,” the invention and reinvention that comes when preexisting material is retailored to fit unique bodies in time and space. In a way that I recognize as democratic, Dapper Dan destabilized the authority of the Master-designer and transformed it to the wearer, allowing the wearer a say in what looks good and what doesn’t. But there is more to say about this story of curiosity and exploration. Dapper Dan was a different kind of expert, a different kind of innovator. His genius, if we choose to use that word, was participatory and flexible, an ideal I explore in more detail in chapter 2. The quality of his work could not be judged by standards that were external to his community. Involvement in his methodological field— his form—required a sensibility for adventure that could move knowingly across open and closed landscapes. Surface and depth coexisted in his laboratory space, as described by Sanneh: In the convivial atmosphere of the shop, Dapper Dan was a friendly but serious presence. He took measurements and drew up designs, leaving most of the sewing and cutting to African tailors. . . . [He] wielded several different kinds of authority, depending upon whom he was talking to: he could be a self-taught philosopher, a refined couturier, a gruff salesman (no discounts, no matter what), or a local guy who found subtle ways to remind people that he knew a lot of other local guys. . . . He cultivated a sense of mystery about the trademarked materials he used, and about himself.

Several things strike me. Day’s shop was a reconceptualization of what a shop could be; its operations were horizontal and vertical, authoritative and shared, formal and informal, traditional and innovative, serious and playful. He moved knowingly across and within a continuum, from the very creative to the very secure. His art was enriched by the strange and nonstandard. This sensibility

6

|

Remixing the Classroom

constitutes my ideas of what makes a good school. But unlike the schools I know, it appears that at Dapper Dan’s Boutique, surprise was valued much more than predictability. This was a space in which the construction of value or “quality” was negotiated. In the making of a tracksuit or the retrofitting of the leather interior of a BMW convertible, the client took part in its redesign, in the transforming of a new but contingent norm. The client did not need special expertise, beyond personal taste and imagination, to be creative. Each innovation was momentarily right, contingently indigenous in a paradoxical way; what made one piece “right” for the wearer was unrepeatable from one client to the next. And unlike today’s schools, measurement and assessment, essential aspects of the creative process, were reached through qualitative, idiosyncratically defined means. In Day’s shop (in this laboratory, in this parable of an ideal music classroom) risk, uncertainty, and pleasure were involved. There was adventure, too. It deserves asking what kind of education could prepare today’s Dapper Dan for such an open and imaginative life? What kind of education could foster risk taking and courage, innovation and happy surprise? What kind of learning environment could assist the novice tailor in finding the skills, knowledge, and disposition to succeed at making his own ineffable haberdashery, using the resources, people, and talents that surround him? In an age of accountability and standardization, is there a space within the university or public school to recognize and then amplify the diversity of skills represented at Dapper Dan’s Boutique? In an age of competitive rankings and winner-take-all stakes, can the university school of music seek out the bricoleurs and bandits and provide means for their flourishing? On some level, this is an emancipatory process, one that takes the lingua franca of global power, hierarchy, and oppression and bends it to local needs. Dapper Dan’s Boutique is no longer around. Today, there are many chain stores on 125th Street, offering fashion that is identical to what young people wear in Houston, Texas, and Hartford, Connecticut. In the place where Dapper Dan used his ingenuity to great effect stands the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, an institution that guarantees that its graduates receive the same education as children in Houston and Hartford. Chain stores and chain schools—H&M and HCZ, side by side—each offer identical services, quality assurance to clients, value at the price-point level, and, above all, a commitment to standardization.

Before the Law A fundamental principle of Goldmann’s teaching was that the students must play what is printed in the score, and yet that they must not play something simply because it is written in the score, but rather because they feel it that way. —Henry Kingsbury

Toward Open Encounters

|

7

In Franz Kafka’s existential parable “Before the Law,” a man from the country arrives before a great gate seeking admittance to the Law. A doorkeeper stands in the way and tells our protagonist that he cannot get in, not at this time. Because Kafka’s rendering is a parable, we are left to decide for ourselves what the Law represents, who the man from the country is, and why his desires to get in are blocked. Repeatedly, the man from the country beseeches the doorkeeper for entrance, but he is denied each time. “I am powerful,” he tells the man from the country, “and I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last.” Having sacrificed all that he had, the man from the country continues to ask for admission to the Law, but his efforts are rebuffed. The doorkeeper ignores him, taunts him, makes small talk, accepts bribes, but still he will not let the man from the country come inside. As years go by, the man from the country grows stiff and old, but even as his eyesight dims, a radiance emanates from cracks within the gateway of the Law. Close to death and a fragment of his former self, he begs the doorkeeper one final question: How is it, he asks, “that no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?” And in perhaps the cruelest joke played in the canon of Western literature, the doorkeeper answers, roaring in the man’s ears, “No one could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made for you. I am now going to shut it.” So ends the tale. I encourage readers to spend some time with this short text. I am interested in the feelings that Kafka’s parable evokes in formally trained musicians, especially those who have earned a university degree in music. As I lend myself to the tale, I wince at every plea. A gnawing outrage is aimed first at the doorkeeper, and then at the force without a name, the Law. There is the wait, the deferral, a feeling of choice, and then the dawning perception that there never was a choice to begin with. The desire for justice and then the dawning perception that fairness and equity were never starting terms. In solidarity with the man from the country, and turning to my own past, I feel that a terrible joke has been played on his devotions. The man from the country risked it all, and to what end? The words of my former teachers, “Almost,” and “Not yet,” and “Non—faites-le encore!” ring in my ears. In mixed tape form, I bring Kafka’s tale together with Henry Kingsbury’s ethnography of an elite North American conservatory, an education system that many readers will recognize immediately. Kingsbury’s research concerns the intersection of institutional beliefs and the ways in which teaching and learning are structured around notions of talent, mastery, power, and performance achievement. In a chapter titled “Lessons with the Master,” Kingsbury describes the teachings of a world-renowned pianist called Goldmann. The setting I summon below details a European-style applied studio where a heterogeneous group of preprofessionals take turns performing for their teacher, who, in return,

8

|

Remixing the Classroom

dispenses wisdom and advice about how they should play. Unsurprisingly, most lessons focus on score interpretation and expression. Like all classical performers, the apprentices in Goldmann’s studio are told emphatically that they are compelled to honor the notes and markings on the score they are studying. When they do, in Kingsbury’s account, the musicians may be praised, or they may be chastised for playing only what’s on the score. If they play what’s not on the score—if, for example, they play with a feeling for the markings on the score—they may be praised, or they may be rebuked for suggesting that they know more than the composer or for misrepresenting or misunderstanding the composer’s markings. In Kingsbury’s ethnography, students may be contradicted for reading the score one way and not realizing that the authority of the score also has an aural component that may be more important than what is felt or even indicated by the composer, or they may be praised for their intuition and good musicianship. Students may be scolded or applauded for appealing to one edition and not another, but in the end it is Goldmann who decides which choice is right and which is wrong. Like the man from the country who stands before the Law, his students await his accounting. In a way that represents the absurdity and cruelty of approaching the Law and expecting fairness or respect for one’s choices, it is really only Goldmann the Master who is allowed, by the earned authority endowed in him through previous accomplishments, to decide when playing with feeling is appropriate or too much, when to interpret the score in one way and not another, whether an edition is to be respected or not, and whether a sense of felt history trumps all these concerns: On at least one occasion Goldmann explicitly contradicted an indication given in the score, without casting doubts on the authenticity of the edition in use. “Janet, you don’t use your ear,” he complained to a student working on the Brahms horn trio. “Think of it as pianissimo, rather than piano.” Moments later, as she played, he insisted, “pianissimo, play pianissimo!” Taken literally, it is clear that Goldman has contradicted the text: the score says piano, Goldmann says pianissimo.

This kind of act, I believe, is not an example of hermeneutics, that which musicians call “interpretation.” It is not an illustration of a close reading of a text, in which ideas are debated among equals and no true account would be expected to exist. In Kingsbury’s hands, this process of education appears, instead, to be a kind of divination disguised as science. It’s a nod to the light that emanates from cracks beneath the closed doors of the Law, a light that has called us from the country and to which we have devoted our very lives, but a light that is, nonetheless, shining perpetually out of reach. I have never met a trained musician who has not encountered the cruelty and contradiction of Goldmann’s way. Some supplicants, whom our profession

Toward Open Encounters

|

9

calls the very talented, are ushered past the Law’s great gate, but most of us get left outside. Many of the very talented return to the university as future doorkeepers, deciding whose edition is right and whose is wrong, whose interpretation of piano should be pianissimo and whose should be mezzo forte, who plays well and who does not. This is Kingsbury’s account of a young musician who learned by a committee of Masters that she wasn’t good: The gravity of Johanna’s failing her promotional was grounded in the fact that although the voice faculty agreed that she had a wonderful singing voice, they found her to be very “unmusical.” This is a serious judgment, for it is commonly held among conservatory musicians—and it was explicitly stated by several of the voice teachers—that a person either is or isn’t “musical,” and on such a matter there is little that can be done to change things one way or the other.

To extend a critique of the cruel privileges of Mastery would, in my mind, only continue to state the obvious, although the idea that one can be denied an education because one needs an education really confuses me. I remain unconvinced, however, that we have adequately interrogated the problem of musical expertise: who has it, what it is, and how it might be attained. There may be those outside the field of music who romanticize the study of music as the ideal hermeneutic act. Maybe it is. But how often do we mistake music’s grammar for its language, its modes of communication for its poetry? And how often do we call on its mysteries to disguise the play of power? It is surprising to me that so little research in the field of music education has been undertaken into the issues of learner fear and teacher bullying. To call a studying musician “unmusical” is to extinguish a light; it is to act as if the future is certain and that human potential is somehow fixed. It is to act as if the arts can be frozen in time and that the concepts of “musician” and “musicianship” will not change. To teach in a way that is capricious, furthermore, is to play cunningly with power. These are acts of violence. I want to know how we can instead protect and sustain this inner light throughout our careers. In the face of music majors like Johanna, the university music-teacher educator is often the last hope in rekindling the light that has been extinguished by the keepers of closed forms and the upholders of traditional standards. I am interested in the design of formal learning environments in which students act in tandem with their teachers as creators and judges. There must be forms of study that can provide a better groundwork for discovery and surprise than the examples above. The Law is abetted by institutions in which deferred entry through an endless series of doors and doorkeepers is an accepted norm, each door more difficult to get through and each doorkeeper more powerful than the last. This is the Master-apprentice model. Once entering this system (not all professional

10 |

Remixing the Classroom

musicians and music educators begin their study this way, but most do, and all will eventually meet a Master), the Law remains external to the initiate and its light is fleeting and just out of reach. The learner is placed in a looping deficit to the form she is studying and the Master she obeys. Ironically, the better she gets, the further away she feels—the more the light recedes. Consider the tragedy of Johanna and thousands of musicians like her who want to be called “musical.” Johanna, in all likelihood, was a celebrated singer in her community before she left to study music at an elite conservatory, before she pledged herself to the Law, before she left the country and discovered she wasn’t good. I do not know the circumstances of Johanna’s early musical world, but I can offer a guess. Once upon a time, singing was a kind of intoxication for Johanna, a daily pleasure. People told her she was good and envied her talent. Learning an adult tradition felt open, and everything was new. There was probably a stage at which Johanna was not ashamed to make mistakes, a stage when singing meant messing around. Then, her tradition began to bind. How do traditions go from being open to closed? It is important to remember that all musical traditions begin as paralogical phenomena; they start, naturally, as pretraditions, with no heraldry to mark a starting date. Dapper Dan and his cadre of early hip-hop artists borrowed heavily from many sources, their frames of reference were plural and relative, and diversity was a premium, not a problem. Surely, Dapper Dan and his apprentices inherited norms, but they also reshaped them to meet emergent needs, amending and reassessing what looked good, always experimenting with and breaking the Law. The closing of a form begins with the making of the Law, when there is an appeal to a progenitor whose innovation vis-à-vis his location in history is used to set the bindings in which choices are later shaped and circumscribed. “The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work,” writes Roland Barthes. “Literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions.” Subsequent authority is sedimentary, coming from the study of respected archeological relics that the progenitor left behind (these can be scores, records, videos, aural accounts, etc.), appeals to a so-called “authentic” context, and the mind and fingers of a contemporary executant. In a closed form, the father is always easy to authorize: the composer (Beethoven), the virtuoso (Coltrane), the conductor (Revelli), the exemplar (Tupac). In contrast, keeping a tradition open and evolving—treating one’s form as a “text”—is an act of redistribution and generosity. In a theory of the text, the Author is treated as a guest in his own work. In contrast, “to give a text an Author [to make an open form closed] is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. . . . [W]hen an Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the Critic.” In other words, when authenticity or authority is “discovered,” the Law gets made. Its codes become grammar. Context

Toward Open Encounters

|

11

is poured like wet cement. Poetry becomes prose. Language is explained away and communication trumps the search for new meanings. A science of learning is created. The well-positioned determine value. This logic forms the caste system on which the modern university music program is built, supported by Masters like Goldmann, and paid for by students like Johanna who ask for admittance. As mentioned earlier, we are more than makers of music; we are made by the music we make. To participate in a hierarchical art form is to practice certain kinds of relationships at the expense of others. Because the matters under discussion deal with human choice and public interaction, they can be described as ethical or not. Kingsbury communicates the treatment of Johanna in terms that are profoundly troubling, calling attention to an educational structure in which a student like Johanna has so little to contribute to men like Goldmann, and they have so little to learn from her. In later chapters, I look at the moral dimensions of creativity and following a quest. I argue that the benefits of the Master-apprentice relationship come with a human cost, and this cost, if it is too great, is at odds with the values of a democratic society. I am aware of Elizabeth Ellsworth’s warning against overly simplistic visions of antioppressive teaching: she asks us to consider that all formal educational settings have the potential to be authoritarian, including those that espouse socially just values. With her caveat in mind, I still believe that defenders of hierarchical relationships have a special burden of proof if they wish to justify their method and approach. They may point to efficiencies in the learning process or lay claim to cultural authenticity of some kind or other, but no justification can be made to defend actions that are oppressive. As Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Any situation in which ‘A’ objectively exploits ‘B’ or hinders his or her pursuit of self-affirmation as a responsible person is one of oppression.” Oppression, the love of overwhelming control, is by nature an effort to silence alternative voices. In this way, relationships of control damage not only the soul-life of an apprentice but the Master’s, too. Indeed, the Master loses a source of self-knowledge in his desire to control and silence others, and thus his own journey may narrow along with that of his apprentice. “Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it—oppressor and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in the situation, and both bear the marks of oppression,” writes Freire. “Apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world and of people, the oppressor consciousness could not understand itself—could not even exist.” This is quite a strong claim, suggesting that doorkeepers like Goldmann would be existentially lost—their identity would cease to “exist”—if they were separated from their relationships of power and control over others. In this and subsequent chapters, I intend to make a case for the teacher as coauthor or reader (chapter 1), a flexible expert who moves comfortably within

12 |

Remixing the Classroom

closed and open arenas (chapter 2), a laboratory facilitator (chapter 3), and a fellow adventurer (chapter 4). I want to make a case for the concerted and conscious circulation of power and control. The music teacher, working with and on behalf of her students, may need to repair or discard historical norms, especially those that harm others or diminish possibility. There are many educators of music teachers who share this longing. Lucy Green’s Musical Futures project puts the music that children like at the center of all teaching activity. I have seen firsthand the collaborative ethos that Heidi Westerlund is fostering among doctoral students at the Sibelius Academy in Finland. Elizabeth Gould has throughout her career moved researchers to attend to silenced voices, a radical break from our positivist tradition in music education. I wonder, however, whether teachers like these are outliers. I worry that the ideology of achievement, excellence, and Mastery makes more nuanced considerations feel subordinate. The student- or learner-centered classroom remains in a “dualistic relationship” with the authoritative and the closed, in which, writes Gould, stakeholders are separated by “a distinction based both on a ranking and inferiorization.” Gould continues, “Institutionalized by and through systems of power, dualisms are never neutral, natural, or innocent, and accumulate in terms of interlocking and mutually reinforcing systems of domination. Further, dualisms function in these systems in both the cultural and material worlds, enabling particular types of social structures supported by particular (dualistic) ways of thinking.” Dualisms, in other words, make equality impossible by creating a lesser category of opposite. Creativity is fine, the story goes, but you have to know the rules. Studentcentered learning is fine as long as its methods produce achievement, excellence, and Mastery. Explore, but don’t go too far. The use of the male pronoun to reference the Master is not unintentional; it is a nod to the work of Gould and others. I am in sympathy with feminist teachers who see the markings of authority and Mastery as inscriptions of protomasculinity. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously begin their critique of the Western canon by deconstructing the myth around which the very word “author” has been constructed: the myth of father as creator. They quote the postcolonialist writer Edward Said: Authority suggests to me a constellation of linked meanings: not only as the [dictionary] tells us, “a power to enforce obedience,” or “a derived or delegated power,” or “a power to influence action,” or “a power to inspire belief,” or “a person whose opinion is accepted”; not only those, but a connection as well with author—that is, a person who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements. . . . Taken together these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (1) that of the power of an individual to initiate, institute, establish—in short, to begin; (2) that this power and its product are an increase over

Toward Open Encounters

|

13

what had been there previously; (3) that the individual wielding this power controls its issue and what is derived therefrom; (4) that authority maintains the continuity of its course.

In this context, it appears that power and fatherhood are key terms when referring to authority: the power to produce, reproduce, and control. Dualisms come to mind, with first- and second-order questions: (1) Who has the power to make and explore? Who has the power to explain and enforce? (2) Who is being silenced? Who must be told and taught? Who must wait? There are first- and second-order relationships inscribed in these questions. To illustrate their peril, I turn now to the story of Jiro Ono, the proclaimed last great sushi Master in Japan and a figure of popular fascination thanks to the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In the next section, I discuss the authority that Jiro Ono has earned and the power he wields, and I look at the relationships that are embedded in his work. Ono is a chef, an epicure, and the owner of a famous restaurant, but he is also an educator and a protector and purveyor of tradition. He is a great Master, and the art of sushi is his form.

The Dreams of the Master, the Dreams of the Apprentice An apprentice must first be able to properly hand squeeze a towel. At first the towels are so hot they burn the apprentice’s hands. It is very painful training . . . Until you can adequately squeeze a towel, they won’t let you touch the fish. Then, you learn to cut and prepare the fish. After ten years, they let you cook the egg. —Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Ono is the oldest chef ever to receive the coveted three-star Michelin rating, and his ten-seat restaurant attracts connoisseurs from all over the world. Ono has been making sushi for three quarters of a century, and today his basement restaurant makes nothing but sushi—no appetizers, no desserts. His kitchen is also an educational space, and those who endure his training can earn renown. Ono’s apprentices, as in most fine restaurants, are ranked according to experience, with clear skills they must master before they qualify for higher stations within the kitchen and thus more complex and interesting work. In Jiro Dreams of Sushi, we meet a young apprentice who is massaging a squid for fifty minutes to release its perfume and tenderize its meat. Another is seen fanning leaves of seaweed over a charcoal fire. All who work in Ono’s restaurant aspire to the title of shokunin, a severe kind of routine expert who attempts to master one skill for as long as he lives. In the documentary, Ono alludes to its meaning: “Once you decide upon an occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work. You must fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to

14

|

Remixing the Classroom

mastering your skill.” Ono describes the making of sushi as ecstatic: “I would see ideas in dreams. I would wake up in the middle of the night. In dreams I would have visions of sushi.” The documentary opens with a quiet passage from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major. No sooner are we introduced to Ono than we begin to hear words like “genius,” “talent,” “purity,” and “taste.” From this point on, all adjectives are superlative. The camera moves in time with the music, panning lustfully over gleaming morsels of glazed fish. It appears that we are in the presence of the sublime, the moment of umami, when perfection and harmony makes us gasp with pleasure. When documenting the life of a genius, it is a common trope to seek authorization from an external Critic, and we are quickly introduced to one in this film. After giving us his qualifications, the Critic begins an explanation of Ono. We learn of Ono’s great self-discipline and how, through a combination of repetition and intense desire, Ono took the art of sushi to new heights. When Ono passes away, warns the Critic, “sushi may never reach that level again.” Throughout the film, we hear aphorisms such as “To make great food, you must eat only great food” and “Your palate must be finer than your customers’, or you have no business serving them.” Ono, we learn, is a benevolent autocrat, a practitioner of tough love, someone who may withhold praise for years, presumably because that is the best way to condition excellence. “The great chefs, they are better leaders than collaborators. They are stubborn, and insist on having it their way.” His apprentices, accustomed to hearing “Almost,” and “Not yet,” and “No. Do it again!” have their work judged many times throughout the day. “There are some who are born with a natural gift,” we are told, “some with a sensitive palate and sense of smell.” This surely describes the apprentices. “But, if you want to get to the next level, you need talent.” This, of course, is a reference to Ono. I think that Jiro Dreams of Sushi is meant to be an inspirational story of extraordinary talent and the spirit to achieve that lives in every one of us. (Cue the classical music.) I think that we are supposed to approve of the cost of Ono’s genius. (Cue the minor key.) We are asked to admire this philosophy of shokunin, a concept so analogously pronounced in our university music programs. The makers of this documentary are savvy, however, and they allow for a sly counternarrative to emerge, one that casts doubt on the benign heroism of Ono’s passion. The camera lingers, for instance, on the faces of Ono’s apprentices as they stoically receive disapproval and disappointment, their daily education: “The slice is too thick.” “The tuna is too tough.” “The wasabi is too fresh.” This documentary, too, is a parable of the Law. We learn once again (as if we haven’t internalized its precepts) that many will stand before the Law, but only the very few can make the Law. Because talent begets authority (and not the other way around), and authority makes the Law, this documentary-as-text (constructed by Westerners for a global-Western audience) offers us a way to examine the ideologies that shape

Toward Open Encounters

|

15

the way a society thinks about talent, and, importantly, how and who to teach. An undercurrent of the movie is the fear that Ono’s eldest son, the fifty-year-old Yoshikazu, who has worked with his father since he was nineteen, cannot live up to Ono’s acclaim—that he may lack talent, or worse, that he may lack the perception of talent. We are left to wonder at Yoshikazu’s fate. We know little about his happiness. For Kingsbury, “One of the most basic aspects of the notion of talent is that of differentiation.” We cannot expect everyone to be good at music, any more than we can expect everyone to be good at swimming or making sushi. An education in music (or swimming or sushi), then, becomes the discriminating process of locating increasingly fine levels of differentiation between performers as they advance in their field. This is problematic because when our profession’s focus is on individual achievement, we fail to take sufficient note of the social relationships that construct and sustain the field. Talent takes on the kind of “special power” that Kingsbury locates in the figure of Goldmann, a power that educates and mystifies the apprentice, or supplicant, as he stands before the Law, a firstorder power that is inured in our classical literature as a paternalism that Gould, Gilbert and Gubar, and Said all call attention to. For Kingsbury, the logic of talent starts with the belief that some people have tremendous amounts of talent; some have little or none; many have talent in some areas but not in others. Talent thus conceived is understood as located “in” the person’s mind, psyche, or perceptual apparatus and is widely felt to be transmitted genetically, like hair or eye color. Talent, then, is a representation of differentials of potential for certain socially valued behavior, differentials that are believed to be ordained not in social order but rather by the inherent nature of people.

When the Master calls on talent to justify certain ways of acting in the world, his authority deemphasizes the social construction of Mastery and brushes up against, ever so favorably, the mystical and the sublime. It is in the Master’s favor to confuse virtue and virtuosity. This mystification allows oppressors like Goldmann to make pronouncements about who is musical and who is not. Its logic concludes that certain apprentices—those like Johanna and others—are ultimately uneducable. I do not know what the ending lines of “Before the Law” mean, but I am haunted by the roaring voice of the doorkeeper, refusing access for the very last time: “No one could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made for you. I am now going to shut it.” I wonder if these words speak to the ways in which each one of us participates in our own self-deception, about the ways in which we act against our best interests when we subscribe to a particular belief system or stay within its borders. Why didn’t the man from the country leave when he was told

16 |

Remixing the Classroom

“no” so often and so emphatically by the doorkeeper? Perhaps the answer lies in Kingsbury’s ethnography: Conservatory life is about talent. Musical talent is at once the most pervasive phenomenon and the biggest issue in conservatory life. While everyone in the conservatory “has” talent . . . it is also the case that nearly all of them, or at least nearly all students, are very much concerned with how much talent they have, and sometimes whether they “really” have talent at all.

Maybe the man from the country stayed so long in front of the door for the simple reason that he wanted the doorkeeper to tell him that he was ready to come in, that he “had what it takes” to enter the door and approach the Law. Still, I have questions for university music educators. Is it the student’s burden to pack up and leave, to know when he has waited long enough? Or is it the teacher’s responsibility to teach (and not to blame the student for needing to be taught)? Is it on the student to name and unpack the ideology that is standing in his way? Or is it our responsibility to define terms like “musician” and “musicianship” and dislodge the ideology that hides within layers of false obviousness? I wonder what would happen if university music educators insisted that words like “talent,” “power,” “achievement,” “leadership,” and “excellence” were understood as culturally constructed and historically located. I wonder what would happen if university music programs stopped differentiating between exasperatingly fine levels of talent and took it upon themselves to fund all manner of talent, to see and hear that their students are multitalented and that their powers, abilities, and capacities are both interconnected and idiosyncratic. The twenty-year-old student can hardly be expected to refuse the door and go somewhere else. His devotions have been shaped by the kind of education he has received, and if he has left the country in search of the Law, it is because we have helped prepare his journey. I humbly assert that we have a problem of backward design. If we believe as a society that talent is an individual accomplishment and that its effects are located in the mastery of observable and measurable skills, the Master-apprentice model makes logical sense. If we believe that only a minority of learners can be labeled as “gifted and talented,” we separate these students from others. If we believe that musical excellence is the performed understanding of musical standards and highly coded practices, a focus on musicianship becomes an educator’s aim. If difficulty and achievement are admired and valued, a long-term sequence of calibrated study will be offered. If innovation is reserved for Authors, as Said and others understand the term, initiates must learn the rules before they are allowed to break the rules. Among these beliefs are relationships of power, to which I bring no small degree of ambivalence and concern. I want to root for the apprentice who is moving up the chain of command, from the proper squeezing of a burning hand towel to the cutting of the fish, from the first five notes of the

Toward Open Encounters

|

17

B-flat scale to the band concert for parents and peers. In a gesture to Plato’s Cave and the light that gleams from behind the door, I want all students to be driven by something just out of reach, dazzled by a gleam of light. But I also want to celebrate the novice who says, in the words of Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” Indeed, I want to root for the novice who says, “I won’t wait ten years,” “Burn your own damn hand! I quit,” or “I’m tired of this lousy beginner music. I want to play something that sounds good. I quit!” I ask my graduate students to consider that we are the winners in a vast system of deferral and self-control and that we have been culled. We are the survivors of an institutional practice that is largely indifferent to our needs. “When, according to our common practice,” writes Michel de Montaigne, “a teacher undertakes to school several minds of very different structure and capacity with the same lessons and the same measure of guidance, it is no wonder that, among a whole multitude of children, he scarcely finds two or three who derive any proper profit from their teaching.” The fact that we willingly participate in this winnowing system is unusual, I think, and not typical of most music learners outside the university system. This is a source of deep conflict for me as a music-teacher educator. What do we make of Senior Apprentice Nakazawa, who after ten years of working as an apprentice for Ono, was finally allowed to cook the egg: “I thought I would be good at it. I kept messing up. But they kept saying, ‘no good, no good, no good.’ I felt like it was impossible to please them. After three or four months, all were rejected. When I finally did make a good one, Jiro said, ‘Now this is how it should be done.’ I was so happy I cried. It was a long time before Jiro called me a shokunin.” I’m not sure I want to subscribe to this system, even as I admire what the concept of the shokunin represents, even as I admire the results of a long apprenticeship. Sure, I want there to be exemplary fine restaurants, just as I want to hear exemplary live music when I visit Lincoln Center (both middle- and upperclass privileges, mind you). Still, I remain convinced that our profession can find other ways to teach, methods with less cost to the majority of learners who have not elected the path of the shokunin. Even as I respect the ideals of the routine expertise, I don’t see its general application in a diversity-affirming classroom. There is also a danger, as we see in chapter 2, that the routine expert’s growth may diminish over time, leading to anxiety and burnout. The tragedy of Nakazawa’s story (if it is a tragedy) is that someone else enjoyed the intense pleasure of inventing the egg recipe that Nakazawa elected to make, a recipe that was handed down to Nakazawa in a closed and difficult form. I don’t quibble that certain recipes or musical scores are so pleasurable that we disavow changes to their makeup. Nor do I hold that classical forms disallow space for free exercise. Rather, I hope that somewhere in Jiro’s kitchen there is room for Nakazawa’s idiosyncrasies and taste. I hope that his total relationship

18 |

Remixing the Classroom

to sushi—prior to and outside of the context of Jiro’s kitchen—is included in the making of this art. At no point in Nakazawa’s sushi education was he a tabula rasa (there is no such thing) and in hiring him as an apprentice, Ono did not inherit a clean slate. On the contrary, what Nakazawa brought to his work and art was useful—but only insofar as it advanced the needs of the Master. Does the apprentice Nakazawa dream of sushi? Whose sushi? Do we care about the dreams of the Master more than the dreams of the apprentice? After more than ten years in Ono’s kitchen, does Nakazawa dream of a time when he can make his own inventions, or has he lost the ability or desire to make something new? Does he dream of starting his own restaurant, becoming the new Master, and inducting the next generation of apprentices into the pedagogy and art of Ono? Or, does Nakazawa dream of Paris, of escape, of a wholly different way to cook and eat and live? Jiro Ono was both a maker and breaker of Laws. He enjoyed a period akin to Dapper Dan’s, in which the form he was playing with was open. But unlike Dapper Dan, whose work occurred on the eve of a closing form (soon after Dapper Dan’s inventions, members of New York’s hip-hop community would compete with West coast rappers in defining its authoritative version)—Ono took a form that was closed and opened it up. This is Ono speaking about his youth, which I render in verse: The Masters said that the history of sushi is so long. That nothing new could be invented. They may have mastered their craft, But there is always room for improvement. I created sushi dishes that never existed back then. I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed at night with ideas.

In my reading of this ode, I grasp a vision of a young Ono with a cadre of secret coconspirators in their own Dapper Dan’s Boutique. (Was this after hours, in a restaurant kitchen? Were their plots to change sushi cooked up at home? Where was their laboratory?) Surely these innovators took intense pleasure in opening up an ossified form, a closed practice with standards so strict and a history so long that it was believed to be impervious to change or that change was forbidden. Ono, by himself or, more likely, with others, stepped outside a hierarchy and rescrambled the codes, “codes which are known but their combination is unique.” For a moment in Ono’s life, sushi was in mutation. “The ‘classic’ when it was produced,” writes John Dewey, “bore the marks of adventure.” But in an act of contradiction (or in an act that is depressingly familiar), Ono the creative artist, whose transgressions gave him so much meaning that he

Toward Open Encounters

|

19

literally dreamed of new inventions, became Jiro the Law. The irreducible problems of his time and place in history were solved for the next generation, an act of totalizing control. As with every generation, the young Ono faced new conditions and challenges that spurred him to seek out alternatives. He refused the doorkeepers of his day who said, “Nothing new can be invented.” I believe that Ono’s refusal to accept the Laws of his tradition has something to do with freedom, with a dissatisfaction with the established order of things. It wasn’t genius, I think; it was merely the desire and, in the words of educational philosopher Maxine Greene, “the capacity to move beyond what is, to create identity in the light of what might be” that produced both a new kind of sushi and a new kind of expertise. In this sense, at this irreducible and place-based moment, Ono was a reader rather than an Author, and his form was an open text into which he asserted a new set of relationships and understandings. When a form is approached as open, Greene explains, “a reader—as Roland Barthes has said—can rewrite the text of what she or he reads in the text of his or her life. For Barthes, we can rewrite our lives as well in the light of such texts.” This was a conceptual turn on the part of Jiro Ono. The option was his: (1) to make and serve sushi in its closed and obvious form—what Barthes calls “the Work”—and follow its authority and learn its rules or (2) to definalize its signifiers, recirculate its relationships of power and authority (a move to the erotic or pleasurable), and delay the object of recognition. In rewriting sushi, Ono writes a new life—his life becomes a text, as Greene suggests, open and evolving. His aesthetic form gives him freedom to choose a new self. His quest allows him to act in moral terms. But something happened. Craving, perhaps, a new set of relationships— more powerful relationships—Ono asserted new terms. He surrendered the pleasures of reading and declared the rights of the Author: the power to establish a rule, to control its issue, and to direct the continuity of its course. I do not know how quickly Ono returned to the closed and categorical, equipped with information to impart and a lexicon to communicate. But the path of the shokunin and the traveler must eventually branch apart if through travel we seek out the new and different. The routine expert thrives in the closed and categorical, a point I expand on in the next chapter. In my rendering of Ono (and I am a reader of Ono, not his Author; he is a text in my hands, not a Work that I can “explain” to readers), there is still more to say about the distinction between education and training. Ono’s kitchen is an analogue to what Dewey refers to as the traditional classroom, a space that “consists of bodies of information and of skills that have been worked out in the past; therefore, the chief business of the school [the kitchen] is to transmit them to a new generation.” Its methods can be severe and oppressive,

20 |

Remixing the Classroom

or just plain boring. I ask myself which is worse—playing long tones on the saxophone for an hour, or massaging a squid? For Dewey, the methods determine how students think and behave: “Since the subject-matter as well as standards of conduct are handed down from the past, the attitude of the pupils must, upon the whole, be one of docility, receptivity, and obedience.” Ono, leaving behind the momentary adventures of his youth when he became a reader and writer, becomes a bully. In the film, we watch (we gasp) as he tells his son that he must continue to do what he has been taught exactly the way he has been taught for the rest of his life. In Dewey’s words, “Learning here means acquisition of what already is incorporated in books and in the heads of the elders. Moreover, that which is taught is thought of as essentially static. It is taught as a finished product, with little regard either to the ways in which it was originally built up or to changes that will surely occur in the future. . . . [It] assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” The danger of teaching a traditional art form can be the danger of mistaking induction for education. A closed tradition uses knowledge of the past as its end—this is what Dewey warned against—rather than as a means for understanding the present. In contrast, education (as distinct from induction) furthers the quality of life and living by adapting the past to serve present needs, a moral undertaking. Induction brings the learner into a bound system that operates outside of time, a kind of mysticism that traffics in the remote. An example is the hunt for the elusive bel canto style, the secret source of pure vocal technique what was allegedly achieved in another age. Such teaching has no obligation to acquaint the learner with the contingencies of today’s world. Because induction and training look the same across time, the future matters only to the degree that conditions can be procured for its survival (no small matter, given the depletion of fishing stock, the loss of state support that so many European and North American cultural institutions are facing today, and changing tastes in music and food). This point finally brings separation to our parable of Ono’s kitchen. A restaurant, with no public obligation to speak of (beyond sanitation), needn’t bother with the vision of education described above. It has no public mandate. It may disseminate knowledge of a tradition like sushi, but a restaurant is not obliged to reconstruct its practices because it is not seeking to equip its clients with the tools for a changing future. Schools are. Public schools must equip students to use the past, as Dewey suggests, “in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present.” Eschewing the path of the shokunin, a university teacher education in music must prepare a different kind of expert. Not just a shokunin, not just a bricoleur—say, a shokoleur?

Toward Open Encounters

|

21

(Re)Forming School and University Music Education The principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past. Although the great form of the future will not be as it was in the past, At one time the fugue and at another the sonata, it will be related to these as they are to each other. —John Cage

In what remains of this chapter, I hope to provide a rationale for why we should refocus our attention on the musical forms we study and produce. Form, I think, is a cherished word in the didactics of musical study, an arch-element that even Dewey believed conveyed the whole of human existence. Anecdotally, I have observed the peculiar fascination that early career teachers have with teaching this concept to children of all ages, even the very young. Form, allegedly, appears to be so fundamental to musical experience that its understanding must be taught as soon as linguistically possible. (I want to ban all lessons on ABA form immediately from student-teaching practicums.) And who can forget sitting through Form and Analysis in college—a source of great mystery for some, a rabbit hole for others? I don’t think I have met a trained musician whose ears didn’t attend to form first. I confess that I must listen to an entire song, even the most annoying, to its very end. I know that I have been properly “trained” when I jump with exasperation as a friend fast-forwards through a song that is already playing, as if he has somehow misunderstood the universal contract that is inherent between listener, composer, and object. Of course, the word “form” has philosophical as well as pedagogical meanings, from Plato’s ideal forms to Eduard Hanslick’s concealed forms. It is easy to agree with Umberto Eco that “in every century the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.” Nineteenth-century aesthetic formalists believed that musical forms had autonomous or universal qualities, a sensibility that matched up nicely with the romantic construction of genius. In this context, the texture of social relationships were secure: there were listeners, composers, and performers, each with separate roles and separate experiences, just as there were peasants, the bourgeoisie, and the noble born. Eco, in a mid-twentieth-century essay on music called “The Poetics of the Open Work,” traces the breakdown of traditional European classical forms to the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry and the new principles of relativity that emerged from the study of physics. “In this general intellectual atmosphere,” he writes, “the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer’s freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes.”

22 |

Remixing the Classroom

Later, music education writers from the 1990s would grow tired of the elitism attached to the word form, preferring to locate musical meaning within ideas of bound and multiple cultures as well as psychological domains. I see their preoccupation as a gesture to the identity politics that defined their time: an era’s assertion of difference that was decidedly antiassimilationist. In their multicultural moment (so unlike ours today), new canons were called for and marginalized voices brought definable differences to our attention. Today, the notion of open and closed forms makes new sense in a world that is less certain about cultural boundaries and more resistant to the canonical. Artists like Christian Marclay, Joanna Newsom, DJ Spooky, and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson revel in the blurring of aesthetic forms (you can name your own favorites), actively destabilizing categories and moving beyond explication, toward what Jacques Attali called “a new noise.”

Beyond Explication, toward the Wondrous and Unholy Muddle A word so fascinating deserves interrogation. Any musical form, we know, is a collection of human and sonic relationships, and the music education community is in great debt to Christopher Small for pointing this out so dramatically in his seminal treatise Musicking. I come to the word “musicking,” like Small, from an antinominal position, refusing a singular constituting frame, preferring the verb as much as the noun. “The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies,” writes Small. “They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity.” Riffing on Small’s concept of musicking, I enjoy the discursive play that is found in the noun “form” and its gerund, “forming.” If all musical forms, in the continuum from the very closed to the very open, are a collection of irreducible and changing relationships, they are forever in a state of forming and reforming. They are also forever in a state of forming and reforming us. Small doesn’t talk about remusicking, though he emphasizes temporal qualities when he asks us to look at the place where musicking is happening as well as the conditions and qualities that bring its inert capacities to life. I agree with Small that it is in the gerund form of the word “music” that we can locate music’s iterant quality—its unfinishedness—and this, I believe, is where a surplus of meaning lies. Music, in other words, has more to communicate when it is experienced as open, more so than when its meaning is made understandable through sundry means. We know that functional harmony “explains” one aspect of music. We know that the teaching of music can be “explained” differently depending on one’s method. David Elliott’s philosophy of “praxial”

Toward Open Encounters

|

23

music education, for example, asks practitioners to locate meanings in the identification of a context-dependent grammar. “Musicianship is practice-specific,” he emphasizes. It is coded and norm-governed, and dependent on context. We can debate whether his method is an effort to reduce music or not (a point I take up in chapter 4), but Elliott’s praxialism is very much an effort to explain music and thus explain a way to teach music. Once musical properties can be identified and understood, music can be taught in ways that are consistent with established conventions. This is the history of Western music education. But it isn’t the whole story. I have said that we are more than the music we make; we are simultaneously made and remade by the music we make. If the student-musician is more than a producer of context-specific sound, more than the mere executant of a composer’s intentions, and more than a cultural decoder and future Critic, care for the quality of one’s human and sonic relationships becomes newly important. If music has more to communicate when it is conceptualized as open, care for the unfinished quality of music becomes newly important. This characterization provides us with an educational orientation that is decidedly temporal in nature without a clear center of power. From the perspective of public schooling, this orientation appears more student-centered and place-based than traditiondirected. As a sociologist and musicologist, Small doesn’t talk about student growth, and he eschews base appropriations of value. As a performance educator, Elliott writes about student growth and the appropriation of values, but for him, quality is measured and directed by the Master-performer and his earned expertise. While both scholars have had quite a large influence on the field of music education, neither seems comfortable with the antinomic contradictions of public schooling and its place in a democratic society, the starting point of chapter 2. It seems to me that both Small’s Musicking and Elliott’s Music Matters reach their logical conclusions outside of the public school, in community and informal music-making. (Re)forming school and university music education suggests an improved form and a remade form, an avowed effort toward (1) improving and remaking the quality of human and sonic relationships that fund the conditions of our growth; (2) improving, remaking, and enlarging the contours of our inheritance or tradition; and (3) acknowledging and affirming the temporal arenas into which we are inserted, where we are driven to make something new and cherish something old. In past works, I have argued that music teachers in public schools are endowed with an obligation to alter—to (re)form, to (re)musick—the quality and character of their musical forms to ensure that student life and learning is enlarged, deepened, and enriched. Public school is different than many other institutions because at its heart is the mandate to prepare children to meet life’s challenges intelligently and responsibly.

24

|

Remixing the Classroom

This Deweyan image of the moral schoolhouse parallels Paul Woodford’s robust vision of the music teacher as a public intellectual, an ethically minded change agent who operates intelligently and responsibly in a changing world. Likewise, Heidi Westerlund and I have put forth a moral vision of music teaching in response to those tradition-driven music curricula that appear to operate outside of a changing world; we emphasize the teaching of the whole child, as when “a teacher’s chosen methods of instruction are deliberated against a myriad of social and individual visions and social and individual consequences, not merely against musical consequences, musical ‘goods,’ or musical outcomes alone.” Music education, we argue, should be human-specific, not practice-specific. The practice of music education should be mindful of the present tense and aimed at transforming human culture rather than the mere replicating of practices worked out by the lucky innovators of another age. This is a vision that would collapse the either-or binaries that direct most of today’s practices: The purpose of music education should be to renew the musical culture from which it comes; to remake a new generation of music lovers and practitioners; to revitalize its historic practices; to reawaken interest in the familiar and forgotten; to reconstruct musical ways that range from the radical to the reliable. The “re” words we use to describe this vision of education are a rebuke to those methodological ends for which certainty is a quest, and for those traditions that trade in the authentic as authoritative.

What my appeal to openness hopes to offer is a departure from the educational logic that is represented by the Master-apprentice model, a tradition that trades in the faux-authentic and the protoauthoritative. This long-standing orientation reached its logical conclusion in Elliott’s first edition of Music Matters and continues with his second. I believe that it is time to make music teaching more complex, more muddlesome, and more unholy and uncertain. The internet-provoked collapse of the (fictional) nineties mono-subculture makes a more messy future inevitable. What I propose, however, is also a sharp pivot away from old-fashioned visions of child-centered learning (in which everything and anything goes, and the teacher stands haplessly by). Nor is my appeal a call for a new practice of informal learning (in which everything and anything goes, and the teacher stands haplessly by). Small’s thought experiment—that everyone is a musicker, from the man who scalps the ticket to the alto on the stage—was meant only to open our eyes and ears to music’s irreducibility, not to create a public-school music curriculum. A great space has opened up before us. In moving away from the Master’s singular Law, our profession’s wondrous, strange, and unholy muddle will be what to do with the plurality of principles (not Laws) available to us—the ones we make up, the ones we follow, the ones we repair, the ones we put aside. In the case of public music education in the twenty-first century, schools and universities

Toward Open Encounters

|

25

need more Dapper Dans than they need Jiro Onos. As a teaching force, we need a richer rationale for Lawmaking and Lawbreaking than the one that is provided by Kingsbury’s Goldmann—or Ono, for that matter. We need educational institutions that are less certain about who is musical and who is not. Preprofessionals like Johanna and Nakazawa must be considered worthy of an education that sees them as human and complete, as ends in themselves, and not (paraphrasing Kant’s categorical imperative) as means to a Master’s ends. In this reforming of school and university music education, I posit that the millennial breakdown of highly structured aesthetic forms has presented our profession with opportunities to repair the practices that no longer serve our best interests. My attention and affection remain with the teacher and the student and, by extension, institutional spaces like the public school and the university school of music. My affections are not located in the abstract but in the here and now. I confess that I am not terribly concerned with explaining what music is and what it is not. Human relationships concern me more than the exact function of a secondary dominant or the practice-specific conventions of trombone tonguing. And, in company with Small and Elliott, I am loath to value one kind of music more than another. The sundry and glorious forms that music takes, along with the multiple ways in which we conceptualize our place within these forms, are my units of analysis. But these relationships need more study. In their dual critique of European classical art music, Small and Elliott fail to appreciate or at least fully articulate that the study and performance of a sonata (like the study and preparation of sushi) can be embedded with all manner of healthy and unhealthy relationships, some experimental, some highly coded, some abusive, some loving, some that focus on learning and growth, some that focus on performance exactitude, and some that are purposefully open-ended. (Though he or she may exist, I resist promoting the notion of a loving Master). With the aim of increasing life’s enjoyment, I wish to propose conceptual alternatives to dominant modes of musical activity in the service of a public education and the mandate that goes with it. I want to look at how the effects of music give meaning and direction to our lives, and how the manner in which we approach the teaching and learning of music sets into motion one way of being in the world and not another. In chapter 3, I look at how stakeholders in the Master-apprentice relationship engage differently than the teacher and the learner in a laboratory setting, in what Barthes calls “the seminar.” It is a temporal difference—on a continuum— between the former, which is closed (not a fixed or determined positionality), and the latter, which is open. To be clear, a closed form can be made open, and an open form can be closed. Likewise, the Master-apprentice relationship can be made open, just as the laboratory setting can be closed. This is a conceptual accounting; it speaks to a disposition as much as a practice. “To account satisfactorily for

26 | Remixing the Classroom the distinction between open and closed concepts depends upon one’s rejecting a traditional, essentialist or realist theory of meaning,” writes Lydia Goehr. “It depends instead on the construction of a theory that takes seriously the idea that human beings have decisionary power and control over their language and concepts.” Concepts are adaptable, and they adapt “according to their role in activities and the theories bound up therewith.” Jiro Ono understood the conceptual form of sushi (its conditions, practices, properties, intensities, discourses, relationships, codes, norms, and felt meanings) differently at different spans across time and place. He took part in and inaugurated different relationships depending on his understanding of the form in which he was operating and the people he was working with. Passionate about his form, Ono moved an open practice to the strictest end of the open-to-closed continuum. This was not a benign act, of course, as he implicated others in the realization of his needs. And certainly, by adopting the Master-apprentice form, Ono became more powerful. Yet, as we might infer from our investigation of the concept of expertise in chapter 2, this move to a severe form of routine expertise may have stunted his growth as an innovator and lover of all kinds of food. Still, there are many ways of operating within a closed form, ways that redistribute power and leadership, and ways that fund a life of growth. In chapter 4, I look at the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in New York City, an institution that claims democracy as a constituting element. With the professed aim of increasing personal satisfaction, this highly skilled ensemble rewrote and repaired the normative relationships that define what a professional orchestra is or should be, in part by wiping away three hundred years of Master-apprentice residue from its form. The group operates without a conductor, and shares all aspects of administration, preparation, and performance among its forty-odd members. As such, the Orpheus players have reimagined the closed conception of the European classical orchestra. What appears on the stage of Carnegie Hall and around the world is some kind of a polyphonic hybrid, a large group with no conductor, playing music that is perfectly compliant with the notational requirements of an Author (say, Mozart or Barber) and the nominal properties of its historical genre. But, unlike their closed-form older cousin the New York Philharmonic, the Orpheus ensemble is inhered with an alternative logic and sense of self-regard. Not quite a symphonic orchestra, not quite a chamber group, loyal to the Laws they respect and feisty with others, Orpheus makes the personal satisfaction of all members its primary aim (unlike the Philharmonic, where personal satisfaction is incidental to larger performance aims) while exhibiting outwardly high performance standards that are second to none (like the Philharmonic). Out of Orpheus’s search for a new form, I locate an ethics of repair and exploration, a longing to redefine and remake practitioner categories that have been finalized by their predecessors.

Toward Open Encounters

|

27

Category Fatigue At a time when educational standardization and measurable assessment are reaching levels that were almost unthinkable only a short while ago, and at a time when the performance practice of university musicians has never been higher, one can detect a kind of category fatigue in the field of music education, a hunger to end the hard boundaries that define the production and study of music in public schools, universities, and community ensembles. I draw once again from the work of Elizabeth Gould, who has consistently appealed to a collective sense of outrage and impatience with the ways in which closed forms predominate the work we do, especially as they perpetuate asymmetrical relationships of power. Gould calls for a pedagogy of resistance, one that “interrogates cultural practices, focusing on what is unexpected, marginalized, and silenced, opening spaces for change.” For Gould, hard categories define and secure our place within increasingly complicated systems of surveillance and control, erasing alternative visions of what is possible. Critics in New York, for example, enjoy punishing the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for relinquishing the very fine differentials that a talented Masterconductor could ostensibly elicit from his ensemble. The secondary-school performance and evaluation system still directs increasingly large aspects of musical study. A university’s prestige is tied to its production of shokunins, not bricoleurs. But I am also thinking of those second-order political categories that Gould asks us to attend to. These are the women band directors, the gay and lesbian teachers, the transgendered students we make invisible by an adhesion to the status quo. Concerning schools, these are the marginalized musics like rap, spoken word, and hip-hop that we employ as a bridge to more serious music. These are the second-order pedagogical processes, like improvising and composing, which must give way to concert preparation and endless scales. Gould writes, The first term of every dualism is not only preferred but expected to the extent that the second term is marked by its difference to the first. There can be no presence without absence, no man without woman, and even no heterosexuality without homosexuality. While the first term may claim to be self-identical and self-referential, the two terms of each dualism exist only in an asymmetrical, hierarchical relation, with the second term distanced, differentiated, and deferred from the first, and hence defined as not-the-first term.

In these systems of power and control, “each signifier or word must be commensurately singular and indivisible; thus the signifier (word) is prioritized above the signified (meaning).” In other words, a first-order conceptual term (a signifier or sign) like the word “orchestra” or “band director” presents its meaning as final; it stands for itself as self-evident and normal. Its obviousness pulls us like a magnet away from the investigation of alternative, even strange or “queer”

28

| Remixing the Classroom

conceptualizations, just as it requires the binary association it attempts to deny. The color blue has a meaning that is independent of a binary structure, and thus it falls largely outside a system of power, at least one that I can name. The color white does not. In an analogous way, we know what a band director looks like, who he is, and what he should do. Picture in your mind a tenor saxophone player onstage at the Village Vanguard. Who do you see? For Gould, these concepts— the college band director, the jazz saxophone player—are closed, and thus they need no qualifier, as they would upon the arrival of a gay band director or a female jazz saxophone player (or a gay Asian band director or a middle-aged female jazz saxophone player). Like Dapper Dan, I think many of these terms need hijacking. Recall the way he destabilized closed forms, like the brands Fendi and Gucci, and dislodged them from their first-order associations. Recall how Dapper Dan reassembled meanings, confusing associations in such a way that new structures of power— locally rendered and distributed—emerged. Barthes might call his reappropriation of the European fashion house a communication in disguise, signification beyond grammar and explicit sense, a communication that permits a “freedom of position with respect to narrative.” To explain a piece as simply a Fendi parka with a Gucci lining would be to miss the point, as would failure to notice its representation of a shift in power. Dapper Dan Africanized Gucci, “took it away from that, like, Madison Avenue look,” with results that were neither nominally Gucci nor constitutively African. They were Harlem iterations, ongoing and unfinished representations of something new. And so I ask, in the spirit of Dapper Dan and Elizabeth Gould, can we Africanize music education? Can we homosexualize the college band director? Can we feminize jazz? It is important to underscore that on a fundamental level, words like “conductor,” “talent,” “jazz,” and “orchestra” are essentially arbitrary. Even though they appear closed, they are still provisional; they are cultural constructions that can and will get redefined and recommunicated across time. “They [all signs, all signifiers] do not make sense as a result of an inherent referential function,” writes Petter Dyndal, “but because they have been given a linguistic function within a language system which can, and will, vary in time and space. In other words, signs do not refer to the real world but to the system or the underlying structure.” I am interested in the human relationships that are implicated in these signs (terms like “conductor,” “talent,” “jazz,” and “orchestra”). We cannot speak of underlying structures without recognizing that these structures exert power, that they structure ways of life and living, that they are embedded in the forms we are “allowed” to play in the ways that we are “allowed” to play them. Worse, these structuring structures (some are forming forms) communicate commonsense definitions as to who can do what and how—who can play the tenor saxophone, who can direct a college band, and so on.

Toward Open Encounters

|

29

For Patrick Schmidt, hijacking the common sense terms of music education, putting them in open source form, and misreading and mislistening to their signs is to amplify opportunities for disclosure and disruption. We enlarge our professional capacity when we absorb and explore more than the expository and the sanctioned, a point I expand on in chapter 2. I think that Schmidt is correct when he implies that this auspicious crisis of meaning is a sign of our times (pun intended). Ultimately, for Schmidt, the closed nature of binary thinking fails to address “the multiplicity of representation in contemporary society, and . . . the need to address rather than resolve the Other as a central premise for learning.” What would it mean for music educators to relinquish the constant need to resolve, explain, and contain? What would it mean to misread the notes on the page? To listen, as John Cage would have us, to the sound between the notes? To turn the music upside down? To attend to the silence and the silenced? Is it part of our DNA as music teachers to seek finalization, to move doggedly toward resolution, to always end on Roman numeral “I”? Why can’t music education expand its tonal range? Or is harmony a mask for the very ordering of life? This is Jacques Attali: An ideology of scientific harmony thus imposes itself, the mask of a hierarchical organization from which dissonances (conflicts and struggles) are forbidden, unless they are merely marginal and highlight the quality of the channeling order . . . the harmonic system functions through rules and prohibitions: in particular, what is prohibited are repeated dissonances, in other words, critiques of differences.

Western harmony, so embedded with rules (somehow in analysis class I could never weed out my parallel fifths, always wrong), so complex and controlled. Yet dependent, Gould and Schmidt would remind us, on the dissonant. There is no Master without an apprentice, no conductor without someone to conduct. Is it a coincidence that the hierarchical relationships that are embedded in the forms we study are also reflected in the first-order and second-order relationships that organize its study? I have spoken of a longing for openings, a feeling within our profession for something more than what we have right now. In conferences and in classrooms, in readings and in friendly debate, we are stirred by the myriad forms of communication that are present in our world, by the multiple modalities that are employed by the populace to sign, read, and signify who we are, or who we wish to be. We are expanding what we once thought of as beautiful—perhaps we are doing away with the word “beauty” altogether, moving toward something wondrous and unholy. We are intersecting persons, unfinished people, moving and colliding in one great muddle.

30

|

Remixing the Classroom

The Pedagogy of Earned Induction Something of this new world was prophesied by artists and writers in the twentieth century, during which the breakdown of closed forms coincided with the “interpretive turn” that linguists often refer to, as well as by the work of those postpositivists and poststructuralists who refused a totalizing or objective vision of the world. Many visual artists took new interest in the liminal space between what we see or say and what we know or can explain. I am thinking of Jasper Johns’s famous paintings of the American flag: The colors are all wrong, the tones distressed, the image blurred. These aren’t depictions of the “real” American flag. They are both flag and not flag, a revel in obtuse meanings. There is René Magritte, who famously painted an image of an ordinary pipe under which he wrote, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). For Umberto Eco, such provocations as these brought into high relief the hermeneutic role that art has traditionally played in Western society and a prophesy of its own breakdown. Like a flag or an ordinary pipe, a traffic sign, Eco writes, “can only be viewed in one sense, and if it is transfigured into some fantastic meaning by an imaginative driver, it merely ceases to be that particular traffic sign with that particular meaning.” Jasper Johns’s flag and Magritte’s pipe were transformed signs. According to traditional aesthetic theory, a symbol or sign that works on the level of mere information cannot be art because it purports to aim only at clear communication. All works of art allow for the interplay of overlapping codes and practices that signify a range of meanings, from the merely informational to the obtuse. In this sense, even the most highly structured form is open on a basic level. “A work of art,” Eco writes, “is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.” Understanding the tension between an imposed structure and the interpretative freedoms that are required of an addressee or executant is the starting and ending point of a traditional arts education. For much of the twentieth century, Western artists attempted to stretch the limits of this interpretive function, but always they relied on a second-order role for the receiver or performer, a role that Fredric Jameson describes as “hermeneutical, in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.” “In this sense,” according to Eco, “the author presents a finished product with the intention that this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form as he devised it.” This is the Law that Kingsbury’s Goldmann has access to. This is the same Law that his students beg entry into. It is important to emphasize, however, that even within a traditional closed form like a sonata (or

Toward Open Encounters

|

31

sushi) there is an expectation of agency on behalf of the receiver or executant. (Igor Stravinsky, like Vladimir Nabokov, famously tried to limit this agency to its smallest unit, belittling the role of the reader). As the receiver or executant “reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning,” Eco writes, “the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices.” This space is a location of freedom, small for some, large for others. But because music is allographic (dependent on a performance or reading for its substantiation) as opposed to autographic, performers must be trained according to very specific means if they are to earn citizenship in the interpretation of their form. Training is needed, likewise, because the musical Author requires a wellconditioned executant (not a reader) for the realization of his work. A music education, thus, is, as Eco writes, “the end product of an author’s effort to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author. The addressee is bound to enter into an interplay of stimulus and response which depends on his unique capacity for sensitive reception of the piece.” This is the ethics of the closed form, a poetics of fidelity and earned respect, and the dominant paradigm in secondary-school and university music education. But consider, too, Eco’s use of erotic behaviorism. The performer’s technique, taste, and intuition are sensually conditioned (by a Master who teaches love, loyalty, and bondage). The form (provided by an Author, the pastoral Father whose approval we must earn, who trusts us with the care of his offerings) provokes a stimulus that requires an appropriate response. An aphorism of sorts is uncovered. As the learner comes to obey the Law, more freedom is revealed. The learner comes to love the Law. The learner loves the Father. For Elliott, this pedagogy is a deeply felt exercise, the loving study of a pregiven framework: to know its limits, boundaries, and freedoms; to yield to its codes; to become sensitive, intuitive, and refined. One steps over a threshold and becomes a musician. This, he writes, “is essentially a matter of induction”: Students must enter and become part of the musical practices (or music cultures) they intend to learn. This is so because musicianship is context-dependent. The musicianship underlying any practice of music making and listening has its roots in specific communities of practitioners who share and advance a specific tradition of musical thinking. Musical practices swirl around the efforts of practitioners who originate, maintain, and refine established ways and means of musicing, as well as cherished musical histories, legends, and lore.

Elliott positioned his praxial methodology as a new philosophy of music education, but it is actually terribly old. Conserving a method that Western music

32 |

Remixing the Classroom

educators have been practicing for centuries, he merely changed the rationale for why we teach and learn in closed forms. Rather than call on nineteenth-century aesthetic principles that had fallen out of fashion, and without proposing a new method of teaching in return, Elliott merely substituted late-twentieth-century multicultural codes for those universalist tropes that were still haunting the university (and that had found material affect in public-school music programs). Of course, there is nothing wrong with bringing various cultural traditions to the students we teach, provided that they are living traditions and put to use and that their pedagogy enhances human dignity. But, in addition to this long-standing method, there are new forms of study to pay attention to, forms that portend new distributions of interest and power. “It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities,” writes Attali. When music education is tradition-based, rather than focused on the reordering and remaking (and rereading) of past and present realities, practitioners are always starting with another person’s frame or the outlines of a tradition one must earn entrance into. I would like to suggest that students and teachers put together their own frames as often as not—or look for new ones. It is intolerable, John Cage writes, when the function of the musician “is comparable to that of someone filling in color where outlines are given.” He is talking about degrees of freedom. I believe there is insufficient debate within our university performance programs and music-teacher-preparation coursework about how wide-ranging these degrees of freedom can be or how long it takes to employ them. It deserves asking, when is teaching students the codes of a tradition an empowering act and when is it not? The shading of a phrase and the coloring of a line is an empowering act, I agree. But for some aspiring music makers, its rewards may not be worth ninety minutes of practice, five days a week for ten years. The art of cooking the perfect Japanese egg (or massaging a squid) is something beautiful to behold, but for some aspiring chefs its rewards may not be worth waiting ten years, or even three months, to attempt. Certainly, nothing worth doing is easy (I think). Nevertheless, we have to factor the costs and the benefits of what we do and why. This may mean that a teacher’s tradition may be too costly and its benefits too few. For me, as a music teacher of all ages and abilities, this has been a heartfelt—nay, heart-breaking—realization: there is no guarantee that my students will love what I love. Nor can I replicate what I experienced as a young musician on behalf of others. The existential facts of time, location, and personhood make the poetics of earned induction problematic. Yes, we can do our best to bring our traditions to life, and we may try to repair harmful teaching practices in the process, but the rejection (even the death) of a tradition must always be understood as an inherent possibility, if only to remind us of the seriousness of our work. A conservative teacher-preparation program will teach us to frame

Toward Open Encounters

|

33

and to finalize, but attention to what we don’t know, and what we can’t do, should likewise be an integral part of our university and public-school music education.

New Forms of Life Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows! —William Shakespeare

What if we attended to new frequencies? What if we untuned the string? What if, following Maxine Greene, we pushed back at the boundaries of what we once thought of as beautiful? What would we find? A new noise, a new ordering, a new way of teaching? Just degrees from our controlled music curricula are the willfully hybrid, the open-sourced and appropriated, the interdisciplinary and the weird, our wondrous and unholy muddle. Attali refers to this as noise. I see within this muddle a democratizing force, a plurality of discourses in which the great collapse of dualistic music education can be made out, if we choose to listen. “When Cage opens the door to the concert hall to let the noise of the street in,” Attali suggests, “he is regenerating music: he is taking it to its culmination. He is blaspheming, criticizing the codes and the network.” Prophesizing the twentyfirst-century mash-up and the aesthetics of the open form, Attali writes, “Noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for the receiver.” Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins write, The incongruity in mash-ups is not only that two individually pre-existing songs are combined and moved from their original contexts; it is also between social conventions. Mash-ups often blend samples from what might be perceived to be resolute categories, such as high and low, serious and playful, black and white, rock and pop . . . [and] are often intended to violate the genre conventions of musical categories, usually to create a humorous effect. The stronger the experience of incongruity between the original contexts is—the more humorous the effect is likely to be.

The street and the concert hall, the high and the low, the serious and the playful, the black and the white are all definalized signifiers, dualisms in mutation. A new order is set in motion, with decisionary power in the hands of many. Old codes are scrambled and alternative meanings are disclosed; diversity is cherished; incongruity is enjoyed; strange roads are taken. Behold, new forms of life: a species counterpoint. John Cage and Jacques Attali saw a connection between the way in which the Western world reordered human society and the way in which it reordered sound to make music. Attali held that the hierarchical relationships that are embedded

34

|

Remixing the Classroom

in Western tonal music are characteristic of an older form of Western capitalism, nineteenth-century leftovers from its great monopoly stage. In this view, the trained musician becomes “the spokesman for a harmonic order—this required a fantastically efficient process of normalization, a training process, a marking of the creator and listener alike. The normalization of the musician, for the purposes of turning him into the producer of an order and an aesthetics, was to be the dominant trend of this period. The normalization of music meant first of all the normalization of musicians, performers, and composers, who up to that time remained undifferentiated.” Do we, too afraid of the discord that might follow, remain in a socializing order that was worked out centuries ago, even applying new musics like jazz and pop and non-Western traditions to this closed framework? Have we refused our right to be noisy, a right to assemble and reassemble the codes that shape life and living, a right to repair the still-differentiated roles of musician, performer, and composer? “Not only does that mean doing away with the preserves and the private enclaves,” writes Greene. “It means expanding our notions of what the domain of the arts includes.” Greene’s vision refuses the multiple “private” music educations that fear contact with a messier world, asserting that larger public values are found in open encounters with art. For Attali, the aesthetic breach from music to noise “takes the route of the permanent affirmation of the right to be different. . . . [I]t is the conquest of the right to make noise, in other words, to create one’s own code and work, without advertising its goal in advance; it is the conquest of the right to make free and revocable choice to interlink with another’s code—that is, the right to compose one’s life.” And here is the climax of this chapter, in Attali’s words: “Today, in embryonic form, beyond repetition, lies freedom: more than a new music, a [new] kind of musical practice. It heralds the arrival of new social relations. Music is becoming composition.” We are well past the embryonic state that Attali referred to a generation or two ago. Today, composing is all around us: a new kind of authoring, a new kind of reading. Composing is what follows: not composition in its teacherdirected sense but an ethos of coauthoring and facilitation. This vision of music education looks differently across locations. It permits endless permutations: composing new music with our students; composing contingent standards of performance; composing in heterogeneous groups or collectives; taking as a right the freedom to link with others, in queer combinations. It encourages composing new ways of cherishing the old (as the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra does), new ways of making traditions come alive, and living in counterpoint with past achievements. We will compose new forms of teaching and learning, too. The loving Master (an oxymoron that I earlier refused) will accept the uncertainty of passing on a tradition and will identify as a loving facilitator; she will trust the integrity of another generation. The apprentice will put his inheritance to use,

Toward Open Encounters

|

35

in the present, facing different circumstances and different challenges. This is an evolution in music education, an expansion rather than a new form of music education. It advances the Master-apprentice model by (re)forming its practices. And just as surely, today’s evolutions will be provender for the generation that comes next, forever regenerating, renewing, and reforming. So I end this chapter with the final paragraph from Charles Darwin’s great book on evolution, The Origin of Species: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Endless forms most beautiful and wonderful, wondrous and unholy, an entangled bank, a New England swamp, the hijacking of a style, recovering the old, covering the briefly new, the flipping, dipping, and serving of a mash-up—these endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.



Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

The thing needful is improvement of education, not simply by turning out teachers who can do better the things that are now necessary to do, but rather by changing the conception of what constitutes education. —John Dewey

T

his chapter is about what constitutes a quality music teacher at this time in history. My framing question is this: What kind of music teacher do our students deserve? Working backward from this question, I propose a more open, expansive, and adventuresome vision of music-teacher expertise, paying particular attention to the role of the university in music-teacher preparation. These are public problems, like all questions that circulate around education and schooling. Necessarily, the questions begin with the learner, but they quickly direct us to the unique role that teachers play in the growth and development of other people’s children. What do students deserve from a public education in music, and how can universities better prepare a new generation of music teachers to meet their needs? I begin this investigation by looking at the purpose of public schooling.

The Ends of Public Education Consider for a moment the following question: What is the purpose of public education? What constitutes a good education at this moment in time? Leave aside for now the issue of what an education in music is good for, or what the rationale for school music might be. Rather, think about the place and purpose of public schooling in a democratic society. It is a surprisingly difficult task, and one that will be entered into differently by Finnish, Australian, Korean, and other readers. While we may agree that schools are not the only places in which an education may occur, it remains important to consider what it is that schools do hope to accomplish, as well as their role in shaping a society for better or for worse. How is a society’s investment justified by schooling’s considerable expense? What is public education’s end? What goals direct the services that schools provide? Just what do we hope to get out of them? Schools, undoubtedly, are places that prepare us for work. They help us to find worthy occupations; it is agreed that they prepare us for adulthood. We are

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

37

told that schools provide foundational knowledge, “first principles” on which we learn increasingly complex concepts—concepts that are relevant to the socalled “real world” outside. And teachers? One could say that teachers are the axis by which the mechanics of approved content is delivered and passed on. A public has a stake in who gets educated and how, as our future depends on the generations that succeed our own. There is, in a very real sense, a vital relationship between the public and the teacher. Importantly, as Dewey’s quote at the start of this chapter suggests, a society’s concept of education—explicitly stated or not, held in consensus or in disaccord—drives what we expect from schools and the preparation of our children. It is not enough to say we want better-trained teachers in math, music, or otherwise; we need to think carefully about what constitutes quality teaching and learning. To our list we can add other dimensions of what public education is, or can be, dimensions that go beyond preparation for work and the instrumentalities of ordinary adulthood. We might attach to schools, or reattach as the case may be, socalled humanist values, in which the formative undertakings of a life lived well are played out as stated ends: Notions of human flourishing, for example. Health and well-being. Independence of thought and mind. Civil responsibility. Citizenship, as locally defined. Self-transformation and self-disclosure. Curiosity and a longing to explore. In our evolving definition of public education, we might consider whether schools should serve radical ends, with the teacher as change agent, acting vigorously with and through the lives of other people’s children. Is there a moral end to schooling, and if so, what might it look like? How would our conception of public education change if we thought closely about the aesthetic dimensions of life and the way that youth identities are tested out, formed and reformed, and affirmed and refused through the qualitative and rigorous exploration of a disciplinary field? In thinking deeply about the meaning of public education, hard-to-answer questions emerge. How do schools and universities negotiate a public’s mandate with its multiple stakeholders and competing needs? How liberal should a university education degree become or remain? How vocational? How inventive, or how traditional? To whom do university teacher-preparation programs need to account, and whose interests do they serve? Who is accountable for student success and student failure? Across the globe, a results-driven consortium of governmental and nongovernmental actors are asking a great deal from professional educators and the universities who prepare them. The pro-business Gates foundation and other powerful nongovernmental organizations working within in the United States and around the world are employing their resources to shape public opinion about the purpose of public schooling. Unfortunately, as I see it, these forces have reduced the complexity of deeply philosophical problems to skim-milk questions (borrowing a metaphor from Ruth Bader Ginsburg) and exposed our great vulnerability and unreadiness to respond. We are confronted

38

|

Remixing the Classroom

with simplified demands such as “What is effective teaching?” Prove it. “What does good teaching look like?” Show us. In music education, I believe that we diminish the scope and complexity of our work by asking ourselves a slightly altered question, which is just as pernicious: “What does good music teaching look like?” Just listen. I wish I could say that we don’t ask this question in this way, that we consider the exploration of music an irreducible experience, a place-based experience more voluminous than the sounds we produce. I wish I could say that comparative evaluation does not drive the purpose of musical instruction. But this question and our response lurk within the countless competitions and performance assessments that drive public and private music tuition. We know there is more to an education in music than step-by-step instruction. If we believe this to be true, then how do we answer this question: What constitutes a quality music education? I would like to join this debate, a debate started by the business community but insufficiently interrogated by our profession. What does a good music teacher do, and how do we prepare her for a fulfilling lifetime career? What considerations determine a quality music education for the children in her charge? What counts as expertise in the twenty-first century? We might begin this discussion by claiming that the university’s role in preparing quality teachers reflects an institutional conception of public education in a pluralistic democracy: schools must play a role in preparing youth for a mostly unknowable future. It is more obvious than ever to see that calls for improvements in education and schooling are not neutral or nonpolitical endeavors. Often, slogans, rather than philosophical discussions, fill the space of this debate. In his article “The Possibility of Public Education in an Instrumentalist Age,” Chris Higgins provocatively asks, “When do we find an increase in talk of excellence and achievement? Answer: when a culture has become deeply uncertain about its values and inarticulate about what is worth achieving.” In the United States, it is safe to say, the discourses of excellence and achievement are so loud and so frequent that we rarely pause to consider that there are multiple ends to a public education and multiple means to employ. Words like “excellence” and “achievement” are drained of vitality when a society fails to articulate which values are worth pursuing and why. Excellence for whom? In what context? Through what method? Toward what end? There are paradoxes in play. Since all societies, old and new, lay great claim to the value of education, it would be logical to assume that the preparation of teachers is an honored and vital tradition, a distinguished canonical practice that has evolved in myriad ways across countless cultures, culminating in the status of an art, science, or philosophy. Yet, thinking deeply about teacher preparation appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, as if it were only recently invented. Music education, by contrast, has a long and distinguished commitment to teaching and teachers; our pedagogical practices, codified and passed down over centuries, predate the modern public-school movement, which has only been in exis-

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

39

tence since nineteenth-century agrarian reform made mass education a public concern. Western classical art music, moreover, has placed great value on the teacher and his training. The familiar archetype of virtuoso or maestro is in step with a vision of the music teacher as Author or authority, our profession’s defining ethos. To become a teacher, one apprentices with a Master. Induction into the work of a specialized form takes years of careful practice, and there is little room for outside adventures. In the end, only excellent performers can become music teachers. As a result, a performance tradition of excellence and achievement continues to form the backbone of our conservatories and university music-teachereducation programs. But performance excellence for whom? Achievement in what context? Through what method? Toward what end? As this pedagogy of excellence and achievement finds its way into kindergartens, secondary schools, and university preparation programs, its ethos results in a cycle of replication for most, achievement and freedom for the lucky few, and alienation for far too many; this winner-take-all sensibility is at one with today’s capitalist meritocracy. The hegemony of this culture creates, for Paul Woodford, intellectual and artistic passivity in its inductees, reinforcing the prevailing notion that music teachers are performance professionals rather than “public intellectuals” or the kind of flexibly minded leaders who are interested and equipped to address the needs of their students and their community. Furthermore, when faced with changing conditions—new media, new technologies, new understandings of learning and the mind, new ways of living—our long-running pedagogy of excellence and achievement appears closed or at least hostile to innovation and popular input. It is a terrible irony to note that as our music students become increasingly extraordinary at what they do, they may enter a diverse twenty-firstcentury classroom only to realize quite suddenly just how removed they have become from the “ordinary” musical needs of “ordinary” students. I have seen outstanding performance graduates from the best conservatories in the world who are afraid to play an ostinato on a drum. I have seen operatically trained singers who decline to sing in a microphone (in these situations, the canard of protecting and promoting the healthy voice is trotted out). Secure in their tradition, they may be uncomfortable in forms that are unstable, with fewer rules and more open expectations. Their performance education, I contend, has focused too much on one thing, leaving them without conceptual and material tools to operate confidently in unpredictable arenas.

Education’s Antinomy I define music-teacher quality as the ability and curiosity to move skillfully and knowingly within and across closed and open domains. I present a music teacher, in other words, who can teach a student to sing into a microphone as willingly and as easily as she can teach bel canto style. This is a vision of music-teacher

40

|

Remixing the Classroom

expertise that is both creative in character and respectful of traditional forms, a vision that can be implemented in changing conditions, a vision with an unfinished and ongoing conception of what “excellence” and “achievement” mean. To move toward this vision, we need to conceptually move the location of the music teacher. Recall the competing mandates that are placed on the contemporary school by our global post-Enlightenment society. Does the teacher train students to fit into the world, change the world, or do both? Does the teacher teach traditions alone, only that which is new, or a bit of both? As mentioned, the difficulty of defining the purpose of teaching in a pluralistic democracy is due in large part to the paradoxical nature of what we mean by education. Education, as a concept and as a material practice, operates as a classic philosophical antinomy, according to Jerome Bruner. The qualities that give meaning to the term “education”— replication and transformation, tradition and change—are in an equal state of contradiction. An antinomy exists, thus, when a concept cannot be understood apart from the paradoxes that give it meaning. Importantly, inferences drawn from these contradicting truths are equally valid: There is no education without innovation. There is no education without tradition. In the case of music education, each contradicting concept is equally magnetic and equally valuable to the growth of a new generation of students. Tugging teachers to one side of this antinomy are the conservative end of preserving what is established and codified and an understanding of public education as a force for social reproduction and accommodation to norm-governed practices and standards. Adaptation, in other words, to what is. Tugging teachers to the other side is the idea that public education is supposed to prepare us for what might be—that schools and universities are expected to transform a culture, to innovate, reimagine, and liberate (Latin: liberare, to free from domination; Old English: léodan, to grow). Both propositions are valid and necessary, and both exist in acute tension. Public education, to underscore the point, can have no real meaning without both of these imperatives, and without its resulting tension. While the past and future impinge on the present, the teacher, Janus-like, must look in both directions, pulled simultaneously toward the future and the past. We are talking about the forces that impinge on the teacher and the public school in general. To be clear, we are not talking about cultural or tautological determinators. The teacher, I believe, remains an agent within these tensions, not an object of their brute forces. I have never met a teacher who cared nothing for the past or nothing for the future. Throughout this chapter, I look closely at these competing imperatives as they frame particular practices of music education, especially as the ideals outlined above circulate within institutional learning environments. Of course, some institutions favor one side of education’s antinomy more than the other. Few would argue that the music conservatory (Italian: conservatorio, a home for foundlings, a place of safety) is devoted mainly

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

41

to preservation, as a safe home for past accomplishments. The ideology behind the conservatorio has real-world consequences for what a music teacher can or is allowed to do. An endowed trust is attached to the concept of the public school with all its logical and illogical contradictions. Public-school teachers are expected to play a role in socializing the citizenry, inducting young minds into the particular culture into which they were inserted by birth and circumstance. Enabled and restricted by a governing culture, schools play a role in helping a society or tradition regenerate itself while maintaining continuity with the past. Without the conserving force of an institutionalized public education, a citizenry might dissolve into social anarchy or forget its past. Without a conservatory to safeguard art and art practices, an artistic tradition might dissolve into anarchy, as Matthew Arnold feared, or die off because of lack of interest. By placing at their disposal the best that we have thought and done—our exemplars and past accomplishments, or what Arnold famously called “sweetness and light”—we not only teach the young the established norms of a given discipline, but we inspire and potentially elevate them. Arnold’s vision of educational culture has kinship with the Germanic and Scandinavian notion of bildung, a concept of human flourishing that extends the conserving character of education and schooling by “building up” character, intelligence, and sensitivity as one interacts with the best of one’s heritage. Nonetheless, a vision of education in which replication of the existing social order is its main function calls special attention to the ideological nature and potentially oppressive conditions of real-world accommodation. Excellence and achievement are often one and the same with cultural privilege. “Theories of social reproduction,” according to Henry Giroux, “take as a central issue the notion that schools occupy a major, if not critical, role in the reproduction of the social formations needed to sustain capitalist relations of production.” For Giroux, “schools have emerged historically as social sites that have integrated the traditionally separate tasks of reproducing work skills and producing attitudes that legitimize the social relations in which these skills are located.” These work relationships are everyday-normal; they burrow into the very fabric of schooling and university music-teacher training (e.g., the Master and the apprentice, the student as blank slate, the conductor and his orchestra, the composer and his executant). As mentioned in chapter 1, these dualisms are important to heed, but we must deconstruct them. New meanings can arise, for example, when the composer-executant relationship dissolves into one (or dissolves in a way that is unfinished and ongoing, in which the agent is a bit of both but neither, too—rather, something new). Likewise, new instructional environments can be created when the apprentice hijacks a course of study and reorders the Master’s codes. A Lawbreaker, such an artist, may seek to redefine cultural achievement by deprivileging the standards of another, creating her own definition of excellence.

42 |

Remixing the Classroom

But really, how often does this happen? Public schooling, it is worth emphasizing, errs on the side of accommodation and preservation rather than civil or individual transformation when teaching and learning take on the quality of apprenticeship only; when education, including university music-teacher education, is conceptualized as the teaching and learning of preestablished standards alone; when tradition is the end of education, not its starting point; and when context replaces questioning. All parties become domesticated, and minds (of teachers and learners alike) are bureaucratized when public consensus holds that schooling is the unidirectional transfer of information, pulling teachers to mistake instruction for education. Paulo Freire writes, “To know how to teach is to create possibilities for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge.” We need to look closely at all aspects of our work so that sonic outcomes become only part of what determines a quality music teacher. As I mention in the chapter 1, we are more than the music we make; we are simultaneously made and remade by the music we make. Particular learning and performing environments, conducive to but not determined by particular musical forms, put into motion the interplay of certain values and not others. If preexisting rights and wrongs make up the bulk of a teaching encounter, then certain social relationships are advantaged. When open-ended or student-centered practices are put into place, different social relationships are advantaged. Are the forms we teach exclusively closed, or are they a combination of the rule-bound and the open? The sociomusical associations within the forms we select for study in schools and universities are practiced and rehearsed within the act of making and learning music. It is not enough to teach what we know. Teachers must be aware of how we teach; whose human, institutional, and sonic relationships are being constructed and why; and the manner in which the learning environments we create endow our associations with the possibility of good or ill.

I Sit with Shakespeare In furthering our understanding of the purpose of public education, I start with a proposition shared by many. Each generation, each culture, each community responds differently to the problems of their time and location, often finding solutions that work and, just as often, finding solutions that fail. What is passed on to the next generation cannot be handed over in whole cloth, and what we inherit from the past needs remaking. Poetically speaking, the full light of another era cannot guide us on our particular quest, as Dewey suggests: No course is lit By light that former burned. From darkness bit by bit The present road is learned.

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

43

I look at what it means to structure an open music lesson in chapter 3, but for now I am not afraid to endorse what appears to be a pedagogy of muddling in the semidark—or better yet, a pedagogy of travel and surprise. The use of heavily scripted lesson plans and methodologies, for example, provides a false security to teachers, as each road—each educational objective or end—is experienced differently according to changing terrain and chance encounters. I’m glad to know that not everything can be mapped. I am reminded that Freire describes liberatory education as an adventure in unveiling, and one might recall the way the veil figures as an epistemological symbol in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the stronglimbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.

I return later in this chapter to the notion of sitting with Shakespeare, with inviting Marcus Aurelius or Richard Wagner to spend time with me as a guest in my home. For now, I wish to emphasize the simple fact that we are cut off from neither tradition (this would be impossible) nor past (also impossible). A quality teacher’s purpose is to increase the plasticity of our interactions with both, whether that process resembles a rerouting of our present road, an invitation from the past, or the slow epistemological unwinding from darkness bit by bit. Freire writes, “The moments we live either are instants in a process previously inaugurated, or else they inaugurate a new process referring in some way to something in the past. That is why I have spoken of the ‘kinship’ among lived times—something we do not always perceive, thereby failing to unveil the fundamental why of the way in which we experience ourselves at each moment.” Only through this kinship between past and present can both continuity and innovation occur. And, more radically, only through this kinship can we name what is wrong with the course we are on and try to rechart it. This assertion presents a more complicated vision of teacher expertise than that which is provided by the Master-apprentice model. Said Confucius, “If by keeping the old warm one can provide an understanding of the new, one is fit to be a teacher.” From this aphorism, Confucius gives followers a vision of teacher quality, holding in both hands the vital kinship of past and present. But look carefully at his temporal unit of analysis. It is the teacher together with his students, in the present, that is his concern, not the past alone, tradition alone, or the teacher alone. The past is useful only as it provides help in understanding the present voyage, inverting the conservative mandate of education and teaching. Tradition, Confucius implies, is something that exists in an inert capacity, imbued with the possibility of heat or warmth. A good teacher, importantly, is

44

|

Remixing the Classroom

a kind of catalyst, the flint that sparks new learning, the spark that helps light another generation’s course. Likewise, for Alfred North Whitehead, the only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and the future. At the same time it must be observed that an age is no less past if it existed two hundred years ago than if it existed two thousand years ago.

In a curricular sense, Stevie Wonder and Jean Sibelius are as close or as far away as the fitness of a music teacher affords them to be. There is no assumption, in other words, that Stevie Wonder or Jean Sibelius will come to our students already warm. Another inversion, another aphorism: the more the teacher provides an understanding and appreciation of the present, the more the past directs and enriches the present. The past, for Dewey, “is a great resource for the imagination; it adds a new dimension to life, but on condition that it be seen as the past of the present, and not as another and disconnected world.” Concerning the teacher, the school, the child, and the curriculum, the temporal center of interest must be the present—an insistent, connected, and moving present. As such, this feeling of a contiguous present is not adequately captured in my earlier discussion of education’s antinomy, whereby the teacher appears stuck between the contradictory mandates of public education. While Bruner’s educational antinomy speaks to these inherent tensions, his depiction fails to show that the quality teacher is, in point of fact, a traveler, not unlike Socrates or Confucius. The teacher is a growing being, with evolving skills, curiosities, and understandings, a teacherlearner who is interested in what other explorers have to share and disclose. Even within the paradoxical space of public schooling, expertise is experiential and unfolding, a winding journey between and among the forces of tradition and change that never leave the teacher as she moves, and sometimes muddles, through space and time. An antinomy, furthermore, is more or less a static concept, with little conceptual room to remake or rechoose. Dewey writes, “In its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent power from within, and the formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past, the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing or reconstructing of experience.” The muddle of moving forward in time as we are joggled between past obligations, future anticipations, and present surprises represents Dewey’s “technical definition of education: It is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience that adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience.” Without an enlarged space to try out, undergo, and retest among education’s antinomic

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

45

forces—without the capacity to grow and expand in purposeful and nonpurposeful ways—our tentative definition of a public education contradicts itself by potentially denying teachers the agency or freedom to change or begin anew. If education is, sine qua non, growth, then public education is the directing and enlarging of student growth. In chapter 4, I enlarge this concept to include the existential imperative to explore. The charge before us is to increase music-teacher capacity in the here and now with the end of providing more public-school children with more access to more and different ways of making and enjoying music. Thus, the two-part problem of enhancing music-teacher capacity across changing social and temporal landscapes and providing children with the music education they deserve is a problem of diversity, interaction, and the ability—nay, the disposition—to be mindfully flexible. Capacity, in this temporal sense, suggests both an orientation to being receptive and open to the needs of others and the inhered potential for movement and growth among changing social landscapes and the aesthetic forms we study and teach. Music-teacher-preparation programs, even the best and most thorough, can never prepare the music teacher for everything the future holds in store (how could they?), even if this is the expectation of music-education majors and school hiring committees. When music-teacher expertise is envisioned as occurring across a lifespan, rather than taking place in a two-, four-, or five-year program of study at an academic institution with limited time and resources, the purpose of skill building becomes more open. The skills that the institution provides a music-education major become mere starting points, which will be modified, abandoned, or refined over the length of a teaching career. Rethinking music-teacher preparation around teacher potential and capacity building across an evolving lifeline, furthermore, is a socially responsive act. “The idea of enhancing teachers’ capacity along the learning continuum has a particular appeal because of the ever-rising expectations for teachers,” write G. Williamson McDiarmid and Mary Clevenger-Bright. “Expectations, already high, have, in recent years, risen almost exponentially. Driving these expectations is a range of forces—changing demographics, policy initiatives, technology, and phenomenal growth of knowledge as well as our growing understanding of what successful teaching requires.” In the United States, a combination of recession-induced budget cuts and an increasingly diverse and fluid school population has made standalone specialization in orchestra, choir, or band increasingly uncommon for the newly hired graduate. Once upon a time, a music-education major in North America could feel secure that her training as a band director would land her a job teaching instrumental music education in a public school. Narrow specialization—what I refer to later in this chapter as “routine expertise”—was not a problem for most band directors because the forms of public-school music education were stable and predictable. Needless to say, this is changing rapidly.

46

|

Remixing the Classroom

Still, not all countries have been caught as unprepared as the United States. Responding to student need, and anticipating changes in demographics, technology, and public taste, music-education programs in Australia, Finland, and Scandinavia broke some time ago with a monocultural tradition of music teaching and teacher preparation, and consciously designed popular curricula that today produce many high-quality music teachers with expertise in multiple styles and genres. I don’t think that North American university music-teacherpreparation programs need to or should look like those in Australia or Northern Europe, but a reform specific to the institutional structure of American and Canadian schooling, with its proud history of large ensembles and its dedication to in-school music making, needs to be embraced. Our reforms might start in ways that are conceptual. How might we open our public-school classrooms to a greater diversity of students and musics? How might we open the music we study to a greater diversity of methods and ways of knowing? How might we expand the range of skills and knowledge we bring to an educational encounter? Can we create spaces of exploration, unencumbered by the heavy language of outcome and achievement?

An Evolving Vision of Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise I move now to introduce a vision of music-teacher quality and expertise across a lifespan, a thought experiment that I gradually refine throughout this chapter. First, I start with five propositions that frame this action ideal. . Public-school music teachers are never outside the forces of replication and transformation. . It is the music teacher’s mandate, as entrusted by her community, to know the forms of her tradition while preparing for change. . The music teacher grows in knowledge, skill, and disposition as she operates willingly within and across these forces and forms. . Quality can be measured by the degree to which a music educator can move fluidly among the forces and forms of tradition and change. . This manner of plasticity can be taught and thus enlarged.

In this vision, the life of the music teacher is an open, discursive field, located in the present, working and growing inescapably within the antinomic forces of change, innovation, and uncertainty on one side and tradition, accommodation, and certainty on the other. The zone of optimal growth expands and deepens with time and experience. Growth is visualized as funnel-shaped and generative but not linear. Development is sedimentary or cumulative, but interest and curiosity mean that the teacher will make increasingly wider and deeper forays into the zones represented by the traditional and the innovative, those magnetic forces of authority and change that are existential aspects of human experience. When

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

47

we speak of growth or chart its development, there are earlier and later stages but no lower and higher ones. The experience of the child at the age of four and five is just as intrinsically valuable—is just as much life—as the experience of a person in high school or college. In contrast, Bruner, channeling Benjamin Bloom, assumed in his spiral curriculum that more complex forms of knowledge represented higher levels of life and learning. His spiral went up. I envision growth as going up and down; its movement is sometimes straight and sometimes bent. Our students come funded by their previous experience. We are never blank slates. All aspects of the music-education major’s musical and pedagogical experiences are thus intrinsically valuable, and deficit comparisons to veteran teachers or to external performance standards can often be unhelpful, particularly when pedagogical and musical capacity is viewed as empty and needs filling. The aim is to ensure a quest-driven expansion of present-day capacity, one that seeks to capture the plasticity of experience that I argue constitutes a “quality” music teacher and musician. As a music-education major moves into ever larger arenas, her kinship with tradition and change is increasingly enriched, which in turn deepens as she teaches comfortably in styles and genres that are evolving and new, as well as in those traditions that make up her inherited tradition. Attention to the aesthetic turn that has taken place since the end of the twentieth century, with the rise of globalism and the deessentialized character of artistic engagements and individual identities, adds another dimension to this notion of teacher quality.

Music-Teacher Quality and Open Forms My idea of a quality music-teacher education is one in which music-teacher candidates are encouraged to think openly and less certainly about the design and implementation of musical instruction. For Maxine Greene, teaching for openings has to do with teaching that provokes critical questions around the many modes of literacy, the preferred languages, the diversity of languages, and the relation of all of these to the greater cultural context. Prevailing literacies and discourse should be taken as occasions for study and expression, for the sake of disclosing more materials in lived experiences—the multiplicity of lived experiences that mark our society today. . . . [This is] a matter of transcending the given, of entering a field of possibilities.

Teaching literacy is helping students learn to say what they want to say, the way they want to say it. It is learning to read the world with others but differently than others. Greene’s field of possibilities, thus, is both open and closed (but never fixed). It is one in which readers—who understand it through writing, performing, creating, discussing, and sharing—situate study around the known and the undisclosed, the preferred and the devised, and the old and the new, with the Deweyan aim of enlarging and deepening experience through more and greater experience.

48 |

Remixing the Classroom

All forms, however, must bend toward openness. The prevailing literacies of, say, note-reading, standard performance practices, and aural skills should be taken as occasions for study and expression. They should be put to use in present conditions with an aim of transcending the given. This means moving beyond explanatory frameworks—moving beyond the explication of what is—and toward the undisclosed possibilities that a new time and location can provide, toward what might be. The reality of today’s pluralistic society makes it imperative that we multiply the methods and modalities employed in the pursuit of meaning and the construction of knowledge. Literacies are seen here in their plural forms, employing multimodal means to ensure independence of voice and identity. A vision of music-teacher education that embraces independent road making and diverse means for what Dewey called “lighting the way” must contend with no small number of surprises. In contrast with the process of induction and the great confidence of the Master, the music teacher–traveler must contend with the relationship between rapidly changing student demographics and the disclosure of new voices, new artistic forms, and new modes of aesthetic participation. This section calls attention to the nature of these relationships, as well as to the connection between tradition and engagements in art that are effectively “closed.” “Open form” refers in part to hybrid, irreducible, often digital, often participatory, texts—generative and sometimes open-source ways of making and doing music in the mediated and historicized information-rich world of the early twenty-first century. Open forms also refer to those closed forms that have been made open, as when (as discussed in chapter 1) a reader or writer resists Authorizing a style, genre, or tradition and treats the closed form as a text. Closed forms, by contrast, exist in proximity to the authoritative, the certain, and the canonic. Closed forms represent culturally structured and norm-driven literacies, where valuations of excellence preexist an aesthetic encounter. Closed forms benefit from stability, with historically agreed-on modes of participation that are rigid and dualistic in nature (think: composer → conductor → performer → audience). Because expertise in each modality looks different across these zones, and because valuations of excellence change as teachers negotiate the demands encountered within these discursive fields, an effort to investigate these relationships is important. But there is always the problem of change.

Insecurity as a Condition of Life All contemporary societies have suffered rapid change, from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to today’s so-called knowledge or “indie” economy. Yet, Dewey suggests, it would be difficult to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as is the present. . . . The most

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

49

marked trait of present life, economically speaking, is insecurity. . . . The vast development of technological resources that might bring security in its train has actually brought a new mode of insecurity, as mechanization displaces labor. . . . Realization that honest and industrious pursuits of a calling or business will not guarantee any stable level of life lessens respect for work and stirs large numbers to take a chance of some adventitious way of getting the wealth that will make security possible: witness the orgies of the stock market in recent days.

What could have been written in October 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers with the Great Recession that followed, is taken from an essay that Dewey wrote in 1930 called “The Lost Individual.” Dewey, foreshadowing the violence of the atomic age and the technological upheavals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, calls this enduring breakdown between the individual and his society “pathological” and a state of affairs that “detach individuals from their local ties and allegiances but not far enough to give them a new center and order of life.” New aesthetic sensibilities—postmodern modes of production and participation that displace the established order of things in favor of the ephemeral, fragmented, and incomplete—will emerge from this pathological (or paralogical) state of affairs. A “decentered reordering” might be one way to begin a definition of postmodernity, and one way to talk about a teacher’s future trials. To this point, I give no special favor to the forces of change and uncertainty as I compare them to the forces of tradition and authority. The values embedded within my vision of music-teacher expertise come from an educator’s ability to negotiate purposefully within these fields for the good of the students in her charge. But goodness is something we determine and redetermine throughout our lives and professional careers—and this is in part what I mean by teacher quality and performance excellence. With dislocation, insecurity, and rapid change as societal norms for the foreseeable future, university music-teacher-education programs that fail to embrace changing definitions of what is good (a question of teacher quality) and fail to shift values from ends to means (a question of teacher expertise) will be increasingly marginalized by larger and more powerful forces. The largest of these forces are irreversible. In the United States, the Census Bureau reports that for the first time in the country’s history, minority births outnumbered those of whites; the New York Times highlighted a demographer’s calculations that “minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010.” Yet 83 percent of American teachers are white. Between 1990 and 2009, immigration to Finland increased sixfold. Foreign-born women in Sweden are giving birth to more children on average than Swedish-born women. Economic conditions are shifting expectations for education and job training, as well. One could go on and on.

50 |

Remixing the Classroom

Rapid economic change and demographic disruption has serious consequences for public education generally, and for education in the arts and humanities specifically. It has been remarkable, furthermore, to note the sudden eclipse of the qualitative dimensions of teaching and learning in contemporary political discourse and education research since the discovery of “big data.” Pasi Sahlberg, a high-ranking official in Finland’s education and cultural ministries, calls attention to the way that globalization has unified and standardized educational practices across the vast diversity of the world’s nation-states and local public schools, narrowing curricula in the name of global competitiveness. International benchmarks of achievement—the quantifiable test-based outcomes designed to be compared across cultures, ethnicities, and nation-states—have driven reformers to homogenize public-school assessment, using “management models from the business world, such as test-based accountability, merit-based pay and data-driven administration.” Sahlberg calls this the “Global Educational Reform Movement” (GERM), echoing a notion of cultural pathology that Dewey saw in his day as well. Critics contend that advocates of the GERM seek to deprofessionalize teaching by reducing teachers to mere technocrats, replaceable drivers of standardized content. With Finland arguably the sole holdout in a world where political and economic security is linked to fifth- and eighth-graders’ test scores in math and science, the teacher, de facto, has become the primary locus of blame. Giroux, speaking about American public schools, contends that the passage of laws promoting high-stakes testing for students and the use of test scores to measure teacher quality have both limited teacher autonomy and undermined the possibility of critical teaching and visionary goals for teaching. Teachers are no longer asked to think critically and be creative in the classroom. On the contrary, they are now forced to simply implement predetermined instructional procedures and standardized content at best and at worst put their imaginative powers on hold.

When the arts are talked about in connection to public schooling (if at all), their justification is tethered to economic development and the emerging creative economy. In this instrumentalist vision, the arts and humanities are important because, according to New England’s Creative Economy Council, “for companies and organizations to remain competitive and cutting edge, they must attract and retain individuals who can think creatively.” When art for economics’ sake replaces art for art’s sake, music teachers and their professional organizations are reduced from the “opinion leaders and champions of the public good,” as Woodford envisions, to “just another special interest group.” I worry not only that music educators are becoming infected by GERM advocacy but also that we share an affinity for its closed forms and the certainty attached to these forms, a

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

51

point I return to in chapter 3. Ours is an inheritance of closed or routinized expertise where highly coded practices—safe and predictable practices—offer testable rights and wrongs. I worry that we will transition seamlessly to this regime: a quarter note gets one beat, not two, not three. We will teach musical facts along the lines of the great moralist Master Gradgrind, “addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, settle everything somehow and never wonder.” Music will become acultural, disinfected of the wondrous and the strange, and an information-driven practice. This would be a strange contradiction in the face of current artistic practice.

The Arrival of Open Forms Once upon a time, anthropologists like Alan Merriam saw music as a singular expression of a time and place, “a summation activity for the expression of value, a means whereby the heart of the psychology of a culture is exposed.” Today, much artistic expression resists a summative explication; there is no central circulatory system like the one Merriam implies, no throbbing cultural heart, no gestalt effect that can reveal the whole. Rather, incongruity is the directing condition of contemporary aesthetic theory. At the same time, aesthetic forms are increasingly open-sourced and deauthored, with shelf lives so short they effectively wiggle free of the ossification of agreed-on standards of practice. Primarily youth-driven, these open forms thrive in mashed-up appearance; they are authorless in artistic collectives, in the underground and overground. A new generation of music-education researchers like Heidi Partti and Evan Tobias are investigating the way that digital music and information technology are dissolving the boundaries between specialized musical expertise and amateur music-making. Today’s online composer-producers are avoiding the Masterapprentice model, in which training in culturally defined ways of doing moves from expert to neophyte, with advocates finding unhelpful a notion of Mastery that effectively says, “Just wait.” With a multitude of literacies at their disposal, these artist-citizens are inhabiting a vast, asynchronous, digital landscape, entering and reentering musical and visual forms where filiation is a myth and no tune is accepted as complete. It is worth appreciating that much of what is achieved in this participatory culture is accomplished without institutional music training. For those outside the margins of power, this decentered reordering has been a socially just corrective to the false stability that is found in the authoritative and canonical. As early as the 1970s, this turn from closed forms to open texts was anticipated by the collapse of high modernism, with prophets proclaiming “the death of the author” and “the death of the specialist.” Long before the Internet made artistic forms irresistible to cross-fertilization, and before global migration placed more people in greater contact with each other, French poststructuralists

52

|

Remixing the Classroom

Jacques Attali and Roland Barthes called attention to a new era’s longing for openness, the yearnings of an emancipatory aesthetics, one less paternalistic and more welcoming to new voices. In this turn from composer to composing, from musical Work to musical text, “we see emerging, piecemeal and with the greatest ambiguity, the seeds of a new noise, one exterior to the institutions and customary sites of political conflict.” A political economist by training, Attali prophesized that composing— “doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes . . . inventing the message at the same time as the language”—represented a new field of musical production. This vision of a new political order anticipated the horizontal, web-based, post-nation-state communities that social networks have made possible. Calling the composer a “guest” in his own text, “no longer privileged, and paternal,” Barthes challenged “the myth of filiation” that for centuries placed Western culture’s composer- and performer-defined traditions at the top of the musical food chain, thus breaking open the silos that separated composer from performer, and performer from audience. Instead, the closed forms of, say, works by Beethoven and Bizet can be read as texts, as layerings of discourse into which a coexistence of meanings can be drawn and are continuously drawn, as Susan McClary famously demonstrated in her feminist readings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Carmen. Christopher Small extended this research, beginning with the distinction between music as a noun and “musicking” as a verb: “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. Music, as such, is an event, in which layers of relationships are revealed.” By emphasizing the complex social relationships that make up a musical event, Small sought to deconstruct the hierarchical distortions that separate the high from the low, the classical from the vernacular, and the active from the passive. In our quest to rethink music-teacher quality, it is interesting to note that for Small, “the verb to music is not concerned with valuation. It is descriptive, not prescriptive.” While I believe that it is the teacher’s ultimate job to move beyond mere description, toward normative spheres of reconstruction and reparation, I appreciate that for Small, aesthetic quality does not exist in advance of an individual experience, as it does with the canonical. Quality teaching, to extrapolate, must be made and remade within a field of everchanging and irreducible activity—and that this nonbounded field is open to all is his very point. “To try to tease out the complex texture of the meanings that a musical performance—any musical performance, anywhere, at any given time— generates is not reductionist or destructive. Quite the contrary; it is to enrich our experience of it.”

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

53

Closed Forms and Their Care Today’s postmodern notion of music as a nonbounded event, asynchronous in its making, and existing in an eternal virtual space is easier to characterize when we contrast it with the ways in which brick-and-mortar institutions serve the closed forms in their care. Anthropologist Bruno Nettl famously described the North American university school of music in monastic terms, designed to be as enduring and awe-inspiring as a French cathedral: the faculty are its clergy, the rehearsal hall and auditorium its place of worship, the pantheon of great composers its deities and saints. Christopher Small’s exegesis of the symphony hall notes that while many everyday buildings leave room for openness, “for a variety of activities and relationships,” the concert hall or opera house is closed; it “imposes its structure very firmly on what goes on within” its walls. In contrast to garage bands and cybercommunities, these relationships are scripted, synchronized, and rarely altered, signaling behaviors that appear caste-bound and exclusive: A grand ceremonial space such as [the symphonic concert hall] imposes a mode of behavior on those who are unaccustomed to it. They become somewhat self-conscious, lowering their voices, muting their gestures, looking around them, bearing themselves in general more formally. They may even feel something like awe. But frequent concertgoers who are accustomed to the place cease to feel the need for submissive behavior. . . . [T]he muted gestures are replaced by gestures of body and voice that are not only relaxed but signal relaxation. . . . I am at ease in this place and with this occasion.

Suffice it to say that these are institutional spaces where spontaneity and surprise are circumscribed to a degree that is barely recognized by those inducted into the culture of these spaces. Thus, expectations, sonic and social, are defined by the standards that govern the traditions they protect; context plays an important role in advancing or delimiting what is allowed or what is made possible. In the ideology of closed forms, there are limits to the ways in which a Beethoven symphony can be interpreted; there are limits to the ways in which an audience can react to a performance of Bizet; there are limits to where and when a performance can take place; there are limits to who can participate and who can watch. To be clear, commercial popular music, Texas old-time fiddling, and even the oddly (though accurately) titled genre of “classic alternative rock” thrive within a circuit of closed interactions. Closed forms are not the sole province of Western classical musicians, though their progenitors are worth paying attention to. Thus, Igor Stravinsky, arguably the greatest defender of closed forms and the elitism that is attached to them, is worth citing. In the following passage about the role of the performer when playing his music, Stravinsky touches on the caste system that binds artistic functions and social class within the discursive field of

54

|

Remixing the Classroom

classical music, as well as the attitude of deep submission that is required of those who wish to internalize its codes of practice. He writes, The secret of perfection lies above all in [the performer’s] consciousness of the law imposed upon him by the work he is performing. And here we are back at the great principle of submission that we have so often invoked in the course of our lessons. This submission demands a flexibility that itself requires, along with technical mastery, a sense of tradition and, commanding the whole, an aristocratic culture that is not merely a question of acquired learning.

Many aspects are troubling for music-teacher education as I contrast the logic of closed forms with the poststructural notion of text. Expertise in closed forms takes a very long time to accrue. Digital music promises immediate rewards. Some years ago, before public-school iPad and iPhone bands enjoyed their flash in the pan, a music video by the group Atomic Tom created quite a buzz in the music-education community, wherein a group of hipster youth were recorded on a New York subway playing all parts of a standard rock piece (piano, drums, guitar, and bass) live on their individual cellular phones. I recall thinking that American music education has just jumped from classical instruments (with all our reeds, valve oil, horsehair bows, and spruce wood) over rock guitars, drum kits, and crash cymbals to land in the back pocket of my teenage neighbor. Were Stravinsky alive, he might recognize flexibility in this new generation of music makers, who compose as they walk down the street. But technical mastery, a sense of tradition, and an aristocratic sensibility? He might choke. All closed forms are inherently opposed to popular input. Stravinsky was talking about Western classical music, but I could easily substitute one closed form for another. When induction takes places over years, or decades, the expert is naturally averse to democratic participation. What right, after all, does a mere aficionado of Texas old-time fiddling have to change or even suggest a change in the practice of an “advanced” form? What right does an amateur have in the evaluation of a symphony orchestra, its choice of repertoire, or the interpretations of its conductor? Speaking for all advocates of excellence and achievement, Milton Babbitt famously asked, “Who cares if you listen?” Popular taste does not confer rights. Learn to enjoy what you cannot practice, or leave it alone. Babbitt writes, The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

55

And in a reminder of how unattractive sarcasm is, Babbitt asks, “Why not then equate the activities of the radio repairman with those of the theoretical physicist?” Another way to understand the concept of closed forms is to name a musical genre that is attached to a well-known competition. Classical music, jazz, Irish “trad,” or Texas old-time fiddling: all thrive in competition. All exist in stable, predictable disciplinary fields. All have codified standards to which advocates can clearly point. None embrace change—or, at least, they allow innovation by only the elite. Where notions of good and bad have consensus, where what counts as quality is in general accord, where expectations of mastery are connected to words like “perfection,” “excellence,” and “virtuosity” (more than “experimentation,” “subjectivity,” and “amateurism”), one finds a closed form waiting to be evaluated and ranked. Connected to a closed form is a Critic who is ready to explain what is meant and eager to define what is allowed and what is not, and a cultural or educational institution that has been built to protect and preserve the form from unsanctioned change. In this way, the contemporary school and university, housed in a world of accountability and cross-cultural comparison, is ideally suited for all manner of closed-form instruction, in which teachers traffic in musical rights and musical wrongs, saying no more than saying yes, exercising authority, and demanding submission. Now, the critique I have drawn is hardly new and it is probably familiar to most educators of music teachers. But this point is worth repeating: traditions are not just bound by community standards that have developed over time; they also reveal the sensibility of the culture into which they were accepted and codified. Their practices shape lives. A culture of closed forms is one of perfection, not uncertainty; submission, not play; elitism, not access; merit, not democracy; Law, not innovation. As a component of a public education, a pedagogy of closed forms fails the starting point, captured in Bruner’s antinomy, in which educational meaning is found in the tension between the antinomic forces of tradition and change. Put simply, within our public-school music programs and university teacher-preparation programs there exists a critical imbalance, favoring preservation and authority over creativity and the imagination, in our obligation to teach the children and young adults in our care. Even in countries where popular music is a public-school norm, teachers may treat these genres didactically, or they may overemphasize their study, as researchers Georgii-Hemming and Westvall have pointed out. There is a difference between teaching popular music and teaching children to do something with popular music. The former perspective deals with codes, contexts, and Laws; the latter concerns creativity, self-expression, and a kind of quest. What is important for university music-teacher-preparation programs to admit is that students who are inducted into a closed-form culture, whether that

56 |

Remixing the Classroom

culture is Western classical art music, Irish trad, or any other found in the (conservative) conservatory system, these inductees will have a very hard time unlearning the caste system into which they were inserted or in which they elected to train. Studies reveal that in the United States, 92 percent of a music-education major’s time is spent studying and playing Western classical art music. The majority of music teachers in the United Kingdom are classically trained. Yet we know that students prefer popular music to traditional school-based music. Given this context, is there any surprise that 93 percent of students opt out of school music in England at age fourteen? As this section draws to a conclusion, it is important to underscore the effects that an ideology of closed forms has exerted on the way in which music teaching is conceptualized, on what counts as quality teaching, and on the shape of musical expertise. It is also important to underscore how difficult it is for teachers to change their practice. This conceptualization is all the more dramatic given the rapid changes taking place in contemporary life.

The Problem of Routine Expertise The multifaceted problem of a historically validated pedagogy that leads to narrow specialization, an adherence to a cultural history of closed forms in which quality is predetermined, and an international institutional support frame that favors preservation over innovation needs to be reckoned with. On the one hand, according to Hildegard Froehlich, we have an “occupational mandate to follow stable patterns of actions and thought that are accepted and agreed upon by acknowledged experts in the field,” but on the other hand, “to be called a professional also means one must be willing to question and let go of routinized behavior when the situation calls for it. . . . Shifting freely between routinized and non-routinized actions makes the truly professional decision-maker.” University music-teacher-preparation programs may indeed value issues of creativity and teacher independence, but the structure of our institutions, the beliefs that animate our courses of study, and the forms we study bring to life “stable patterns of action” more than “questioning” and “letting go.” The difficulty of achieving new conceptualizations of teacher professionalism whereby quality is situationally dependent and expertise is revealed in the movement between routinized and nonroutinized action lies in these realities: . The aim of routine mastery is structurally embedded in the aesthetic forms we study and the way we study them. . The Master-apprentice model is highly compatible with closed or canonic forms. . The institutional structure of schools and universities privileges teaching methodologies that are sequential, stable, and predictable—a Masterdirected structure into which students must submit or be let go.

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

57

I believe that we cannot begin to redefine teacher quality or remake our methods of preparation until we address the ways in which form, institutional ethos, and educational ends intersect. I emphasize all three because there is no singular facet that we can point to as the source of the problem. We cannot blame the university without looking at the tradition we study. We cannot blame the tradition without looking at how it is taught. Our understanding of how we teach, and why, is reflected in our beliefs about education, which find material structure in our university coursework. An example is due. Today, many jazz musicians in the United States complain that jazz is no longer creative and that it has ceased to evolve, a terrible irony given its historical roots as an expression of an oppressed people yearning for freedom. Critics protest that today’s performers all sound the same (at least in the United States). The culprit, they claim, is the American university, where jazz found a safe haven in the 1960s and 1970s and came to flourish as an academic discipline. The university school of music, the story goes, with its Western classical tradition based on the Master-apprentice model, its focus on written literacies, and its preservationalist ethos, turned jazz from something that was living into something that is dead (in other words, jazz devolved from an open form into one that is now closed). The prevailing critique is aimed at the university as the sole source of the problem rather than at the intertwined relationship between an art form that became standardized by its adherents, a historic though informal Master-apprentice model that preserved its codes and lore (an instructional tradition that started well before jazz’s acceptance into the university), and conservation-minded educational institutions that had already in place a pedagogical ethos that “fit” the art form’s closing structure. It stands to reason that the North American university school of music will eventually accommodate (if it hasn’t already) rock, bluegrass, hiphop, and any other traditional musical form to which consensus around what good performance practice is and what it is not has been made. It is not incidental to note that jazz in Northern Europe and Asia is alive and kicking, with many devotees in and out of academia resisting the urge to define it there for good (and hence it does not sound like today’s codified American jazz). It has been my experience that most music majors have not been prepared for a variable and quest-driven musical life, so that instead of achieving growth that is expansive and wide, their professional development across a lifetime is more narrowly conceived, staying closely within the domain of the traditional rather than moving strategically and curiously among the antinomic tension between the old and new. A church choir director and organist, for example, who spends his life working within a specific canon, a piano studio instructor who teaches the ways of her craft through its historic literature, the university jazz instructor who conducts a big band and teaches chordal harmony: all are routine experts who have mastered and continue to master the expectations of their art form.

58

|

Remixing the Classroom

To be sure, none are robots, following the same rules, in the same way, in every context. There is freedom within the norms that govern how a sonata is played or how a church service is rendered with music, and interpretation always means going beyond mere decoding and into a realm of self-expression and originality. Many performance educators, furthermore, widen these codes and practices for larger critique and reinvention, bending the rules when warranted, like Glenn Gould did so famously with Bach’s Goldberg Variations or the way countless jazz musicians do when they reinvent Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark.” I argue, however, that the mere nonroutinizaton of closed forms remains inadequate for the wider purposes of public education in a pluralistic society. Yes, it is important to think critically about the “how” of church music and sonata playing, but public music education requires that teachers have the flexibility to thoughtfully interact within new musical and social arenas. There is a difference between freedom within closed forms and the uncertainties and pleasures of life in areas that are unstable and new. My point at this stage is to describe as clearly as possible the various approaches that music educators employ in everyday teaching contexts, linking them to belief systems that affect the music education of public-school children. There is certainly nothing wrong with closed forms, with thinking about the past as much as the present, with preserving and protecting an art form through exposure and experience. That is part of the reason why we have museums (some notions of a museum education are explored in chapter 3), and concert halls can be conceived of as musical museums, as Small and Nettl suggest. But the public school is not a museum, at least not entirely. Recall that the public school is located in the insistent present, as part museum and part laboratory, where the past is the past of the present and the present is the starting point for finding knowledge and creating something new. Too often, talk of interpretation and self-expression is limited to the decisions a performer makes within a prenegotiated context, within the musical rules that a music educator brings to an instructional encounter. The question before us is the degree to which excellence in routine expertise is the best measure of quality when considering the design of music-teacher-preparation programs and how such a belief system directs the aims of public music education. As I emphasize the notion of expanding teacher capacity to better reflect a diverse and uncertain world, I call attention to the limits of the Master-apprentice model and the terrible potential for routinization to deaden musical experience specifically, and life generally. There is a downside to specialization, not the least of which is burnout. Our training prepared us to handle surprise. Our art form promised us safety. No one warned us of the danger of diminishing returns.

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

59

The Problem of Induction in University Music-Teacher Education When the future is pre-given, there is no room for education, only training. —Paulo Freire

There is a link between the human quest for certainty and the desire of musiceducation majors, and the professors who teach them, for immediate mastery in the practical demands of schooling. There is a link between the human quest for certainty and the need to finalize aesthetic signifiers. In both instances, the notion of the real world is often floated as the idea of a knowable future into which an early career teacher can be inserted with the right skills to survive and the faith that she is teaching the right musical rules at the right time. Students make appeals for more coursework in classroom management, skill training in conducting and instrumental technique, more practice writing lesson plans, more assurances that they can out-predict the contingencies that lie ahead. Educators of music teachers respond in kind. There may be little patience for philosophy coursework or lofty discussions of human flourishing. Thus, the music-education degree remains a mostly vocational degree, the learning of skills to teach skills. If form is a cherished word in the study of music, as I contend in chapter 1, skill is its equivalent in music education. I fear that the university has forsaken the laboratory side of public schooling for the certainties of the museum. The real world beckons—authentic and alive, if a little dreary. For my student-teachers, the real world is a foreboding and depressing place where teachers must teach students the facts of music. Creativity is fine and good, they may tell me, but in the real world there are tests, and grades, and expectations for what we must do. For some researchers, the real world is where authenticity exists, where real music is made on real instruments. Schools, it seems, are neither real nor authentic. Schooling succeeds the more we make classroom activity the preparation of what is rather than the preparation for what might be. A university education succeeds the more its graduates can assume the responsibilities for what already exists “out there.” In either scenario, there is scant vision for a curriculum that is built on a longing to explore. Within these discourses of instrumentality, there is no small amount of what Freire calls “immobilizing fatalism.” He writes, “From the standpoint of such an ideology, only one road is open as far as educative practice is concerned: adapt the student to what is inevitable, to what cannot be changed. In this view, what is essential is technical training, so that the student can adapt, and, therefore, survive.” Band, in North America, for example, is the dominant paradigm in public music education. Thus, music-teacher preparation in North America is largely technical training in band performance. Popular music in Sweden is the dominant paradigm in public music education. Thus,

60

|

Remixing the Classroom

music-teacher preparation in Sweden is largely technical training in popular music performance. To reiterate Freire’s contention, when the future is pregiven, training usurps education. Necessarily, the apprentice model is called on, and calls for experimental learning are given short shrift in favor of a pedagogy of induction. But there is a cost to this imbalance, for students and universities alike. Dewey writes, The teacher who leaves the professional school with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of the psychology, logic, and ethics of development. But later “progress” may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching. . . . Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he can not grow as a teacher, an inspirer and director of soul-life.

Successful teaching is confused with quality teaching. A successful university music-education program is confused with a quality university music-education program. In other words, while demonstrated expertise in classroom control and readiness, coupled with command of what to do and success in when to do it, are part of good teaching, they do not define good teaching. For sure, a university music-teacher-preparation program, one that focuses on skills, technique, and classroom and rehearsal control, may endow the novice teacher with certain advantages on day one. The more an American band director or a Swedish popular music instructor is apprenticed in the mechanics of her craft—tuning a clarinet, assembling a drum kit, supporting a good sound, singing in a microphone, slurring legato on the trombone—the more assured the early career professional will be of her classroom choices. This preparation is important; indeed, it is vital. But the Master-apprentice model is only part of what makes a quality music educator, I contend. Dewey warns us that teaching is larger than craft alone and that later development may “consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching.” Growth is cumulative—this is inevitable. But such routine expertise becomes, without wider considerations that are educational rather than instructional, a continuous narrowing and refining of skill already possessed. Now, I admit that such depth of expertise may bring deep satisfaction to the teacher-performer if the educational landscape in which she teaches remains stable and predictable for the whole of her teaching life. But it is hard to imagine that this scenario will become anything but the exception. An education in routine expertise holds many dangers for the teacher. To illustrate its perils, I turn to the story of Atul Gawande.

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

61

A Case for Diversity Surgeon Atul Gawande, in an autobiographical essay in the New Yorker, takes readers through the beauty and peril of routine expertise. Gawande, like all surgeons, is expected to perform a particular operation intelligently and consistently within the strict restraints of his domain, endocrine surgery. As a representative of routine expertise, the expectations for performance in his domain are highly secure, and he is required to make important judgments within the tight confines of his professional work. Like all routine experts, Gawande was inducted into his profession through long apprenticeship, working systematically toward a highly foreseeable end. His training was carefully undertaken with the ultimate goal of diminishing surprise: During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coordination—you have that down halfway through your residency. . . . Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

In this context, the demonstration of professional judgment is determined within the strictures of a bounded domain. Good judgment is understood as the correct application of procedural know-how, sharpened with experience as one learns to successfully prevent or respond to problems inherent to a domain. This is what praxial philosophy calls musicianship and what medical doctors refer to as professional ethics. What I wish to underscore is that Gawande’s specialization favors a limited rather than an exploratory band of expertise. In medicine, time and experience bring about maturity and confidence. “For my specialized cases,” Gawande writes, “I’ve come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solutions. For the others, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary.” Musicians who have been trained as performers are likely to identify with this notion of expertise—in particular, the deep enjoyment of putting into practice one’s training and exercising appropriate judgment in familiar, though ever-changing, settings. But something unexpected occurred: Gawande reached a plateau. He stopped getting better. “As I went along, I compared my [surgical] results against national data and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.” Gawande, as an elite performer, had a serious problem. The space for judgment and improvisation that previously funded his growth no longer presented adequate

62

|

Remixing the Classroom

challenges. He needed something new, but the Laws of his domain, his form, couldn’t give it to him. Gawande’s development consisted, echoing Dewey, only of perfecting and refining skill already possessed. His professional domain was too secure, and thus his professional development and sense of well-being was threatened. The great problem of elite performance in a closed form is that for growth to continue across a lifespan, expertise needs to be exercised within diverse environments. It is unsurprising that even while Gawande was met with success as a surgeon (at least statistically), he became increasingly dissatisfied personally. He stopped growing. He stopped exploring. Prevented from diversifying his environment for obvious reasons (we want to minimize diversity in the case of a standard surgical procedure), Gawande looked at other specialists in closed-form environments, specifically tennis and classical music. He wanted to see how other routine experts like Itzhak Perlman and Renée Fleming avoided burnout and still continued to grow and be happy. What is interesting in Gawande’s essay is not his conclusion, per se—he ends as an advocate for coaching, for increasing one’s satisfaction with life through tiny advances with the help of a coach. Rather, I am interested in the dilemma his research poses for the preparation of experts in fields that are hostile to innovation, and how a lifetime of growth and happiness can be sustained when one chooses to work in a closed domain. To be sure, innovation occurs all the time in the field of medicine. But Gawande was a surgeon practicing medicine in a specific area of the body, and he was not conducting exploratory research on his patients. Likewise, Itzhak Perlman, whom he interviewed as an elite expert, is a performerexecutant rather than a domain innovator. Yes, creativity occurs in the field of classical music all the time, but Perlman’s violin has not changed; nor is it likely to. Innovation may occur in the rendering of a concerto, but violin literature is fixed to a large extent, and audiences expect a closed repertoire of familiar works. As an executant for the composers he serves, Perlman can no more alter the notes on the page than Gawande can invent a new medical procedure. And those who explore their domain too freely, like the Chinese pianist Lang Lang does so famously, are punished and then labeled unmusical by the Critic. Without the technical capacity to absorb surprise and the disposition to actively seek out and learn from the new and different, routine experts live lives that Freire calls “pre-given,” in which growth diminishes into ever-finer gradations of quality and performance expertise. So fine are these gradations of excellence that the role of the Critic must be invented to help explain to an audience why Itzhak Perlman’s rendering of Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 5 in A Major is better than all the rest, and why we should care. The exquisite shading of an eight-bar phrase or the perfect tuning of a double-stop may be highly satisfying for some and inspirational to a cadre of specialized fans, but when translated into a pedagogy for public music education, this particular ideal of excellence disfigures—or

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

63

refigures—our methods of instruction. As an end, it produces means that may contradict what is actually in the best interest of our students. With a closed concept of achievement as our guiding principle, how often have we seen product becoming more important than process? Replication more important than creativity? What happens to beliefs about instruction when the University of Texas wind ensemble defines excellence for the North American middle school band? Why is Itzhak Perlman a better model for music education than Lang Lang—or for that matter, the fifth-grade Spanish teacher who plays amateur gigs on Friday nights? Some time ago, Lucy Green held up twelve English rockers as a model for music education and subsequently changed much of how music is conceptualized and taught in the United Kingdom. Surely there are others from the black or Latino community to offer up as models of excellence, or others we can’t see because of the lens through which we look. Surely there are a plurality of models, including those offered by Perlman and the University of Texas. So I ask: For whom is excellence determined? In what context? Through what method? Toward what end? I am not against the role of the specialist, in education, art, or life. It goes without saying that democracies require specialists, and that one role of public education is to help children find something important, something they long to uncover and spend time with. Finding out what one is good at and helping others do the same is a diversity-enhancing project that contributes to the general wellbeing of society. But I am concerned that aspects of institutionalized music participation have embedded within their forms certain basic divisions that obstruct rather than enhance the general good of the students in our care. These divisions are set up in ways that are needlessly hierarchical. “These barriers,” writes Dewey in his critique of dualisms, “mean absence of fluent and free intercourse. This absence is equivalent to the setting up of different types of life-experiences, each with isolated subject matter, aim, and standards of value.” Dewey’s longing for openings has something to do with creating continuity across time, seeking out “a network of interconnections [in which] any past experience would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new experience.” Recalling the scenario of W. E. B. Du Bois sitting with Shakespeare, Balzac, and Dumas, Itzhak Perlman might say to me, “I sit with Wagner and he winces not. Across the Jewish ethnic line I move arm and arm with Beethoven and with Brahms. C’mon, Randall. In your plea to teach in the living present, aren’t you contradicting yourself?” In my mind, the questions before us are not whether we should teach Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 5 in A Major or whether our students should read Shakespeare. Nor is the problem one of honoring a particular genre or specialization above another. The questions before us concern the ways in which Mozart and Shakespeare are invited to sit down and speak with us, how they interact with others as invited guests, and how gratefully they receive

64 |

Remixing the Classroom

our welcome. The questions before us deal with open starting points and open endings. Do Mozart and Shakespeare wince at the ways in which our acquaintance is put to use? Do they scorn the assortment of guests with whom they are invited to mingle? After all, these great figures from history may no longer find themselves in gilded halls with powdered wigs. I rather like the idea that Mozart would enjoy a marching band’s arrangement of his Concerto no. 5. His famous childlike disposition may like the open space of a football field, the sounds of a syncopated drum line, and the genial atmosphere of a marching band camp. But let’s be clear. It is not Mozart or Shakespeare who wince in our multicultural company. Standing behind the divisions that give meaning to their roles are the Master, the Critic, and the performer-executant who bring condescension and scorn. The doorkeeper in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” recounted in chapter 1, is the Master who says, “Almost,” and “Not yet,” and “Non—faites-le encore!” It is the Master who decrees that this person is musical but that person is not. Thankfully, this is not the whole story. For Du Bois, art is an ongoing and self-forming relationship across time, an intimate collapse of distance if one so decides, rather than something Goldmann-like, secret with obscure truths and ultimate meanings. For Roland Barthes, “the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic.” It is the fluidity of this network that creates continuity across time; the diversity of its codes affords the reader freedom. In contrast to the Work, “no vital ‘respect’ is due to the Text: it can be broken. . . . [I]t can be read without the guarantee of its father. . . . It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest.’” Is it the forced respect that youth find so unappealing when music teachers bring Mozart into the classroom? What if respect came later, if at all? What if distance were our concern? And diversity? Rather than waiting years to get close to Mozart, what if we were to sit next to him, right away, as close as we could, and ask only that none of us wince?

Keeping the Old Warm, Searching for the New What’s at stake in the preparation of today’s music teacher? What do our children deserve from a public-school music education? University music-teacherpreparation programs matter more now than ever. But we must learn to embrace the same antinomic forces in which our graduates find themselves when they enter the public school. Are we present-tense institutions, keeping the old warm by providing an understanding of the new, as Confucius would have it? Or do we keep the old warm as a comfort to ourselves? Music-teacher-education programs are not conservatories, though we may wish to conserve certain practices and though we may find ourselves housed among conservators. We must assert that our mission is different, that it is tied to an understanding of education as a way

Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise

|

65

of seeing that looks simultaneously ahead and behind. Instruction in music is not the same as education in music. Induction is not the same as expertise. Success is not the same as quality. Parsing these distinctions, debating their implications, and complicating the questions that arise is our charge as we move forward. In the end, we must bring the topics of our debate and our myriad illustrations back to the public schools and the university music-teacher-education program. An important dilemma remains. Just as we studied our craft over decades of practice, perfecting our skills to ever-greater degrees; just as we chose induction into a preferred historical style, apprenticing with great Masters; just as we adopted the learning style of the institutions we attended, normalized by history and context—have we forgotten whom we teach? Do we, in other words, teach a tradition, or do we teach a child? Should we choose to teach children first and share with them our traditions second, we would attend to students’ needs and their desires to explore and could avoid a life of fading narrowness. While our training and subsequent life history may place our growth along a constrained trajectory, we can bend the arrow, so to speak; we can expand our interests and expertise into larger and more diverse arenas. We can grow within our traditions, becoming ever-finer musicians, while experimenting with the surprises that attend a life of openness and curiosity. This is a quality teacher. This is the expertise our students deserve.



Learning in Laboratories

We live, someone has said, in a haphazard mixture of a museum and laboratory. —John Dewey

I

know an English teacher in Brooklyn who was visited by her supervisor and evaluated on her performance, as required by law. Among other things, the supervisor documented that her children took twenty-two seconds to put their books away. “The next time I visit,” the supervisor warned, “I want you to cut this down to twelve.” I shared this story with a colleague some days later, trying to make a point about the bleak conditions of public schooling and the promise of efficiency that is driving the design of today’s instruction. “What would the teacher even do with those extra twelve seconds?” I wondered out loud. “Surely children need time to follow a thought or blow off a little steam.” Without missing a beat, my colleague, a band director from New Jersey, reminded me that instructional efficiency is what music teachers excel at. When it comes to using time effectively, the band director is the envy of every English teacher. I stopped walking. He was right. The renowned excellence of the North American large ensemble setting comes from the fact that director-educators squeeze every second from every rehearsal. Children don’t follow their own thoughts so much as they follow ours. A classroom divisible by seconds is a classroom of overwhelming control, I thought. And wouldn’t such a classroom put a premium on teacher knowledge and learner submission? It was a depressing conversation. This anecdote has something to do with the dominant discourses that have come to define teacher quality at this moment in history, as explored in chapter 2. But it also has something very particular to say about music teachers, the forms we study, and the ways in which these forms are conceived and put into practice. What does it mean that rights and wrongs can be dispatched with the speed of a stopwatch and that learners are kept stimulated every minute of every hour? What does this method say about curriculum and instruction, and about the ways in which classroom environments are created and maintained? I am thinking of my time as a high-school band director when I had to limit the amount of wrongs that I could communicate at any given moment, lest I overload

Learning in Laboratories

|

67

my students. My own saxophone instructor probably thought the same about me: How many wrongs can I dispatch before I overwhelm this young player? I wonder about the differences between the experiences of the Master and the experiences of the apprentice. When I was a band director, why did time fly by so quickly? Because every second counted and there was so much to teach. When I was an apprentice, why did my university lessons go by so slowly? Because every second revealed my inadequacy and there was so much to learn. This chapter is concerned with school spaces and the ways in which music educators shape the formal environments in which music is made and explored. I continue my critique of the closed form by contrasting its educational principles with a concept of instruction that is purposefully open and unfinished, one in which learning takes place over large stretches of time, and inefficiency is its own “value-add.” I continue to seek out a larger vision of what is possible in public-school music classrooms and university music-teacher-education programs. Speaking to performance educators and music-teacher educators alike, I am insistent that the Master-apprentice model is not our profession’s only option. It remains our commonsense option for the simple reasons that musical instruments have always been difficult to play and that the “correct” way to sing has always been difficult to learn. This matters because most university-based music instruction takes place on instruments that were developed in the eighteenth century and do not lend themselves easily to self-mastery or peer learning. So-called “healthy” singing stems from the bel canto style of the eighteenth century, a “natural” technique that cannot be developed at home or with friends. Attached to a host of knowable rights and knowable wrongs is a form of functional literacy—also from the eighteenth century—that is highly structured, intricately coded, and standardized in such a way that effectively excludes novice input or learning through discovery. This is a vocational model of music education, with specialists teaching future specialists. Few would argue that the structure of music-teacher Mastery remains more than a vestigial part of the fabric of post-Enlightenment capitalist ideology, a winner-take-all episteme that extols virtuosity, celebrity, cost-effectiveness, and hierarchy-based roles. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-mayor of New York City was fond of saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In this context of brutal excellence, it may appear ungenerous to point out that the Master-apprentice model is the easiest way to teach. The Master works in a stable domain in which norms are preestablished, expertise is objectively recognized, and ends are measurable and clear—a take-it-or-leave-it learning environment of overwhelming control. The Master needs to know very little about the person he is teaching beyond the sound she is making and the body part that is making the sound. In fact, an effort to consider larger apprentice needs, especially nonsonic concerns, might complicate clear ends and clear means. At its most obvious, it is

68 |

Remixing the Classroom

the Master’s job to fix musical problems that emerge from a lesson by listening for what is right and listening for what is wrong. This assessment-driven system of study is highly effective as long as we don’t factor in the damage that takes place when problems can’t be fixed, or fixed right away. As the story of Johanna (the student, described in chapter 1, who was told by a collection of Masters that she was unmusical and thus unfixable) reminds us, faults lay inherently with the apprentice and rarely with the Master. It may be too late for Johanna to receive this message, but I hereby announce the Master’s demise. His system of control is unsustainable. He must learn to share.

New Visions of Formal Instruction They took the credit for your second symphony Rewritten by machine and new technology . . . Video killed the radio star . . . We can’t rewind; we’ve gone too far —The Buggles The kids are disco-dancing They’re tired of rock and roll I try to tell them, “Hey, that drum machine ain’t got no soul” But they don’t want to listen, no They think they’ve heard it all They trade those guitars in for drum machines and disco balls We can’t rewind now; we’ve gone too far Internet killed the video star —The Limousines

While playing an eighteenth-century instrument may be difficult indeed, digital life has made making music easier than ever. Today, inquisitive interdisciplinarians can learn to play and compose without a Master, outside of an institution, in a style or mixed styles of their choosing. Old-fashioned notions of nontransferable context-specific “musicianship” are giving way to multimodal literacies. Young people—the hackers, gamers, and the curious—are disrupting traditional assumptions about mastery, context, and musicality. They decide for themselves what is good and what is not. We don’t need the Buggles or the Limousines to tell us that technology is making older forms of study obsolete. If video killed the radio star, and if the internet killed the video star, surely the open-text educator will dethrone the closed-form Master. In a world of expanding knowledge, where information is accessible to anyone with a mobile telephone (perform a web search for the term “m-learning” instead of “e-learning”), the Master must come to grips with his partiality. Humbled but hopefully not humiliated, the twenty-first-century music educator can

Learning in Laboratories

|

69

no longer rest on his performance accolades alone; he must concern himself with his students and their world, lest he go the way of the radio star. Foregoing the certainty of closed-form assessment, he must embrace a style of teaching that is much more difficult, one that accepts, and even welcomes, the muddled and messy. Putting aside his ego, he must be willing to make use of school and home; he must find room, if so required, for the drum machine and the disco ball. Above all, he must appeal to the creative impulses of the learners who seek his assistance. Under these circumstances, I predict that sometime very soon, formal musical instruction will no longer be synonymous with the Master-apprentice approach. Technology has opened up spaces that are potentially more cooperative and more socially just than the Master-apprentice model. To that end, and with a spirit of adventure, I gesture in this chapter toward a concept that I call laboratory learning, a space within the strictures and structures of formal music education that embraces the principles of the open text. To illustrate what I mean by a music laboratory, I offer some insights from my own practice. Yet I share Estelle Jorgensen’s caution that in reimagining practice it is “easy to slip into a descriptive mode and address only literal situations in schools or empirical realities in the phenomenal world. . . . [W]hen teachers hear situations described that they believe do not apply to them, they are inclined to dismiss the entire argument. . . . The difficulty of using literal examples is that they are taken literally rather than figuratively.” This problem is compounded by the philosophical stance to which I have subscribed. In making a case for the open classroom, I am making a case for the nontransferable and the ineffable, something place-based and idiosyncratic. Each classroom is different, composed of a specific group of students, with me at this time, with these interests and talents, never to be repeated. My examples cannot be yours—not literally. A certain character or ethos is revealed in the open classroom; that is true. Trying to capture these principles without being dogmatic or prescriptive is an important aim of this chapter. The principles of the laboratory, furthermore, must be tempered by an insistent appeal to norms that remain unfinished or ongoing. This is especially the case if we accept that any teaching act takes place against a backdrop of uncertainty and future surprise. Thus, any literal example must be considered figuratively, as Jorgensen suggests, whether or not the reader’s particular learning environment is commensurate with mine. By way of contrast, it is the Master who offers the assurance that all learning environments can operate in predictable ways.

A Living Union of Thought and the Instruments of Expression Referring to the quote that begins this chapter, laboratories and museums are metaphors that frame an alternative vision of formal music education. At their

70

|

Remixing the Classroom

best, both are locations of what Maxine Greene calls “wide-awakeness,” careful places of observation, experience, and reflection. Museums record innovation; laboratories are spaces where new knowledge is looked for and possibly discovered. Museums, like libraries, are resources: both settings work in mutually reinforcing ways to make invention and preservation possible. While both settings are spaces of heightened experience, what Dewey might call “consummatory” experience, I hope to show that they should not be thought of as somehow apart from life or in contradiction with each other. So integrated did Dewey consider the relationship between the museum and the laboratory that in The School and Society, he composes an imaginary school setting that houses a museum at the center of the building with openings on four sides leading to chemistry, biology, art, and music labs (see figure 3.1). Dewey calls this “a living union of thought and the instrument[s] of expression.” Inspired by Jane Addams’s Hull House and Dewey’s own work at his laboratory school at the University of Chicago, Dewey’s union of innovation and continuity “is symbolized by saying that in the ideal school the art work might be considered to be that of the shops [laboratories, studios, and work spaces], passed through the alembic of library and museum into action again.” It is thrilling to contemplate this circuit of life and learning. The museum is not a building where dead objects go but a living space of invention and reinvention, a vital heart, a

Laboratories Research

Physical and chemical laboratories

University

Library Museum

Biological laboratory

Museum

Art

Music

Figure 3.1 Dewey’s ideal school. From John Dewey, The School and Society, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 1, 1899–1901, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 52.

Learning in Laboratories

|

71

text. The laboratory is a place of patience and action, where knowledge is sent in arterial fashion into the world and back. The school, like life, is alive with its pulse.

The Metaphors of Life and Learning One hundred years later, Dewey’s thought experiment seems like the naïve dream of an out-of-touch liberal. Schools today, in the popular imagination and in actuality, are rarely seen as mixtures of museum and laboratory, as the heart of democratic life. While exceptions exist, and I have visited some of these exceptions in Finland and the United States, one might turn to a darker metaphor to describe the public school, a vision more fitting of our postrecessionary age: the bank and the banking system, a place where every second matters and minutes are counted up like interest on a loan. In Paulo Freire’s concept of education as banking, knowledge is bestowed on the learner as a down payment for further service, a gift with strings attached. “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor . . . in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing deposits.” It appears that all nation-states, regardless of political party, agree that schools are to be held accountable for a country’s wealth and that children are the resources that secure that wealth. But there are other metaphors, too. Why do primary schools in New York City look like prisons, shuttered boxes made of cinder blocks and concrete? Why do public schools in Finland look like college student centers or public libraries? Why do American prep schools look like country clubs, larger and greener than many liberal arts colleges, better maintained and financed than many European and Asian universities? Metaphors about education are important. They “rely on imaginative and subjective understandings that,” according to Jorgensen, “are more amenable to philosophical reflection and qualitative description. . . . Regarding music education metaphorically has the potential to subvert the preeminence of scientific, objective, and rational ways of thinking and doing.” A central theme that governs this book is my search for openings—in classrooms, in aesthetic forms, in the way we think about education and civic life. In chapter 1, I turn to a notion of “text,” Roland Barthes’s understanding of the open aesthetic form, to consider new ways of responding to music and art as educators. The text is (con)sensual with the metaphoric; it is “unstoppable,” Barthes writes. “It cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres.” The concept of the open aesthetic form, I have argued, pushes us to consider ever-unfolding teaching responsibilities. The text, if embraced, points us to alternative conceptions of art, whereby commonsensical notions of (say) excellence or self-expression are contingent on changing needs and circumstances.

72

|

Remixing the Classroom

Institutions can be looked at in ways that are open and closed. This point is critical because they structure our daily interactions and create the conditions for how knowledge is approached and how it is disseminated. For Barthes, in his essay “To the Seminar,” an institution’s structure needn’t determine the quality of relations that take place within its form any more than an Author can determine the final meaning of a Work: “The institution determines a frequency, a schedule, a site. . . . Does it compel us to recognize levels, a hierarchy? Certainly not—at least not here,” at least not in the seminar. Turning the institution from a Work into a text, from a studio into a seminar, Barthes speaks with “(minor) delirium” about the pleasure of mutual learning: “The famous ‘teaching relation’ is not the relation of teacher to taught, but the relation of those taught to each other.” While the Master-apprentice model structures learning in mono-directional ways, the institution within which all manner of education takes place is, in point of fact, inert, a space that can be activated for good or evil. Even the harshest conservatory of music can find room for the seminar—for the text, for the laboratory, for the open form. It goes without saying that course requirements, graduation expectations, required readings, curricular methods, and historical repertoire, as well as the way in which these objects and events are brought to life, are human constructs amenable to critique and change. I take Dewey’s words at the start of this chapter to mean two things. First, there are institutional spaces in life that are devoted to either end of this social dichotomy, physical places that are dedicated to preservation and cultural continuity, like museums and music conservatories, and real-life places that are designed to facilitate innovation and transformation, like the laboratories that build on a culture’s recorded inheritance. As discussed in chapter 2, certain concepts like “public education” or “teacher” can best be understood by examining the tensions generated between these ostensibly opposing forces, creating a classic antinomy for those who study or think deeply about education and society. Recall that an antinomy is a logical paradox that is drawn between two equally plausible though opposing principles, a concept whose defining characteristics cannot be understood apart from the oppositional forces that give it meaning. The institution called “school” is a physical place of inherent contradiction and tension, a location that serves society through the preservation of past accomplishment and agreed-on cultural standards, as well as through the expectation of new discoveries and reimagined practice. Of course, particular schools or universities may favor one end of the continuum over the other, but the opposing tug is always felt and plays a factor in defining an institution’s ethos. Secondly, when Dewey says that life is a haphazard mixture of a museum and laboratory, he is referring to lived experience, to the forces of a sedimentary past of accomplishments and trials and a living present that contains new hopes and problems, unfolding tensions that continually make and remake an

Learning in Laboratories |

73

individual moving through life’s uncertainties. Accordingly, we are each a messy storeroom of memories, traditions, and experiences—some cobwebbed, some dusted off, some reimagined—that make teaching decisions possible. Teachers are not bound to the past ipso facto; nor is our past in inherent contradiction with our present. Rather, human agency is funded by previous experience: any choice freely made is one in which our inner museum is called on when confronted by new uncertainties, when we compare the results of a new experience to past achievements or failures. Constructivist pedagogies, which scholars trace back to Dewey’s lab school in Chicago, help the learner use past experiences to make sense of and shape new tomorrows. While Dewey didn’t use the words “constructivist” or “constructivism” per se, preferring to emphasize the recursive nature of learning by emphasizing “re-” words like reconstruct, revitalize, and renew, it is fair to say that Dewey-inspired constructivist pedagogy has been underutilized as a teaching strategy in music education because of our discipline’s emphasis on teacher control and learner submission. For better or worse, the Master suffers an uneasy relationship with the laboratory side of life, with the forces of innovation. Throughout history, apprentice learning has often been replaced when a new technology comes along, whether that technology is the conveyor belt, new media, or rock and roll. Still, choosing to learn any craft well takes time, and learning to play a musical instrument takes a remarkable amount of time. Because so many structural resources need to be invested in the learner, the Master-apprentice model fits well within an institutional culture. “Formal apprenticeship has important cognitive characteristics,” writes Dan Lortie. “The neophyte is ushered through a series of tasks of ascending difficulty and assumes greater responsibility as his technical competence increases. Apprenticeship illustrates the learning principle of ‘simple to complex sequence.’” Ends are clearly defined, means are norm-governed, work is face-toface and hands-on, and everything is contextually located. Barthes understands apprenticeship as a gradient place where procedural know-how, close observation, and context are core values: The “master” . . . works for himself in the apprentice’s presence; he does not speak, or at least he sustains no discourse; his remarks are purely deictic: “Here,” he says, “I do this in order to avoid that. . . .” A proficiency is transmitted in silence, a spectacle is put on (that of praxis), to which the apprentice, taking the stage, is gradually introduced.

Efficient because there is no need for debate, and economical because all remarks deal with execution, an education of this sort prepares the learner to inherit the Master’s stage, to assume the responsibilities of one’s chosen domain after years of patient study. This conceptualization calls to mind Vivaldi’s Pio Ospedale della Pietà or the Flemish studio of an Old Master.

74 |

Remixing the Classroom

It is important to emphasize that music-teacher candidates are often stifled as much as funded by their museum side, and research suggests that our past experiences, especially when they were experienced as positive or transformational, can be roadblocks to reimagining practice. This makes sense. A new orchestra conductor will draw on her experiences as an apprentice when she is confronted with problems in her own classroom ensemble. She may remember specific methods her teacher used to effect positive results and employ these as teaching strategies. Every music-teacher educator, furthermore, recognizes that preservice music-education majors are often driven by a desire to duplicate their personal histories on behalf of a new generation of learners, passing on traditions that gave meaning to their lives. It is in this manner that our museum side may limit our ability to imagine musical learning environments in new ways. New historical circumstances, new technologies, changing demographics, evolving cultures—these conditions provide the rationale for the protection of preexisting musical forms, but they make evident the impossibility of replication as the end of formal music education. I emphasize the need to appeal to both aspects of the teacher-and-school antinomy, as when tradition tugs us one way and innovation tugs us another. Creativity is located in the tension between these two forces. To make a case for more creativity and learner relevance in the music classroom, I refer to museums and laboratories metaphorically and literally as (1) those physical locations that protect, structure, and fund new knowledge, and (2) the subjectivities of inner life that are employed in testing out new experiences and making sense of their results. Teachers can refuse the tensions that define their work, and many do. But the burden is on all of us, not just the Master, to embrace the discomfort of the new.

The Principle of Circulation The museum as closed form is easy enough to envision. My mind conjures an empty gallery of watercolor rowboats or those insipid pink cupids perpetually falling from the sky, paintings that inspire me to keep on walking. Or the pitiful rows of dusty lutes, inlaid with mother of pearl, silenced in glass cases. The classroom curriculum can be frozen, too, even as its manuscripts of great works cycle through generations of students. Here the classroom-as-museum is a fundamentalist reserve, a bureaucracy in which objects, experiences, and events exist as prevalued and canonic; in which meanings have been worked out by others from another time; and in which the chief business is to transmit these meanings to others, regardless of their culture or context. The frozen museum is partly what Dewey meant by “old education,” in which an idea or object is “taught as a finished product, with little regard either to the ways in which it was originally built up or to changes that will surely occur in the future. It is to a large extent

Learning in Laboratories |

75

the cultural product of societies that assumed the future would be much like the past, and yet it is used as educational food in a society where change is the rule, not the exception.” The laboratory can be a closed form of education, too, as when the processes of investigation and discovery are abstracted from life outside, or when scientists or artists confuse invention with inquiry. The great composer Milton Babbitt was famously unconcerned with public life (like so many writers and composers before and after), satisfied that his creations pleased himself and a few others in the know. For the laboratory to be public—to be open—it must be, like the museum, more than just a space of safety. “The misconception which identifies art with what is remote, high-flown or artificial is paralleled by another which confines science to the laboratory or lecture hall,” writes Albert C. Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Foundation, a museum purposely designed as an educational institution—a laboratory—to express the educational and aesthetic theories of his friend John Dewey. “Science is science,” Barnes continues, “not because of laboratory apparatus or words of a technical vocabulary are employed, but because observation and reflection are joined and correlated by methods that have proved themselves to be illuminating and fruitful.” Science is science, Barnes seems to say, when science becomes a public good. At the very least, we can question the validity of those scientific and aesthetic experiments that fail to illuminate human life, if in their autonomy they fail to engage the layman. Not only refusing a conversation with the public but also denying the very concept of shared experience or mutual interest, Babbitt defends the closed concept of the laboratory and the closed concept of the museum: I say all this not to present a picture of a virtuous music in a sinful world, but to point up the problems of a special music in an alien and apposite world. And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition. By so doing, the separation between the domains would be defined beyond any possibility of confusion of categories, and the composer would be free to pursue a private life of professional achievement, as opposed to a public life of unprofessional compromise and exhibitionism.

Recall the circulation of knowledge that is represented in Dewey’s vision of the public school, where the museum sits at the center with its doors wide open. The school or university does not withdraw from public service but is integrated into the whole of social life. Here the child applies to daily life what she learned in school. In return, the conditions of daily life fuel her interest in formal learning. Ideally, the relationships captured in this conceptualization of public schooling

76

|

Remixing the Classroom

suggest the classic chicken-and-egg riddle. Which comes first? An interest developed in school, which is applied to life outside? Or is an interest developed outside school later shaped and clarified in school? The public will judge a school excellent the more the origins of student knowledge are so happily confused. The university is judged excellent when exploration confuses as much as clarifies categories, when public and private intelligence commingle. Thus, the danger for Barnes, a chemist by training, occurs when the activity of learning is closed off and becomes self-referential, as when (1) specialists teach initiates who are new to a discipline as if they were future specialists rather than intrepid explorers, keeping their discipline in private hands, or when (2) a tradition remains satisfied with its methods and standards of operation, mistaking the activity of the lab with science or the activity of the practice room with music. Describing the laboratory as a space of open circulation, like the school and the museum, Barnes writes, As the problems crystalize, possible solutions take form in the realm of hypothesis, and it is in the laboratory that these receive their first experimental test; but the testing is never complete until the course of reflection has flowed out into the world again, and human activities there have been given wider scope and a richer meaning.

It may seem contradictory to think of the laboratory as a closed space, given its appearance as a place of problem solving and experimentation. As Dewey and Barnes remind us, its discoveries must flow out into the world and enrich and enlarge the world (and returning, “pass through the alembic of library and museum into action again”). Jazz, by way of example, was once the United States’ original laboratory music, born in fusion with a mandate to circulate and evolve. But to many American critics, contemporary jazz artists in the United States have confused codes and contexts with experimentation and exploration, employing a tenaciously held form of technical know-how as a substitute for invention. Elsewhere across our music curricula, teachers promote improvisation as the exercise of a remote musical faculty, an independent mental state that is often called “critical thinking.” It is true that improvisation can be highly coded and learned by rote, but it can also be the means by which a child tests a hypothesis or reads the changes in her world. Improvisation, in my mind, is about finding something out as much as expressing something learned. I worry that popular music in US public schools will take on the appearance of the laboratory but retain the techniques of the Master. It would be easy to teach popular music didactically, like any other established form: from a teachercentered position, with lots of rights and wrongs and lots of step-by-step instruction. Barnes’s words about science can be reappropriated: music is music “not because of laboratory apparatus or words of a technical vocabulary are employed,

Learning in Laboratories

|

77

but because observation and reflection are joined and correlated by methods that have proved themselves to be illuminating and fruitful.” A popular music laboratory would be centered on composing as much as on learning repertoire and following rules. The point, of course, is that students make something illuminating or invent something meaningful and test it in a public arena. In this sense, the ideal laboratory is not a finalized space or a specific methodology that can be pointed to. It must be larger than the room in which its investigations are housed and deeper than the activity of teaching. Borrowing Barthes’s concept of the seminar, the lab must be unstoppable as it moves in and out of hierarchies, methods, contexts, and structured norms. I seek a resurrected vision of museums and museum music, in which past accomplishments inform new engagements and the other way around. I seek a vision of laboratory learning that engages the traditional without worshipping the past, a vision of learning that is funded by personal history and one that engages learners in idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and nonhierarchical ways. As part of this larger exploration, I move now to a renewed appreciation of tradition as a source for innovation and present-tense meaning, which David Hansen calls a “living tradition.” The laboratory, in this sense, cannot exist without the museum. The museum, informing the work of the laboratory, is alive with innovation.

The Museum as Living Tradition Consider the public trust that is placed on teachers in a democratic society. The teacher is expected to draw the child into important domains of knowledge and experience that will secure the child’s success in the world outside school. Ostensibly, it is our responsibility to engage the child with the facts of that world, to teach her what is and what isn’t. As music educators, we are expected to teach students “first principles”: the basics, the elements of music—what sounds good and what doesn’t. We want our students to sing, to play in tune, and to hold a steady beat. These are important values and we pass them on because they are part of a commonsense approach to what we believe it is our public responsibility to do. Yet because many of these tenets have fixed ends and appear “natural,” contemporary music teachers may have difficulty understanding why students may be insufficiently appreciative of our efforts, why they may resist or fail to value them. An increasingly pluralistic world exasperates our commonsense practices. Why aren’t children singing anymore, we are wont to ask? Why is no one practicing? Why do choirs sound worse each year? What has gone so wrong, and why? These were questions that my colleague Heidi Westerlund, of the Sibelius Academy, and I heard again and again at the fortieth anniversary of the Tanglewood Symposium, where a selected group of music teachers and researchers met

78 |

Remixing the Classroom

for a weeklong discussion of the most difficult questions of our time. Another topic at this seminal conference revolved around the question of literature and the programming of concerts. Topics that involved youth culture, social media, and multicultural education repeatedly directed interlocutors to uncertainty: What, then, should we teach? In a world that is riven by innovations in technology and rapidly changing tastes, What music do we teach our children? In the book that came out of these discussions, Wynton Marsalis suggests that we have “forgotten to embrace the arts we developed over hard fought centuries. We have an embarrassment of artistic riches in trust. And, we’re not collecting our inheritance.” He goes on, “When you don’t consider the song of yourself, you become lost. And when you’re lost, you do lost things. And, if you are lost long enough, you stop looking to be found.” His cries, addressed to music educators in the United States, are replete with heartfelt frustration: In this time of redefining the American identity, who will teach our young the rituals of romance through dance? Who will have the courage to teach the most heroic songs and stories of what we have done all over this land and demand that the best of who we are be the national story? . . . Who will sing the living tale of America to our kids to counter-state the emptiness of catchy slogans and rescue them from the isolation of technological gadgets?

I take seriously these questions and their underlying ideology. (Let me say, however, that I make an appeal for getting lost and doing lost things in chapter 4.) Marsalis is the closest the United States may have to a public intellectual for the arts, and many music educators across the globe share his panic. His concern that a great cultural inheritance has been left to spoil, a public trust left uncollected, is deeply felt and deserves interrogation in a globalist world. What sense could we possibly make of our present lives as artists and as citizens if we were to turn our backs to the very traditions that made present experiences possible? Shouldn’t music schools be more like art museums, shelters in a storm of banality and change? Shouldn’t music educators everywhere locate their greatest songs (the folk songs of the Karelia in northeastern Finland or of the southern United States or haunting pentatonic melodies of China’s Mongolian territory) and teach them to a new generation, lest they evaporate into the past, never to be recovered? It is important to point out that no human being exists outside of a tradition, that all persons are unique amalgamations of multiple inheritances and cultural intersections, and that all manner of new traditions are being made and remade at this very moment. Rhetorically, I want to know: How do traditions become traditions, after all? Do their practitioners know that they are making a Tradition during moments of discovery and reinvention? I doubt it. Did hip-hop artists set out to “make” a Tradition when they played around with the resources of their

Learning in Laboratories

|

79

day? I am thinking of characters we met in chapter 1, Lawmakers and Lawbreakers like Dapper Dan, Goldmann, and Jiro Ono. Why should an older generation enjoy the deep satisfaction of inventing something new—based on what came before, which later becomes a tradition, a code, or “context”—but the young get only hand-me-downs, frozen dinners from another age? Ralph Waldo Emerson made a similar appeal to a group of teachers and students not far from Tanglewood, Massachusetts, some time ago. Like Marsalis, Emerson’s appeal dealt with the problem of tradition in a changing world. What do we owe our forebears when history has shown us that an inheritance is always an imperfect fit with the present? When Emerson said that each age “must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding,” he emphasized the mutuality between past and present, accenting the acute tension between preservation and invention that sparks new forms of expression. To think of young people as “needing” tradition bothers me. Perceiving youth as outsiders to society is approaching their lives from a deficit point of view. If I can’t “see” your culture or your tradition, your life will appear empty to me. If your reading of a text doesn’t make sense to me, you will need fixing—or silencing. Or maybe I don’t value the way you sing or the music you play or listen to, in which case I will teach you the correct way to sing or play or listen, and I will elevate your taste. But youth aren’t lost in their tastes, moving aimlessly without purpose, like so many fairy-tale children lost in the woods. Nor do they need rescue from technology; that simply isn’t possible. And while Marsalis’s and others’ calls for a shared cultural identity in the United States reveal the Master’s uneasiness with the laboratory side of life, at their worst, these appeals suggest there exists a ready-to-teach shared cultural narrative, an ideal way of being American, which is a position I disavow for any nationality or ethnic group. One has only to consider whose stories would be left out. Whose rituals would count more, and whose would count less? It is not my point to take aim at those who wish to conserve one tradition or another. Nor do I quibble with those who would disallow the languishing of a historical tradition that is unable to compete in the marketplace of popular taste. My intention is to engage with the prevailing discourses that frame everyday debates in music education. The problem with asking why children aren’t singing anymore is that it assumes that there is or ought to be a connection between the tradition and culture of the teacher and the desires of her students, that there is or ought to be a parallel between what she learns in a music-teacher-preparation program and what she ends up teaching in school. To concern oneself with appropriate literature and professional training is to begin a conversation about the multiplicity of needs that an increasingly diverse classroom requires. It is to begin a conversation about the potential role that the public school plays in assisting the newly arrived or those whose lives fall outside the dominant culture.

80

|

Remixing the Classroom

It is to talk about a circulation of shared interests between the university and the public school, between market demands and professional preparation. The Helsinki Philharmonic or Jazz at Lincoln Center function as independent institutions in a democratic society, holding steady to their respective missions amid larger societal changes. Likewise, a conservatory of music may wish to maintain a museum-like dedication to certain historical styles of music. All such institutions are presented with questions of programming and stakeholder fit, like the kind that public-school music teachers consider everyday. Should the Helsinki Philharmonic perform more music by female composers? Should Jazz at Lincoln Center perform more works by young composers? Should the Juilliard School admit highly qualified folk musicians? How these questions are answered defines an institution’s mission as open or closed. By contrast, the public school must strive to be open. Rather than regarding questions about diversity as a nuisance and a distraction, and rather than implicitly blaming students for historic and ongoing changes in style and taste, the public school must accept the tensions that these questions provoke and follow them where they lead. Neither the public school nor a university music-teacher-preparation program is permitted the kind of independent attitude that other nonprofits or set-aside conservatories may enjoy. The public schools and the universities that prepare their teachers must address the questions that emerge from a society’s changing demographic needs. A haphazard mixture of museum and laboratory, the public school must consider the well-being and growth of those in its care, a moral obligation that is forever unfinished and fraught with peril. (Like debates about programming, debates about teacher preparation are essential, if not forever unfinished and fraught with peril.) Are children singing less? This is the wrong question, Westerlund and I concluded. It is more likely that singing has changed. If the notion of singing has changed, then what is our public response to this new condition, and how is our response related to student well-being and growth? If the notion of singing has changed, then how are university music-teacher-preparation programs preparing teachers to grapple with this new condition? The point for public-school music teachers and university music-teacher educators to consider is that there is a stark difference between a tradition that is alive and a tradition that is merely enacted. Yes, we can teach traditions to children. But unless a tradition is embodied, unless its norms are made adaptable, unless its tenets illuminate public concerns, the tradition will remain one more imposition on the lives of young people, reinforcing the stereotype of formal learning as closed and closed off. Recall that a tradition remains vital only when it embodies some kind of mutuality between preservation and innovation, between museum and lab, between school and society. “The sense of tradition means something other than enacting a particular version of tradition,” writes David Hansen. “Rather than turning a teacher’s gaze backward, with an eye

Learning in Laboratories |

81

on regaining a lost world, a sense of tradition encourages a teacher to see heror himself as a being in time, as a person responsible for ensuring that things of value—knowledge, understandings, outlooks—endure in a dynamic way for future generations.” There is a generosity and trust in this vision of a living tradition. I hope to show that such a vision requires a plurality of ends and a commitment to open up those commonsense teaching practices that attempt to secure cultural norms at the expense of surprise and relevance. A study of living traditions may also help us rephrase commonsense questions, like What music do I teach? to questions that encourage mutuality, like What music can we make together? It may help us move from befuddling questions, like What tradition do I teach? or Whose tradition do I teach? to the profound and plural questions of What traditions can we make together? What traditions can we bring to life?

The Paradox of Living Traditions On Dewey’s gravestone, on the campus of the University of Vermont, in a nook beside the kind of steepled red-brick building that brings to mind college architecture across New England, there is the following inscription, the meaning of which lies in counterpoint to the crabgrass and lichen that enfold its pale New Hampshire granite: The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.

Museum nouns like “heritage” and “conservation” blend in stunning mutuality with laboratory gerunds like “rectifying” and “expanding.” Was Dewey speaking to arts educators, or does it just appear this way? “Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding.” At the heart of a teacher’s work is a bond forged across ages, a trust that we are given—inserted as we are, at this moment in time—to help preserve and rectify, to transmit and expand. This is a socially just vision, one of conservation with expanding welcome, freedom with care and concern, and continuity with rectitude and humbleness. Attend as well to the overtones of suffering and confusion in this account of life on earth. Are we too attached to our moment in time, I wonder? Do we fail to appreciate that others who come after us will enjoy the world as deeply as we do now? Our job is to secure the conditions—nothing more—such that a new generation can make something of happiness out of their moment in time. More needs to be said about this paradoxical notion of a living tradition, our haphazard mixture of museum and laboratory. For Hansen, “tradition in teaching

82

|

Remixing the Classroom

is not something determinate”; rather, it “undergoes more or less constant modification and adjustment.” Any tradition has certain practices and expectations; that much is sure. Traditional blues can stray only so far from the harmonic and rhythmic characteristics that make up the form before the communication of its language is lost among differing signifiers. The teaching tradition has certain expectations that look different across time, but the public-school teacher must always grapple with the antinomic forces of continuity and transformation that shape her job. All professional and artistic traditions—if they are to remain open, generously shared, and expanding parts of society—must have the option of growing beyond what another generation has determined good or right. A twenty-first-century music teacher should not be identical to one from the 1970s; nor should a university band director or a university music-teacher-education program. Today’s living blues—open, generously shared, and expansive—should not sound identical to Ma Rainey or Ida Cox; nor should today’s living big bands and church choirs sound like yesterday’s. “Tradition and its voice alter, if ever so slightly, with the entrance onto the scene of each new teacher who brings to bear a distinctive, if still evolving, intellectual and moral sensitivity,” writes Hansen. I want to point out that Hansen is drawing from a Deweyan understanding of aesthetics and public arts education in a democratic society. His vision of a living tradition gestures to the public-school music teacher and the educational mandate that defines her job, as well as to the needs of the learner to integrate the old with the new. Dewey’s perspective, thus, may not apply to all manner of music instruction everywhere. Indeed, one might very well wish to study a particular tradition from a specific time and place in history, say, early bebop or baroque harmonic counterpoint. Learning in this context is advanced by the direct instruction afforded by a great Master. In contrast, Hansen’s music teacher is a facilitator, experimentalist, and expert guide. This teacher is not the Master-insider who inducts his apprentice into culturally specific context-dependent procedural practices, nor the Master-performer who employs a fixed-end model of transmission and induction favoring mostly or only the conservative side of schooling’s mandate, nor the Master-as-father who chooses wisely for another. The latter describes the curatorial pedagogy found in most conservatories today, a philosophy of artistic apprenticeship that was crystalized in David Elliott’s highly influential book on music education in the late twentieth century, Music Matters. Elliott has continued to expand this vision of pastoral care into the new century, now with coauthor Marissa Silverman. What counts as music circulates within the strictures of a given community, they write. Mentors, in turn, “shape preferences and decisions (formally and informally) about what counts as ‘musical’ in a specific context of musicing and listening. . . . They ask musicers and listeners to respect and work within present boundaries.” They continue:

Learning in Laboratories

|

83

Music students enter into a mentor-apprentice relationship with musically proficient teachers who shape the actions and interactions of the musical practicum in relation to the knowings, values, standards, and traditions of carefully chosen music cultures. Educative, effective, efficient, ethical, and joyful teaching and learning exhibits itself in a teacher’s judgments about the kinds of knowing and types of curriculum that it’s most appropriate or desirable for students to experience.

Here, the center of gravity is the Master, the tradition, the literature and its codes—rarely is the center of gravity on the learner, whose joy is expressed in her Master’s judgment. Such an orientation is typical, Dewey would say, of old education: its passivity of attitude, its mechanical massing of children, its uniformity of curriculum and method. It may be summed up by stating that the center of gravity is outside the child. It is in the teacher, the textbook, anywhere and everywhere you please except in the immediate instincts and activities of the child himself. On that basis there is not much to be said about the life of the child.

For Dewey, old education puts preservation in opposition to innovation, rather than seeing these opposing forces in some kind of counterpoint. Analogously, for Freire, the child is too often in opposition to the teacher. In both instances, the object is more important than the subject. In traditionalist or banking approaches to learning, there is little room for the novice to explore the reaches of a tradition, and there is little room for the teacher or student to decenter a method of study. Thus, there is a difference, as Hansen writes, between traditionalism, understood as a backward-looking reactionary attitude toward change, and tradition or “a sense of tradition,” understood as a reflective response to new influence while retaining reflective loyalty to timehonored ideals and values. A feeling for tradition, as contrasted with traditionalism, helps people grasp what it means to leave home in the walled-in sense of the term while also remaining at home—and esteeming it—in a windows open sense.

This vision recalls the riddle that Dewey poses, of “conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” A tradition—qua life—is enlarged, not by the number of initiates who enter in and obey but by the free association of diverse individuals in the muddlesome pursuit of meaning and inquiry. This is not to say that the curious novitiate who knocks on the door of a great and worthy tradition and freely elects to abide by the norms that govern the execution of its context-specific practices may not find inordinate satisfaction in submission to its rule (think Frank Sinatra tribute bands, Beethoven quartets,

84

|

Remixing the Classroom

or Gabonese drumming traditions). Nor should it be supposed that a traditionalist musician is merely “enacting” a tradition. As mentioned in chapter 2, the routine expert grows in knowledge and judgment across a span of time and experience; his trajectory may be narrow and deep by choice but never completely static. In chapter 1, the point is made that there is freedom in every interpretation of a musical work and every shading of a phrase. I emphasize that there is nothing morally wrong with a private citizen’s obedience to a specific style or to the notated wishes of a long-ago composer. Nor is there anything wrong with a child who willingly chooses to specialize early in her life, becoming enamored with the music of Bach and the sound of the harpsichord. I consider the role of specialization in open learning environments in the next section. Until then, I simply wish to underscore that a traditionalist pedagogy fails the test of a publicschool music education or a university music-teacher education if its aims direct practices that contradict the purpose of public education, if its practices become more important than the child, if its Master is unwilling to adapt to its practices for educational rather than merely musical ends, if all children are treated to an ethos of specialization without regard to difference or need, and if its pedagogical ends narrow more than enlarge future opportunity. I am concerned with public schooling in a pluralistic democracy. And traditions in schools are enacted rather than lived when they move in mono-directional fashion, like the teacher who bestows his tradition on his classroom like a gift but without generosity, welcome, or concern for the impinging forces of past and future, like the teacher who uses popular music as a one-lane bridge to classical music rather than conceiving of educational and musical exchange as free-moving. Recall Hansen’s distinction between tradition and traditionalism. The latter is a doctrinal perspective in which the past forms the basis of our beliefs, theories, and policies; it calls to mind our earlier discussion of the banking concept of education. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire writes, Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. . . . They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become collectors or cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the people themselves who are filed away through lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.

I worry that well-intentioned conservators issue the traditions they think others should value, or assume that the artistic procedures and processes of an earlier generation are compelling enough in extant form that they need no classroom reconstruction or revitalization. It is the nature of schooling that children receive, memorize, and repeat. But this is nothing more than mere enactment if initiates aren’t trusted—at all stages of the learning process—with the creative

Learning in Laboratories

|

85

capacity to make the work they do personally meaningful in concrete ways. I hold, furthermore, that there is no magical point or developmental stage at which a learner can suddenly be trusted to employ creativity and critical thinking, play expressively, change a rule, or take a walk. A living tradition must start openly and progress openly. In the next section, I describe what an open music classroom looks like. In spite of the long history in Western classical art music in which the teacher is celebrated as the Master of his tradition, and in which the teacher is recognized through demonstrated performance excellence, universities need to reconsider how they will prepare the next generation of public-school music teachers, as well as what a university music educator looks like and can do. Rather than the Master-apprentice as Master-performer, the music teacher of the future will be an expert guide, a Jack- or Jill-of-many-trades, a facilitator-educator who uses the multiple traditions at his or her disposal (including traditions that students bring with them and are experts in) to fund learners with the greatest capacity to make the widest range of decisions to benefit their long-term growth. Refusing the passivity of traditionalism and its banking pedagogy of collection and objectification, I sketch the music-education laboratory. “For as the very word laboratory suggests,” writes Dewey, “there is action, there is work, there is labor involved in it.” From the Latin laborare (to work) comes the laboratorium, a place equipped for experimental study, observation, and practice for testing, analysis, and exploration.

Learning in Laboratories The term “laboratory” “is of course usually confined to the scientific laboratory, that of physics, chemistry or biology,” writes Dewey. But the idea inherent in the word extends further than this restriction. The first great characteristic of a laboratory is that in it there is carried on an activity, an activity which involves contact with technical equipment, as tools, instruments and other apparatus, and machinery which require the use of the hands and the body. There is dealing with real materials and not merely, as in the old, traditional education, with the symbols of learning.

At first glance this appears to be a literal description of a learning laboratory— and, of course, it is, with busy children manipulating the discrete tools of an industry or art. But Dewey also describes an orientation to education and schooling. Recall figure 3.1, Dewey’s sketch of a vision of the public school. The museum, understood literally and figuratively, with its collection of traditions and past accomplishments, with its assembly of minds and its compendiums of texts, has open doors—it is designed to expand and rectify the heritage of values collected therein. Traffic moves freely, not merely from museum to lab or from

86 |

Remixing the Classroom

encyclopedia to activity, and circulates in all directions, from learner to learner and learner to teacher and back. In this vision, the museum is more like a lending library or wiki-space, a public collection of knowledge and information that is amended, added on to, and treasured. With continuity and inquiry as its defining mission, the public-school-aslaboratory-as-museum must be necessarily learner-focused (a better descriptor than child-centered, perhaps), and if there is a Master directing its activities, then the principles of his discipline must be tested out and deemed useful—or not—by his apprentices. In this activity-privileged setting, there is a distinction between discovering knowledge or meaning and taking information. “I think the laboratory gives a good example of what I mean,” Dewey writes. “The individual has to be using his hands, doing things, but his experimenting in the laboratory is not simply running wild and at random. He has to have enough physical activity to see that his ideas are made definite and precise; that he is getting principles rather than taking information on faith at the word of the teacher or textbook.” Throughout his life, Dewey bristled at the ways in which progressive education was characterized, famously debating the traditionalist Robert Maynard Hutchins about the purpose of a liberal education. “The sound idea that education should derive its materials from present experience and should enable leaners to cope with the problems of the present and future has often been converted into the idea that progressive schools can to a very large extent ignore the past,” Dewey warns, and for him, “new education” can make no sense without the old; continuity and inquiry are part of the antinomic forces that make up a multicultural democracy. I reemphasize this point because in characterizing the aims of a laboratory education, it must be understood that the laboratory cannot exist apart from the museum side of life (even if some museums or museumminds choose never to accommodate the laboratory). If it sounds like I am about to make a rehash of worn-thin constructivist bromides (and yes, my sympathies are deeply constructivist, epistemologically and pedagogically), I make no apologies. But let me suggest something else that may be going on at this moment in time. I believe that some kind of sociopedagogical mutation is occurring in schools and outside them, a change in learning and knowledge making that might move music educators beyond past appeals for constructivist classrooms—too often ignored or misunderstood—and into new territories of collective experience. Call it what you will, but a dramatic technology-driven social experiment is unfolding before our eyes with all manner of danger and opportunity, one that affects and is affected by the forces of digital media, moving information, participatory culture, and the economics of sharing. Its yeomen are the gamers, programmers, ecologists, and open-source artists of our new century. The laboratory concept of learning, I contend, both portends and inhabits a new way of living in the world; its investigative impulses—at once

Learning in Laboratories

|

87

deeply unstable and nonauthoritative, webbed and web-making—are congruent with the aesthetic turn that I describe in chapters 1 and 2: the turn from the Work concept of art to the postmodern notion of the text. In this rehash of constructivism (“hash,” after all, is a mostly delicious amalgam of the new and the leftover), I am moved to embrace circulatory concepts like riffing, hacking, tinkering, and regifting. I want to suggest that educational inquiry can be playful and unencumbered by the modernist conceits of creativity. The laboratory, which once brought to mind white Bell Labs coats and test tubes, is in mutation, too. Its subjectivities call into question what it means to invent something new, as we see in the next section. It is in this context that I reannounce the Master’s demise. Once upon time, a word like “authenticity” could be used to describe “real” music or a representative performance practice. In Leo Tolstoy’s writings on aesthetics, three conditions are required to make art: individuality, clarity, and sincerity. These highly subjective qualities add up to the concept of authenticity, which became one more Law that was controlled by the Master (or his henchman, the Critic). Yet even as music in the university continues to privilege closed concepts like authenticity, talent, and genius, and even as it yearns for the highly personal statement and the sincere interpretation from its performer-executants, interdisciplinarians outside its system (todays’ aesthetic ecologists) are, according to Susan McClary, “reveling in the rubble” of modernism’s wake. These revelers are the envy of Kenneth Goldsmith (also known as Kenny G), a celebrated poet who aspires to uncreative genius by limiting the source material for his work (including his nickname) to what others have left behind. Goldsmith writes, In music, sampling—entire tracks constructed from other tracks—has become commonplace. From Napster to gaming, from karaoke to torrent files, culture appears to be embracing the digital and all the complexity it entails— with the exception of writing, which is still mostly wedded to promoting an authentic and stable identity at all costs.

His sense is that the typical classical art form “is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again [Do we need another modernist symphony?], confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and is unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time.” What would it mean to investigate this world? I want to explore its reaches, in time and across time. This is the role of the laboratory in public music education, funded by the museum, located in the moving present. We needn’t do away with concepts like individuality, clarity, and sincerity—at least not altogether. Tolstoy offers these criteria as a way to democratize art, suggesting, like Dewey does in Art as Experience, that an aesthetic encounter isn’t restricted to the concert hall or a stained glass window. I want to see aesthetic criteria from the past

88

|

Remixing the Classroom

destabilized and thrown into strange combination. I want to see standards of practice challenged, norms negotiated or refigured, and contexts confused. I offer this vision as a potentially emancipatory stance, a socially just correction to the Laws and limits that frame too much of formal music education. If continuity and inquiry define the laboratory concept of music education, it is our job to reclaim and repurpose the Law; it is our pleasure to riff on words like “excellence,” “talent,” “creativity,” and “genius” until they lose their oppressive features and give way to something new and beautiful.

A Longing for Openings Our gathering is small, to safeguard not its intimacy but its complexity. —Roland Barthes

The activity of the laboratory is work, if by work we mean activity that is directed to specific ends and ignited by a question or problem. It is labor “only as the activities are onerous, undergone as mere means by which to secure a result.” The practice room is the setting for labor, for the assigned étude and scales at 144. The laboratory, or Barthes’s “seminar” (the terms are collapsible and share the values of exploration and open-ended learning), is a place where play becomes work and work becomes play. For Dewey (as for Barthes), “play remains as an attitude of freedom from subordination to an end imposed by external necessity, as opposed, that is, to labor; but it is transformed into work in that activity is subordinated to production of an objective result. No one has ever watched a child intent in his play without being made aware of the complete merging of playfulness with seriousness.” Here is an institutional space, free from external subordination, where serious work is so joyfully encountered that labor is locked in the practice room and energy is directed to the production of a desired end. I can speak to an abundant sense of “serious play” in the courses I teach, and I can recall memories of classes in which a teacher left me so energized that the exercise of my study felt effortless. To be sure, experimentation and invention needn’t require the test tubes and cold machinery of a literal laboratory. As mentioned earlier, any institutional space can be made open, can be transformed to appeal to a learner’s sense of exploration and freedom. But the laboratory is a peculiar space, embryonic and self-referential but equally connected to the world outside the school. It is serious and playful, directed and free moving; it is concerned with norms and standards but always reaching beyond. “We should not be surprised,” Barthes writes, “if the seminar is somewhat ‘giddy,’ too: displaced beyond meaning, beyond the Law, abandoned to a certain minor euphoria, ideas being generated as though by chance, indirectly, from flexible listening, from a sort of swing of the attention.”

Learning in Laboratories

|

89

I am thinking about my past, about my early coursework with Lee Pogonowski at Teachers College, when improvisations and class discussions often instigated a terrible case of the giggles. These were moments beyond meaning, if I understand Barthes: insight beyond fact, experience beyond description, a euphoria that is only understood in the present (now past), une jouissance. But the laboratory is not a Lawless realm; it “is not simply running wild and at random.” It is a space where the Law remains a guest, where Lawmaking and Lawbreaking are a form of play. Facilitation requires rules or principles of action and thought, of course—in contrast to Mastery, which emphasizes the rule of Law. Barthes writes, “I am neither a sacred (consecrated) subject, nor a buddy, only a manager, an operator, a regulator: the one who gives rules, protocols, not laws.” This is a capacity-building space, a place of free exercise. To borrow language from chapter 1, the laboratory provides the conditions for (1) improving and remaking the quality of human and sonic relationships that fund the conditions of our growth; (2) improving, remaking, and enlarging the contours of our inheritance or tradition; and (3) acknowledging and affirming the temporal arenas into which we are inserted, in which we are driven to make something new and cherish something old. Recently, looking to reexperience my first encounters in an open classroom, I went over an old set of notes dating back to my days as an early graduate student of Pogonowski and Maxine Greene. The distance between what I experienced and what I could articulate is embarrassing to me now, though it remains beautiful in its confusion. This leads me to wonder if the best kind of teaching is a muddle of mutual interest, a longing for openings by both the teacher and her students, a journey alone and together. Dewey would appreciate this muddle, I think. There is a certain disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons not engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, the results from activity. But out of occupation . . . there is born a discipline of its own kind.”

A definition of laboratory learning begins to take shape. The tension between teaching and learning, between teacher and taught is not merely “tolerated”; it gives form and quality to the relationships therein. There is born a discipline of its own kind. “In the seminar (and this is its definition),” writes Barthes, “all teaching is foreclosed.” He continues, No knowledge is transmitted (but a knowledge can be created), no discourse is sustained (but a text is sought): teaching is disappointed. Either someone works, seeks, produces, gathers, writes in the others’ presence; or else all incite each other, call to each other, put into circulation the object to be produced,

90

|

Remixing the Classroom

the procedure to compose, which thus passes from hand to hand, suspended from the thread of desire like the ring in round games.

What does this mean, to embrace the disappointment of teaching? In the laboratory, those who consider teaching didactically are sure to be disappointed, as power and intelligence are shared and distributed, “put into circulation.” In this setting, students are not deficient learners, as measured against their teacher or by external standards of evaluation, and the words “novice” and “apprentice” are not used. But a terrible beauty is present: call it the poetics of disappointment. The notion brings to mind the pleasures of partiality, the shock of something new, the rupture of an open encounter. “Nothing is more transgressive than to surprise the Father,” Barthes writes. What is disappointment, after all, but another path chosen? Surely, parents know the beauty and perils of disappointment. To assert one’s independence means that I must disappoint all of my teachers. If I choose, my path cannot be yours to direct. And yours, necessarily, cannot be mine. A colleague sometimes asks me, what are your classes about? What do you want your students to learn? This question, forthright and slightly righteous, tends to paralyze me. I’m not sure what my students take away from our time together. But my guess is that outcomes differ depending on the student, where she started, and what she became interested in. I also admit that the concept of the laboratory is wildly inconsistent with today’s rationalist logic, in which the myth of accountability assures stakeholders that there is a visible relationship between teacher input and learner outcome. This is closed language, befitting a closed form. In preparation for a visit by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) at my college, it was discovered that my two-part teacher preparation course on creativity was not in compliance with external Law. In effect, I had no learning objectives in my syllabus. Naturally, it would be assumed by auditors that I held my students to no observable standards; I had no contractually agreed-on sale or plan of action. To meet with compliance, I was told to describe my classroom using action verbs, to begin sentences with “Students will engage in” and “Students will demonstrate.” This is what I provided: Students will engage in dialogue and written assignments that analyze the teaching profession and public schooling, and they will reflect upon their past experiences as music learners. Students will analyze and interrogate beliefs about teaching and learning. Students will improvise and compose collaboratively, and experiment with new sounds and sonic structures. Students will design and demonstrate lessons that emphasize creativity, and multimodal forms of musical literacy. Students will experience and reflect upon approaches to music education that are open and culturally responsive, as opposed to traditional methods that are closed, standardized, and teacher-driven.

Learning in Laboratories

|

91

What depresses me about this exercise in external compliance is not so much the truth of the claims I made (though I’m embarrassed by its alleged certainty) or even the fact that I was required to reduce the complexity of the laboratory space to a one-paragraph form (since removed). Rather, what depresses me is the very closed manner in which university teacher education is conceptualized today, particularly the difficulty of capturing—or even justifying—open-ended learning in a landscape that values clarity of purpose over the muddle of mutual exploration. “The language of contemporary schooling and, indeed, of proposed reforms emphasizes something quite different from interpretative thinking,” Greene wrote in 1988. “Rather than being challenged to attend to the actualities of their lived lives, students are urged to attend to what is ‘given’ in the outside world.” Like Greene, I hope that students will choose to analyze their beliefs, choose to engage others in dialogue, and so on. Like Greene, I believe that “these are choices of consequence for the self and others; and they are made, they can only be made in social situations where custom, tradition, official codes, and laws condition and play upon what people think and do.” I emphasize again that the laboratory is not a place that is hostile to rules, precepts, principles, or even “learning objectives.” But Laws and learning objectives alone don’t ignite agency. Objectives that are debated in public, however, tested out with others, and adhered to or altered in the light of present circumstances can become acts of freedom. More and more, we see that complex teaching relationships that were once idiosyncratic in their approach are transubstantiated into relationships of mere cause and effect. I call attention to the great irony of the open-source age: the tools of global interconnectivity and limitless musical exploration on which today’s laboratory depend are the same tools that enable and normalize perpetual surveillance. These are the same tools that collect and store data on all aspects of our personal and professional lives. Teachers have never been more closely watched and followed. At the same time, student learning (including university learning) must be externally visible and publically evaluated at all stages of growth. Big data has reenergized the forces of standardization, forces so powerful that any debate about the aims and actualities of constructivist classrooms are effectively eclipsed. I have found that the more teaching and learning become externally visible, and the more a direct relationship between a teacher intervention and a student response is established, the more the word “structure” is happily applied to classrooms that meet these criteria. I have also found that students who have little experience in an open classroom—in a laboratory setting—are quick to label its activities as “unstructured” and, therefore, an inadmissible model for their preparation as teachers. So I ask: Are debate and discussion, and composing and improvising, so alienating to the music-education major that her first thoughts are what am I supposed to be learning here, and why is this classroom so unstructured? I believe that the word

92

|

Remixing the Classroom

“structure” (so closely related to “form”) desperately needs unpacking. Unexamined, it suggests that good teaching is controlled learning. It suggests that excellent teaching (or what global reformers call highly effective teaching) is highly controlled learning. Recall the story that begins this chapter, of the teacher who was asked by her supervisor to find a cost savings of ten seconds in the design of her instruction. Is this really so shocking? Many music-teacher-preparation programs (at least in the United States) ask candidates to structure lesson plans down to the second. American band directors are notorious for their use of the ten-second rule: diagnose and fix a problem in ten seconds and get the kids playing again. With an industry of method books and a history of scripted methodologies—some that span centuries of practice—at our fingertips, music teachers are the progenitors of the stultifying structure. But what is this efficiency producing? More independent musicians, or fewer? Who are we designing these lessons for? Ourselves, our supervisors, our students? There has rarely been a time when a counternarrative was so desperately needed— and so utterly implausible. Laboratory learning? A muddle of mutual interest? A fool’s errand, I think. Yet I see cracks in this coalition of control: parents demanding time out from tests, large ensemble researchers wrestling with alternative ways of teaching, shifts in demographics and changes in technology, new platforms for making art and media, and calls for creativity and innovation in public schools. If there were ever a time for laboratory learning, it is now. I have taken pains in this chapter to describe the ideals of the laboratory as the result of a beautiful dialectic of the conservative and the forward thinking. I have explored how an appreciation of the past might be embodied in the metaphor of the living museum. Because I insist on continuity as much as innovation, my approach cannot be described as radical. Though the open classroom has an outline, a form with structure, there is never an absolute or radical break from the past; there is only a reordering of lived and recorded events. Thus, all teaching has form, and all teaching (as distinct from learning, which is often incidental) has structure. How, then, does a teacher design a classroom that is both structured and open-formed? What is the texture of its form? What processes advance the character of its form, and can these processes be taught? What relationships are privileged, and what roles emerge? I have been wrestling with the notion of how to structure the open classroom for over two decades (I fail less than I used to), and I hope to disabuse skeptics of the notion that it is impractical in the preparation of public-school music teachers or as an approach for classroom teaching. To set the stage, I begin with six propositions: . A linear structure of music teaching is not the only vision we can permit or imagine; a closed structure of music teaching is not the only vision we can permit or imagine.

Learning in Laboratories

|

93

. Learning does not need to be visible or be made visible to account for its meaning or impact. . There is no inherent contradiction between an open classroom and a structured plan of action. . A teacher-dominated structure can never fully capture the richness and complexity of a student-initiated quest. . The teacher has more, not fewer, responsibilities in an open classroom than in one that is closed. . It is more difficult to be a laboratory facilitator than it is to be the Master.

In such a system, the classroom, with its facilitators and learners, becomes an open form, a text—“the rarest text, one which does not appear in writing,” envisions Barthes. “There are texts which are not products but practices; it might even be said that the ‘glorious’ text will someday be a pure practice.”

Structuring Open-Ended Instruction The educator cannot start with knowledge already organized and proceed to ladle it out in doses. —John Dewey

There is a remarkable section in The School and Society in which Dewey names the conditions that must be tapped if effective instruction is to take place in public schools. He refers to the so-called “natural resources” of childhood on which the exercise of growth and exploration depend. “If we roughly classify the impulses which are available in the school, we may group them under four heads.” First, there is communication, by which the learner is brought into contact with others through conversation, personal intercourse, and social life. “Language is primarily a social thing, a means by which we give our experiences to others and get theirs again in return.” The limits of student interests are challenged by close contact with others. The teacher’s job is to expand these interests beyond the parochial. Second, there is inquiry. “The instinct of investigation seems to grow out of the combination of the constructive impulse with the conversational.” Debate assumes the possibility of divergent responses to the problems at hand. Space must be afforded within a curriculum to ask why or why not, to find out something new, and to demonstrate the results of trial. Next, “children simply like to do things, and watch to see what will happen. But this can be taken advantage of, can be directed into ways where it gives result of value, as well as be allowed to go on at random.” The constructive impulse— the impulse to make, to mess around with, and rearrange—should be available to all learners, regardless of age or ability. Finally, the expressive impulse grows out of inquiry, communication, and making. “Make the construction adequate,”

94

|

Remixing the Classroom

Dewey tells the teacher; “make it full, free, and flexible, give it a social motive, something to tell, and you have a work of art.” Behold a vision of art and creativity that needn’t bear the weight of originality, clarity, and sincerity (though indeed it may)—located in the public school, no less! Authenticity is uncovered within the ineffable combination of all these qualities, with a specific group of learners at one moment in time, using a specific combination of materials to communicate a unique idea in one particular place. These are “the natural resources, the uninvested capital, upon the exercise of which depends the active growth of the child.” Here I number these resources sequentially; though inquiry and making go more or less hand-in-hand, dialogue is always a great place to start any lesson. . Communication. The social aspect of learning: the urge to share. . Inquiry. Asking questions and solving problems: the desire to find out. . Construction. Shaping materials, finding divergent means: the need to make. . Artistic expression. The aesthetic domain: the urge to say something new, to reveal an aspect of one’s self.

Appealing to anything less than these four resources, Dewey suggests, is like leaving money on the table. Attend to the fact that Dewey did not call these “ideals” or “aspirations.” They are concrete things: natural impulses, varied and overlapping interests, the resources of shared activity; should we wish to use the language of the market, this is start-up capital to invest. Children, in other words, bring these resources to the school, endowed as they are with all manner of proclivities, talents, and powers. They are each, in their own way, specialists and generalists, moving horizontally and vertically across fields of concern and interest. Perhaps it is the nature of contemporary schooling that teachers and the public misrecognize the potential that is inherent in the diversity of these resources and thus squander time and opportunity ladling out knowledge already organized in a steady drip, drip, drip. “Again, the question comes: What are we to do with this child’s interest—are we to ignore it, or just excite and draw it out? Or shall we get hold of it and direct it to something ahead?” writes Dewey. He is asking teachers to structure learner potential through the idiosyncratic resources, talents, and concerns of one particular classroom at one particular moment in history—to call attention to an interest and, ultimately, to direct curiosity to an open space, to something ahead. Growth is the ideal, and so is exploration; for either to be of any use, they must be realized through some kind of community-constructed, perhaps temporary, norm. Something ahead: I take this imperative to mean something around the corner, just out of hearing, just out of reach—a surprise-in-the-making for students and teachers alike. This imperative appeals to a nonprescriptive and nonlinear conception of growth: a muddling move forward toward a place that is better

Learning in Laboratories |

95

than yesterday, better than before. With this spirit of ambiguity in one hand and the requirement of growth in the other (and with no small degree of trepidation), I offer the following framework as a structuring device for the design of the open music classroom: • An investigation (an encounter) begins with a meaningful idea or musical text containing problems that are relevant to participants (or problems in which relevance emerges), organized toward purposeful long-term or shortterm growth. • Through dialogue, something new gets known, something ordinary is seen or heard anew, and imagination is sparked through inquiry. • The environment fosters exploration: Musical and verbal brainstorming takes place. The teacher provokes new thinking, just as students provoke new thinking. Divergent musical and verbal responses are appreciated. • A challenge is arrived at. (Limits are negotiated.) • Students respond—first, by experimenting and rehearsing and, then, by performing and sharing. • Assessment takes place through group and self-reflection. • A new problem is looked for that builds on prior knowledge. • The process renews itself.

The form presented is a text, a thought experiment that is amenable to redesign. Regifting is welcome. I insist, however, that if this “open template” is to have any value, its contradictions must remain unresolved. In this vision of laboratory learning, the teacher both organizes and receives. The students both lead and follow. Ends are both directed and open. There are rights and wrongs, but decisions must be made locally, individually, or within a specific community of inquiry. I have found that in practicing this form, a certain flow or rhythm comes into being (this is not a contradiction with the open classroom or the open form). While communication is emphasized at the beginning, voices are heard and honored throughout the process. Expression may be emphasized at the end, but disclosure occurs at any moment. As a form, its parts are fueled by student and teacher agency, and thus its internal processes are pliant at all stages of design and redesign.

On Subject Matter An investigation (an encounter) begins with a meaningful idea or musical text containing problems that are relevant to participants (or problems in which relevance emerges), organized toward purposeful long-term and short-term growth.

The problem of subject matter—particularly, how to begin—is apparent in this template. What manner of problems does the laboratory explore? Whose problems are privileged, and in what order? How is subject matter conceived, and

96

| Remixing the Classroom

how is it communicated? The Master-apprentice model has a ready answer for this dilemma: the child studies what the teacher has been trained in. The Master chooses a work that represents his tradition and by extension his life, and his choice contains within it the totality of the teaching event. His “subject-matter furnishes the end, and it determines method. The child is simply the immature being who is to be matured. . . . [I]t is his to receive, to accept.” By outward appearance, this kind of instructional process is natural and familiar. The music teacher selects a representative work from his repertoire—say, Sonny Rollins’s Blue Seven or the Andante from Mozart’s Quartet no. 8—and the method of instruction is inhered within the expectations of the form. Put another way, the job of the music teacher is to help the novice assume and adopt the conventions of the work as determined by historical standards of practice. For David Elliott, whose writings on music education breathed fresh life into the Master-apprentice approach, the musical novice develops an understanding of these conventions only through active music making in curricular situations that teachers deliberately design to approximate the salient conditions of genuine musical practices. . . . [T]he musical authenticity of the teaching-learning situation is a crucial determinate of what students learn and how deeply they learn. . . . [D]eveloping musicianship is a matter of inducting students into particular music cultures.

I’m not sure what Elliott means by terms like “authentic” musical practices. Perhaps he is suggesting that there is a distinction between “genuine” musical practices and the musical activities that occur in public schools or that there is a difference between “authentic” music and the resources that children bring to the public school. Too often, I think, words like “genuine” and “authentic” are employed to indicate an insider-versus-outsider perspective. If this is true, so-called authentic musicians may fail to recognize that the music classroom is its own community-in-the-making, its own evolving culture. The Master of a “genuine” musical tradition may likewise fail to appreciate that students are at the intersection of multiple talents, powers, cultures, and interests, that their lives are open and changing. I believe that these resources and interests are, in point of fact, “authentic” and that they can contribute to knowledge finding and meaning making. Recall the four resources that fund student learning: communication, inquiry, construction, and expression. Consider the ways in which they are directed by the Master in a closed musical environment: communication moves in banking fashion from most knowledgeable to least knowledgeable; inquiry is limited to what the subject matter furnishes; construction is rightly appreciated, but music-making is subject to the codes and contexts of the Master’s tradition; and expression, often disguised as intuition, is really just a sophisticated kind of coding signal, one that can be taught according to exacting norms of historic

Learning in Laboratories |

97

practice. This is not to say that there is a want of freedom, only that freedom of choice resides within a closed realm, a space that takes ill advantage of the breadth and complexity of the classroom resources otherwise available. In a closed form, the totality of a teaching event is limited to what the subject matter provides. In an open form, the totality of a teaching event can never be limited by subject matter alone; rather, subject matter puts into motion an “overflow” of production. This overflow is unstoppable, full of problems to investigate, opinions to share, questions to ponder, norms and standards to debate, and disclosures to reveal. While the Master-apprentice model is limited to the object—“the salient conditions of genuine musical practices”—or the solidarity of a tradition, my vision of the laboratory treats all subject matter as text, as methodological field. Subject matter, in other words, has open doors—doors that connect student identity to culture, neighborhood to school, learner preferences to teacher tastes, secrets to surprises. It represents, above all, the idiosyncratic, never-repeatable mash-up of a particular classroom community growing together through inquiry and experimentation, funded by the resources that the students and teacher bring to the classroom space. Subject matter, in a sense, is the museum, and the activity is the laboratory. Conceiving subject matter in this way puts into play a different set of human and sonic relationships. To start with, the student is not an “immature being who is to be matured” through a pedagogy of earned induction. The teacher is neither master nor naïf. She is a skilled facilitator cued into the needs of the students before her and aware of her own goals for their growth, but she leaves room for adventure. Sonic relationships are not the sacrosanct province of a past age but a subject for debate. I admit that selecting subject matter is very difficult at the beginning stages of a laboratory music education, especially when the assigned classroom is little more than a disparate collection of multiple interests and undiscovered resources. The process will become less fraught with confusion and misunderstanding as students begin to reveal who they are and start to take ownership of the investigative process. Nonetheless, the teacher’s first job, her most difficult, is to ignite the curiosity and passion of her students as quickly as possible. Referring back to the beginning of my framework, the teacher brings in a musical text, a musical idea, or even an extramusical issue that holds some possibility of activating the self-interests of her students but leads to her vision of growth and adventure. The subject matter contains a problem that is designed to promote mutuality— to connect self-interest to interest in others—thereby laying the groundwork for community from the first encounter. Trust may be a short-term goal; the aim of risk-taking and experimentation may take longer. Students, over the course of their study, have a say in what their goals are, too. I like to start the fall semester with an investigation of the art, music, and philosophy of Christian Marclay. I can assume that his ideas will provoke a range

98

|

Remixing the Classroom

of reactions from my highly trained music-education majors and that our discoveries will elicit new thinking on topics as diverse as sound and noise, open aesthetic encounters, the musician’s ego, the role of the composer, right and wrong musical answers, and the purpose of notation. An immediate goal is to hear all voices and to establish an environment of respect and trust. Fluency in improvisation and composition is a longer-term aim. Another teacher, in another school or university, may start the year with protest songs, with the hope that the music selected will stir up a conversation about local and global issues that might matter to her students. This teacher may have the same short- and long-term goals or different ones. An applied performance instructor who wishes to turn her studio into a laboratory setting may start the year with an investigation of extended technique through the recordings of Meredith Monk, hoping to provoke an experiential understanding of new vocal sounds. As the semester goes by, students and their teacher will work together on subject matter, looking for rich and complicated texts that uncover a range of problems that matter to them. The structure is inherently recursive and unfinished. While there are always beginnings, nothing begins anew; in constructivist fashion, learners build on previous experiences, particularly those shared within the laboratory setting.

Fostering Dialogue and Risk The environment fosters exploration: Musical and verbal brainstorming takes place. The teacher provokes new thinking, just as students provoke new thinking. Divergent musical and verbal responses are appreciated.

In presenting this framework, the role of classroom dialogue and the opportunity for critical divergence cannot be overstated. I accept that teacher-facilitators in the laboratory setting will encounter differing levels of comfort in the degree to which they share in the selection of topics, readings, and musical texts. A highschool music-technology class may opt for more student input in the selection of topics than, say, a university music-teacher-preparation setting where an instructor may knowingly wish to disrupt patterns of action and thinking through the careful selection of problem-rich texts. Fundamentally, I am interested in the way classroom environments are made open to multiple realities, how they give voice and cause to their inquirers, and how such carefully designed spaces uncover new ways of being with others in the world. I am fatigued by the mysticism that is attached to too many musical traditions. I am fatigued by the disembodied convention, like a séance in a circus tent, of voices from the past that speak only through the most powerful Masters. I sense a great need within the heart of our profession for more voices, more sounds and colors. “I had no philosophical ‘movement’ in mind when I began expressing impatience with the voice from nowhere, the voice of the anonymous

Learning in Laboratories |

99

(but white and male) authority,” writes Maxine Greene, reflecting on her early career. “I wanted the speakers to say who they were and why they are saying what they were saying. . . . I was rejecting the model of the distanced, autonomous observer of the world, trying to work through to an image of some one participant, open to the world, in the world.” To Greene’s point, this notion of “voice” is not an abstraction, but is understood in its situatedness. I share with Greene a longing to hear what these real and multiple voices have to communicate (if students so choose). I want to hear a blend of histories and cultures, accents in English and Spanish, songs in Chinese. Here is an environment that honors difference more than harmony or consensus. For example, what if a laboratory classroom were to compare Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” with Sufjan Stevens’s “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”? What if the investigation included all manner of observation? With no fixed end in mind (beyond enjoying the sheer pleasure of hearing what others have to share), what if explication was eschewed in favor of interpretation and impression: dialogue that, as in Barthes’s seminar, is “displaced beyond meaning, beyond the Law, abandoned to a certain minor euphoria . . . from flexible listening, from a sort of swing of the attention”? In this diverse classroom, what would the classical vocal major say to the jazz musician about his history with Schubert lieder and his experience with this particular song? Trading fours, what would the jazz musician reply in return? Putting these texts in combination, what might a parent have to say? Surely the topic of monsters would come up, and men who prey on children. Is that allowed? How are these stories of monsters created? Surely someone who writes lyrics will have something to say about that. Of course, there is the musical content: the harmony, structure, form, historical context. How do Schubert and Stevens create tension, a sense of unhinged time moving rapidly forward, in the songs they write? In retiring the tired explanations of Schubert’s “Erlkönig” that we learned as undergraduates—Schubert meant this when he wrote that, and this marking is meant to represent such and such—could we then reexperience the horror and fear and darkness of the original? How much need the teacher say? (Very little, I think.) “My role (if I have one) is to clear the stage on which horizontal transferences will be established,” writes Barthes. “What matters, in such a seminar (the site of its success), is not the relation of members to the director but the relations of the members to each other.” The results of our dialogue will provide the materials for further musical exploration, and in the next section I look at the experimental phase of this framework, in which learners make new meanings or test out new ideas. But now I would like to make a pointed remark about listening in music classrooms and studios. It has been my experience that music teachers want to hear students only when they say the right thing or play the right way. They want students to listen only to “good” music or good-sounding sounds. Of course I want to hear music

100

|

Remixing the Classroom

played well. But I also want to hear students when they try something new, stumble through an insight, perform in a different way, or experiment with new techniques. I want to be surprised by an observation I have never considered. I want to be shocked into a new (and difficult) awareness. I want to hear students fail as often as they succeed. In contrast, the Master-apprentice model values right answers and correct playing at the expense of open encounters; thus, in this model, there is little value to be gained from the laboratory conception of dialogue. It is no controversy to say that the Master listens primarily to assess an apprentice’s understanding of a specific style or convention. “In terms of evaluation,” writes Elliott, “the primary point to make now is that a student’s level of musical understanding demonstrates itself primarily in the quality of his or her music making, not in what a student can tell us about musical works. . . . Verbal information (or formal knowledge) about music is no substitute for the ultraspecific nonverbal conception of musical works that a student exhibits when he or she performs (improvises, composes, arranges, or conducts) intelligently.” Later in Music Matters, Elliott writes that anyone “who does not possess the musicianship to participate in a musical community is not a competent judge of its internal goods.” Insulated from critique, the Master is also Critic, a synthesis that effectively arrests debate and disallows difference. Thomas Turino contrasts two approaches to the music classroom: the presentational approach, in which students are prepared to present high-quality concerts for audiences and adjudicators, and the participatory approach, which favors formative learning processes and ongoing community engagements. There is a history of American literature devoted to the former, and much less to the latter. Reviewing this literature, particularly Elliott’s Music Matters, I’m struck by the fear-inducing environment fostered by the presentational approach. The apprentice is under determined and consistent evaluation, performing publicly as a means to demonstrate knowledge and understanding, always under the watchful eye of the Master. Sound counts more than words. Music counts more than people. As Elliott himself says, there is little need for dialogue. And forget about taking a stray path. In such an environment, how do students experience risk? How do they try out something new? What is the reward for divergent thinking? It would be tempting to contrast this state of affairs with a notion of the laboratory as an educational “safe space.” Yes, the laboratory is a space that allows safety from personal harm and degradation. And, as mentioned earlier, a teacher will live lovingly with “disappointment.” Nevertheless, I am uncomfortable with this metaphor of the safe space (in the same way that I am uncomfortable with the notion of the laboratory as an unstructured space, or as a laissez-faire space where there are no rights and no wrongs and only easy desire). Indeed, there is a long tradition in educational philosophy—from Socrates to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and from Dewey to Greene—that emphasizes risk at the expense of comfort and security. I cannot expect that my students will enjoy giving up a long-held

Learning in Laboratories

|

101

belief in favor of a new insight. Nor is the trial and error of musical investigation easy. “Reflective thinking,” writes Dewey, “is always more or less troublesome,”— more or less unsafe—“because it involves overcoming the inertia that inclines one to accept suggestions at their face value; it involves willingness to endure a condition of mental unrest and disturbance. Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful.” Dewey calls this the “training of good mental habits,” a learnable skill that “consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion.” To suspend conclusion is to practice openness. To suspend conclusion is to suspend the self, to definalize one’s identity, to explore someplace else, to look ahead or beyond. Communication is more than hearing others or being heard. Ideas become personified, transforming learners and teacher together through experiments in thinking, dialogue, and (as we see in the next section) music-making.

What Music Can We Make Together? A challenge is arrived at. (Limits are negotiated.) Students respond, first, by experimenting and rehearsing and, then, by performing and sharing.

The question of literature haunts formal music education. The inherent tension of pursuing a program of study that is growth-oriented and culturally responsive, while inviting learners to share in an ongoing conversation or “living tradition,” reveals once again the antinomic condition of formal education in a democratic society. I have never met a music teacher who did not suffer this tension. We want others to love the music that gives meaning and direction to our lives. But we know, echoing Emerson, that each age must write its own songs and love its own inventions. Even the most unbending traditions change as generations of practitioners move in and out of a beloved style or genre. Combine this tension with the educator’s mandate. Recall that the public institution we call “school” is an invention that is designed to facilitate the regeneration of cultures large and small, equipping an evolving society with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to meet new challenges as they unfold across time and location. The classroom laboratory is designed to explore the past and to test out new combinations of life and living. Earlier I mentioned that a study of living traditions might help us with difficult questions like What music do I teach? or Whose tradition do I teach? The laboratory, I strongly believe, is ideally suited to skirt the false binary of my-music-versus-your-music or my-past-versus-your-present debates. Knowledge circulates within the laboratory, from museum to home, from hallway to classroom, from new to old. Rather than asking, What music do I teach? we can circumvent the dualisms inhered in this question by asking a different question: What music can we make together? Suddenly, a vista opens before us. What histories can we extend and revitalize? What traditions can we invent or reinvent? What problems can we explore and test out?

102

| Remixing the Classroom

Time spent in dialogue and musical exploration must always lead to making. My favorite aspect of laboratory learning is finding the problems we wish to investigate and arriving at the moment when a challenge emerges. For example, one might begin a laboratory exploration with the music of John Cage. Trusting that a group usually knows more than a singular person, students in a university classroom might start by amassing as much knowledge as they can about the life and music of John Cage, again eschewing explanatory discourse for impressions, memories, performance experiences, and felt understandings. Perhaps a grammar school will start with listening to his music, watching his amusing version of “Water Walk” on YouTube, or performing “4′33″.” Regardless of settings or topics (surely, we can just as compellingly study the origins of hip-hop, or the Beatles, or Mongolian folk music) a search for more information entails. Facts will accrue, but facts, like mere information, remain inert until something is done with them. There must be a controversy, a sense of wonder, frustration, or urgency; a trial of ideas—un essai—something that puts the mind “in an attitude of search, of hunting, of projection, of trying this and that.” Dewey speaks of the operation of inference, the phenomenological gap “between here and now of direct interactions whose funded result constitutes the meanings with which we grasp and understand what is now occurring. . . . Because of this gap, all conscious perception involves a risk; it is a venture into the unknown, for as it assimilates the present to the past it also brings about some reconstruction of that past.” There is an existential component to this exercise in making. At stake are multiple identities and contested realities, even the security of one’s personhood is at risk. A challenge to write and perform a piece of music using nontraditional notation, following the explorations of Christian Marclay or John Cage, is not a mere exercise in composing, but (if allowed) the activity may contain within it the possibility of rupture, a break in a system of belief or experience. Provoked, students may reconsider (or defend) convictions they hold about what notation is good for, for whom it is good, and for whom it is not. They may arrive at conclusions that contradict the edicts of a well-loved teacher from their past. They may experience frustration (or exhilaration) with issues of freedom and control. As a facilitator, it is not easy to negotiate this terrain, and I can attest to a range of emotions that surface when one experiments with one’s past. But aren’t all improvisations an experiment with one’s past? Obedience, the great virtue of the apprentice, is at once longed for and disavowed. A tremendous pull is exerted in the laboratory to honor, test out, and explore. Greene writes, I am tempted, you see, to remain within what Foucault calls “the established order of things.” . . . I am drawn to affirm the timelessness of what I have come to love over the years, of what I choose to think of as the very sources of my self. Allowing myself to be carried along by the great conversation initiated

Learning in Laboratories |

103

by others (and, indeed, maintained by others), I would not have to disrupt. I would not have to begin anything; I would need only be swept along by what the great ones have said and remain partially submerged in them.

“But then I think,” writes Greene, “of how much beginnings have to do with freedom.” Perhaps this is the climax of this book. The existential turn from obedience to freedom, the aesthetic turn from doing to making, the transformation of past into present, the revelation of self with others—teaching for openings. Some time ago, I made a prediction that the emphasis of formal music education would move from composition to composing, from doing to making. In other words, school and university music educators would begin to appreciate and emphasize the distinction between performing someone else’s compositions and making and playing their own. I stand by this conviction, though I emphasize scales of degree. We will always need access to the museum. We will always study and perform its contents. And of course, music from the past is our music, as long as we bring it to life, as long as we continue to unearth new meanings. The question I would like to consider is this: What would it mean to put equal resources into the laboratory side of formal music education? What would it mean to build school capacity for group composing, to revel in the “stereographic plurality” (Barthes’s words) of text meeting text? At the heart of the laboratory is the impulse to discover and create. There are many ways to configure the processes in my framework. Students might study a complex harmonic passage and write their own melody on top. A laboratory that is attached to a concert band might study the conventions of a form and test out alternatives with their director’s help. Some band members might write for their ensemble in a style of their choosing. A choir might choreograph its rehearsals and bring in arrangements they worked out in small groups. In school-based garage bands, students might compose songs that reflect who they are and how they see their world, working across cultures or within. A technology class might experiment with multiple platforms, decoding media messages while producing materials to share and remake. In the laboratory, students are making, not merely doing. They are not executing the Master’s bidding, at least not without input of their own. What they compose reveals aspects of who they are and who they are becoming. In the end, the Master is just another resource, and no undue privilege is afforded his expertise. What is created in the laboratory “can be read without the guarantee of the father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy.” Barthes clarifies, “It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest.’” I’m okay with this. There are methods available for creating a music laboratory in public schools and universities. My particular practice, a collage or “remix” of postmodern and

104

|

Remixing the Classroom

constructivist tenets (both emphasizing situational understandings and multiple lived realities), has been deeply informed by teachers versed in Comprehensive Musicianship and the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project. All (incidentally or not) were women. Other advocates and practitioners of laboratory learning trace their classrooms to location-specific sources of inspiration: teachers’ teachers like Jackie Boswell, Lee Pogonowski, Liz Wing, or Eunice Boardman in the United States; John Paynter in the United Kingdom; or Canada’s R. Murray Schafer. We must refuse a unifying method and capture the energy of horizontal networks. “We see emerging, piecemeal and with the greatest ambiguity, the seeds of a new noise, one exterior to the institutions and customary sites of political conflict. A noise of Festival and Freedom,” writes Attali. The school and university can make noise, too. Barthes calls this force demonic—demonic in its threat to self and to the established order of things. We are many, the practitioners of this new order. Against the closed form and the Master’s Law, “the text could well take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5:9): ‘My name is Legion: for we are many.’”

Revelations I strongly believe that constructivist educational processes are congruent with the kinds of aesthetic mutations that are increasingly commonplace in the arts today. Of course, artists still make traditional forms according to traditional procedures, like oil paintings and orchestral symphonies, but much of the art world has done away with essentializing terms like “high” and “low,” “popular” and “classical,” “complex” and “easy.” Categories are increasingly fractured and wonderfully open. So a question deserves asking: Why—at least in North America—have constructivist teaching methods (to say nothing of interdisciplinary arts classrooms) failed to take root? I posed this question recently to Peter Webster, a longtime advocate of the constructivist music classroom. He reminded me that many student-centered movements like Comprehensive Musicianship and the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project have failed not because their original content needed to evolve and adapt (as all curricula do) but because the North American music educator seems unable to reimagine the role of the music teacher. We have to learn to give up control, Webster told me. I think his assessment is true, and this is why I have spent considerable effort in critiquing the Master and calling for a robust vision of the music teacher-facilitator. Another answer to the question may be that music educators are simply unable to imagine classroom locations where project-based explorations are as important as direct instruction in a particular art form or musical instrument. As a discipline, we are at once romantic and utopian, all memory and all control, focused on the past and preoccupied with the future. We seem uninspired by the present, with all its attendant messiness.

Learning in Laboratories

|

105

Architects have long understood that the way in which we construct physical (and virtual) space affects and shapes the human relationships located therein. Thus, the laboratory and the museum are both metaphors for relationship making as well as actual physical spaces that construct how we live and learn with others. They can be tools for helping us conceive and assemble a multiplicity of student and teacher roles. I remain concerned with the ways in which power circulates in the physical spaces of learning and the ways in which power is attached to particular forms of study. I have hypothesized that one can construct a theory of music education by examining these forms, and that they contain within in them varying degrees of freedom and control. Likewise, there is in every formal teaching setting a politics of music education, with processes that advance learner welfare in different ways. Like musical forms, the physical spaces where formal music education takes place are inherently historicized and nonneutral. A setting like the laboratory is not only congruent with a larger aesthetic movement that is taking place in modernism’s wake; the laboratory is a formal setting in which community members can test out, refuse, and construct not only new musical forms but new human identities. I am intrigued by the ways in which learners reveal who they are in the laboratory setting. This is an aspect of the constructivist classroom that is not emphasized enough. Diversity is not understood as something I introduce to students. Diversity is encountered, and its problems are unpacked, as we work within and across layers of difference and divergence. Through the process of creating and performing original music, through debate of readings, through discussion of classroom performances, a hidden wealth of identities and cultures is disclosed. I think that this is powerful. As a gay white male, I have always understood “identity” as something one can and can’t control, as something complex and evolving, with parts that are fixed. I am, after all, at the intersection of great privilege and societal disgust. And, like my students, I am much more than you can see, and more than I can tell you. I am a text, like my fellow students, like our classroom community. We are the Chimera, a monstrous and beautiful assemblage, moving, like the music we make, in between, within, and outside labels. In this sense, I see my students as unfinished and ongoing, as well. I have given up asking them very much about themselves at the beginning of the year. If there is something I need to know, I will ask. If there is something they wish to share, they will do so. I want to look beyond what I can see. I want to hear new frequencies. I trust in ongoing revelation. This is why questions are so important. They create new beginnings, and new beginnings create new selves.



Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

Living together, being together, revealing themselves to one another, people have the capacity to bring an “in-between” into being, a public space. —Maxine Greene

I remain passionate about the capacity of school for fostering the in-betweenness that Maxine Greene calls to mind in this epigraph. The feeling is one of longing, not faith or romance in the notion of public schooling as some kind of fixed good. Instead, I long to find or create a space in which people can connect with others across difference and ability in an ongoing and unfinished way. I want to reorder and confuse myself and to look for what Roland Barthes calls a “third meaning,” a space suspended between lived history and what I am not yet. Yes, schools are often closed in character, often dreary, and increasingly influenced by antidemocratic and market interests. But reflecting on my own life as a student and a teacher, I can bring to mind glimpses of moral living in this most contradictory of public institutions. These moments might flourish in spaces outside the regular and regulated, spaces in which some kind of search is involved and a supplemental meaning—a self, an object, a value—is called into being. By expanding the range of what is possible in schools, teachers and students stand a chance of prolonging these moments and increasing their appearance. In this chapter, I am interested in enunciating the texture of this search.

To Stray Afield After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. —Michel Foucault 

My longing for openings has something to do with a general dissatisfaction with the lack of diversity within my professional field. It has something to do with a symbol system that has been made obvious and less open, in which the mere relay

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

107

of information is characterized as education. Structural racism and homophobia, combined with the economics of access and privilege, result in a teaching force that remains—at least in the United States—predominantly white, middle class, and heteronormative. Indeed, all might heed Estelle Jorgensen’s concerns that the music-education profession, particularly its philosophy community, is insufficiently broad, ambivalent about the personal perspective, unhearing with regard to critique, detached from lived concerns, and lacking the courage to speak. Jorgensen and others are calling for a bolder, more venturesome arena in which to work, teach, and study. Recall Thoreau and the way he studied himself in relation to the world he lived in and explored. Teachers need better rewards for straying afield and fewer for staying put. We need less knowledgeableness and more varied, even strange, ways of knowing. This is the case I would like to make. A culture or social system can maintain a normative order only when it is sufficiently integrated and inclusive, when all have an equal say in the debate about what counts as good or right. More likely, a normative order is achieved when a system takes firm control of its borders, regardless of the cost to the individual or to individual differences. Troubled by the latter, I want to trespass predetermined borders, to look beyond unifying references and unified standards of practice, beyond the kinds of statutory art-making that give license to hierarchical displays of power (or is it the other way around?) and exclusionary practices that mark off some as musical and others as not. Recruiting a diverse teaching force has much to do with the norms that are maintained and legitimized by the status quo. This is not a question of handpicking one set of norms to replace with another. (I don’t know how this could happen, and, anyway, to whom would such a privilege extend?) Rather, our solution depends entirely on conceiving of norms as open and amenable to change or repair. Concerning school- and universitybased music study, I propose that educators recognize the following: . Norms and traditions should be understood and communicated to learners as provisional, ongoing, personal, and negotiable. . Although their purpose is to generalize, norms should be tested and retested across a span of lived and evolving contexts and deemed useful or not by the learner. . Norms and traditions should be continually expanded to include those voices, ways of knowing, and emerging practices that have been hitherto silenced or disregarded. . Practices that eventuate harm must be named, and then altered, repaired, or discarded. . There are fields of interest and longing beyond traditional norms and authorial intentions toward which a learner may choose to stray.

108 |

Remixing the Classroom

In this way, what I have been calling the “open form” or “text” (in contrast to the closed notion of the work) is not the terminus or the curricular endpoint of a music education. I am ultimately interested in the subjectivities from which engagements in open encounters are formed and reformed. I have no favorite musical genre, history, or style I wish to advance over another, only a longing that formal musical study is approached with fewer fixed meanings in place. While I have claimed that open musical forms inaugurate certain conditions of life and learning (fostering values that may or may not be at odds with traditional musical practices), they are not inherently moral. An open-source composer or artist who plays disrespectfully with idiomatic material, unconcerned or unaware of his privileged stances, is neither defendable nor a model for ethical music study. I do not suggest that we replace the classical sonata with digital collage simply because the latter is arguably more open than the former. School and university music education can be enriched and enlarged, I suggest, by paying attention to our forms of study and attending to an expanding range of practices that have the well-being of our students at the forefront of our concern. Just as there are some very old and profound norms and traditions echoing within and among today’s open-sourced and participatory experiments, there are some very old and profound educational principles that have vitality in them. The qualities and characteristics of the open form provide a directive—a cautionary directive—whose incompleteness is both end and means. And yet there needn’t be a contradiction between appealing to moral principles and reveling in the subtle subversions of the text. A principle, moral or otherwise (like a sociomusical norm), comes from cumulative values that have accrued over time, a texture of ideas and experiences that become generalizable and thus indicative of what should or might be. A moral principle, like a living tradition, should not be understood as unified or as a given; it is not a rule of law, benchmark, standard, or decree from which a society or community may govern or control human behavior. Laws, in contrast to principles, are both inviolable and universal (and this is why the first letters of terms like “Law,” “Master,” and “Work” are capitalized throughout this book). Principles, like sociomusical norms, are generalizable but not universal; they are aids in assessing the contingencies of change with regard to human behavior and one’s environment. Thus, moral principles, with no fixed ends to govern behavior, depend on inquiry, dialogue, and communication with others. They are directive, but open. They are tools, not Laws. A sociomusical norm can be engaged in, actively adhered to, or refused in ways that are moral if such a norm is treated openly—if it is taught openly—and used to enlarge and enrich the capacity of the learner or her society. Greene, quoting Dewey, writes, “here, as elsewhere, the values to be sought (what favorably affects the general welfare) are ‘identical with goods that are the fruit of intelligently directed behavior’ . . . and the activity moves in a future direction

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

109

within a context, but in an open world.” It would be interesting to speak of norms as tools, since it is commonsense that tools have both delineated purposes and supplemental or unanticipated uses. No singular tool is ever operated only and exactly as it is intended to be. It is also commonsense that an ordinary tool is open to whatever operation it may be put, and the user, not the maker, makes a conclusion about whether this use is good or bad. Of course, a use of a tool can be judged as “good” even while causing harm to others. As the actions of Goldmann, recalled in chapter 1, illustrate, a norm (a tool) can be judged as appropriate by its operator but used to perpetuate violence on others. I am also thinking of the movie Whiplash, set in a parafictional university jazz setting, where the oppressive was normalized, shared, and agreed to in the search for excellence and achievement. If the domain from which a norm is legitimized is not inclusive, or if members act aggressively to control its contours (if the owner of a toolkit refuses to share his tools equally or tries to control all aspects of their use; if a music teacher treats musical norms as Laws and acts capriciously to include or exclude others), questions of power and privilege deserve naming. Greene writes, “Fixed principles, like fixed ends, tend to close off inquiry. They may focus the vision in such a way as to exclude diverse possibilities. It is because of this that the pragmatic tradition has been so antithetical to traditions focused on the monolith, the tenacious, the pre-determined.” From an epistemological stance that sees knowledge as found and made in and through practical consequences, through observation and testing, the tenaciously held principle, just like the tenaciously held sociomusical norm, can undercut innovation and creativity and “lead to the frustration of individual and community growth.” The aim of school and university music education is not performance expertise in closed or open forms; it should be openness. This concerns straying and muddling, the disposition to search and wander, and the pleasure of problem posing. It can be characterized by Deweyan notions like independence of mind and ability; the enlargement and enrichment of individual capacity, loyalty, and adventure (freedom to and freedom from); imagination and creativity; critical thinking; and understanding of self and others. For Dewey, the moral principles of education “aim at making the methods of learning, of acquiring intellectual power, and of assimilating subject matter, such that they will render behavior more enlightened, more consistent, more vigorous than it otherwise would be.” “Enlightenment,” writes Kant, is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. . . . Sapere aude! [Dare to be wise!] Have courage to use your own understanding!

110 |

Remixing the Classroom

Such courage requires constant mental unshackling, Dewey suggests: “Instead of caring for himself and others, [the immature] becomes one who has himself to be cared for.” Moral education, he continues “is equivalent to that training of the child which will give him such possession of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them.” Equipping students with the tools, musical and otherwise, not merely to respond or adapt to change but to consciously shape and direct one’s future is a moral end of school and university. Paul Woodford would emphasize the critical dimension of learner and teacher growth, calling on the development of an empowered and politically savvy teaching force. The democratic music educator is an agent, one who is willing to direct and shape the impinging conditions that strain school and university music programs in today’s neoliberal, globalist world. Adventuresome and with courage, the ethically minded music teacher would claim a public stance as an intellectual leader, directing conversations with students about, say, “how music and music education help to ‘produce the discourses of which [they are] a product’ and are therefore often implicated in their indoctrination to capitalist and other sometimes dubious social values.” For Jorgensen, this is not a singular effort but one that music teachers “can do best in the company of others, in communities in which we aspire to treat others with respect, dignity, honesty and integrity.” I don’t believe we lack the capacity for a more enlightened citizenry or the capacity for more public music intellectuals. The problem, I think, has to do with educational method: with opportunity, access, and an ideal of music education and music-teacher education that is narrowly focused on performance norms and closed standards of musical expertise. I agree with Woodford and Jorgensen that a culture of timidity regarding issues of power and privilege keeps us from engaging in difficult conversations around issues of race, gender, politics, and so much more. “Many music education majors and teachers,” writes Woodford, “narrowly conceive themselves as performers and performance teachers—as practitioners charged with acquiring and replicating traditional performance and teaching methods.” The progenitors of standards and standardization, the discipline to which others might look for ways to increase efficiency and control—are we shackled by ties of our own making? Does our preoccupation with extant norms obstruct richer, more strange, and more obtuse encounters? If straying afield of oneself is a moral endeavor, how is this search made manifest in a world of documentation and surveillance?

The Crisis of Standardization Prescribing is, of course, a delicate matter when what one wants to produce is freedom from the dead hand of authority. —Martha C. Nussbaum

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

111

While few would disagree that the ends of a music education should be human flourishing and a commitment to individual and social well-being, it remains important to reemphasize the contradiction between these aims and the reality of contemporary schooling in the United States and much of the world. Martha Nussbaum claims that schools and universities are in a “silent” crisis, meaning that dissenting voices are all but squelched by the powerful and the vested. “Radical changes are occurring” Nussbaum writes, “and if this trend continues [it will for quite some time, I editorialize] nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements.” Question: What do any of the following have to do with critical thinking, empathy, and developing an aesthetic sensibility toward life and art? Benchmarks for excellence Defined, measured, and observable learner outcomes Teacher accountability School choice and market-based competition Teacher value-added measurements Standardized testing and scoring rubrics Alternative teacher-preparation programs Venture philanthropy Public school–private sector partnerships Big data and cradle-to-grave surveillance

If you answered “very little” or “nothing at all,” you are probably an advocate of creating competent democratic citizens through the public-school and university systems. If you said “everything” or “a good deal,” you are probably in favor of using market values to produce economically productive workers for the new knowledge economy! Punch line: All this and more is coming to a nation-state like yours, if it hasn’t all ready. I was recently invited by representatives of the National Association for Music Education to write a position paper that would be used to craft new Common Core Standards in music education. The Common Core, for the reader outside the United States, is our nation’s first attempt at a national curriculum, purportedly designed to help American students gain the kind of twenty-first-century skills needed to succeed and outcompete others in a global economy. (Apologies for the jingoism, though my guess is that all politicians everywhere—conservatives and liberals—say much the same thing.) Advancing the testing regime developed during the George W. Bush years, with the help of progresses in data mining and online surveillance, this nonfederal and nonacademic movement was conceived

112 |

Remixing the Classroom

by a mostly conservative group of state governors and private interests, with millions of dollars in support from nongovernmental organizations like the Gates Foundation. Cash-strapped states are awarded millions if, among a host of conditions, they adopt the Common Core and “evaluate the effectiveness of teachers in significant part by the test scores of their students (and remove any statutory barriers to doing so).” The Common Core requires testing at all stages of learning and teaching, and, with a guiding ethos of “college and career readiness,” it favors real-world events, history, and biography over imaginative fiction, with a strong emphasis on thinking skills that are based on “hard” evidence rather than feelings or personal perspectives. My assignment, in collaboration with Eric Shieh, was to make a case for independence as a musical standard; in other words, I was asked to look at how age- and experience-appropriate benchmarks could foster independent musicianship among learners. This means that, as required by law, musical independence among a host of other observable behaviors would be annually tested and evaluated by those music teachers in states (forty-one at the time of this writing) that have adopted the Common Core. I remember thinking, after receiving this invitation, that standardization and freedom are an oddly matched pair. And, more problematically, I had just published a strong critique of the very notion of musicianship, offering a more open conception of understanding music and life through multimodal literacies. In my own silent crisis, and worried about what I could contribute that could be of service to my profession, I sat down with Shieh in a café in Times Square (of all places) and sketched the following: Independence is related to freedom. It is the end of education. Independence of mind, therefore, is a moral aim. It is made manifest in choices. Though an aim common to all persons, it sits uneasily with standardization because choice is personal and particular. If independence of mind and purpose is to interact with a standardized education, standards must relate as much to process as outcome, to experiences as much as predetermined goals. Otherwise, a contradiction takes hold.

From this credo, we hypothesized that independence could be understood in two very different ways. Musical independence could be defined, demonstrated, measured, and externally evaluated if an individual learner were observed making behavioral choices within a unified musical field where norms and standards were so closed that they could be agreed on in advance (by those in power). Even though its actualization remains dependent on inference on the part of the observer, this perspective is the most common understanding of musical independence among music teachers, in which instruction takes the form of a set of skill-based outcomes, such as an individual’s ability to play a minor scale in three octaves or a child’s capacity to sing alone, in front of others, and in tune. In this

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

113

conceptualization, it is the scale that advances independence, regardless of how the scale gets taught; it is the ability to sing alone, in front of others and in tune, that fosters independence and, presumably, lifelong music-making. Attention is paid solely to what can be seen and measured, with the instructor held to no a priori moral code of conduct beyond an effort at the fair evaluation of a learner’s effort. A written contract, in the form of a rubric, is essential so that the student and teacher alike are aware of the expectations for outstanding, acceptable, or poor outcomes and can prepare accordingly. Or, in a more open classroom, where process is emphasized and evidence may be purposefully ambiguous, we supposed that independence could be determined (and since this is a question of state-mandated evaluations, a determination must be made), but not through inference alone. There is no assurance, in other words, that independence is consistently demonstrable by the learner or made observable to the teacher in the kind of laboratory setting depicted in the previous chapter. Here, measurement would be seen as antithetical to the values of freedom, whereas evaluation, still necessary, would take place through dialogue and debate: What choices did you make? What problems did you encounter? What were your intentions? Tell us your story. Rubrics would be a hindrance in such a qualitative setting, unless the individual learner had a say in their creation and revision and took part in his own evaluation. The process is further complicated when students are working creatively in groups. Imagine trying to determine who, among many, was the most creative? Who was the least? Who was the most independent? Who was the least? What if a musical Law, or a social more, were intentionally violated? What if these violations confused the adjudicator? What does evidence mean should an ensemble play purposefully “wrong” in an effort to achieve an underground sound or to some other end? Another group might apply ruptures in tone and sensibility to a well-known song as a way to critique anticapitalist or sexist discourses, as Alanis Morissette did in her cover of “My Humps”—or as a mostly Asian and Asian American group did in my class one evening when they reinvented the 1980s hit “Turning Japanese”? (Unsurprisingly, Shieh the provocateur was a performer in that group.) In a standards-based laboratory setting, two-way communication would be essential for determinations of value because objective, universal, or tenaciously held norms would almost certainly represent external bias on the part of the adjudicator. Concerning the group that reordered “Turning Japanese” and my experience of that moment, I could do little more than learn from what just happened; assessment was the last thing on my mind. Moreover, a critical disposition that seeks to interrupt a societal norm, one that wishes to call attention to an injustice or an indecency, is as likely as it is not to use nonstandard artistic protocols. In disturbing the comfortable, new inventions are often called for, and the teacher—often white, suburban, and middle class—may

114

|

Remixing the Classroom

be the comfortable target toward which a new invention is squarely aimed. In this contradictory and perilous setting, what assurances could possibly be made that utterances like “highly proficient” or “developing” or “needs improvement” are fairly applied and collectively understood? And finally, who among us is so good at what we do that we need neither development nor improvement? Such an open disposition is too risky, not just for teachers, who must quantitatively demonstrate their value-add from fall to spring, or for students, who deserve fair feedback on creative work, but also for the administrator, who must publically report on the academic progress of his students and the quality of his teachers. Moreover, school is a neutral zone, the story goes. In a high-stakes arena, the safest recourse for actors bad or good (the principal who wants to fire an expensive but independent-minded teacher; an idealistic early career music educator who really needs her job and loves her pupils) is to stick to a curriculum that has plenty of observable rights and wrongs but avoids controversy. This is true in spite of the fact that the musical objects we make and perform in the twenty-first century are increasingly multitudinous and migratory, with multiple levels of meaning that range from the obvious to the obtuse. In an educational climate that has little use for the latter, little use for collectively constructed and contrary meanings or for constructivist practices and artistic collectives, music educators are risking their careers if they move away from conventional practices and functional literacies. The pleasures of the text yield to the rigors of the Work, and classroom interactions are limited to what Barthes refers to as the informational and the denotational level, “closed in its evidence, held in a complete system of destination.” I am talking about closed and open ways of reading and writing. Literacy, in its broadest conception, is a way of coming to know the world through writing or reading an object or text, and there are multiple and ever-evolving modes of literacy available at any given moment. Yet, importantly, there is no singular level within a text, or specific modality to employ when reading or writing a text, that can produce meaning on its own. There are surplus meanings in every teaching or learning event, and these meanings intersect and multiply. For those who study multimodal literacy, these simultaneously coherent and conflicting messages endure or evolve in a muddle of signification (Barthes, influenced by Julia Kristeva, calls this signifiance), from the well-coded to the abstract, from the informational to the unexampled. In a climate of high-stakes teacher and student accountability, only functional aspects of reading and writing are privileged because only the functional aspects can be independently validated—that is, numerically measured and numerically communicated to the public. The term “functional literacy” refers to a way of reading and writing (visà-vis a cultural practice, a written manuscript, a musical language) that accords with the norms and structures that have been developed by a society’s dominant culture. In this sense, modalities of literacy can be understood hierarchically.

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

115

According to Cathy Benedict, functional literacy in school- and university-based music education serves reproductive purposes, as “found in the commonsense practice of conceptualizing literacy as something bound by notation, or note reading and writing and other elements of music that are so often considered universal.” For Benedict, such a closed practice is an “imposition of meaning” and thus dismissive of alternative forms of communication, particularly those that resist the dominant culture. Functional literacy, disguised as neutral or normal, serves as an instructional proxy for a range of modalities that operate within a less-delineated symbol system. Foreclosing spheres of experimentation that may be more elliptic in purpose results in a diminished range of moral outcomes available to a teacher when designing curricula. Time signatures and chord functions, with a smattering of biographical facts, become the business of teaching and learning music, whether or not their ends enlarge and enrich life. In the following passage, Benedict captures the acute tension between teaching in ways that invite multimodal literacies and ways that are preestablished or “school-based,” between approaches that are improvisational and those that are considered professionally right. One witnesses in this account the novice teacher pulled between competing visions of teacher professionalism, with obvious moral consequences. Benedict observed her student-teachers with their classroom: There were brief moments in which I witnessed the abandonment of how they thought they were supposed to be teaching—in one case, the student teacher took out his guitar and in the other the student teacher sat at the piano and improvised music in the moment. Both facilitated different kinds of musical encounters, but, unfortunately, these disappeared as soon as they reminded themselves to return to the business of teaching music. With the exception of those moments when they were allowed to engage with the musicality of the teacher, the high school students’ schooled literacy was clearly evident as they sat with great patience bound by infinite boredom.

Functionality imposes meaning on an educational event in ways that go beyond predictability and routine. Its methods are implicated in a belief system that makes a teacher feel wrong when she foregoes terms and technicalities (and boredom) in favor of what is contingent and irreducible—in other words, what is needed in this moment and in this place. Closed methods deprofessionalize teaching, according to Benedict, by becoming “more real than the music itself,” suggesting that teachers too often teach the Orff Approach but not music through Orff. Similarly, Barthes writes that “method becomes a Law, but since that Law is devoid of any effect outside itself . . . it is infinitely disappointed.” This, in turn, alienates both teachers and students as they move further away from a process of inquiry, away from the uncertainties that spark interest and creativity. There is “no surer way,” writes Barthes, “to kill a piece of research and send it to join the great waste of abandoned projects than Method.”

116 |

Remixing the Classroom

Beyond Translation I think there are experiences that we can’t or don’t want to translate. There are meanings that exist outside the casings that define the familiar and the normal. Like the gap between frames in a movie reel, these might be called liminal spaces. Barthes calls them “third meanings,” and they are everywhere—moments of becoming that are so fearfully open that they shock us with a bittersweet pleasure. I can’t count the number of times I heard Greene say, “I am what I am not yet.” (And I can’t count the number of times I paused to think, just what does that mean?) One needn’t adopt a metaphysical philosophy of aesthetics to feel dissatisfied with functional symbols and finished forms or to feel hungry for more than the praxis of procedural know-how. Regarding schools and universities, this has something to do with awareness more than method of address. Writing with wit and aspiration, Iris Yob longs, like many of us do, for the (im)possible. If we knew what it was, we would teach for it. Although Yob refers to a notion of spirituality within educational spheres and I do not (then again, maybe Yob would say that I do), we have both remarked on a glimpse: a fragile noticing, one that can be undone so easily by application and sequence, by the rough hands of instruction. Perhaps this so-called third meaning is something that can’t be taught, though it might be experienced or discovered in classrooms. But I’m getting ahead of myself. As music-teacher educators and performance educators, we are aware more than ever that there is more to music than its sonic properties alone. Most agree that there are at least two distinct ways to understand, experience, and appreciate music: what Lucy Green calls “delineated” and “inter-sonic” (or inherent) meanings. The latter, according to Green, is concerned with musical parts and wholes, and their inter- and intra-sonic relationships and functions. Delineated meanings refer to “the extra-musical concepts or connotations that music carries: for example, its social, cultural, religious, political or other such associations.” Accordingly, delineated meanings mark a work, genre, or text as distinct from another. What we think of as music, David Elliott writes, is really “a universe of mini-worlds (e.g., the jazz world, the world of choral music), each of which is organized around indigenous knowings, beliefs, values, goals, and standards toward the production of certain kinds of music works for a particular group of listeners.” Barthes analyzes the aesthetic form somewhat differently than Green and Elliott do, distinguishing between those meanings that exist on the informational level, those that exist on the symbolic, and those that elude capture—the “third meaning.” Barthes conceives of these levels hierarchically, even as they interact. The informational level communicates what is apparent; it deals with message more than symbol. We know, or can easily find out, that Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano written by Franz Schubert; that the key of G major

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

117

has one sharp, never two; that The Rite of Spring, if it is attributed to Igor Stravinsky, begins with a bassoon melody in its altissimo register. Naturally, we bring the information we know about a piece to our understanding of it. The second level deals with signification: referential symbols, historical markers, discipline-specific functions, and authorial purposes. This level is “intentional (it is what the author wanted to say) and it is taken from a kind of common, general lexicon of symbols.” This level is where the Author and his Law communicate through context-specific norms and disciplinary grammar. “Context is a structural given not of language but of speech and it is the very status of context to be reductive of meaning. . . . [A]ll speech is on the side of the Law.” This is a highly counterintuitive claim. Most music-education researchers and university teacher educators, including myself, have long decried the way in which formal music is taught with little regard to context, as if music existed freely outside of history, discourse, culture, or politics. How, then, is it possible that context reduces meaning, especially when we are seeking to add meaning where, in so many instructional spaces, it is sorely needed? This perspective, I think, is the difference between reading and understanding; the former is an open process of meaning making, while the latter aims at closure. Context brings meaning to a Work by indicating to learners the intentions of an Author or the norms that delimit the Work’s “indigenous” community of practitioners—for example, the rules of its “mini-world.” Barthes asks us to consider that something might be lost when cultural meanings accumulate and then cohere within these sites. When music is taught on the side of the Law, understanding becomes an act of translating, and explication becomes the method by which music is made contextual to others. Rather than members of a class reading the world together, the teacher reads on behalf of the learner, explaining music in the most useful manner possible, via context. The result, for Jacques Rancière, is enforced stultification, a method favored by two Lawmakers we met in chapter 1. One can imagine Jiro Ono, Goldmann, and Johanna filling the roles of Rancière’s Master and student: [Ono:] But the Old Master would say: such and such a thing must be learned, and then this other thing and after that, this other. Selection, progression, incompletion: these are his principles. We learn rules and elements, then apply them to some chosen reading passages, and then do some exercises based on the acquired rudiments. Then we graduate to a higher level: other rudiments, another book, other exercises, another professor. At each stage the abyss of ignorance is dug again. . . . [Goldmann:] The master always keeps a piece of learning—that is to say a piece of the student’s ignorance—up his sleeve. [Johanna:] I understand that, says the satisfied student. [Goldmann:] You think so, corrects the master. In fact, there’s a difficulty here that I’ve been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. . . .

118 | Remixing the Classroom [Ono:] I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature; you wouldn’t understand it at all.

As much as I can, I want to live in the tension between my reading and your intentions, in the third space between your efforts to clarify and my search for another way to see and hear. I want to embrace the beautiful failure of language, which makes reading an antidote to the kinds of measurable outcomes that lessons make possible. Of course music is a language! It is made up of codes, which we can learn, most certainly—and share and test and change. But language must be interpreted (codes must be explained), and because language is read and reread differently by everyone who so chooses, it is never reducible to its delineations, functions, codes, or context. As art is distinct from photojournalism, language is distinct from speech. Speech is “a message that seeks me out, me, the recipient of the message, the subject of the reading, a meaning which starts with [the Author] and which goes on ahead of me; evident certainly (so too is the other), but closed in its evidence, held to a complete system of destination.” As language cannot be reduced to speech, music cannot be reduced to context. Formal music education remains the learning of musical information and the decoding of sociomusical symbols, levels one and two. But it is only through reading that a third space can be glimpsed and possibly articulated. Ultimately, university- and school-based standards are a dominant culture’s effort to ensure that a learner can communicate her understanding of musical information and sociomusical context upon public examination. Students who lack skill in decoding symbols and recalling information are necessarily viewed through a lens of deficiency and redirected to observable behaviors and clear and evident meanings. The teacher’s role is clinical. Elliott writes, “Music educators are diagnosticians of musical thinking. We consider what our students are giving attention to, what they fail to notice and understand, what they find difficult to solve, what they feel right or wrong about musically, and so on. . . . [W]e target students’ attention and guide their thinking-in-action by using different languages of instruction.” Accounts like these, in which habits of mind and practice are directed by a Master problem solver on behalf of another, may be goodintentioned, but they also have a way of disregarding children’s unique points in time; worse, they may silence alternative readings of the world. Teachers may be insufficiently curious about what is not noticed. The teacher-as-diagnostician may see children as unfinished adults or as bad adult musicians. A learner like Johanna from chapter 1 may be labeled insufficiently musical and denied a music education because of some perceived failure on her part. At a minimum, such a perspective fails to account for the “funds of knowledge” that youth bring with them to a teaching encounter, ways of seeing and hearing that may be invisible to the adjudicator.

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

119

Leaving aside questions of patrimony and power, I don’t have a problem with teaching students the grammar of music, as long as we don’t forget that language gives grammar its life. Language, as mentioned above, is more than the sum of its codes. And while we can no more escape context, observable norms, and rules of grammar than we can escape language itself, the trap is mistaking the former for the latter—the Law for the totality of an art, or one’s disciplinary field for the limits of exploration. In the following passage, Barthes attempts to communicate this point and disrupt its closure, freeing discourse from delineation, gesturing playfully toward a third meaning. Committed and bothered by his codes, he cedes and supersedes them all at once: The speaker [composer, writer, performer] is bothered by all this Law that the act of speaking [composing, writing, performing] is going to introduce into what he wants to say, in which case, since it is impossible to alter the delivery (condemning one to “clarity”) but possible to excuse oneself for speaking (for laying out the Law), he uses the irreversibility of speech in order to disturb its legality: correcting, adding, wavering, the speaker moves into the infinitude of language, superimposes on the simple message that everyone expects of him a new message that ruins the very idea of a message and, through the shifting reflection of the blemishes and excesses with which he accompanies the line of the discourse, asks us to believe with him that language [a song, a poem, a play] is not to be reduced to communication.

Three points are worth noting. First, while we may be both funded and condemned to codes, contexts, and tenaciously held norms, and while we may at times find the Law discourteous to idiosyncratic needs, we can disturb its legality through the act of searching—through resistance and rewriting, through reading and rereading, through blemishing and brandishing. Second, we are permitted, if we are indeed bothered by the Law, to explore the excesses and edges of its field and stray beyond its delineations. Third, it is from the perspective of a search that we can catch a glimpse of a third meaning; this third meaning is transformational (and thus possibly moral), though it exists outside of functional literacies, sociomusical technologies, and categories of rule or observable behavior. To reiterate, one consequence of consensus understandings is that they come at the expense of more layered, more diverse ways of knowing and being in the world. I want to argue that straying afield has a moral character; it is an act of freedom though quite possibly unheroic in tone and sensibility. Preferring Thoreau’s swamp to the shoulders of giants, I want to speak in favor of moral longings. I am fascinated with the ways in which signs can break down, crack, or open up. I am thinking of Dapper Dan from chapter 1, who Africanized the language of fashion by working in the space between old and new and between high and low.

120

|

Remixing the Classroom

When Barthes collapses disciplinary meanings (inter-sonic) and cultural meanings (delineated) so that they refer to information or symbol, depending on their obviousness, he splits opens a new space previously unavailable to vocational practices of music education: “The third, the one ‘too many,’ the supplement that my intellect cannot succeed in absorbing, at once persistent and fleeting, smooth and elusive, I propose to call it the obtuse meaning.” Here, at the border between the known and the possible, Barthes has brought me to a counternarrative I can point to but cannot touch: “the form of an emergence, of a fold (a crease even).” In the section that follows, I hope to give an account of its character: my own muddle of an interpretation. “Obtuse” means blunt in form, rounded, not sharp. “An obtuse angle is greater than a right angle: an obtuse angle of 100º, says the dictionary; the third meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely.” In concluding this section, I part ways with those philosophers and sociologists who seek to explain music first and devise a method of teaching thereafter. When teaching music is analogous with explication and description (in contrast with imagination and exploration) we take responsibility only for those things we can point to, a notion of professionalism that fits nicely with the discourses of accountability and standardization that shape current teaching practices. And while I believe that it is moral to actively resist the forces of neoliberal education reform, I am equally attracted to a notion of wondering and wandering. I want to say that we can catch a glimpse of something moral in the effort—the failureprone effort—to read, search, write, and search again. This contention has something to do with failing as much as refusing. Yes, to learn what can be known is a very good thing. But to make possible the apprehension of obtuse meanings is an act of radical openness that resists the false limits of category, function, and, yes, even context. For Barthes, thirdness exists by virtue of outplaying the paradigm. It sits beyond either-or, at that point where communication ends and another language begins. Outside of what, I wonder? In contrast to the first two levels of signification, the third meaning is not built into the structure of the Work (or even into a text) as are other aspects like time and key signatures, and performance and contextual norms. Its apprehension resides in the experiencing of the individual. And since thirdness is not found within a text, we must go in search of its rewards; we must bring questions to the text. The Work says, Stay with me. Don’t wander far. The Master says, Trust me. I have everything you need. But the text tells us, Be off! Don’t try to own me. You only think you can understand me. The text speaks in aphorisms. Only you can find what you’re looking for. Here is an unholy form of music education—ours, if we can just let go.

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

| 121

Toward a Third Meaning Those images that yet Fresh images beget —William Butler Yeats

There are many music-education scholars, teacher educators, and studio instructors who stray afield. And there are many whose work outside the center brings change to the formal study of music. There is Constance McKoy, who reminds us again and again of the underrepresentation of African Americans and other minorities within our schools and universities, provoking us to name injustices and to reject the status quo as insufficiently encompassing. There is Sidsel Karlsen, who listened to the voices of immigrant children in Northern Europe; Chiao-Wei Liu, who spent time with Asian youth in New York’s Chinatown; and Altovise Gipson-Colon, who documented the stories of African American music teachers as they struggled with issues of isolation. These scholars find resilience in borderland spaces. A crafty cohort of doctoral students and faculty meet monthly at Penn State to debate, define, and redefine what democracy might mean in the context of one of the most hierarchical of educational locations: the American concert band. There are the countless general music teachers and early childhood specialists from around the world, or practitioners of vapaa säestys (free piano accompaniment), for whom openness is a way of living and teaching. I haven’t heard much of the Master-apprentice model willfully employed in the public-school music-technology setting, either. Teachers like these are rebels, free thinkers, artists, and activists, and their restlessness has incited a search for alternatives: they are calling into being new forms, both wondrous and strange. The third meaning is approached or apprehended through a search. It cannot be given to a student; nor can the Master command its appearance. To muddle through, to stray afield, to seek out, to refit and repurpose, these longings emphasize the pleasures and perils of aporia: an ongoing sense of self-doubt and wonder, a general suspicion of Laws and prohibitions, the confusions of being stuck, unstuck, and restuck. While the third meaning may be indifferent to moral categories and fixed principles, it is a consequence of freedom, and in this way I describe it as a potential moral undertaking. It is the search that concerns me, more than anything—the object called into being, the meaning that is glimpsed across the border; but its antinomic qualities shape classroom life in ways that are nondestinational, that exist beyond mere function. Elusive and seductive, the third meaning shimmers, says Barthes; it is disguised and disguising, a source of bliss, “on the ‘underside’ of meaning.” Is it the gay gene I recognize in Barthes’s discourse on transformation? An enunciation that flouts

122

|

Remixing the Classroom

decorum, existing within, outside, and among, a kind of drag show, a turn on don’t-ask-don’t-tell, a philosophical lisp? I point readers to Elizabeth Gould’s work for a larger exegesis on queering music education. Suffice it to say that Barthes brings nuance, confusion, and a sense of humor to Dewey’s principles of moral growth, to which I adhere but whose rationalist-scientific jargon can be mistaken as positivist in tone and kind. Missing in these discourses on growth and enlightenment is a playfulness unencumbered by direction or desire: classroom giddiness, surface beauties, the erotic tingle of debate (I am thinking of Socrates’ jousts with the handsome Alcibiades), the noninstrumental instrumental encounter, the pastiche, the passage to elsewhere. These accents are not incommensurate with growth, but they are hardly directives by which to design an “effective” music curriculum; nor do they help an administrator make determinations of teacher quality. I’m bored with the predictable; I’m bored with heroism and rugged justice, especially regarding education. I want my students to grow, of course, but I hope their growth isn’t linear or consistent, or easy or fast. I hope my students find things they can’t explain and encounter experiences without delineation or purpose. In this way, I want to hold two things in each hand: a case for depth and a case against it, not because I think this vision represents a new moral principle for music education but because its characteristics resemble what I think is art.

From Work to Text: Moving Beyond the Predetermined In a previous work, I make two claims that have something to do with this search for a third meaning and its moral implications. Both have to do with changes in the world of art, in which methods of classifications and notions of ownership are disintegrating and new forms, chimera-like in their devolution, pass before our eyes. The first claim is that a turn from musical performance to composing looms, like a specter that haunts the Master, in school and university music education. I do not mean that future musicians will give up performing but that they will use the study of acoustic and nonacoustic instruments as a means to realize more wondrous and strange inventions, and new forms of life and living that are open and unstoppable, composing a “layering of meanings which always lets the previous meaning continue, as a geological formation, saying the opposite without giving up the contrary.” My second claim is that the great hierarchies of Western classical art music will become increasingly unattractive to artists new and old, a potential democratization that will confuse the location of composer, improviser, performer, Author, Conductor, and audience in relation to one another. Performance-as-Work will give way to performing-as-text. Compositionas-Work will give way to composing-as-text. I think that Panagiotis “Panos” Kanellopoulos is trying to hasten these changes, as I am in my own classes in New York. Composing and improvising,

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

123

in contrast to purely allographic modes of performing, have the capacity to cultivate teacher and student autonomy, he writes. “They entail the creation of modes of musical action that constitute [new] instituting practices, and at the same time, they create the context for constant questioning . . . without ‘any guarantor or guarantee.’” For Kanellopoulos, improvisation in and of itself is not a magic bean that will cultivate independent musicians and democratic citizens. But when music-making is understood and experienced from a position of fundamental openness, as “an irrevocable act,” it calls into being an alternative, more horizontal, set of human relationships. These values, nonetheless, are pursued against a backdrop of what Kanellopoulos calls a state of heteronomy, or “conditions that do not allow for the questioning of the legitimacy of the socially created norms, institutions, practices, and values . . . [or for] effectively participat[ing] in forming new institutions,” leaving hierarchies and positions of power untouched. It is important to note that this crisis of standardization predates neoliberal discourses around student and teacher accountability and that, as I have been arguing, heteronomic values are inhered in the dominant musical traditions that comprise the bulk of school and university music curricula. Even “creative” pedagogies like composing and improvising can be measured or made measurable by focusing on “psychologising educational encounters . . . that adopt a view of cognition within which creativity emerges as a private mental problem-solving process, even in those cases where the social dimensions of creative collaboration is not neglected.” When creativity is seen as developmental and norm-governed (when children are observed making good or poor choices) or unwrapped in stages (from beginner to advanced), its observable processes belie richer, more existential needs and yearnings, as well as lighter moments of pleasure or jouissance. We are back, in other words, to inter-sonic and delineated meanings made clear, made authoritorial, made tidy. What is this mode of composing and improvising that holds such capacity for agency and human dignity? It contains, I think, traces of the postmodern turn from Work to text that was prophesied by Barthes as well as theorists, philosophers, and artists like John Cage, Umberto Eco, Jacques Attali, Maxine Greene, Susan Sontag, Lydia Goehr, and others in the second half of the twentieth century. In Sontag’s analysis of Barthes’s writings, she writes, “Considering something as ‘text’ means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature), to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinction among the arts)” for the sake of more complex and multilayered meanings. In this approach, Barthes writes, “the Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. . . . [T]he Text is a methodological field. . . . [T]he Text is experienced only in an activity of production.” I agree with Kanellopoulos, as with John Paynter and

124 |

Remixing the Classroom

Lenore Pogonowski, that musical creativity, and thus life and living, is enriched and made multiple when efforts move beyond the cliché of self-expression, beyond the representations that mark off my culture from yours or my music from another’s. There is more to discover, more ways to get lost. Such a search would take place within a field of production, “a stereographic plurality” that enlists a multiplicity of classifiable signs and discourses; “they [may] come from codes which are known but their combination is unique,” as well as from group and individual affects and sensibilities. Indeed, the pedagogical field may be prepared in advance—a teacher-facilitator may set up certain basic conditions that deal with time or space, or, as I suggest in chapter 3, the teacher-facilitator or an individual learner may propose the study of a problem that requires debate and dialogue—but the field is always remade at each encounter and is always unique to the members present at that particular moment in time. Norms may be brought to an encounter (how could they not?), but they do not predetermine an encounter. I would like to illustrate this problem. A conductor studies the score she has programmed for her group; she decides in advance of a rehearsal exactly what sounds she wants, what problems will need to be addressed, and what her ensemble is capable of doing. She is a strong and unhesitant leader. The choir is hers, though in public she says “ours.” Her job is to clarify and communicate signs, from the notation on the page to the expectations of her historic form. As Master, she remains in firm control of the borders of her domain. Contrast that scenario with a different illustration, a pastiche: “Imagine a small group of musicians and children,” writes Kanellopoulos, in a school setting in which a freestyle improvisation is taking place, “where everyone takes both the position of a player/listener and of listener/audience; nobody aims at emulating a particular musical style, although stylistic references are not a priori excluded. In such a group, adults treat children as musicians and thinkers.” “‘You might like what is wrong better than what is right’ [says the student playing next to you]. [O]nce you have begun you just ‘shut up and swim’ [says another]. Structure is not pre-conceived but emergent.” Here is an definalized space in which teacher and students play together outside of diagnostic relationships of better and worse, a space in which readymade rubrics and taxonomies do not direct educational ends, sounds are thrown in unique combination in and outside of style or genre, and pleasure is decanted and allowed to breath. In this arena, “the child, based on his experience, regards improvisation as a mode of music-making which is, at the same time, an opportunity for exploration,” writes Kanellopoulos. “But here, exploration is not the result of intention but of risk that inheres in every improvisation; risk is welcomed and, in fact, what can occur by mistake can be more satisfying.” What does it mean to suspend intention in favor of risk? Intention directs us to what we already know, I think. A teacher’s intentions direct him to the observable, to the

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

125

accountable. Risk taking, in contrast, allows us to walk backward into insights, to stumble on something we haven’t previously considered. This form of exploration reveals both a depth of experience and a buoyancy of action, in which risk taking is more of a muddle than a domain-generated experiment: a “walk,” Kanellopoulos writes (and note that a walk is neither a march nor a parade), during which the “scenery” is created as players saunter through sound and time.

Strange Beauties The open classroom does not “give birth” to a new form, as the modernist impulse once gave birth to countless new inventions, propelled Prometheus-like by the fires of creative destruction (today “disruption” is the term favored by Silicon Valley elites). Nor is there a simple binary alternative, as if a switch could turn a classroom from closed to not-closed. Openness is an aim, like democracy is an aim, and, like the democratic classroom, openings must be called into being, searched for or wandered into (sometimes backed into) from encounter to encounter. Its method is intertextual, which means that an open-ended curriculum operates within, among, and outside a plurality of sociomusical norms and pedagogical constructions, some evident and some obtuse. The form—the text, its layerings—exists within an unfinished texture of discourses, woven in counterpoint, with and without contradiction, with a depth of meaning or not. To be sure, some degree of openness is attained every time a musical work is rendered, as when a choir director and her students work to unpack the symbol system that shapes their form. Indeed, a forthright conductor might push back against a characterization of her rehearsal as closed. “I work intertextually every day, among a bevy of obvious and complex forms of signification,” she might say. “When I conduct Vivaldi’s Gloria, my choir—I mean our ensemble—is operating within, among, and outside of sociomusical norms and pedagogical constructions. These are slippery, as you admit yourself, Randall. Plus, there is plenty of risk taking on everyone’s part.” It is certainly true that self-actualization and community making can be achieved in even the strictest forms of study—I know that from high-school marching band. Reading music or playing the B-flat blues is the very art of declassifying and reordering complex signs. Interpretation, no matter how exacting the tradition, cannot be reduced to mere function or made communicable according to an actual rulebook. Freedom, furthermore (as mentioned in chapter 1), can be located in the finest shading of a phrase, in the delicate space between a fermata and a breath. “I long for openings in every rehearsal,” the choir director might say. “You have made a straw man of my work.” Fair to say, the fictional choir director above is a projection of my own selfdoubts, the manifestation of an ongoing search that feels perpetually beyond my

126

|

Remixing the Classroom

reach, like the word I can’t find at the tip of my tongue (which then reveals itself spontaneously, but only at an inopportune moment). So, too, let it be said, have I found immense satisfaction throughout my life in the rendering of traditionalist forms—the choirs, concert and marching bands, big bands, solos, and chamber groups whose music and fellowship have brought me so much happiness. Like all artists, I have lived dialectically in the great tension between freedom and responsibility, which, Bennett Reimer once cautioned me, is a better way of capturing the antinomies of art than “open” and “closed.” Yet to find transcendence in the Work is not the end of the story, or the end of my story; nor does my confession deny me the validity of other pleasures or foreclose a search for new meanings. I remain unconvinced that the case I am making for a more open school and university music curriculum—the search, in part, for a third meaning—can be attained through traditional forms alone, at least not without alteration to structural components of the Work. Put differently, in having strayed afield of myself and of the borders that have defined the forms I have come to know and love, I bare witness to strange beauties. More than that, I have encountered, as Kanellopoulos has encountered, too, a richer and more diverse array of human, sonic, and sociomusical relationships: relations in which power shifts quickly, classrooms where students talk and I listen, musical encounters and fractious debates that are so confusing—sometimes angering—that they continue in arterial fashion beyond school walls and back. Moving past mere decoding, listening more than hearing, as Joseph Abramo would suggest, has made music more tinted, more many-colored. It’s fair to say that the pleasures of receptivity and generosity—a public notion that Louis Hanzlick calls “one-anotherness”—have made me different than I once was and different than I otherwise would be. I concede that closed forms of art share with those that are more willfully open the possibility of self-actualization and community. But their means to actualization differ, particularly regarding issues of power, access, and diversity. It is within the exercise of means that disciplinary limitations become apparent. It is possible, for example, for a student to feel self-actualized through music without ever considering that the school ensemble she is playing in is mostly white and privileged by class and economic advantages. The sociomusical relationships that constitute a vocational education in school and university music, and the Masterapprentice model that focuses primarily on craft and procedural know-how, may very well produce knowledgeable and independent musicians, but their knowledgeableness and independence may not be recognizable outside the borders of their field. For university teacher-educators who must place certified teachers in the public schools, this is a problem. As learners move within the hierarchies of their domain, opportunities for growth may be fenced in, ironically, by success. I have seen how difficult it is for conservatory musicians, shaped by years

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

127

of competition, to compose cooperatively, or to trust that they will not be laughed at when they perform before their peers. I have seen players from the world’s best schools unable to tap a steady beat on a drum, or attend mindfully to the timbre they are producing when striking a drum or ringing a bell. Public-school students may have little use for such routine experts, self-actualized or not. I argue that there are limitations—blind spots, if you will—to our profession’s reliance on the kinds of literacies that produce states of knowledgeableness more than diverse and ongoing ways of knowing. “Our masters stuff these things into our memory, fully feathered, like oracles in which the letters and syllables are the substance of the matter,” writes Michel de Montaigne. “Knowing by heart is no knowledge; it is merely a retention of what has been given into the keeping of memory. What we really know we can make use of without looking at the model.” Extending this point, I argue that self-actualization is best seen as a moral end of music education when it is experienced as a public phenomenon more than as an inner achievement. This end cannot be attained, I believe, without access to a diversity of social and sociomusical interactions. This aim also cannot be realized within strict hierarchies of power. While there is no method of study that can guarantee its realization (I cannot present to you a fully feathered model for a moral music education), I see glimpses of moral encounters when pedagogical, musical, and social formations are thrown into unique combination, when we are stirred to reconsider a tenaciously held norm or start something new. Literacy, in this sense, is an unfinished concept; when it is made and remade collectively, it is a public concept. Diversity, understood through the production and arousal of differences, enlarges our capacity to look at the world as though it could be otherwise. “Difference means—what?” asks Barthes. “That each relation, gradually (it takes time), is made original: discovers the originality of bodies taken one by one, breaks off the reproduction of roles, the repetition of discourses, counters any staging of prestige, of rivalry.” The possibility of a new development, aroused through interactions with others who are different, saves me from endless replication. (Once an apprentice, I am now the Master. Someday I’ll be first chair. I will teach just like my teacher.) What would it mean to search out, within one’s classroom community, points of novelty and surprise at each level of relation and intersection, at every level of signification, from individual to individual, from object to text, from moment to moment? (Barthes concedes that it takes time.) Webbed in this way, we can no longer treat normative terms like “Conductor,” “composer,” “Master,” or “apprentice”—or terms like “school” or “schooling”—as though they are final. We can no longer hear music the way it is supposed to be listened to. This is the shimmer referred to earlier, the disguise, the lisp that belies the message. Call it the seminar, the third meaning, the text, but it is a space of freedom, a place of potentiality without prerogative or guarantee of progress.

128 |

Remixing the Classroom

While the turn from Work to text may alter or shape actual practice, it begins with perception. Once you have made this conceptual leap, once you have strayed this far afield, it may prove difficult, as it did for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, to expect that home will remain just the way you left it. Writers like Montaigne, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Salmon Rushdie know about the dangers of travel. The things we thought we knew are suddenly uncertain. The conventions were thought were “normal,” we realize, are culturally constructed. The music we used to love sounds strange in our ears. Given the space we have traveled, we certainly can no longer run a rehearsal or design instruction in a way that is safely predictable. The qualitative dimensions of musical experience expand exponentially, as we welcome back the soft cognates of feelings, surface impressions, metaphors, and pleasure in the exploration of a text. Identity is conceived as fluid; the self, as always achieved. As a community, we might leave some experiences undefined, careful that hard analysis might weigh down an insight. Importantly, as writers and readers of an expanded field employing multiple modalities of seeing, speaking, hearing, and being, we work at the edge of our ability, at that space just shy of articulation. The world, made more perilous, is also more open, and it is moral, I think—or at least it might be. It has a moral sense—a quality of travel, growth, and adventure: muddled, unholy, with shimmers and lisps and glints of something otherwise, and somewhere else. It is a passage to elsewhere.

Reclaiming Music Education When was the last time you were moved by a high-level speech about education? —Mike Rose

Ask a group of music-education students the following question: What preoccupies us at this moment in time? It is a fair question to ask, connected as it has always been to the life and work of an artist. Then, follow up with: What do our preoccupations say about schools, the arts, and life today? The first thing you are likely to hear is a lot of talk about testing and systems of evaluation. You might learn about the pressure placed on young people to succeed, get good grades, and go to good schools. We are preoccupied with status, however defined. We are preoccupied by the conditions of work and employment. Time is a constant worry. You may not hear much about art or the good life, except to say that these topics appear to be missing in the world outside the university. A great feeling of insecurity will descend on your conversation, followed by panic. Teaching will be described in bleak terms, and schools, even worse. If you are a music-teacher educator, your students will let you know that they want to be ready for work, that they want the skills they need to succeed, and that it is your responsibility to give these to them.

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

129

As I reread the paragraph above, my heart sinks. I feel like a fraud, lonely in my house in Vermont, dreaming up bourgeois nonsense. What right have I to make a case for open classrooms and constructed knowledge—this philosophy of foraging—when my future teachers will be evaluated by their students’ test scores, when lesson plans must include action deliverables, and when, all the while, their careers depend on proof of their value add? There is a moral case to made, isn’t there, in providing students with the conditions of future employment? They are entering a new world in which all aspects of teaching and learning are expected to be visible, documented, and driven by results. I am haunted by this tension. In my darkest place, I wonder if the philosophy I have cooked up is for my self-actualization, not theirs—or worse, at their expense. Schools are failed institutions, the story goes. Drastic measures are needed. Teachers must be held accountable. Though I participate in this conversation, I refuse these starting terms. I think that we need to reclaim what we mean by “music education.” I think we need to redefine what we mean by “achievement.” This is a moral project. “There’s not much public discussion of achievement that includes curiosity, reflectiveness, uncertainty, or a willingness to take a chance, to blunder,” writes Mike Rose. Education must be more than preparation for work. A music education must be larger and richer than vocational study alone. Achievement must be something that a learner has a say in describing. I want to begin here, staking these claims, pushing back against an instrumentalist logic that has little use for exploration and risk taking, to say nothing of shimmers and lisps. My hypothesis is that if we can create spaces of renewal for our students and ourselves, hurt as we may be by internal practices and external forces, we can begin to reclaim a richer and more open understanding of music education. If there is, indeed, a moral case to be made in providing music and music-education students with the conditions of future employment, we should look carefully at potential sources of damage, frustration, and fear. Then, maybe, we can begin to renew and reform.

Loss and Repair: On Learning a Trade Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect. —William Wordsworth

There’s a short excerpt in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that I want to share; it has something to do with learning and loss. Much of Twain’s semifictional memoir concerns the art and science of navigating steamboats when steamboating was new; the phenomenon serves as a metaphor for the awakening of a young country’s sense of self and worth and its subsequent “loss of innocence.” The

130

|

Remixing the Classroom

protagonist, Twain’s alter ego, starts out as the “cub” of an experienced steamboat Master and, through a long apprenticeship on the Master’s boat, comes to know “every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet.” But, while his education made him a “valuable acquisition,” he lost something. “I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!” There was a time, Twain writes, when the wonders of steamboating were new, and every aspect of his employment on the Mississippi filled him with an exquisite, almost painful, joy. Marvel after marvel filled his senses: “There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it every passing moment with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched.” But then, a day came when the protagonist ceased to notice them. The waters that provided him with knowledge beyond delineation became calmly predictable, its functions and forms neatly categorical. Habituated to the contingencies of the river, he began to remark on former pleasures with clinical detachment. A sandbar means a dangerous shoal. A certain kind of sunset means wind tomorrow. “That floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it.” “No,” Twain writes, “the romance and beauty were gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.” The symbols, codes, and functions that funded a world of mystery and wonder were bleached of all but the barest meanings. Reflecting on this loss, Twain remarks that he pities the medical doctor as much as the steamboat captain: both must endure training that puts borders around what was once a strange and expanding world. What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a “break” that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t he view her professionally? . . . And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?

It is possible to read this excerpt wistfully, and to look at the education of the young Mark Twain as the reluctant but bittersweet passage from naivety to a world of great and important knowledge. Others might speak more abruptly and say, “Thank goodness for science and the protocols of good training! I don’t want a pilot to emote his way around a river bend any more than I want an ophthalmologist who is distracted by the arch of an eyebrow.” A child’s loss of innocence is the necessary price of modernity, progress, and all that the Laws of Copernicus have put into place. What are we to do? Wallow in ignorance?

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

131

I want to ask whether there is something inherent about learning a trade—or learning a musical instrument, or learning to compose—that incurs this particular cost. And, if so, what is the source of this loss? Routine? Knowledge—knowledgeableness? Is this a question of pedagogy or of a learner’s disposition? What role does an expert play in shaping our early fascinations? My French teacher warned me as a youth never to study the thing I loved. Could this be sound advice? I remember wondering. Perhaps, like Wordsworth, she was referring to a “meddling intellect”—the need to dissect a curiosity, even if the cost is beauty. Did she intuit, as Atul Gawande, introduced in chapter 2, came to discover, that the path to professionalism narrows the longer we travel its road? As trained musicians, do we or do we not listen functionally to the music around us? As trained teachers, how often do we dissect the work that a student brings to a lesson, leaving her an hour later with a misshapen form, like some cut-up frog in formaldehyde? How much of a lesson is devoted to explaining music, to teacher-talk, like “Here’s what you’re doing, and here’s why you shouldn’t do that”? How often do we rush children away from the musical stories they tell and the feelings they want to share? “I hear a carousel!” “No, no. What in the music sounds like a carousel? Can you tell me what that term is?” The key word is “trade.” Once a discipline becomes a science, once it becomes defined by the function of its parts, it ceases to be an art form. Learning music as a trade is different from learning music as an art. The former precept deals with defined procedures and secure functions; the latter deals with defined and open procedures and secure and open functions—its ends are open. It has been my experience that students arrive at graduate school having forgotten this distinction. Or, rather, they arrive at graduate school having forgotten that the floating log means much more than that the river is rising, or that a ii chord means much more than its function as a secondary dominant. The point is that the more we search, the more meanings we can find. Narrowness of thought and action is the damage that is incurred when a discipline is unsure of how it defines education and when its practitioners confuse education with induction. Twain’s protagonist alter ego laments, “All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.” To be sure, he did become an independent-minded pilot of a steamboat on the Mississippi river. Surely he had an arsenal of tools to employ in changing conditions. But his quest became confused with the expectations of his trade. His quest, once as open as the river itself, anchored itself to a space within the borders of his craft. In contrast, and speaking now of music education, I would like to unmoor the conceptual limits of what it means to be a professional music teacher. I would like to put the quest back into our work. Twain is sly. As an artist as well as a steamboat pilot, he knows that we need both technique and some kind of open question. He knows that a learner cannot

132

|

Remixing the Classroom

remain in a state of constant rapture without growth. The formal beauty of his prose exhibits an exquisite sense of this tension. To be a great writer, Twain needed to know that the floating log had a function as well as a supplemental meaning; his skill allowed him to hold together the obvious and the obtuse in such a way that neither could have meaning without the other. This is the moment of repair, I think: to teach others in a way that is more complex, more contradictory, and more muddlesome, and then, in return, to be made more whole through the effort. If we wish to reclaim a sense of music education that is larger and richer than preparation for work, we must embrace the longings, ambiguities, and personal pursuits that contemporary school reform has tried to eliminate. The fact that this position is incompatible with rationalist discourse does not alter the obligation. Learning music is more than the mechanics of a trade (piloting a steamboat or otherwise) or learning to diagnose and fix a problem (attending to a patient or otherwise). I am drawn to this perspective, despite a deep suspicion of the sublime, despite its incompatibility with a world of evidence, and despite a twinge of guilt that I am not teaching a Method that is guaranteed to work. For help in these moments of self-doubt, I turn to essays by my late teacher Maxine Greene. In one, titled “The Wonder of Mystery, the Rejection of Commodification,” Greene gestures to the notion of a public space, called into being through an open question. “I like to talk about moving from the predictable to the possible. The predictable is what is seen and measured from the outside. . . . [T]he possible is what is seen from the vantage point of the actor, the one with the sense of agency, the beginner.” Wonder, romance, mystery—these are not fixed starting points or ending points, or instrumental values to be used operationally; they are realms within which one may wander, spaces in which questions may appear and clarity (temporarily) is sought. “Works of art give rise in their wonderful incompleteness, in the opening to indefinable possibilities,” to the realization that we needn’t accept objective conditions as permanent. We have the capacity to be and to do otherwise, to imagine alternatives, “to be ushered into the spaces of art where, using eye and mind, [we are] enabled to bring new visibility to the physical world, new melodies and resonances to the sounding world, new recognitions to the human world.” If there is stasis, its location might be found, and movement made possible. If there is hurt, it might be named, and then, with hope, repaired.

From Work to Text: From the Predictable to the Possible The claim that a concept is open can, therefore, be no more than the beginning of the story, certainly never the end. —Lydia Goehr

I am interested in finding and creating opportunities for moral encounters in formal musical settings, particularly in educational spaces where people come together

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

133

for the sake of some kind of new meaning. Earlier, I hypothesized that if we, as a community of educators and artists, could begin to repair some of the abuses that have been normalized by the forms we practice, we could collectively compose a counternarrative to prevailing discourses around education that are exasperating current conditions. This might be one way to repair our field and ourselves. I agree with Christopher Small that more attention should be paid to the diverse web of human relationships that make up a musical event, more than to the functional norms that mark one tradition as different from another. But I do remain puzzled, like Odendaal and his coauthors, at Small’s insistence “that the term musicking can be taken as a conceptual tool that remains useful, ‘as long as we keep our value judgments clear of it.’” Small longs, like many of us do, for an open conception of music that is free of predetermination and prejudice and in which “the value of the [experience] is tied to the consequences of the actual ‘event’ of musicking, and these consequences cannot be determined beforehand, as they change according to actual conditions of the ‘event.’” But for teachers and learners who wish to work and play within and outside of prevailing norms, or for musician-artists who want to call attention to injustices and indecencies, Small’s vision is insufficiently venturesome, leaving critics struggling to articulate an open and inclusive concept of music education in which a multitude of values and perspectives intersect. The dilemma, as I see it, has much to do with our particular moment in time, the epistemic conditions of advanced capitalism that uphold closed or private relationships as the ideal “public” good. Bureaucracy and control appear to be twin aspects of contemporary life, a contradiction, remarkably, that fits easily within the channels of unending information that flow through our daily lives. As a witness to the birth of the internet age, I understand that the great disappointment of the open-source turn has been how quickly proponents went from freewheeling adventurers to officers in the service of ever-greater regulation and surveillance (think Facebook and Google). Like Small, I want to pay attention to the human relationships that bring meaning to our understanding of music. Unfortunately, I see too many of these relationships as bound by new hierarchies, funded by a legacy of aesthetic supervision and obedience to the Law. For example, new diagnostic tools, in place at this moment in the United States, are able to trace the effectiveness of a university teacher-preparation program, based on the effectiveness of its graduates and on the comparatively scored outcomes of these graduates’ students, as determined by standardized tests and without the consent of the university, teacher, or school. The Common Core Standards in music (another example of bureaucracy and control) feed this system, and thus it matters very little to me just how well-intentioned or progressive the standards may be in outlook or intent. A system shapes its participants in particular ways; its participants give form to its structure in particular ways. This is a problem of borders and containment.

134 |

Remixing the Classroom

In a world where the 1 percent are flourishing and everyone else seems stuck in place or losing ground, the notion that life and art can be experienced as closed and open makes new sense. Concerning the former, I am not talking about fixed concepts or fixed relationships, which are essentialist in nature and not something I recognize. Nor am I projecting on my analysis a universal binary, in which an actor or phenomenon is either one or the other. Closed concepts, forms, and relationships, I want to emphasize, do reflect the reality of current oppressive conditions and oppressive actors, a state of affairs that I describe in chapter 1 as the love of overwhelming control. “Closed concepts function within systems or practices requiring different kinds of formality, exactness, or precision,” writes Goehr. “Whenever a concept is treated as closed, it is given exact and complete definition in the light of a stipulation made at a given time ‘for a special purpose.’ This definition stipulates boundary conditions.” In contrast, open concepts can only be enlarged and amended. An open form cannot be replaced in the way that one Work may give birth to another, as was the preoccupation of romantic and twentieth-century composers. Goehr writes, “The claim that a concept is open can, therefore, be no more than the beginning of the story, certainly never the end.” This is why beginnings are so important, and why collaborations around a common search hold the possibility of enlarging and enriching life. To begin a new story is to mark some kind of break and to name a dissatisfaction or impediment. It is true that there is no guarantee that a break will lead to a more socially just outcome (or, just as dramatically, a break may not portend the shimmer of a third meaning). And, as the parable of Jiro Ono, in chapter 1, suggests, an artist dissatisfied with the Law may create a new invention or a new Work, as Ono did with sushi, only to put in place a different definition with new stipulations and new Laws to obey. To create a Work is to create a system of control. To participate in a Work is to form and be formed by its human, sonic, and sociomusical relationships. The key point, if we are concerned with enlarging our field of exploration, is that we cannot or should not speak of replacing old Works with new Works, as the offspring of the new system will only produce new boundaries that once again reproduce hierarchies and thus delimit possibility. In contrast, an open philosophy of music education is one that must continually seek renewal; it must operate in a way that is ongoing and provisional. An open curriculum, particularly one that is built around dialogue and exploration, “might lead to the creation of a different, critical, non-submissive and creative relationship with musics of other people, places, times, and cultures,” writes Kanellopoulos. He suggests, like I do, that a kind of reinstituting or reinstating process remakes both the participant and her form by accenting her idiosyncratic needs within and among a community of fellow inquirers, as in “contexts where musico-social action produces social imaginary significations that are actively engaged into the project of autonomy through an ever-present critique of their

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

135

own foundations.” This means that all manner of meanings, from the obvious to the obtuse, fund future enterprise but that the tools that an individual or community employs, no matter how sacred, foundational, or long-lasting their utility, are always subject to critique. This has everything to do with moving from the predictable to the possible.

Loss and Repair: On Opening a Closed Form I want to take pains to say that a tightly controlled musical form holds the possibility for agency on behalf of the executant. It would be ridiculous to suggest that closed forms, even those that depend on tightly wound hierarchies, are inherently immoral. I do not deny the pleasure of submission to another’s vision or need. The faithful interpretation of a score has a puzzle-like character that is deeply satisfying, to say nothing of the great joy of marveling in the re-creation of a Work that has been passed down through time. I love the big-band arrangements of Sammy Nestico, the instrumental music of Bach and Francis Poulenc, and even those classic American concert-band marches (I particularly enjoy playing them). The decade I spent singing under the baton of Dino Anagnost, requiring a three-hour choir rehearsal every Sunday, was an indelible experience that I miss poignantly, especially now that Anagnost has passed away. Still, something is missing when a formal music education stays mostly within a closed realm. We lose something when a form is resistant to the effects of dialogue and diversity. I studied conducting for many years and conducted many bands, and maybe I was good at this job, or maybe not, but it always did seem to puzzle Anagnost, my teacher and friend, that I was reluctant to embrace its potential for teaching and learning music. I came to realize that I didn’t like to be the Master any more than I enjoyed being the servant, and as a consequence, I found greater satisfaction in learning how to facilitate creative encounters with my students. Abandoning conducting had more to do with the relationships that were attached to the music than with the music itself. This awakening (my word; it may not apply to others) did not stem from a theory of social justice or an articulated vision of an open classroom. It emerged out of a longing that I, as a young teacher, could not fully articulate and did not know how to resolve. Today, there are models for the conductorless orchestra. The Knights in New York are the latest group I know about (I am sure that there countless others around the world), and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra is the oldest and most renowned. These groups did not have to abandon the form they loved, but they did have to name and then act on a limitation that was preventing their community from growing as fully as they wanted to grow. I want to come back to this idea of loss and longing and to the possibility of repair. In this final section, I present one last parable for consideration. Here is

136

|

Remixing the Classroom

the story of how a longing to engage with music as if it could be otherwise led a community of fellow inquirers to break with a specific Law that once seemed almost inviolable to those who know the form well: the rendering of a professional democratic classical orchestra, without a conductor, in which members study, rehearse, and program their own music; organize their own concerts; and perform together—in one-anotherness, Hanzlick might say—in pursuit of a better social ordering. I am referring to the New York–based Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1972 expressly as a conductorless ensemble. With Michael Albertson, I have been attending their rehearsals at Riverside Church and their concerts at Carnegie Hall for over three years, writing up field notes and speaking formally and informally with their members. They have created a very different kind of laboratory than the one I employ and attempt to describe in chapter 3, in which my students write original music in democratic “garage bands.” For Orpheus, creativity takes place in a laboratory-like rehearsal setting and through the rendering of new and classic repertoire. Exposure to their laboratory has broadened and deepened my understanding of what an open philosophy of music education can make possible. From my conversations with early members, I believe that the Orpheus orchestra came about because of a longing for something different; these young musicians wanted more out of the music that they were trained in and passionate about pursuing. While the early 1970s were fertile ground for countercultural thinking, my guess is that the evolution of Orpheus started with questions and dialogue, rather than as a Deweyan notion of freedom or a postmodern theory of the text. The evolution of Orpheus did not begin with a group of restless orchestral conductors, who (the idea is ridiculous) willingly sought to de-Authorize their privileges in favor of the growth and actualization of their players. Perhaps the early members of Orpheus walked backward into their discovery. Surely the impetus for the first-ever conductorless professional orchestra was discovered in some kind of third space, a trespass during which a cohort of curious wanderers began to name their dissatisfactions and commence a process of repair. The chamber music setting “is highly democratic and a lot of fun,” Orpheus trumpeter Louis Hanzlik told me, “so why can’t an orchestra be just as rewarding?” For Hanzlik, something was lost in the large ensemble setting, something that was available elsewhere. But instead of abandoning the modern orchestra and traveling afield without returning home, he chose to participate in the repurposing of the orchestra. Orpheus’s strange hypothesis is that they can reorder the social arrangements that have come to define the very concept of an orchestra without sacrificing their dedication to the musical norms they have each come to love. In fact, many claim, and I would agree, that Orpheus sounds much larger than it actually is (it is a group of twenty to forty-five, depending on the piece), while at the same time, it exhibits the intimacy, warmth, and precision of a

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

137

chamber group. As neither an orchestra nor a chamber group but both, Orpheus, perhaps, is a third type of ensemble. To watch and listen to this group play Beethoven, Prokofiev, or Wayne Shorter—without a conductor and without compromise in sound, tradition, or quality—is to be aware of the false obviousness that governs too much of how the arts are taught and learned and of how organizations, schools, and universities can sustain traditions through opening them up. Who says that children cannot cooperate in the evaluation of their own work or the work of others? Who says they must wait and learn the rules before they change a tradition? Who says that a university music major must follow the same four-year trajectory as everybody else? Who says that there is only one way to direct a band, or run a rehearsal, or pursue a career as a teacher, performer, or both? If the story of Orpheus is indeed a parable that can be used to reclaim a more open sense of music education in an era of closure, loss, and standardization, the ensemble might illustrate how a public came into being to create some kind of in-between space. Perhaps, at first, they joined together to repair and heal. Now, they come together to explore and share fellowship, and to laugh and to bicker (which they do simultaneously). Starting points change; new beginnings emerge. Depth and depthlessness are revealed all at once. By making an organization or a musical ensemble more creative and more fun, and by inviting debate across roles and relationships, members shape and reshape who they are through communion with one another. This is another way to understand what has been referred to as a public space. Consider, for example, what happens when the hierarchical relationships of the classical orchestra (one could equally substitute the public school or the university school of music) are vigorously enforced by the Master or internalized by the apprentice. The following quotations deal with the location of power within a large ensemble (the conductor hovers like specter half unseen) and reveal how power or lack of power directs feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy: “If I were playing principal viola in, say, the New York Philharmonic,” says Orpheus’s Nardo Poy, “I couldn’t turn to the timpani player and say, ‘By the way, it’s a little behind,’ or ‘it’s too loud.’ There’s a protocol, and it would not be my role to do that. As a matter of fact, he’d probably tell me, ‘Shut up, you mind your own business. Only the conductor tells me.’” And here is Don Palma, a double bass player: I took a year off from Orpheus at the very beginning and went to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I just hated it. I didn’t like to be told what to do all the time, being treated like my only value was just to sit there and be a good soldier. I felt powerless to affect things, particularly when they were not going well. . . . [Now] Orpheus keeps me involved. I have some measure of participation in the direction the music is going to take. I think that’s why a lot of us have stayed involved for so long.

138 |

Remixing the Classroom

When discussing standards in the context of music education, we never acknowledge that fear and dependency are historically created norms that are passed down from generation to generation. Fear and dependency are norms, not byproducts of bad teaching or ruthless conducting; they are standards of practice that have been found useful in the hierarchies we have inherited. The application of fear and the fostering of dependency are generalizable “guides” that help a “leader” deal with the contingencies of change and surprise that are a natural part of creating art when one is compelled to rely on others. If this is true, then the subscribed practices of a nondemocratic art form play a large part in shaping how an individual internalizes notions of agency and self-worth, as captured in Margaret Berg’s conversation with a young chamber group: Berg: How does your ensemble arrive at an understanding of how to play musically? Cari: I think the coach does that! He’s like “no you should play it like this!” Berg: So then how much do you listen to the coach’s ideas? Cari: I always think “oh he’s right.” Lisa: Yeah, you just assume. Nan: Yeah.

It was the duplicity of advocating the virtue of independence while undermining its realization through teacher-centered practices that compelled Hanzlik to study citizenship in the context of chamber music. The disconnection occurred at his brass quintet’s summer camp. Lauding the values of distributed leadership in the chamber music setting, Hanzlik’s quintet was doing one thing and saying another: I videotaped my colleagues as they coached various chamber music ensembles. . . . I noticed that the sessions were heavily teacher-centered—similar to how a conductor would lead a band or orchestra rehearsal. The coaches (my peers and fellow chamber music partners) often presented strong opinions, even ultimatums, about musical style to the students. Even I found myself acting more as an authoritarian, rather than an authority who was there to nurture student independence. We frequently divulged to the students how and why the ensemble fell apart during a piece, and in numerous instances, we would conduct or clap the students through particularly challenging passages.

The college- and high-school-aged students “never expressed opinions to us, and they rarely spoke to one another during these sessions.” In the end, Hanzlik found out how difficult it was to change a traditional music practice, especially when oppression (my word, not his) has become a useful norm. Neither the students in his study nor the coaches he observed were comfortable with a

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

139

horizontal musical structure. One might pause to consider that if fostering independence and citizenship is this difficult in a form that requires both, what hope have we for reforming large-ensemble education? Hierarchies work because they are clean. By that, I mean that they eschew ambiguity. And, with regard to education, people are unlikely to prefer the alternative. It’s odd, in this sense: the apparent tension between hierarchy and ambiguity that is found in so many musical forms, not merely Western classical art music. The clarity that hierarchies promise should undermine the open nature of art. For much of my writing, I have been unseduced by the attempt to define what music is. I have not been convinced that an adequate definition is possible, or that a provisional definition, once found, could lead to a philosophy of music education. As an educationalist, I have been more interested in the social structures that afford or impede human flourishing through experiences in the arts. But I will say this: art must be ambiguous and open, even when certainties are arrived at or when aesthetic and social norms become settled. This claim—not very deep—helps me pivot back to some previous concerns. I want to keep making a case for the muddle of teaching and learning music and for the search that may eventuate the apprehension of new meanings. I want to connect these notions to Dewey’s insistence that growth—that the enlargement and enrichment of human capacity—is a moral end of education. There is something fortuitous about the meeting of these concerns (and more aphorisms emerge). Growth does not require a clean and clear path. Ambiguity, confusion, and contradiction are conditions for learning and independence. A search may be shared. Experiencing music as a public process, in contrast to an autocratic one, is necessarily messy, but it needn’t be unstructured. Like any other professional ensemble, Orpheus has a strict rehearsal schedule. Music is learned primarily in two stages: First, in a small group, with one player on every part. Here, tempos are tested, cues are worked out, and large and small ideas are debated openly. Later, the full ensemble begins where the small group left off. But no matter the rehearsal, any member can put down their instrument at any moment and come to the front of the ensemble and offer an opinion, regardless of seniority or musical part. The French horn player can give advice to the violins, as could the oboe or timpani player. In contrast to the singular Conductor, who can only solve one problem at a time, a cutoff by any member provides the opportunity for multiple forms of debate, all going on at once. This is the Conductor’s nightmare and the Master’s great fear: the pandemonium of sounds (the viola section working on bowings, the cello section shouting back to the woodwinds, the low brass cracking jokes), all foraging their way toward a performance that no one person can control, with no singular vision to guide its realization. If the Master favored direct instruction, Orpheus prefers study. Members must come to a rehearsal

140

|

Remixing the Classroom

having studied all parts of a score, not just their own. While no one receives instruction from another, all benefit from a shared effort. I have seen inspirational moments of cooperation and high-mindedness. I have seen frustrations and tense debates. I have witnessed such moments of happiness and joy that I laughed along with the clarinets, like a giddy fool, even if I couldn’t hear what was said. In this structure, growth is halting and uncertain. Members know that they must be ready to foreclose a present need for the sake of another’s. Humor helps. But enveloping this group is an apparent sense of mutual affection and care. This is music-making with a Janus-like texture, an enlarged site that harkens back to what Barthes and Goehr might call musica practica, while emphasizing aspects of what contemporary writers call “participatory culture.” Calling attention to the French word for love, amour, Orpheus works in a third space somewhere between the professional and the amateur. “The musical amateur,” Barthes writes, “is a role defined by a style much more than by technical imperfection.” Virtue gives way to love; the Virtuoso yields to the amateur.

A Final Caveat I recognize something important when I observe Orpheus’s rehearsals and attend their concerts: I see repair. It is the same sense I get when the highly skilled music majors with whom I work at Teachers College begin composing in their garage bands and improvising in class, when they let down their guard and start to trust one another and reveal who they are. Most of my students describe an open philosophy of music education as profoundly life-altering: unsettling sometimes, joyous at others. They encounter an expanded understanding of what it means to learn a trade, an understanding that reconnects them to the pleasures of wonder and surprise. For Orpheus, the alteration of form provides members with a greater sense of personal and professional fulfillment. Both groups take great pleasure in the circulation of knowledge that plays out in a laboratory setting. They enjoy the way that dialogue reconfigures traditional teaching and learning roles. All appreciate that the ends of music-making are theirs to create, a search unencumbered by a singular Master. I turn to these musicians and others like them regardless of institution, who, having experienced the repair and recovery of their form, can now make a richer and more complicated claim for the study of music. To experience the expansion of one’s field, to visit its borders, to move beyond and back—this is a moral enterprise, and its case must be made by those who are voyagers. The beauty of pluralism speaks to the fact that there are more meanings available in music, as in life, than we can ever account for—more perspectives, more truths, more ways of knowing. Conceptually, this assertion is not strictly about “letting more in” or expanding the canon. Rather, I’m talking about some-

Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings

|

141

thing that is at once terribly unsafe and terribly light—a voyage beyond, a search outside oneself, a movement beyond one’s field. The heroics of growth can be boring to hear about. The pleasures of surprise are many. When I hear people talk about self-actualization in music education, words like “work,” “practice,” and “sacrifice” too often come to mind. Can we open this conception to include facets like wit, play, humor, and the flirtatious? There are tacit awarenesses and silences, too. If we long to escape from the narrow confines of the Law, we need to make “meaning” more baffling and more attenuated. Our dilemma, Barthes tells us, “is to outplay the signified, to outplay law, to outplay the father, to outplay the repressed—I do not say explode it, but outplay it.” Unfortunately, in the context of contemporary schooling, the right to explore has as much to do with permission as it does with practicality. I also know that the arts, if one is lucky enough to encounter them in the public school, do not inevitably lead to questioning, playful or otherwise. Teachers are particularly powerful in how they shape the borders of knowledge. In our efforts to promote independence and self-actualization, let’s try to be less certain, less weighty, in our attempts to repair and trespass. It may not be possible to teach a “third meaning” any more than it is possible to teach democracy, especially if its contours have been insufficiently explored. Music students and future music teachers, especially those from within the dominant culture, cannot be expected to understand social justice, diversity, or democratic music-making without experimenting with their many meanings. As an educational prerogative, these teachings might be practiced as a muddle, with limits to their efficacy avowed. As in all open concepts, and all open forms, there will be contradictions, and moments of awareness may flicker before they burn. I am happy with the flicker as much as with the fire. * * * We entertain many wishes, and they come and go. But a longing is persistent. A longing is felt in our soul and in our skin, directing us to something just outside the possible. To teach in a way that renews openness, from encounter to encounter, from classroom to classroom, is to forego conclusions. Its ineffable promise is the pleasure and peril of renewal. I don’t want to deny either, to my students or myself. One conventional way to end a book is to leave readers on an upbeat note. But this would deny the complexity of teaching, and of life. The best we can do is to make an unholy muddle of it all. There is beauty in that, I think.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Preface . Maxine Greene, “I Still Wonder at How Unaware I Was of So Many Frequencies . . . ,” in Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 192. . Ibid. . Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 5. . Ibid., xx. . Douglas C. Orzolek, “The Call for Accountability,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 22, no. 3 (2012): 3–6. . Jack Schneider, “The High Stakes of Teacher Evaluation,” Education Week 31, no. 33 (2012): 28–30. . Randall E. Allsup, “A Place for the Humanities in Music Education,” Music Educators Journal 100, no. 4 (2014): 71–75; Randall E. Allsup, “The Eclipse of a Higher Education or Problems Preparing Artists in a Mercantile World,” Music Education Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 251–261. . Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010). . David Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); David Elliott and Marissa Silverman, Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). . Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 9:54 (emphasis added). . Estelle R. Jorgensen, Pictures of Music Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). . Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Values and Philosophizing about Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 5–21.

. Toward Open Encounters . Jon Caramanica, “Snoop Dogg Has More than Money on His Mind,” New York Times Magazine, May 10, 2015, p. MM58. . Ibid. . Ibid. (emphasis added). . See the school’s website at http://www.hczpromiseacademy.org/home. . Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 258. . Kelefa Sanneh, “Harlem Chic: How a Hip-Hop Legend Remixed Name-Brand Fashion,” New Yorker, March 25, 2013, pp. 52–59. . Ibid., 55.

143

144

|

Notes to pages 3–12

. Ibid., 56. . Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 160. . Ibid., 55. . Ibid., 57. . Ibid. . Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). . Sanneh, “Harlem Chic,” 53. . Henry Kingsbury, Music, Talent, and Performance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 87. . Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 22. . Ibid., 23. . Ibid. . Kingsbury, Music, Talent, and Performance. . Ibid., 92–93. . Ibid., 65. . Rosie Perkins, “Learning Cultures and the Conservatoire: An Ethnographically-Informed Case Study,” Music Education Research 15, no. 2 (2013): 196–213. . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 160 (original emphasis). . Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 147 (emphasis added). . Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy,” in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogies, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (New York: Routledge, 1992), 90–119. . Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, 2nd ed. (1975; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1970; repr., New York: Continuum, 1990), 37. . Ibid., 40 (emphasis added). . See the program’s website at https://www.musicalfutures.org/. . See Inga Rikandi, ed., Mapping the Common Ground: Philosophical Perspectives on Finnish Music Education (Helsinki: BTJ, 2010). . See Elizabeth Gould, “Homosexual Subject(ivitie)s in Music (Education): Deconstructions of the Disappeared,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 45–62; Elizabeth Gould, “Legible Bodies in Music Education: Becoming-Matter,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 4 (2007): 201–223; and Elizabeth Gould, “Feminist Theory in Music Education Research: Grrl-illa Games as Nomadic Practice (or How Music Education Fell from Grace),” Music Education Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 67–79. . Elizabeth Gould, “Devouring the Other: Democracy in Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 7, no. 1 (2008): 32. . Ibid., 33. . See Roberta Lamb, “Feminism as Critique in Philosophy of Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 59–74; Estelle Jorgensen, “The Artist and the Pedagogy of Hope,” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (1996): 36–50; Julia Koza, “Aesthetic Music Education Revisited: Discourses of Exclusion and Oppression,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 75–91; Charlene Morton, “Feminist Theory and the Displaced Music Curriculum: Beyond the ‘Add and Stir’ Projects,” Philosophy of Music

Notes to pages 13–17

|

145

Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 106–121; and Patricia O’Toole, “Music Matters: Why I Don’t Feel Included in These Musics or Matters,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 144 (2000): 28–39. . Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intentions and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 83, quoted in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 4 (original emphasis). . I am not the first to look at sushi as an open or closed form. Researchers Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki contrasted two types of sushi chefs, those who followed fixed or traditional ways and those who treated the craft of sushi making as a creative or hybrid art. From their observations, they extrapolated notions about routine and adaptive expertise. See Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki, “Two Courses of Expertise,” in Child Development and Education in Japan, ed. Harold Stevenson, Hiroshi Azuma, and Kenji Hakuta (New York: Freeman, 1986), 262–272. . Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David Gelb (New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2011), DVD. . Ibid. . I read this documentary as a text. I am not looking for an explanation of Ono or an accurate depiction of his life. The “real” Ono is only one fiction among many, one narrative among counternarratives, including the aesthetic rendering given by the movie’s director and editors (with their Western perspective on genius). In this accounting, I offer what Barthes calls “enunciations” or “touches,” an approach that aspires to the metaphorical. See Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 156. . The Critic thrives in closed forms and is often at a loss when he encounters the open and unusual. Consider Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “You raise up your head and you ask, ‘Is this where it is?’ / And somebody points to you and says, ‘It’s his.’ / And you say, ‘What’s mine?’ and somebody else says, ‘Where what is?’ / And you say, ‘Oh my God, am I here all alone?’ / But something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” . Kingsbury, Music, Talent, and Performance, 63. . Ibid. . Ibid., 59. . John A. Sloboda, “Individual Differences in Music Performance,” Trends in Cognitive Science 4, no. 10 (2000): 397–403. . Edwina Pendarvis and Aimee Howley, “Playing Fair: The Possibilities of Gifted Education,” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 19, no. 2 (1996): 215–233; Mara Sapon-Shevin, “Beyond Gifted Education: Building a Shared Agenda for School Reform,” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 19, no. 2 (1996): 194–214. . David Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press), 1995. . Ralph W. Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). . Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 313–335; Peter R. Webster, “Creativity as Creative Thinking,” Music Educators Journal 76, no. 9 (1990): 22–28. . See the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 7:514a–521b; and Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). . Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” in The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 13–46.

146

|

Notes to pages 17–23

. Michel de Montaigne, “On the Education of Children,” in Essays, trans. John M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 57. . Jiro Dreams of Sushi. . A democratic classroom, as an ideal, is a place for the specialist and the generalist. It is a space of difference and equity, not mere equality. I am not advocating that all music teachers disavow the teaching of specialized skills when students require or ask for these skills. Nor am I suggesting that music classrooms prepare everyone as jacks- and jills-of-all-trades. I suggest only that a philosophy of routine expertise may be the wrong starting point for all music classrooms, everywhere. . Jiro Dreams of Sushi. . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 158. . John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10, 1934, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 150. . Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 77. . Ibid. . John Dewey, “Experience and Education,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 13, 1938–1939, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 6. . Ibid., 7. . Ibid., 8. . Ibid., 11. . John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 5–6. . Dewey writes in Art as Experience, “Form is a character of every experience that is an experience. Art in its specific sense enacts more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfillment.” See Dewey, Art as Experience, 143 (original emphasis). . See Eduard Hanslick, “Aesthetics as Founded on Feelings,” in The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen and Morris Weitz (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), 7–19; and Eduard Hanslick, “The Beautiful in Music,” in The Beautiful in Music, 47–70. . Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2010), 169. . Ibid., 171. . Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 133. . Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). . Ibid., 13. . Elliott, Music Matters, 54 (original emphasis). In the second edition, with Marissa Silverman, Elliott writes, “The precise nature of these (categories of musical thinking & knowing) . . . is socially situated, developed, and deployed in relation to the musical products, values, and social-cultural norms of each praxis.” David Elliott and Marissa Silverman, Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 208. . Elliott writes, “Achieving the aims of music education depends on assessment. The primary function of assessment in music education is not to determine grades but to provide

Notes to pages 23–31

|

147

accurate feedback to students about the quality of their growing musicianship. Learners need constructive feedback about why, when, and how they are meeting musical challenges (or not) in relation to standards and traditions.” Elliott, Music Matters, 264. . Randall E. Allsup, “The Moral Ends of Band,” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 179–187. . Paul Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). . Randall E. Allsup and Heidi Westerlund, “Methods and Situational Ethics in Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 11, no. 1 (2012): 136 (original emphasis). . Ibid., 138. . Roland Barthes, “To the Seminar,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 332. . Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Music Works, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 91. . Elizabeth Gould, “Nomadic Turns: Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 13, no. 2 (2005): 148 (emphasis added). . Gould, “Homosexual Subject(ivitie)s in Music (Education),” 51. . Ibid., 50. . Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 63. . Petter Dyndahl, “Music Education in the Sign of Deconstruction,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16, no. 2 (2008): 126. . Patrick Schmidt, “What We Hear is Meaning Too: Deconstruction, Dialogue, and Music,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 3–24. . Ibid., 3 (original emphasis). . Citing Jean-Luc Nancy, Joseph Abramo writes, “‘Perhaps we never listen to anything but the non-coded, what is not yet framed in a system of signifying references, and we never hear [entend] anything but the already coded, which we decode.’ We may seek to hear others, to understand what they signify through their words within a coded system of language and socially agreed-upon meanings. Conversely, we must strive towards listening; listening past signification and meaning, towards différance, interpretation, and sense.” See Joseph Abramo, “Music Education That Resonates: An Epistemology and Pedagogy of Sound,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 85 (original emphasis). . Attali, Noise, 61–62. . See Paul Louth, “The Role of Critical Formalism in Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 2 (2012): 117–134. . June Boyce-Tillman, “The Transformative Qualities of a Liminal Space Created by Musicking,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 17, no. 2 (2009): 184–202. . Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” 169 (original emphasis). . Ibid. . Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 8. . Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” 169. . Ibid. . Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). . Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” 169.

148 |

Notes to pages 31–36

. Elliott, Music Matters, 67. In his second edition, with Silverman, he writes, “Developing musicianship and listenership includes welcoming students into and motivating them to immerse themselves in the doings and makings of the musical praxes (or ‘music-cultures’) they intend to learn. Why? Because musical understanding is context-dependent. The musicianship underlying any praxis of music making and listening has its roots in specific communities of practitioners who share and advance specific forms of music thinking and doing. Musical practices swirl around the efforts of practitioners who originate, maintain, and refine specific ways and means of musicing, as well as cherished musical histories, legends, and lore.” Elliott and Silverman, Music Matters, 228. . Attali, Noise, 4. . John Cage, “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2010), 177. . William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act I, scene 3. . Attali, Noise, 137. . Ibid., 27. . Ragnhild Brøvig-Hanssen and Paul Harkins, “Contextual Incongruity and Musical Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour of Mash-ups,” Popular Music 31, no. 1 (2012): 90. . Attali, Noise, 62–63. . Maxine Greene, “The Open Questions in Classroom Dialogues,” in Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 106. . Attali, Noise, 132. . Ibid., 20 (original emphasis). . Sandra Stauffer, “Connections between the Musical and Life Experiences of Young Composers and Their Compositions,” Journal of Research in Music Education 50, no. 4 (2002): 301–322. . Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859; repr., New York: Barnes and Nobles Classics, 2004), 384.

. Music-Teacher Quality and Expertise . John Dewey, “Relation of Theory to Practice,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1882– 1924, vol. 3, 1903–1906, edited by Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 272. . I am aware that one collapses the concepts of education and schooling to no small peril. John Stuhr observes that “the distinction between education and schooling is often erased, and it is overlooked even more often by ‘educators’ who are employed by, and primarily concerned with, schools. As a result, educational problems and issues are often misinterpreted and viewed overly narrowly as schooling problems and school issues. Education, however, is a broader notion. School is one important means of forming the habits and dispositions of the immature members of a society, but it is only one means and, compared to other more powerful ones, a relatively superficial and ineffectual one.” John Stuhr, Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003), 12. Schooling’s ineffectualness, if true, is no excuse for not attempting a reimagining of its larger capacities, and faith in the ability of critical educators to go beyond the superficial. . Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930); Talcott Parsons, “The School Class as a

Notes to pages 37–40

|

149

Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society,” Harvard Educational Review 29, no. 4 (1959): 297–318. . Gary D. Fenstermacher, “Philosophy of Research on Teaching: Three Aspects,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching, ed. Virginia Richards, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 3–16. . Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). . Notice that I use “a public,” not “the public.” There is no universal or metaphysical public, only multiple and diverse publics: communal and social spaces into which we are born and in which we interact. . Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. H. B. Nisbet (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 1. . William Pinar, The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service (New York: Routledge, 2009), 59–82; Randall E. Allsup and Eric Shieh, “Social Justice and Music Education: The Call for a Public Pedagogy,” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 4 (2012): 47–51. . David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); Randall E. Allsup, “The Moral Ends of Band,” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 179–187. . John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10, 1934, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). . Amy Davidson, “The Skim Milk in Edith Windsor’s Marriage,” New Yorker, March 27, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-skim-milk-in-edith-windsors -marriage. . Geir Johansen, “An Education Politics of the Particular: Promises and Opportunities for the Quality of Higher Music Education,” Arts Education Policy Review 110, no. 4 (2009): 33–38. . Thomas Hatch, Managing to Change: How Schools Can Survive (and Sometimes Thrive) in Turbulent Times (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). . Janet R. Barrett, “Judging Quality and Fostering Excellence in Music Teaching,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 21, no. 1 (2011): 1–6. . Chris Higgins, “The Possibility of Public Education in an Instrumentalist Age,” Educational Theory 61, no. 4 (2011): 451. . David F. Labaree, “An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University,” in Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, ed. Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and D. John McIntyre, and Kelly E. Demers, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 290–306; Thomas S. Popkewitz, “Professionalization in Teaching and Teacher Education: Some Notes on Its History, Ideology and Potential,” Teaching and Teacher Education 10, no. 1 (1994): 1–14. . Colleen Conway correctly points out that music-teacher-education research remains in its early stages; when Richard Colwell “edited the first Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning in 1992 there was just one chapter in the book that addressed issues of teacher education.” Colleen Conway, “Issues Facing Music Teacher Education in the 21st Century: Developing Leaders in the Field,” in Critical Issues in Music Education, ed. Harold F. Abeles and Lori A. Custodero (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 259. . Paul Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). . Jerome Bruner, Culture of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 66–85.

150 |

Notes to pages 40–48

. “Each generation needs to renew education and culture for its particular time and place—its Janus faces to the past and future—and this renewal constitutes the seeds of musical, cultural, or societal transformation.” Estelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 8. . Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). . Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, “Didaktik of Music: A German Concept and Its Comparison,” International Journal of Music Education 22, no. 3 (2004): 277–286. . Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: Toward a Pedagogy for the Opposition, rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001), 78. . Jorgensen deconstructs many of these myths and metaphors. Estelle Jorgensen, Pictures of Music Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1970; repr., New York: Continuum, 1990). . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civil Courage, trans. Patrick Clarke (1998; repr., London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 49 (emphasis added). . Cecilia Ferm, “Openness and Awareness—Roles and Demands of Music Teachers,” Music Education Research 8, no. 2 (2006): 237–250. . Quoted in Philip W. Jackson, Dewey and the Philosopher’s Task (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), xv. . Cathy Benedict, “Critical and Transformative Literacies: Music and General Education,” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 152–158. . W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (1903; repr., New York: Cosimo, 2007), 74. . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1994; repr., New York: Continuum, 1997), 27. . Confucius, The Analects of Confucius, bk. 2, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). . Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Free Press, 1929), 3. . John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 9, 1916, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 83 (original emphasis). . Whitehead, The Aims of Education, 3. . Cristina Cammarano, “The Philosophically Educated Teacher as a Traveler” (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2012). . Jorgensen found dynamic movement in her concept of dialect, avoiding the stasis of a synthesis by emphasizing movement among opposing forces. “My own dialectical view sees ‘this with that’ so that various elements and perspectives are in tension with each other, one or the other coming to the fore at a particular time and place as actors might move about on a stage.” Jorgensen, Transforming Music Education, 56. . Dewey, Democracy and Education, 83 (emphasis added). . Ibid. . G. Williamson McDiarmid and Mary Clevenger-Bright, “Rethinking Teacher Capacity,” in Cochran-Smith et al., eds., Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, 136. . Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 111. . Janet McDowall, “Making Music Multimodally: Young Children Learning with Music Technology,” International Journal of Learning 16, no. 10 (2010): 303–315. . Gena Greher, “Transforming Music Teacher Preparation through the Lens of Video Technology,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 49, no. 2 (2006): 49–60.

Notes to pages 49–52 |

151

. John Dewey, “The Lost Individual,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 5, 1929–1930, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 66–68. . Ibid., 70–71. . Sabrina Tavernise, “Whites Account for under Half of Births in U.S.,” New York Times, May 17, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births -in-us.html. . Ulrich Boser, “Teacher Diversity Matters: A State-by-State Analysis of Teachers of Color,” Center for American Progress, November 9, 2011, http://www.americanprogress.org /issues/education/report/2011/11/09/10657/teacher-diversity-matters. . Arno Tanner, “Finland’s Balancing Act: The Labor Market, Humanitarian Relief, and Immigrant Integration,” Migration Information Source, January 31, 2011, http://www .migrationpolicy.org/article/finlands-balancing-act-labor-market-humanitarian-relief-and -immigrant-integration. . A study by Statistics Sweden found that in 2007, the fertility rate among foreign-born women was 2.21, compared with 1.82 for Swedish-born women. David Landes, “Higher Birth Rates among Sweden’s Foreign-Born,” The Local, November 3, 2008, http://www.thelocal .se/20081103/15408. . Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn from Educational Change in Finland (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 98–99. . Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010). . Henry Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values (New York: Pater Lang, 2012), 2–3. . Mark Slouka, “Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2009, pp. 32–40. . Ibid., 36. . Woodford, Democracy and Music Education, xi. . Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 41. . Ailbhe Kenny, Charles Larkin, Daithí MacSíthigh, and Jacco Thijssen, Irish Education Policy for a Globalised World: A Policy for Chasing Black and White (Dublin: Swan Group, 2009). . Alan Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 225. . Heidi Partti, Learning from Cosmopolitan Digital Musicians: Identity, Musicianship, and Changing Values in (In)Formal Music Communities (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2012); Heidi H. Partti, “Cosmopolitan Musicianship under Construction: Digital Musicians Illuminating Emerging Values in Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education 20, no. 3 (2012): 1–16; Evan S. Tobias, “Hybrid Spaces and Hyphenated Musicians: Secondary School Students’ Musical Engagement in a Songwriting and Technology Course,” Music Education Research 14, no. 3 (2012): 329–346. . Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–148. . Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 136. . Randall E. Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts,” in Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, ed. Michele Kaschub and Janice P. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–70.

152 |

Notes to pages 52–57

. Attali, Noise, 133. . Ibid., 134. . Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 155–164. . Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Susan McClary, Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). . Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meaning of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 9. . Ibid. (original emphasis). . Ibid., 14 (original emphasis). . Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). . Small, Musicking, 20. . Ibid., 23 (original emphasis). . Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1942; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 127. . Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity 8, no. 2 (1958): 40. . Ibid. . Eva Georgii-Hemming and Maria Westvall, “Music Education—a Personal Matter? Examining the Current Discourses of Music Education in Sweden,” British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2010): 21–33. . Mantle Hood, “The Challenge of ‘Bi-musicality,’” Ethnomusicology 4, no. 2 (1960): 55–59; Joshua A. Russell, “The Occupational Identity of In-service Secondary Music Educators: Formative Interpersonal Interactions and Activities,” Journal of Research in Music Education 60, no. 2 (2012): 145–165. . Jui-Ching Wang and Jere T. Humphreys, “Multicultural and Popular Music Content in an American Music Teacher Education Program,” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2009): 19–36. . David J. Hargreaves and Nigel A. Marshall, “Developing Identities in Music Education,” Music Education Research 5, no. 3 (2003): 263–273. . Peter De Vries, “What We Want: The Music Preferences of Upper Primary School Students and the Ways They Engage in Music,” Australian Journal of Music Education 1, no. 1 (2010): 3–16. . Jo A. Saunders, “Identity in Music: Adolescents and the Music Classroom,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 9, no. 2 (2010): 70–78. . Jennifer. M. Gore, Tom Griffiths, and James G. Ladwig, “Towards Better Teaching: Productive Pedagogy as a Framework for Teacher Education,” Teaching and Teacher Education 20, no. 4 (2004): 375–387. . Hildegard Froehlich, “Institutional Belonging, Pedagogical Discourse and Music Teacher Education: The Paradox of Routinization,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 10. . David Borgo, “The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2004): 174–190. . Cornel West, Democracy Matters (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). . Stuart Nicholson, Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address). (New York: Routledge, 2005). . Bill Dobbins, “Jazz and Academia: Street Music in the Ivory Tower,” Bulletin for the Council for the Research in Music Education 96 (1988): 30–41.

Notes to pages 57–70 |

153

. David Borgo, “Free Jazz in the Classroom: An Ecological Approach to Music Education,” Jazz Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2007): 61–88. . Joshua Renick, “The Past, Present, and Future of Jazz Education: Toward Alternatives in Jazz Pedagogy” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2011). . Nathaniel J. Olson, “The Institutionalization of Fiddling in Higher Education: Three Cases” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2014). . Small, Musicking; Nettl, Heartland Excursions. . Freire, Pedagogy of Hope, 91. . David A. Williams, “The Elephant in the Room,” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 1 (2011): 51–57; and David A. Williams, “What Are Music Educators Doing and How Well Are We Doing It?” Music Educators Journal 94, no. 1 (2007): 18–23. . Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom, 27. . John Dewey, “Relation of Theory to Practice,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1882– 1924, vol. 3, 1903–1906, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 256. . Ibid., 256 (emphasis added). . Atul Gawande, “Personal Best: Top Athletes and Singers Have Coaches; Should You?” New Yorker, October 3, 2011, p. 44. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002). . Altovise Gipson-Colon, “Spaces of Inspiration, Affirmation, and Resistance: AfricanAmerican Music Teachers’ Racially and Culturally Inclusive Experiences and Perceptions of Being a Teacher” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013). . Dewey, Democracy and Education, 344. . Ibid., 351. . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 161 (emphasis added). . Ibid.

. Learning in Laboratories . John Dewey, “Construction and Criticism,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925– 1953, vol. 5, 1929–1930, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 142. . The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” The Age of Plastic (Island Records, 1979). . The Limousines, “Internet Killed the Video Star,” Get Sharp (Orchard City Books and Noise, 2010). . Randall E. Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts,” in Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, ed. Michele Kaschub and Janice P. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–70. . Estelle R. Jorgensen, Pictures of Music Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 14. . Maxine Greene, “Wide-Awakeness and the Mortal Life,” in Landscapes of Learning (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978), 42. . John Dewey, Art as Experience, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10, 1934, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003).

154 |

Notes to pages 70–83

. John Dewey, The School and Society, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 1, 1899–1901, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 54. . Ibid. . Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1970; repr., New York: Continuum, 1990), 53. . Jorgensen, Pictures of Music Education, 3. . Roland Barthes, “To the Seminar,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkley: University of California Press, 1989), 332. . Ibid. . Ibid., 333. . Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, 2nd ed. (1975; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 72. . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 336–337 (original emphasis). . Mark R. Campbell, “Learning to Teach Music: A Collaborative Ethnography,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 139 (1999): 12–36. . Tami J. Draves, “Fostering and Sustaining Music Teacher Identity in the Student Teaching Experience,” in Issues of Identity in Music Education: Narratives and Practices, ed. Linda K. Thompson and Mark R. Campbell (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2010), 15–35. . John Dewey, “Experience and Education,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 13, 1938–1939, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 8. . Albert C. Barnes, “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education,” in Art and Education: A Collection of Essays (1946; repr., Merion, PA: Barnes Foundation Press, 1978), 10. . Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity 8, no. 2 (1958): 40. . Barnes, “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education,” 10. . Benjamin Schwarz, “The End of Jazz: How America’s Most Vibrant Music Became a Relic,” The Atlantic, November 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11 /the-end-of-jazz/309112/. . David T. Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teacher’s Creed (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 114–156. . For more on the symposium, see http://www.bu.edu/tanglewoodtwo/. . Wynton Marsalis, foreword to Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future of Music Education, ed. Anthony Palmer and Andres De Quadros (Chicago: Gia, 2012), xiii. . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (1837; repr., Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1983), 56–57. . Cathy Benedict, “Defining Ourselves as Other: Envisioning Transformative Possibilities,” in Teaching Music in the Urban Classroom: A Guide to Survival, Success, and Reform, ed. Carol Frierson-Campbell (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2006), 3–13. . David T. Hansen, The Teachers and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education (London: Routledge, 2011), 18. . Ibid., 114. . John Dewey, “A Common Faith,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 9, 1933–1934, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 58–59. . Hansen, Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching, 119, 117. . Ibid., 119. . David Elliot and Marissa Silverman, Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 229. . Ibid., 424.

Notes to pages 83–92

|

155

. Ibid., 405. . Dewey, The School and Society, 23 (original emphasis). . Hansen, The Teachers and the World, 18. . Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 53. . John Dewey, “Essays: Monastery, Bargain Counter, or Laboratory in Education?” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 6, 1931–1932, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 108. . Ibid. . John Dewey, “Essays: Individuality in Education,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 15, 1923–1924, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 176. . See Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936); John Dewey, “The Social Frontier: President Hutchins’ Proposals to Remake Higher Education,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 11, 1935–1937, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 398–402; and Thomas Ehrlich, “Dewey versus Hutchins: The Next Round,” in Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, ed. Robert Orrill (New York: College Board, 1997), 225–262. . Dewey, “Experience and Education,” 52. . Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1930). . Susan McClary, “Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition,” in Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 139–169. . Kenneth Goldsmith, “It’s Not Plagiarism; in the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative -Writing/128908/. . Ibid. . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 332. . Dewey, Art as Experience, 284 (emphasis added). . Ibid., 285. . I think that our discipline can learn a lot from early childhood researchers about the value of play. See Lori A. Custodero, “Observable Indicators of Flow Experience: A Developmental Perspective on Musical Engagement in Young Children from Infancy to School Age,” Music Education Research 7, no. 2 (2005): 185–209; and Lisa Huisman Koops, “Songs from the Car Seat: Exploring the Early Childhood Music-Making Place of the Family Vehicle,” Journal of Research in Music Education 62, no. 1 (2014): 52–65. . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 336 (original emphasis). . Ibid., 333. . Dewey, The School and Society, 12 (emphasis added). . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 337 (original emphasis). . Ibid., 340. . Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988), 6–7. . Greene, “Wide-Awakeness and the Mortal Life,” 49. . Even the Master will suffer this demise. . Randall E. Allsup, “The Eclipse of a Higher Education or Problems Preparing Artists in a Mercantile World,” Music Education Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 251–261. . Roger Mantie, “Striking Up the Band: Music Education through a Foucaultian Lens,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 11, no. 1 (2012): 99–123; Roger Mantie, “Bands

156 |

Notes to pages 92–100

and/as Music Education: Antinomies and the Struggle for Legitimacy,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 63–81. . James Frankel and Thomas E. Rudolph, YouTube in Music Education (New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2009). . Evan S. Tobias, “Composing, Songwriting, and Producing: Informing Popular Music Pedagogy,” Research Studies in Music Education 35, no. 2 (2013): 213–237; Evan S. Tobias, “Crossfading and Plugging In: Secondary Students’ Engagement and Learning in a Songwriting and Technology Class” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2010). . Joseph Abramo and Amy Reynolds, “Pedagogical Creativity as a Framework for Music Teacher Education,” Journal of Music Teacher Education 24, no. 1 (2014): 1–15. . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 333. . Dewey, “Experience and Education,” 57. . See Dewey, The School and Society, 22–39. . Ibid., 30. . Ibid., 35. . Ibid., 30. . Ibid. . Ibid., 31. . Ibid. . Dewey, The School and Society, 48 (emphasis added). . Pam Burnard and Betty Anne Younker, “Mapping Pathways: Fostering Creativity in Composition,” Music Education Research 4, no. 2 (2002): 245–261. . John Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 2, 1902–1903, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 277. . David Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 72. In the second edition of Music Matters, Elliott and Silverman write, “Musical understanding develops best through active music making and listening in curricular situations that teachers deliberately design to approximate (not duplicate) the salient conditions of musically and socially valid musical praxes. . . . [T]he musical credibility of the teachinglearning situation is a crucial determinant of what music students learn and how deeply and joyfully they learn. . . . [D]eveloping musical understanding is a matter of welcoming students into and motivating them to immerse themselves into selected musical praxes” (231). . Judy Lewis, “Musical Voices from the Margins: Popular Music as a Site of Resistance in an Urban Public School” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2016). . Maxine Greene, “Toward Beginnings,” in The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene, ed. William F. Pinar (London: Falmer Press, 1998), 256–257 (original emphasis). . Barthes, “To the Seminar,” 333. . Elliott, Music Matters, 75. In the second edition, Elliott and Silverman write, “In terms of assessment, the primary point to make now is that a student’s level of musical understanding demonstrates itself primarily in the quality of his or her music making and listening, not in what a student can tell us about musical products. . . . Verbal information about musical compositions is no substitute for the ultra-specific nonverbal conception of musical products that a student exhibits when he or she performs, improvises, composes, arranges, or conducts intelligently” (234). . Elliott, Music Matters, 179. In the second edition, Elliott and Silverman write, “People who do not possess the musical understanding to participate in musical praxes cannot fully understand or pass judgment on musical values. The internal goods of musical praxes are available only to those who take part productively in the situational knowledge formed around and for musicing and listening” (279).

Notes to pages 100–109

|

157

. Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). . See Robert Boostrom, “‘Safe Spaces’: Reflections on an Educational Metaphor,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 30, no. 4 (1998): 397–408; Julia G. Brooks, “Bearing the Weight: Discomfort as a Necessary Condition for ‘Less Violent’ and More Equitable Dialogic Learning,” Educational Foundations 25, no. 1 (2011): 43–62; and Maxine Greene, “Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings,” Teachers College Record 95, no. 2 (1993): 211–221. . John Dewey, How We Think, in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 6, 1910–1911, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 192. . Ibid. . Ibid., 269 (original emphasis). . Dewey, Art as Experience, 277. . Margaret Barrett, “Invented Notations: A View of Young Children’s Musical Thinking,” Research Studies in Music Education 4 (1997): 2–14. . Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 109. . Ibid. . Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education.” . Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 157. . Lauri Väkevä, “Garage Band or Garageband? Remixing Musical Futures,” British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2010): 59–70. . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 157. . Ronald B. Thomas, MMCP Synthesis (Bardonia, NY: Media Materials, 1971). . Of the women who shaped my teaching, as I muddled my way through theory and practice during the 1990s, the best were Marsha Baxter, Maxine Greene, Lee Pogonowski, and Nathalie Robinson. I am a hash (a mostly delicious amalgam of the new and the leftover) of all these pedagogues. . Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (1977; repr., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 157. . Peter R. Webster, “Construction of Music Learning,” in MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning, vol. 1, Strategies, ed. Richard Colwell and Peter R. Webster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35–83.

. Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings . Maxine Greene, “Toward the Concrete: An Approach to Moral Choosing,” Moral Education Forum 5, no. 2 (1980): 11. . Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). . Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure (New York: Vintage, 2012), 8. . Estelle R. Jorgensen, “Values and Philosophizing about Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 3–21. . Karen Snell and Johan Söderman, Hip-Hop within and without the Academy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). . Maxine Greene, “John Dewey and Moral Education,” Contemporary Education 48, no. 1 (1976): 19 (emphasis added).

158 |

Notes to pages 109–116

. Ibid. . Ibid. . John Dewey, “Moral Principles in Education,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 4, 1907–1909, ed. Larry A. Hickman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 269. . Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” trans. H. B. Nisbet. (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 1 (original emphasis). . Dewey, “Moral Principles in Education,” 272. . Paul Woodford, “The Eclipse of the Public: A Response to David Elliott’s Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 30. . Jorgensen, “Values and Philosophizing about Music Education,” 18–19. . Paul Woodford, Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 23. . Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 72. . Ibid., 2. . Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Schools (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 14. . Randall E. Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts,” in Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, ed. Michele Kaschub and Janice P. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 57–70. . Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 54 (original emphasis). . Carey Jewitt, “Multimodality and Literacy in School Classrooms,” Review of Research in Education 32 (2008): 241–267. . Lalitha Vasudevan, “Re-imagining Pedagogies for Multimodal Selves,” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 110, no. 1 (2010): 88–108; Lalitha Vasudevan, “An Invitation to Unknowing,” Teachers College Record 113, no. 6 (2011): 1154–1174. . Cathy Benedict, “Critical and Transformational Literacies: Music and General Education,” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 154. . Ibid. . Ibid., 156 (original emphasis). . Cathy Benedict, “Processes of Alienation: Marx, Orff and Kodaly,” British Journal of Music Education 26, no. 2 (2009): 213–224. . Roland Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 201. . Ibid. . June Boyce-Tillman, “The Transformative Qualities of a Liminal Space Created by Musicking,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 17, no. 2 (2009): 184–202; June Boyce-Tillman, “And I Still Wander . . . : A Look at Western Music Education through Greek Mythology,” Music Educators Journal 99, no 3 (2013): 29–33. . Iris M. Yob, “If We Knew What Spirituality Was, We Would Teach for It,” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 2 (2011): 41–47. . Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). . Lucy Green, Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology and Education (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Lucy Green, Meaning, Autonomy and Authenticity in the Music Classroom (London: Institute of Education, 2005).

Notes to pages 116–121

|

159

. Lucy Green, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 87. . David J. Elliott, Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 198. With Marissa Silverman in the second edition of Music Matters, Elliott reaffirms that “MUSICS, overall, form a universe of miniworlds (e.g., the jazz world, the world of contemporary opera music, and so on), each of which is organized around indigenous knowings, beliefs, values, goals, and practices (preserved or reinvented) toward making of certain kinds of musical pieces for a particular groups of listeners.” David Elliott and Marissa Silverman, Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 265. . Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 54. . Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” 191 (original emphasis). . Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 7. . Ibid., 21. . Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 54 (original emphasis). . Elliott, Music Matters, 75. In the second edition, Elliott and Silverman reiterate, “We consider what our students are giving attention to, what they fail to notice and understand, what they find difficult to solve, what they feel right or wrong about musically, and so on” (233). . Luis C. Moll, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzalez, “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms,” Theory into Practice 31, no. 2 (1992): 132–141. . Barthes, “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers,” 191–192 (original emphasis). . Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 54. . Ibid., 62. . Ibid., 55 (original emphasis). . William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996), 248. . Constance L. McKoy, Vicki L. Lind, and Abby Butler, “Equity and Access in Music Education: Conceptualizing Culture as Barriers to and Supports for Music Learning,” Music Education Research 9, no. 2 (2007): 241–253; Constance L. McKoy, “Effects of Selected Demographic Variables on Music Student Teachers’ Self-Reported Cross-cultural Competence,” Journal of Research in Music Education 62, no. 2 (2012): 375–394. . Sidsel Karlsen and Heidi Westerlund, “Immigrant Students’ Development of Musical Agency—Exploring Democracy in Music Education,” British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 3 (2010): 225–239; Sidsel Karlsen, “Multiple Repertoires of Ways of Being and Acting in Music: Immigrant Students’ Musical Agency as an Impetus for Democracy,” Music Education Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 131–148. . Chiao-Wei Liu, “The Music Experiences of Asian Immigrant Youth” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2016). . Altovise Gipson-Colon, “Spaces of Inspiration, Affirmation, and Resistance: AfricanAmerican Music Teachers’ Racially and Culturally Inclusive Experiences and Perceptions of Being a Teacher” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013). . For an understanding of vapaa säestys, see Inga Rikandi, Negotiating Musical and Pedagogical Agency in a Learning Community: A Case of Redesigning a Group Piano “Vapaa Säestys” Course in Music Teacher Education (Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2012). . S. Alex Ruthmann, “The Composers’ Workshop: An Approach to Composing in the Classroom,” Music Educators Journal 93, no. 4 (2007): 38–43; Steve Dillon, Mikko Myllykoski,

160

| Notes to pages 121–127

Aapo Rantalainen, S. Alex Ruthmann, Ketil Thorgersen, and Lauri Väkevä, “Open Source,” Journal of Music Technology and Education 5, no. 2 (2012): 129–132. . Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 259. . Ibid., 249. . Elizabeth Gould, “Thinking (as) Difference: Lesbian Imagination and Music,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 11 (2007): 17–28; Elizabeth Gould, “Companionable Species: A Queer Pedagogy for Music Education,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 197 (2013): 63–75; Elizabeth Gould, “I Always Think There’s a Band, Kid: Queer Music Education Lost” (keynote address for Establishing Identity: LGBT Studies and Music Education, University of Illinois, Champaign, March 23, 2010). . Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education.” . Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” 58. . Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Envisioning Autonomy through Improvising and Composing: Castoriadis Visiting Creative Music Education Practice,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. 2 (2012): 165. . Ibid. . Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Children’s Early Reflections on Improvised Music-Making as the Wellspring of Musico-Philosophical Thinking,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 15, no. 2 (2007): 133. . Kanellopoulos, “Envisioning Autonomy through Improvising and Composing,” 164. . Ibid., 162. . Susan Sontag, “On Roland Barthes,” in A Barthes Reader, by Roland Barthes, ed. Susan Sontag (1982; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 2009), xi. . Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 156–157. . John Paynter, “Making Progress with Composing,” British Journal of Music Education 17, no. 1 (2000): 5–31. . Lenore Pogonowski’s role in the creation of the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project was much more involved than she is historically credited with; this is a case of gender discrimination, as experienced by many of the female pioneers of her generation. . Barthes, “From Work to Text,” 159. . Ibid. . Panagiotis A. Kanellopoulos, “Freedom and Responsibility: The Aesthetics of Free Musical Improvisation and Its Educational Implications—a View from Bakhtin,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 2 (2011): 118. . Kanellopoulos, “Children’s Early Reflections on Improvised Music-Making,” 133. . Ibid. . Ibid., 135. . Bennett Reimer, “Response to Randall Allsup, ‘Music Teacher Quality and Expertise,’” Philosophy of Music Education Review 23, no. 1 (2015): 109. . Joseph Abramo, “Music Education that Resonates: An Epistemology and Pedagogy of Sound,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 78–95. . Louis Hanzlik, “Fostering Citizenship and Democracy through Chamber Music Coaching” (EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2010). . Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). . Michel de Montaigne, “On the Education of Children,” in Essays, trans. John M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1958), 57.

Notes to pages 127–141

|

161

. Roland Barthes, “To the Seminar,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 332 (original emphasis). . Mike Rose, Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us (New York: New Press, 2014), 25. . Ibid., 29. . William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in Lyrical Ballad, ed. Michael Schmidt (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 103. . Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 78. . Ibid. . Ibid., 79. . Ibid. . Ibid., 80. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Maxine Greene, “The Wonder of Mystery, the Rejection of Commodification,” in Variations on a Blue Guitar (New York: Teachers College Press, 1994), 147. . Ibid. . Ibid., 146. . Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95. . Albi Odendaal, Olli-Taavetti Kankkunen, Hanna M. Nikkanen, and Lauri Vakeva, “What’s with the K? Exploring the Implications of Christopher Small’s ‘Musicking’ for General Education,” Music Education Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 163. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Sharon Otterman and Robert Gebeloff, “In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough,” New York Times, February 26, 2012, p. A19. . Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 92. . Ibid., 95. . Kanellopoulos, “Envisioning Autonomy through Improvising and Composing,” 167. . Ibid., 169. . Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy, Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), 113. . Ibid., 26. . Margaret H. Berg, “Social Construction of Musical Experience in Two High School Chamber Music Ensembles” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997), 212. . Hanzlik, “Fostering Citizenship and Democracy through Chamber Music Coaching,” 6. . Ibid. . Roland Barthes, “Musica Practica,” in Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, 261–266; Lydia Goehr, “Musical Meaning: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment,” in Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, 120–147; Thomas Regelski, “Amateuring in Music and Its Rivals,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 22–50. . Evan S. Tobias, “Toward Convergence: Adapting Music Education to Contemporary Society and Participatory Culture,” Music Educators Journal 99, no. 4 (2013): 29–36; Heidi Partti and Sidsel Karlsen, “Reconceptualising Musical Learning: New Media, Identity and Community in Music Education,” Music Education Research 12, no. 4 (2010): 369–382. . Barthes, “Musica Practica,” 262. . Sontag, “On Roland Barthes,” xxxi.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Abramo, Joseph. “Music Education That Resonates: An Epistemology and Pedagogy of Sound.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 78–95. Abramo, Joseph, and Amy Reynolds. “Pedagogical Creativity as a Framework for Music Teacher Education.” Journal of Music Teacher Education 24, no. 1 (2014): 1–15. Allsup, Randall E. “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts.” In Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, edited by Michele Kaschub and Janice P. Smith, 57–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. “The Eclipse of a Higher Education or Problems Preparing Artists in a Mercantile World.” Music Education Research 17, no. 3 (2015): 251–261. ———. “The Moral Ends of Band.” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 179–187. ———. “A Place for the Humanities in Music Education.” Music Educators Journal 100, no. 4 (2014): 71–75. Allsup, Randall E., and Eric Shieh. “Social Justice and Music Education: The Call for a Public Pedagogy.” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 4 (2012): 47–51. Allsup, Randall E., and Heidi Westerlund. “Methods and Situational Ethics in Music Education.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 11, no. 1 (2012): 124–148. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. 1977. Reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Babbitt, Milton. “Who Cares if You Listen?” High Fidelity 8, no. 2 (1958): 38–40. Barnes, Albert C. “John Dewey’s Philosophy of Education.” In Art and Education: A Collection of Essays, 9–12. 1946. Reprint, Merion, PA: Barnes Foundation Press, 1978. Barrett, Janet R. “Judging Quality and Fostering Excellence in Music Teaching.” Journal of Music Teacher Education 21, no. 1 (2011): 1–6. Barrett, Margaret. “Invented Notations: A View of Young Children’s Musical Thinking.” Research Studies in Music Education 4 (1997): 2–14. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ———. “From Work to Text.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 155–164. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ———. “Musica Practica.” In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, translated by Richard Howard, 261–266. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. ———. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. ———. “The Third Meaning.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 52–68. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ———. “To the Seminar.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 332–342. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

163

164

|

Bibliography

———. “Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers.” In Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 190–215. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Benedict, Cathy L. “Critical and Transformative Literacies: Music and General Education.” Theory into Practice 51, no. 3 (2012): 152–158. ———. “Defining Ourselves as Other: Envisioning Transformative Possibilities.” In Teaching Music in the Urban Classroom: A Guide to Survival, Success, and Reform, edited by Carol Frierson-Campbell, 3–13. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2006. ———. “Processes of Alienation: Marx, Orff and Kodaly.” British Journal of Music Education 26, no. 2 (2009): 213–224. Berg, Margaret H. “Social Construction of Musical Experience in Two High School Chamber Music Ensembles.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997. Boostrom, Robert. “‘Safe Spaces’: Reflections on an Educational Metaphor.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 30, no. 4 (1998): 397–408. Borgo, David. “Free Jazz in the Classroom: An Ecological Approach to Music Education.” Jazz Perspectives 1, no. 1 (2007): 61–88. ———. “The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 3–4 (2004): 174–190. Boser, Ulrich. “Teacher Diversity Matters: A State-by-State Analysis of Teachers of Color.” Center for American Progress, November 9, 2011. http://www .americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2011/11/09/10657/teacher -diversity-matters. Boyce-Tillman, June. “And Still I Wander . . . : A Look at Western Music Education through Greek Mythology.” Music Educators Journal 99, no. 3 (2013): 29–33. ———. “The Transformative Qualities of a Liminal Space Created by Musicking.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 17, no. 2 (2009): 184–202. Brooks, Julia G. “Bearing the Weight: Discomfort as a Necessary Condition for ‘Less Violent’ and More Equitable Dialogic Learning.” Educational Foundations 25, no. 1–2 (2011): 43–62. Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, and Paul Harkins. “Contextual Incongruity and Musical Congruity: The Aesthetics and Humour of Mash-ups.” Popular Music 31, no. 1 (2012): 87–104. Bruner, Jerome S. The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. ———. The Process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Burnard, Pam, and Betty Anne Younker. “Mapping Pathways: Fostering Creativity in Composition.” Music Education Research 4, no. 2 (2002): 245–261. Cage, John. “Composition as Process: Indeterminacy.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, 176–186. New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. “The Future of Music: Credo.” In Silence: Lectures and Writings, 3–6. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Cammarano, Cristina. “The Philosophically Educated Teacher as a Traveler.” PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2012. Campbell, Mark R. “Learning to Teach Music: A Collaborative Ethnography.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 139 (1999): 12–36.

Bibliography |

165

Caramanica, Jon. “Snoop Dogg Has More than Money on His Mind.” New York Times Magazine, May 10, 2015, p. MM58. Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Bk. 2. Translated by Arthur Waley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Conway, Colleen. “Issues Facing Music Teacher Education in the 21st Century: Developing Leaders in the Field.” In Critical Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice, edited by Harold F. Abeles and Lori A. Custodero, 259–275. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. “Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity.” In Handbook of Creativity, edited by Robert J. Sternberg, 313–335. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Custodero, Lori A. “Observable Indicators of Flow Experience: A Developmental Perspective on Musical Engagement in Young Children from Infancy to School Age.” Music Education Research 7, no. 2 (2005): 185–209. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859. Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004. Davidson, Amy. “The Skim Milk in Edith Windsor’s Marriage.” New Yorker, March 27, 2013. http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-skim-milk-in-edith -windsors-marriage. De Vries, Peter. “What We Want: The Music Preferences of Upper Primary School Students and the Ways They Engage in Music.” Australian Journal of Music Education 1, no. 1 (2010): 3–16. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10, 1934, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 1–352. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “The Child and the Curriculum.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 2, 1902–1903, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 271–291. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “A Common Faith.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 9, 1933– 1934, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 1–58. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Construction and Criticism.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 5, 1929–1930, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 127–143. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. Democracy and Education. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 9, 1916, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 1–370. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Essays: Individuality in Education.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 15, 1923–1924, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 170–179. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Essays: Monastery, Bargain Counter, or Laboratory in Education?” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 6, 1931–1932, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 99–111. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Experience and Education.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 13, 1938–1939, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 1–62. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

166 |

Bibliography

———. How We Think. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 6, 1910–1911, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 105–352. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “The Lost Individual.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 5, 1929–1930, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 66–76. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Moral Principles in Education.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 4, 1907–1909, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 265–292. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “Relation of Theory to Practice.” In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1882–1924, vol. 3, 1903–1906, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 249–272. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. The School and Society. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 1, 1899–1901, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 1–109. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. ———. “The Social Frontier: President Hutchins’ Proposals to Remake Higher Education.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 11, 1935–1937, edited by Larry A. Hickman, 397–401. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Dillon, Steve, Mikko Myllykoski, Aapo Rantalainen, S. Alex Ruthmann, Ketil Thorgersen, and Lauri Väkevä. “Open Source.” Journal of Music, Technology and Education 5, no. 2 (2012): 129–132. Dobbins, Bill. “Jazz and Academia: Street Music in the Ivory Tower.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 96 (1988): 30–41. Draves, Tami J. “Fostering and Sustaining Music Teacher Identity in the Student Teaching Experience.” In Issues of Identity in Music Education: Narratives and Practices, edited by Linda K. Thompson and Mark R. Campbell, 15–35. Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2010. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folks. 1903. Reprint, New York: Cosimo, 2007. Dyndahl, Petter. “Music Education in the Sign of Deconstruction.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16, no. 2 (2008): 124–144. Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work.” In Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, edited by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner, 167–175. New York: Continuum, 2010. Ehrlich, Thomas. “Dewey versus Hutchins: The Next Round.” In Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, edited by Robert Orrill, 225–262. New York: College Board, 1997. Elliott, David. Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Elliott, David, and Marissa Silverman. Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Ellsworth, Elizabeth. “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy.” In Feminisms and Critical Pedagogies, edited by Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, 90–119. New York: Routledge, 1992. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” In Essays and Lectures. 1837. Reprint, Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1983.

Bibliography

|

167

Fenstermacher, Gary D. “Philosophy of Research on Teaching: Three Aspects.” In Handbook of Research on Teaching, 4th ed., edited by Virginia Richards, 3–16. New York: Macmillan, 2001. Ferm, Cecilia. “Openness and Awareness—Roles and Demands of Music Teachers.” Music Education Research 8, no. 2 (2006): 237–250. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage, 2012. Frankel, James, and Thomas E. Rudolph. YouTube in Music Education. New York: Hal Leonard Books, 2009. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civil Courage. Translated by Patrick Clarke. 1998. Reprint, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. ———. Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1994. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 1997. ———. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. 1970. Reprint, New York: Continuum, 1990. Froehlich, Hildegard. “Institutional Belonging, Pedagogic Discourse and Music Teacher Education: The Paradox of Routinization.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 7–21. Gawande, Atul. “Personal Best: Top Athletes and Singers Have Coaches; Should You?” New Yorker, October 3, 2011, pp. 44–53. Georgii-Hemming, Eva, and Maria Westvall. “Music Education—a Personal Matter? Examining the Current Discourses of Music Education in Sweden.” British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2010): 21–33. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Gipson-Colon, Altovise. “Spaces of Inspiration, Affirmation, and Resistance: AfricanAmerican Music Teachers’ Racially and Culturally Inclusive Experiences and Perceptions of Being a Teacher.” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2013. Giroux, Henry. Education and the Crisis of Public Values. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. ———. Theory and Resistance in Education: Toward a Pedagogy for the Opposition. Rev. ed. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001. Goehr, Lydia. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “Musical Meaning: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment.” In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, 120–147. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Goldsmith, Kenneth. “It’s Not Plagiarism; in the Digital Age, It’s ‘Repurposing.’” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2011. http://chronicle.com/article /Uncreative-Writing/128908/. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Gore, Jennifer M., Tom Griffiths, and James G. Ladwig. “Towards Better Teaching: Productive Pedagogy as a Framework for Teacher Education.” Teaching and Teacher Education 20, no. 4 (2004): 375–387. Gould, Elizabeth. “Companion-able Species: A Queer Pedagogy for Music Education.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 197 (2013): 63–75.

168

|

Bibliography

———. “Devouring the Other: Democracy in Music Education.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 7, no. 1 (2008): 29–44. ———. “Feminist Theory in Music Education Research: Grrl-illa Games as Nomadic Practice (or How Music Education Fell from Grace).” Music Education Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 67–79. ———. “Homosexual Subject(ivitie)s in Music (Education): Deconstructions of the Disappeared.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 45–62. ———. “I Always Think There’s a Band, Kid: Queer Music Education Lost.” Keynote address for Establishing Identity: LGBT Studies and Music Education, University of Illinois, Champaign, March 23, 2010. ———. “Legible Bodies in Music Education: Becoming-Matter.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 4 (2007): 201–223. ———. “Nomadic Turns: Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band Directors.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 13, no. 2 (2005): 147–164. ———. “Thinking (as) Difference: Lesbian Imagination and Music.” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 11 (2007): 17–28. Green, Lucy. How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. ———. Meaning, Autonomy and Authenticity in the Music Classroom. London: Institute of Education, 2005. ———. Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. ———. Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology and Education. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Greene, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press, 1988. ———. “Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings.” Teachers College Record 95, no. 2 (1993): 211–221. ———. “I Still Wonder at How Unaware I Was of So Many Frequencies . . .” In Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education, 192–198. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. ———. “John Dewey and Moral Education.” Contemporary Education 48, no. 1 (1976): 17–22. ———. “The Open Questions in Classroom Dialogues.” In Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education, 104–109. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. ———. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. ———. “Toward Beginnings.” In The Passionate Mind of Maxine Greene, edited by William F. Pinar, 256–257. London: Falmer Press, 1998. ———. “Toward the Concrete: An Approach to Moral Choosing.” Moral Education Forum 5 no. 2 (1980): 2–12. ———. “Wide-Awakeness and the Mortal Life.” In Landscapes of Learning, 42–52. New York: Teachers College Press, 1978. ———. “The Wonder of Mystery, the Rejection of Commodification.” In Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education, 141–147. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001.

Bibliography |

169

Greher, Gena R. “Transforming Music Teacher Preparation through the Lens of Video Technology.” Journal of Music Teacher Education 49, no. 2 (2006): 49–60. Hansen, David T. Exploring the Moral Heart of Teaching: Toward a Teachers Creed. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. ———. The Teachers and the World: A Study of Cosmopolitanism as Education. London: Routledge, 2011. Hanslick, Eduard. “Aesthetics as Founded on Feelings.” In The Beautiful in Music, translated by Gustav Cohen and Morris Weitz, 7–19. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. ———. “The Beautiful in Music.” In The Beautiful in Music, translated by Gustav Cohen and Morris Weitz, 47–70. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957. Hanzlik, Louis. “Fostering Citizenship and Democracy through Chamber Music Coaching.” EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2010. Hargreaves, David J., and Nigel A. Marshall. “Developing Identities in Music Education.” Music Education Research 5, no. 3 (2003): 263–273. Hatano, Giyoo, and Kayoko Inagaki. “Two Courses of Expertise.” In Child Development and Education in Japan, edited by Harold Stevenson, Hiroshi Azuma, and Kenji Hakuta, 262–272. New York: Freeman, 1986. Hatch, Thomas. Managing to Change: How Schools Can Survive (and Sometimes Thrive) in Turbulent Times. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009. Higgins, Chris. “The Possibility of Public Education in an Instrumentalist Age.” Educational Theory 61, no. 4 (2011): 451–466. Hood, Mantle. “The Challenge of ‘Bi-musicality.’” Ethnomusicology 4, no. 2 (1960): 55–59. Hutchins, Robert Maynard. The Higher Learning in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936. Jackson, Philip W. John Dewey and the Philosopher’s Task. New York: Teachers College Press, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jewitt, Carey. “Multimodality and Literacy in School Classrooms.” Review of Research in Education 32 (2008): 241–267. Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Directed by David Gelb. New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2011. DVD. Johansen, Geir. “An Education Politics of the Particular: Promises and Opportunities for the Quality of Higher Music Education.” Arts Education Policy Review 110, no. 4 (2009): 33–38. Jorgensen, Estelle. “The Artist and the Pedagogy of Hope.” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (1996): 36–50. ———. Pictures of Music Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. ———. Transforming Music Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. “Values and Philosophizing about Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 5–21. Kafka, Franz. “Before the Law.” In The Complete Stories, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer, 22–23. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis A. “Children’s Early Reflections on Improvised Music-Making as the Wellspring of Musico-Philosophical Thinking.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 15, no. 2 (2007): 119–141.

170 |

Bibliography

———. “Envisioning Autonomy through Improvising and Composing: Castoriadis Visiting Creative Music Education Practice.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 44, no. 2 (2012): 151–182. ———. “Freedom and Responsibility: The Aesthetics of Free Musical Improvisation and Its Educational Implications—a View from Bakhtin.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 19, no. 2 (2011): 113–135. Kant, Immanuel. An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” Translated by H. B. Nisbet. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Karlsen, Sidsel. “Multiple Repertoires of Ways of Being and Acting in Music: Immigrant Students’ Musical Agency as an Impetus for Democracy.” Music Education Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 131–148. Karlsen, Sidsel, and Heidi Westerlund. “Immigrant Students’ Development of Musical Agency—Exploring Democracy in Music Education.” British Journal Of Music Education 27, no. 3 (2010): 225–239. Kenny, Ailbhe, Charles Larkin, Daithí MacSíthigh, and Jacco Thijssen. Irish Education Policy for a Globalised World: A Policy for Chasing Black and White. Dublin: Swan Group, 2009. Kertz-Welzel, Alexandra. “Didaktik of Music: A German Concept and Its Comparison.” International Journal of Music Education 22, no. 3 (2004): 277–286. Kingsbury, Henry. Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Kohn, Alfie. Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Koops, Lisa Huisman. “Songs from the Car Seat: Exploring the Early Childhood MusicMaking Place of the Family Vehicle.” Journal of Research in Music Education 62, no. 1 (2014): 52–65. Koza, Julia Eklund. “Aesthetic Music Education Revisited: Discourses of Exclusion and Oppression.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 75–91. Labaree, David F. “An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University.” In Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, 3rd ed., edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon FeimanNemser, D. John McIntyre, and Kelly E. Demers, 290–306. New York: Routledge, 2008. Lamb, Roberta. “Feminism as Critique in Philosophy of Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 59–74. Landes, David. “Higher Birth Rates among Sweden’s Foreign-Born.” The Local, November 3, 2008. http://www.thelocal.se/15408/20081103/. Lewis, Judy. “Musical Voices from the Margins: Popular Music as a Site of Resistance in an Urban Public School.” EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2016. Liu, Chiao-Wei. “The Music Experiences of Asian Immigrant Youth.” EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2016. Lortie, Dan C. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. 2nd ed. 1975. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002. Louth, Paul. “The Role of Critical Formalism in Music Education.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 2 (2012): 117–134. Mantie, Roger. “Bands and/as Music Education: Antinomies and the Struggle for Legitimacy.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 63–81.

Bibliography

|

171

———. “Striking Up the Band: Music Education through a Foucaultian Lens.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 11, no. 1 (2012): 99–123. Marsalis, Wynton. Foreword to Tanglewood II: Summoning the Future of Music Education, edited by Anthony Palmer and Andres De Quadros, xi–xiv. Chicago: Gia, 2012. McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. Georges Bizet, Carmen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. “Reveling in the Rubble: The Postmodern Condition.” In Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, 139–169. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. McDiarmid, G. Williamson, and Mary Clevenger-Bright. “Rethinking Teacher Capacity.” In Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Questions in Changing Contexts, 3rd ed., edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, D. John McIntyre, and Kelly E. Demers, 134–156. New York: Routledge, 2008. McDowall, Janet. “Making Music Multimodally: Young Children Learning with Music Technology.” International Journal of Learning 16, no. 10 (2010): 303–315. McKoy, Constance L. “Effects of Selected Demographic Variables on Music Student Teachers’ Self-Reported Cross-cultural Competence.” Journal of Research in Music Education 62, no. 2 (2012): 375–394. McKoy, Constance L., Vicki L. Lind, and Abby Butler. “Equity and Access in Music Education: Conceptualizing Culture as Barriers to and Supports for Music Learning.” Music Education Research 9, no. 2 (2007): 241–253. Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.” In The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, 13–46. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987. Merriam, Alan P. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Moll, Luis C., Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzalez. “Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms.” Theory into Practice 31, no. 2 (1992): 132–141. Montaigne, Michel de. “On the Education of Children.” In Essays, translated by John M. Cohen, 49–85. London: Penguin Books, 1958. Morton, Charlene. “Feminist Theory and the Displaced Music Curriculum: Beyond the ‘Add and Stir’ Projects.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 2, no. 2 (1994): 106–121. Nettl, Bruno. Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Nicholson, Stuart. Is Jazz Dead? (Or Has It Moved to a New Address). New York: Routledge, 2005. Nussbaum, Martha C. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Odendaal, Albi, Olli-Taavetti Kankkunen, Hanna M. Nikkanen, and Lauri Vakeva. “What’s with the K? Exploring the Implications of Christopher Small’s ‘Musicking’ for General Education.” Music Education Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 162–175. Olson, Nathaniel J. “The Institutionalization of Fiddling in Higher Education: Three Cases.” EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2014.

172

|

Bibliography

Orzolek, Douglas C. “The Call for Accountability.” Journal of Music Teacher Education 22, no. 3 (2012): 3–6. O’Toole, Patricia. “Music Matters: Why I Don’t Feel Included in These Musics or Matters.” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 144 (2000): 28–39. Otterman, Sharon, and Robert Gebeloff. “In Teacher Ratings, Good Test Scores Are Sometimes Not Good Enough.” New York Times, February 26, 2012, p. A19. Parsons, Talcott. “The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society.” Harvard Educational Review 29, no. 4 (1959): 297–318. Partti, Heidi H. “Cosmopolitan Musicianship under Construction: Digital Musicians Illuminating Emerging Values in Music Education.” International Journal of Music Education 20, no. 3 (2012): 1–16. ———. Learning from Cosmopolitan Digital Musicians: Identity, Musicianship, and Changing Values in (In)Formal Music Communities. Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2012. Partti, Heidi, and Sidsel Karlsen. “Reconceptualising Musical Learning: New Media, Identity and Community in Music Education.” Music Education Research 12, no. 4 (2010): 369–382. Paynter, John. “Making Progress with Composing.” British Journal of Music Education 17, no. 1 (2000): 5–31. Pendarvis, Edwina, and Aimee Howley. “Playing Fair: The Possibilities of Gifted Education.” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 19, no. 2 (1996): 215–233. Perkins, Rosie. “Learning Cultures and the Conservatoire: An Ethnographically-Informed Case Study.” Music Education Research 15, no. 2 (2013): 196–213. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pinar, William. The Worldliness of a Cosmopolitan Education: Passionate Lives in Public Service. New York: Routledge, 2009. Plato. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992. Popkewitz, Thomas S. “Professionalization in Teaching and Teacher Education: Some Notes on Its History, Ideology, and Potential.” Teaching and Teacher Education 10, no. 1 (1994): 1–14. Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Translated by Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books, 2010. ———. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Regelski, Thomas. “Amateuring in Music and Its Rivals.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 6, no. 3 (2007): 22–50. Reimer, Bennett. “Response to Randall Allsup, ‘Music Teacher Quality and Expertise.’” Philosophy Music Education Review 23, no. 1 (2015): 108–112. Renick, Joshua. “The Past, Present, and Future of Jazz Education: Toward Alternatives in Jazz Pedagogy.” EdD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 2011. Rikandi, Inga, ed. Mapping the Common Ground: Philosophical Perspectives on Finnish Music Education. Helsinki: BTJ, 2010. Rikandi, Inga. Negotiating Musical and Pedagogical Agency in a Learning Community: A Case of Redesigning a Group Piano “Vapaa Säestys” Course in Music Teacher Education. Helsinki: Sibelius Academy, 2012.

Bibliography |

173

Rose, Mike. Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. New York: New Press, 2014. Russell, Joshua A. “The Occupational Identity of In-service Secondary Music Educators: Formative Interpersonal Interactions and Activities.” Journal of Research in Music Education 60, no. 2 (2012): 145–165. Ruthmann, S. Alex. “The Composers’ Workshop: An Approach to Composing in the Classroom.” Music Educators Journal 93, no. 4 (2007): 38–43. Sahlberg, Pasi. Finnish Lessons: What the World Can Learn from Educational Change in Finland. New York: Teachers College Press, 2011. Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975. Saito, Naoko. The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Sanneh, Kelefa. “Harlem Chic: How a Hip-Hop Legend Remixed Name-Brand Fashion.” New Yorker, March 25, 2013, pp. 52–59. Sapon-Shevin, Mara. “Beyond Gifted Education: Building a Shared Agenda for School Reform.” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 19, no. 2 (1996): 194–214. Saunders, Jo A. “Identity in Music: Adolescents and the Music Classroom.” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education 9, no. 2 (2010): 70–78. Schmidt, Patrick. “What We Hear Is Meaning Too: Deconstruction, Dialogue, and Music.” Philosophy of Music Education Review 20, no. 1 (2012): 3–24. Schneider, Jack. “The High Stakes of Teacher Evaluation.” Education Week 31, no. 33 (2012): 28–30. Schwarz, Benjamin. “The End of Jazz: How America’s Most Vibrant Music Became a Relic.” The Atlantic, November 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine /archive/2012/11/the-end-of-jazz/309112/. Seifter, Harvey, and Peter Economy. Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra. New York: Henry Holt, 2003. Sloboda, John A. “Individual Differences in Music Performance.” Trends in Cognitive Science 4, no. 10 (2000): 397–403. Slouka, Mark. “Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School.” Harper’s Magazine, September 2009, pp. 32–40. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998. Snell, Karen, and Johan Söderman. Hip-Hop within and without the Academy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Sontag, Susan. “On Roland Barthes.” In A Barthes Reader, by Roland Barthes, edited by Susan Sontag, vii–xxxi. 1982. Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 2009. Stauffer, Sandra. “Connections between the Musical and Life Experiences of Young Composers and Their Compositions.” Journal of Research in Music Education 50, no. 4 (2002): 301–322. Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. 1942. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Stuhr, John. Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and the Future of Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2003. Tanner, Arno. “Finland’s Balancing Act: The Labor Market, Humanitarian Relief, and Immigrant Integration.” Migration Information Source, January 31, 2011. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/finlands-balancing-act-labor-market -humanitarian-relief-and-immigrant-integration.

174

|

Bibliography

Tavernise, Sabrina. “Whites Account for under Half of Births in U.S.” New York Times, May 17, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under -half-of-births-in-us.html. Thomas, Ronald B. MMCP Synthesis. Bardonia, NY: Media Materials, 1971. Thoreau, Henry David. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Edited by Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. 14 vols. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Tobias, Evan S. “Composing, Songwriting, and Producing: Informing Popular Music Pedagogy.” Research Studies in Music Education 35, no. 2 (2013): 213–237. ———. “Crossfading and Plugging In: Secondary Students’ Engagement and Learning in a Songwriting and Technology Class.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2010. ———. “Hybrid Spaces and Hyphenated Musicians: Secondary School Students’ Musical Engagement in a Songwriting and Technology Course.” Music Education Research 14, no. 3 (2012): 329–346. ———. “Toward Convergence: Adapting Music Education to Contemporary Society and Participatory Culture.” Music Educators Journal 99, no. 4 (2013): 29–36. Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. 1883. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Tyler, Ralph W. Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Väkevä, Lauri. “Garage Band or Garageband? Remixing Musical Futures.” British Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2010): 59–70. Vasudevan, Lalitha. “An Invitation to Unknowing.” Teachers College Record 113, no. 6 (2011): 1154–1174. ———. “Re-imagining Pedagogies for Multimodal Selves.” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 110, no. 1 (2011): 88–108. Wang, Jui-Ching, and Jere T. Humphreys. “Multicultural and Popular Music Content in an American Music Teacher Education Program.” International Journal of Music Education 27, no. 1 (2009): 19–36. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930. Webster, Peter R. “Construction of Music Learning.” In MENC Handbook of Research on Music Learning, vol. 1, Strategies, edited by Richard Colwell and Peter R. Webster, 35–83. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “Creativity as Creative Thinking.” Music Educators Journal 76, no. 9 (1990): 22–28. West, Cornel. Democracy Matters. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press, 1929. Williams, David A. “The Elephant in the Room.” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 1 (2011): 51–57. ———. “What Are Music Educators Doing and How Well Are We Doing It?” Music Educators Journal 94, no. 1 (2007): 18–23.

Bibliography |

175

Woodford, Paul. Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics, and the Politics of Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. ———. “The Eclipse of the Public: A Response to David Elliott’s ‘Music Education as/for Artistic Citizenship.’” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 1 (2014): 22–37. Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned.” In Lyrical Ballad, edited by Michael Schmidt, 102–103. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Yeats, William Butler. “Byzantium.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, 248. New York: Scribner, 1996. Yob, Iris M. “If We Knew What Spirituality Was, We Would Teach for It.” Music Educators Journal 98, no. 2 (2011): 41–47.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Abramo, Joseph, 126, 147n86 aesthetic criteria, 87 aesthetic form, 116–117 amateurs, musical, 140 Anagnost, Dino, 135 antimony, 39–42 Arnold, Matthew, 41 artistic expression, 93–94, 96–97 assessment, 100, 146–147n72, 156nn82–83 Atomic Tom, 54 Attali, Jacques, 29, 32, 33–34, 51–52, 104 author, as term, 12–13 authority, as term, 12–13, 15 Azalea, Iggy, 1 Babbitt, Milton, 54–55, 75 “Ballad of a Thin Man,” 145n40 band directors, 66–67 banking approach to education, 71, 82, 84 Barnes, Albert C., 75, 76–77 Barthes, Roland: on authors, 10; on codes, 119; on diversity, 127; on enunciations, 145n39; on meanings, 116–117, 120; on method, 115; on musical amateurs, 140; on open forms, 51–52; on outplaying, 141; on readers, 19; on role of the teacher, 89; on the seminar, 72, 77, 88, 89– 90, 99; on the text, 64, 71, 93, 103, 123 “Before the Law” (Kafka), 7, 15–16, 64 behaviorism, erotic, 31 Benedict, Cathy, 115 Berg, Margaret, 138 bildung, as term, 41 Bloomberg, Michael, 67 Brøvig-Hanssen, Ragnhild, 33 The Buggles, 68 Cage, John, 21, 32, 33 Canada, Geoffrey, 2 caste system, 53–54, 55–56, 138–139 category fatigue, 27–29 charter schools, 2, 6 circulation, principle of, 74–77 citizens, 111

classroom: democratic, 146n53; management of, 60; open, 92–93, 95; presentational versus participatory approach to, 100; traditional, 19–20 Clevenger-Bright, Mary, 45 closed forms, 53–56; open forms versus, 48; opening, 135–140. See also specific topics codes, 119 Common Core Standards, 111–112, 133 communication, 93, 94, 96 competition, 55 composing, 122–123 Comprehensive Musicianship, 104 concert halls, 53 conductorless orchestra, 26, 135, 136–137, 139– 140 Confucius, 43 conservatorio, as term, 40–41 construction, 93, 94, 96 constructivism, 73, 86–87, 104–105 content, standardized, 50 context, 117–118 Conway, Colleen, 149n17 criteria, aesthetic, 87 Critic, 14, 145n40 Dapper Dan, 2–3, 4–5, 10, 18, 28 Darwin, Charles, 35 Day, Daniel, 2–3, 4–5, 10, 18, 28 decentered reordering, 49, 51 delineated meanings, 116 democratic classroom, 146n53 demographic disruption, 49, 50 dependency, 138 Dewey, John: on classroom management, 60; on conception of education, 36; on dualisms, 63; on form, 146n64; on ideal school, 69–70, 85– 86; on immaturity, 110; on inference, 102; on insecurity, 48–49; on the laboratory, 85, 86; on life as mixture of museum and laboratory, 66, 72–73; on muddle in the laboratory, 89; on “old education,” 74–75, 83; on open forms, 108–109; on past and present, 42, 44, 72–73, 81,

177

178

|

Index

Dewey, John (continued) 82; on progressive education, 86; on reflective thinking, 101; on resources that fund student learning, 93–94, 96–97; on traditional classroom, 19–20 diagnosticians, music teachers as, 118 dialect, 150n37 dialogue, 98–101 Dickens, Charles, x disappointment of teaching, 89–90 disorder, 22–26, 89 diversity, 61–64, 105, 106–107, 127 dualisms, 12, 27, 63 Du Bois, W. E. B., 43, 63, 64 Duchamp, Marcel, 3–4 Dylan, Bob, 145n40 Dyndal, Petter, 28 earned induction, 30–33 Eco, Umberto, 21, 30, 31 economic change, 49–50 education: antimony of, 39–42; banking approach to, 71, 82, 84; liberal, 86; mistaken for induction, 20; “old,” 74–75, 83; progressive, 86; schooling versus, 148n2. See also specific topics efficiency, instructional, 66–68, 92 Elliott, David: on aesthetic form, 116, 159n33; on assessment, 100, 146–147n72, 156nn82–83; on mentors, 82–83; on music cultures, 31, 148n97; on praxialism, 22–23, 31–32, 148n97, 156n78; on subject matter, 96, 156n78; on teachers as diagnosticians, 118, 159n39 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, 11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 79 enlightenment, 109 expertise. See music-teacher quality and expertise; routine expertise facts, x–xi fatalism, immobilizing, 59–60 fear, 138 Finland, 49, 50 flag, American, 30 form: aesthetic, 116–117; as term, 21–22, 146n64. See also closed forms; open forms Foucault, Michel, 106 Freire, Paulo, 11, 42, 43, 59, 60, 83, 84 Froehlich, Hildegard, 56 functional literacy, 114–115

Gawande, Atul, 60–62 GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement), 50–51 giddiness, 88–89 Gilbert, Sandra, 12–13 Giroux, Henry, 41, 50 Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM), 50–51 Goehr, Lydia, 25–26, 132, 134 Goldmann (music educator), 6, 7–8, 117 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 87 Gould, Elizabeth, 12, 27, 122 Green, Lucy, 63, 116 Greene, Maxine: on domain of the arts, 34; on in-betweenness, 106; on interpretive thinking, 91; and longings, ix, x; on music-teacher quality and open forms, 47; on obedience, 102–103; on open forms, 19, 108–109; on public space, 132; on voice, 98–99 Gubar, Susan, 12–13 Hansen, David, 77, 80–81, 81–82 Hanzlik, Louis, 136, 138 Hard Times (Dickens), x Harkins, Paul, 33 “Harlem Chic” (Sanneh), 3, 4, 5 Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, 2, 6 Hatano, Giyoo, 145n36 heteronomy, 123 hierarchies, 53–54, 55–56, 138–139 Higgins, Chris, 38 hip-hop, 1, 3. See also Dapper Dan humanist values, 37 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 86 immaturity, 109–110 improvisation, 76, 122–123 Inagaki, Kayoko, 145n36 in-betweenness, 106 independence, 112–113 induction, 20, 30–33, 59–60 inference, 102 informational level of meaning, 116–117 inherent meaning, 116 inquiry, 93, 94, 96 insecurity as condition of life, 48–51 institutional culture, 73–74 institutional structures, 72, 80 instruction: efficiency in, 66–68, 92; new vision for formal, 68–69; open-ended, 93–95

Index intention, 124–125 interpretive thinking, 91 inter-sonic meaning, 116 jazz, 57, 76 Jiro Dreams of Sushi, 13–15, 145n39. See also Ono, Jiro Johanna (music student), 9, 10, 11, 68, 117 Johns, Jasper, 30 Jorgensen, Estelle R., 69, 71, 107, 110, 150n20, 150n24, 150n37 Kafka, Franz, 7, 15–16, 64 Kanellopoulos, Panagiotis “Panos,” 122–123, 124–125, 134–135 Kant, Immanuel, 109 Kenny G, 87 Kingsbury, Henry, 6, 7–8, 11, 15, 16 knowledge, circulation of, 74–77 laboratory: life as mixture of museum and, 66, 72–73; muddle in, 89; as term, 85. See also laboratory learning laboratory learning, 66–68, 85–88; circulation in, 74–77; dialogue and risk in, 98–101; as a living union of thought and the instruments of expression, 69–77; and a longing for openings, 88–93; making music together in, 101– 104; and metaphors of life and learning, 71–74; and museum as living tradition, 77–81; and new visions of formal instruction, 68–69; and paradox of living traditions, 81–85; revelations in, 104–105; structuring open-ended instruction for, 93–95; subject matter in, 95– 98 Lang Lang, 62, 63 language, 118, 119–120 Law, 1–2; breaking the, 2–6; from breaking to making the, 13–20; in the laboratory, 89; language and, 119; making the, 6–13 learning: metaphors of, 71–74; objectives for, 90–91; resources that fund, 93–94, 96–97; trades, 129–132. See also laboratory learning; specific topics liberal education, 86 life: insecurity as condition of, 48–51; metaphors of, 71–74; as mixture of museum and laboratory, 66, 72–73; new forms of, 33–35 Life on the Mississippi (Twain), 129–130, 131–132 The Limousines, 68

|

179

listening, 147n86 literacy, 114–115 living traditions: museums as, 77–81; paradox of, 81–85 living union of thought and the instruments of expression, 69–71; and circulation, 74–77; and metaphors of life and learning, 71–74 Lortie, Dan, 73 Los Angeles Philharmonic, 137 loss and repair, 129–132, 135–140 “The Lost Individual” (Dewey), 48–49 Macklemore, 1 maestro archetype, 39 Magritte, René, 30 Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project, 104 Marclay, Christian, 97–98 Marsalis, Wynton, 78 mash-ups, 33 Master-apprentice model, 9–10; assessment in, 100; efficiency of, 67–68; institutional culture and, 73–74; Master as center of, 82–83; problem of routine expertise in, 56, 57, 58; stakeholders in, 25–26; subject matter in, 95–96, 97; and talent, 14–15 McClary, Susan, 87 McDiarmid, G. Williamson, 45 meanings, 116–120. See also third meaning mentors, 82–83 Merriam, Alan, 51 metaphors of life and learning, 71–74 method, 115 Montaigne, Michel de, 17, 127 moral openings. See openings Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 64 muddle, 22–26, 89 museum, 66, 72–73, 77–81 music, making together, 101–104 musical amateurs, 140 musical independence, 112–113 music education: category fatigue in, 27–29; and learning a trade, 129–132; loss and repair and, 129–132, 135–140; muddle in, 22–26; new forms of life in, 33–35; and opening a closed form, 135–140; pedagogy of earned induction in, 30–33; reclaiming, 128–141; (re)forming, 21–35; from work to text, 132–135. See also specific topics musicking, 22, 52, 133 Musicking (Small), 22, 23

180

|

Index

Music Matters (Elliott and Silverman), 82–83, 100, 148n97, 156n78, 156nn82–83 music-teacher quality and expertise: and case for diversity, 61–64; closed forms and, 53–56; and education’s antimony, 39–42; and the ends of public education, 36–47; evolving vision of, 46–47; induction in university musicteacher education, 59–60; and insecurity, 48– 51; music-teacher quality defined, 39–40; open forms and, 47–56; past and present and, 42– 46, 64–65; routine expertise, 56–65 music teachers as diagnosticians, 118. See also music-teacher quality and expertise Nakazawa, Senior Apprentice, 17–18 National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), 90–91 “natural resources,” 93–94, 96–97 Nettl, Bruno, 53 new versus old, 42–46, 64–65, 72–73 normative order, 107 Nussbaum, Martha C., 110, 111 obedience, 102–103 objectives, learning, 90–91 obtuse, as term, 120 “old education,” 74–75, 83 old versus new, 42–46, 64–65, 72–73 Ono, Jiro, 13–15, 17–20, 26, 117–118, 145n39 Ono, Yoshikazu, 15 open classroom, 92–93, 95 open encounters: breaking the Law, 2–6; from breaking the Law to making the Law, 13–20; and category fatigue, 27–29; and Law, 1–20; making the Law, 6–13; muddle in, 22–26; and new forms of life, 33–35; and pedagogy of earned induction, 30–33; (re)forming school and university music education with, 21–35 open-ended instruction, 93–95 open forms: arrival of, 51–52; closed forms versus, 48; music-teacher quality and, 47–56. See also specific topics openings: of closed forms, 135–140; and learning a trade, 129–132; longing for, 88–93; and loss and repair, 129–132, 135–140; and reclaiming music education, 128–141; and standardization, 110–115; and straying afield, 106–120; and third meaning, 116, 119–120, 121–128; and translation, 116–120; from work to text, 122– 125, 132–135 oppression, 11

orchestra, conductorless, 26, 135, 136–137, 139–140 The Origin of Species (Darwin), 35 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, 26, 135, 136–137, 139–140 Palma, Don, 137 paradox of living traditions, 81–85 participatory approach, 100 past versus present, 42–46, 64–65, 72–73 pedagogy of earned induction, 30–33 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 11, 84 perception, 128 performance excellence, 39 performer, role of, 53–54 Perlman, Itzhak, 62, 63 play, 88 “The Poetics of the Open Work” (Eco), 21 Pogonowski, Lee, 89 “The Possibility of Public Education in an Instrumentalist Age” (Higgins), 38 postmodernity, 49 Poy, Nardo, 137 praxialism, 22–23, 31–32 presentational approach, 100 present versus past, 42–46, 64–65, 72–73 principles, 108 progressive education, 86 public education’s purpose, 36–39; education’s antimony, 39–42; music-teacher quality and expertise, 46–47; past and present, 42–46 public space, 132 quality, music-teacher. See music-teacher quality and expertise queering music education, 121–122 reflective thinking, 101 reordering, decentered, 49, 51 resources that fund student learning, 93–94, 96–97 risk, 98–101, 124–125 Rose, Mike, 128, 129 routine expertise, 56–58; and case for diversity, 61–64; and induction in university musicteacher education, 59–60; and past and present, 64–65; shokunin, 13–14, 17, 19, 20 Sahlberg, Pasi, 50 Said, Edward, 12–13 Sanneh, Kelefa, 3, 4, 5 Schmidt, Patrick, 29

Index The School and Society (Dewey), 93–94 schooling versus education, 148n2 schools: charter, 2, 6; ideal, 66, 69–70, 85–86 science, 75 self-actualization, 125–127 seminar, 72, 77, 88, 89–90, 99. See also laboratory learning Shakespeare, William, 33, 43, 63, 64 Shieh, Eric, 112–113 shokunin (routine expert), 13–14, 17, 19, 20 signification, 117–118 Silverman, Marissa, 82–83, 100, 148n97, 156n78, 156nn82–83 skill, 59 Small, Christopher, 22, 23, 25, 52, 53, 133 Snoop Dogg, 1 Sontag, Susan, 123 specialization, narrow. See routine expertise speech, 118 standardization, 50, 110–115 steamboating, 129–130, 131–132 Stravinsky, Igor, 53–54 straying afield, 106–110; and crisis of standardization, 110–115; and translation, 116–120 structure: institutional, 72, 80; as term, 91–92 Stuhr, John, 148n2 subject matter in laboratory learning, 95–98 submission, 54 sushi, 13–14, 145n36 Sweden, 59–60, 151n49 symphony halls, 53 talent, 14–15 Tanglewood Symposium, 77–78 teaching: disappointment of, 89–90; successful versus quality, 60

|

181

text: Barthes on, 64, 71, 93, 103, 123; from work to, 122–125, 132–135. See also open forms thinking, 91, 101 third meaning, 116, 119–120, 121–122; and strange beauties, 125–128; from work to text, 122– 125 Thoreau, Henry David, xii, 107 Tolstoy, Leo, 87 trade, learning a, 129–132 traditional classroom, 19–20 traditionalism, 82, 84 traditions: museums as living, 77–81; paradox of living, 81–85; present versus, 42–46, 64–65, 72–73 translation, 116–120 Turino, Thomas, 100 Twain, Mark, 129–130, 131–132 University of Texas, 63 values, 37, 110 veil as epistemological symbol, 43 virtuoso archetype, 39 Webster, Peter, 104 Westerlund, Heidi, 24, 77–78, 80 Whitehead, Alfred North, 44 women as influences, 104, 157n98 “The Wonder of Mystery, the Rejection of Commodification” (Greene), 132 Woodford, Paul, 110 Wordsworth, William, 129, 131 work, moving to text from, 122–125, 132–135 Yeats, William Butler, 121 Yob, Iris, 116

This page intentionally left blank

RANDALL EVERETT ALLSUP is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He holds degrees in music performance and music education from Northwestern University and Teachers College, Columbia University, and teaches courses in creativity and problem solving, democracy and music education, philosophies of music and music education, and doctoral research in music education. Allsup has taught at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, Taiwan; the Arts College of Xiamen University in Xiamen, China; and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. He is the recipient of a Fulbright research and teaching award and the Teachers College Outstanding Teacher award. He is past chair of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) and the Philosophy Special Research Interest Group (SRIG) of the Music Education Research Council.