Critical Theory and the Institutional Dilemmas of Music Education

Faith, Hope, and Music Education

The National Association of Music Merchants envisions “a world in which the joy of making music is a precious element of daily living for everyone; a world in which every child has a deep desire to learn music and a recognized right to be taught; and in which every adult is a passionate champion and defender of the right.” This faith in music education persists despite neoliberal curricular trends like STEM, which push aside the arts and humanities to prioritize global economic competitiveness over vivir bien — living well “in harmony with nature and one another.” Institutions with professional or commercial stakes in music teaching and learning rally together to safeguard school music, promoting a long list of claimed benefits: improved academic achievement, higher math scores, better memory, engagement, creativity, coordination, fine motor skills, problem solving, critical thinking, communication, perseverance, self-confidence, self-discipline, and cooperation. Beyond mere advocacy, music educators, teacher educators, researchers, and policy makers work relentlessly to build strong programs, train future teachers, identify best practices, and lobby governments for funding and curricular recognition.

Pointing out problems with music education and recommending alternatives might seem counter-productive. Yet criticism, as any good ensemble director knows, is essential for improvement. Critical theory is needed today more than ever to understand music education’s ongoing legitimacy crisis and to identify ethically sound, socially just, and environmentally sustainable actions. There is nothing wrong with promoting music education’s benefits, but this approach can feel self-serving, especially when coming from the music industry. All those benefits can be gained through other means — nothing improves math achievement like quality math instruction. Even “intrinsic” benefits such as aesthetic experience or “flow” are available elsewhere. Music can certainly contribute to these goods, but the continued decline of music education in many “developed” countries suggests we need deeper support.

For over twenty-five years, MayDay Group members have studied why music education is being marginalized. People value diverse musical practices, so why is it so hard to justify music in schools? One compelling explanation is the growing gap between school music and everyday musicking. The standard recommendation calls for aligning formal music education with the musical interests and needs of communities. While many outdated practices persist, teachers worldwide are finding success through increased focus on popular music. Another emerging explanation relates to social justice: centering elite European classical traditions can exclude many groups. As societies diversify, a one-size-fits-all approach becomes less viable. A third explanation involves neoliberalism’s expanding reach in schooling, which privileges subjects that appear directly applicable to global marketplace competitiveness.

Substantial obstacles complicate the effort to realize the NAMM vision. Critical theory can help advance such goals. Although many music educators recognize the value of this critique, some dismiss it as “doomsday prognostications,” “irresponsible,” or “absurdist yet eloquent dicta.” Critical theorists need to consider these criticisms and shape arguments for maximum positive impact. Overstatement and impracticality can actually strengthen institutional entrenchment. But conscientious readers will find careful, balanced, practical analyses in critical music education articles. They will encounter a message conveying strong belief in music’s power in people’s lives and a hopeful outlook. “For all their differences and disagreements, critical theorists presumably have at least one thing in common: hope for a better world.”

At their June 2017 meeting in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the MayDay Group discussed Action Ideal IV regarding the systematic critical examination of institutions. In sociology, “institutions” can refer to meta-organizations like governments, systems of organizations guided by common aims, or social structures involving differentiated actions performed repeatedly by multiple agents in compliance with shared conventions and norms. Music education can be studied as one large institution made of smaller ones, as an institution impacted by other institutions, as part of larger meta-organizations, or as a component of an organizational system like neoliberalism.

Tom Regelski emphasizes the importance of institutional critique:

“Institutions are typically obsessed with perpetuating their defining ideologies and resulting activities, or — often at the same time — are focused on steadfast opposition to competing institutions and their agendas. This social fact should provoke critical reflection, because ideology determines and guides the functions the institution comes into being to serve, and not always with due attention to actual consequences. Thus, consequences brought about by institutions may be negative in ways that are (a) self-defeating, that (b) play into the hands of competing institutions, and that (c) progressively lead to institutional irrelevance.”

Institutions organize society and facilitate human action, but can become ossified and focused on self-preservation rather than adapting to changing social realities. This disconnection from human needs creates opportunities for change. Five particularly problematic institutions in music education include classical music, university schools of music, professional associations, the music industry, and neoliberalism. Each also presents openings for hopeful transformation.

Classical music represents a cultural expression of elite European imperialism and colonization. As a global institution, it positions itself as elite and dominant culture nearly everywhere it exists. Jere Humphreys calls it “a product of the sharply hierarchical Western European monarchies. This music is hierarchical in formal, tonal, and melodic structure, and it came to be construed on the ideal of non-contextual contemplation — in other words, as elitist and idealist.” Associated with whiteness and wealth, classical music is offered to the masses as “high culture,” a foil that establishes the cultural superiority of its adherents. Imposing classical music on others through school programs has been identified as racist, classist, and sexist.

Music educators have worked to address these issues. Yet classical music changes slowly in becoming more inclusive. Instances of sexism remain easy to find, and preferences for classical music are not increasing among people of color in the US. Hope lies in growing interest in popular music education.

Professional conferences now focus specifically on popular music education. NAfME added a popular music special research interest group in 2017, and the Journal of Popular Music Education launched that same year. Interest in multicultural music education continues, despite warranted critiques. Centering elite European classical music is becoming increasingly untenable. Race and gender arguments carry weight in today’s political climate, and as economic inequality grows, arguments about classism in classical music may gain traction. These arguments can be directed at administrators and policy makers, particularly as justifications for adding popular music or diverse programs for underserved populations rather than as attacks on classical music itself.

University schools of music serve as the primary institutional vehicle for classical music’s hegemony. John Kratus has shown how these departments have remained consistent in content and pedagogy for over a century. He questions why the training of twenty-first-century music educators remains nearly identical to that of nineteenth-century orchestral performers. Brian Roberts describes how music schools socialize teachers as classical musicians first, a reality perpetuated by faculty needs to fill ensembles and studios. As Roberts notes:

“In the end, the primary operational reality of the music school becomes the reproduction of a cultural reality in which the social investment as a classical performer by the members of faculty is protected, supported, and enhanced. This turns out to be the main delimiting factor in what kind of music is valued, and taught to be valued; and it is subsequently the defining basis for the incompatibilities between credentials and need concerning the "musician" identity on the part of school music teachers.”

Tom Regelski quotes a university chancellor who joked, “It’s easier to move a cemetery than to change a Music Faculty.”

Despite this conservatism, incremental shifts are emerging in university schools of music, documented in a recent collection edited by Robin Moore. University professors often consider themselves progressive and responsive to social justice research. A faster path to change may come through a rupture created by neoliberal education policies. In Utah, anyone with a bachelor’s degree can be hired to teach in public schools and has three years to qualify for a teaching license. Someone not fully socialized in classical music could qualify by passing a music content exam. Bradley describes an innovative BA program at Arizona State University allowing students to develop individualized tracks with “alternative instruments or in non-canonical genres.” Similarly, Weber State University provides online teacher licensure for graduates of Snow College’s commercial music program, where students take more music technology and popular music courses than typical music education majors.

Professional music education associations — NAfME, the American School Band Directors Association, the American String Teachers Association, the American Choral Directors Association — provide forums for professional interaction. They promote special interests, build partnerships, set standards, and lobby for support. Social development as music teachers often begins early. Mark Fonder recounts a teenage honor band experience where he resolved, “I want to be that guy; I want to do what he does.”

These associations preserve and perpetuate strong identities, often in positive ways. Problems arise when service-oriented organizations prioritize self-preservation over serving the needs of their constituents. The association between critical freedom and instrumental music education reveals how easily institutional rigidity overtakes responsiveness.

Yet institutions can also drive transformation during moments of institutional crisis. Greenwood, Suddaby, and Hinings (2002) argue that professional associations serve as significant regulatory agents. In contrast to prevailing institutional accounts that emphasize the essentially conservative role of associations in reinforcing existing behavioral prescriptions, our analysis examines their function during periods of deinstitutionalization and change. We propose that at such moments, associations can legitimize change by hosting discourse through which transformation is debated and endorsed: first by negotiating and managing debate within the profession; second, by reframing professional identities when presenting them to outsiders. This discourse enables the reconstitution of professional identities (58–59).

Music education in the United States demonstrates this dialectic between institutional preservation and change. I have talked with numerous high school and middle school band directors who resist adding guitar classes because they fear losing students from band programs; student musical interests and potential for lifelong musicking often seem secondary to directors’ desires to conduct ensembles. Despite such resistance, efforts by music educators like Will Schmid (recently deceased) through NAfME have helped spread guitar programs across North America. Though the approach too often leans classical rather than popular, professional associations clearly can serve as catalysts for change. This is not to underestimate institutional entrenchment. Culturally, large classical ensembles—especially concert bands—remain an indelible part of another institution: the modern suburban North American school, which will likely persist for many years.

I see another reason for hope regarding change within professional associations: the growing number of critical social theorists serving in prominent roles—including many current MayDay Group members—chairing research interest groups, serving on editorial and governing boards, and publishing articles across diverse outlets. Others have left professional associations in protest against socially unjust policies and practices. This choice is understandable; solid arguments exist for either staying or leaving, and the critical work of non-members can still exert strong influence. Yet those choosing to remain are making a difference as they initiate and participate in deliberations about the profession’s direction.

The Music Industry

The music industry can be understood as a system of competitive institutions that, like any businesses or corporations, prioritize the bottom line. Despite the altruistic tone of the NAMM quotation opening this editorial, profit motives undoubtedly drive visions of daily musicking, increased desires to learn music, and universal school music programs. Successful school music programs require money—often substantial sums—for cellos, tubas, risers, sound shells, uniforms, sheet music, travel, and more. The music industry clearly benefits from promoting music education, especially when it involves items yielding the highest profit margins—perhaps pianos and timpani more than guitars and djembes. Digital technologies can be particularly lucrative. Actual human needs and environmental sustainability remain secondary considerations at best (Shevock 2017; Shevock and Bates forthcoming). For these and other reasons, partnerships between professional associations and corporate interests have drawn criticism. Julia Koza (2006) writes: “Not only does the centrality of consumption in corporate agendas help shape the alchemic product called school music but it may also help explain the ignoring or discounting of sustainable alternatives” (34).

Nonetheless, returning to the NAMM vision, considerable congruence appears between industry and professional aims. Moreover, given the reach of neoliberalism—which I will discuss in the next section—both institutions—the industry and the profession—support the underlying aims and trajectory of late capitalism. One promising sign: the music industry seems responsive to social and cultural change. Over 25 years of teaching music, I have watched the music stores I frequent evolve from showrooms filled with pianos, organs, and band and orchestra instruments to displays of guitars, drum sets, and electronic equipment—though band and orchestra instruments still occupy side spaces. The portion of the music industry serving school music programs appears to follow trends in those programs rather than dictate them.

Neoliberalism

Finally, neoliberalism may be the largest institution blocking fully inclusive, joyful, and enduring practices in music teaching and learning. Differing significantly from classical liberal interests in small governments and free markets, neoliberalism has developed over a century as an “encasement” of capital within strong national governments and international structures designed to maximize corporate profits and protect global finance from popular resistance (Slobodian 2018). Beyond serving as a basic financial structure, wherever neoliberalism prevails, the capitalist logic of competition, domination, and efficiency permeates every aspect of social, cultural, and political life. In Wendy Brown’s words, “neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to the specific image of the economic” (2015, Kindle loc. 61).

Nancy Fraser (2017a) elaborates on neoliberalism’s totalizing effects: “What all the talk about capitalism indicates, symptomatically, is a growing intuition that the heterogeneous ills that surround us—financial, economic, ecological, political, and social—can be traced to a common root, and that reforms that fail to engage with the deep structural underpinnings of these ills are doomed to fail” (141). Schools and other social institutions—families, churches—play crucial roles in reproducing human capital, helping young people acquire appropriate skills and discipline to labor compliantly and competitively in the global economy (Bhattacharya 2017; Fraser 2017b). Dennis Attick (2017) explains: “Teachers today are held responsible for developing in students the skills that the neoliberal economic system requires for its ongoing survival” (42). Moreover, “the central neoliberal tenets of rational individualism and competition” mean that “teaching becomes primarily a series of economic transactions between competitive individuals in a highly administered and audited environment” (42).

In contemporary music education, quantities and qualities associated with musicking stand in for financial currency as the bottom line. Jere Humphreys (2013) articulates a commonly held assessment of North American school music: “Like most aspects of society, music education has improved over time. Hard data are scarce, but we can hear huge improvements in the performance levels of school and university ensembles during the spans of our lifetimes, and from recordings before that. The performance levels of some of the renowned early college and university bands and choirs were far below those of the top groups of today. Recently, I heard someone speculate that the best university bands today probably play better than the Sousa Band in its heyday. The performance repertoire has also expanded dramatically in quality, scope, and diversity” (55, emphasis added). As I have noted previously (Bates 2013), within music education programs in capitalist societies, large ensemble performance often functions as the bottom line for measuring school music program success. This may help explain why so many music educators strongly embrace large ensemble programs in schools. These competitive groups reflect taken-for-granted neoliberal capitalist rationalities: even without awards or formal rankings, public and comparative evaluations serve as currencies that can be earned and accumulated (see Abramo 2017), alongside quantitative elements such as participant numbers and repertoire difficulty. Students are disciplined to defer their own musical needs and interests to the ethos of musical achievement—the ensemble’s, the school’s, and their own—even though very few will participate in similar ensembles or make music in the same ways outside school or after graduation. Music ensemble educators can sometimes cite self-discipline itself—essentially social reproduction—as ample justification for student participation. Many more manifestations of neoliberal rationality in music education exist (see, for example, Stephanie Horsley’s 2014 insightful analysis), but this serves as a primary illustration.

For the most part, neoliberalism works against school music by denigrating its contribution to global economic competition. This pattern is typical of sites for social reproduction: they tend to be overlooked because money does not serve as their bottom line—their contributions to capitalism, though essential, remain more informal and peripheral. Tithi Bhattacharya (2017) explains how capitalism “acknowledges productive labor for the market as the sole form of legitimate ‘work,’ while the tremendous amount of familial as well as communitarian work that goes on to sustain and reproduce the worker, or more specifically her labor power, is naturalized into nonexistence” (2). Music education’s standard response to this neoliberal marginalization is to argue for our place in the global economy—likely why NAMM relies on the list given in my opening paragraph. From my perspective, this advocacy approach is a reasonable reaction; I will not denigrate it. This is the world we inhabit, and we must do whatever we can to preserve and promote our chosen profession. However, I wish to outline two hopeful possibilities for change: the first perhaps moving with the current of neoliberalism, the second pushing against it.

First, a general consensus among critical theorists holds that neoliberal capitalism is in crisis (Fraser 2017a; Giroux 2018; Streeck 2016). Growing inequality, declining wages, and environmental degradation negatively affect billions of lives—especially the most vulnerable—prompting popular challenges to the status quo. One genuine threat to stable employment is automation: many factory workers have already been replaced by robots. Many white-collar vocations may similarly disappear soon (Illing 2018; Pistrui 2018; Streeck 2016). The remaining jobs, along with new occupations, will depend more heavily on uniquely human capacities like creativity and imagination (Pistrui 2018). As music educators, we have a strong case to make for our future within neoliberalism (or whatever system follows)—a case currently being argued effectively in many contexts by STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, math) advocates (see Allina 2018). Of course, this reasoning must be backed by music pedagogies explicitly aimed at developing creativity rather than compliance.

Second, social reproduction has always offered opportunities for resistance (Fraser 2017b). Families, for instance, may tend to adopt and reinforce dominant rationalities, but they do not have to. In many nations, parents still retain considerable flexibility in raising their children; they are not required to reinforce neoliberalism. Even if they do not, schools likely will, but schools do not necessarily have to either. Teachers sometimes possess enough freedom to center rationalities or ideologies other than neoliberalism. Moreover, due to their marginalization within school and curriculum, music teachers may have even more space for resistance than most other teachers. Along with other arts and humanities, music teachers can help students develop critical thinking skills and dispositions to counter neoliberalism. In this regard, we have a solid, growing curricular foundation: critical pedagogy for music education, advocated over a decade ago by Frank Abrahams (2005), “acknowledges that teaching and learning music is socially and politically constructed. It advocates a shift in power relationships within the music classroom [and] engages children in critical thinking through problem posing, problem solving, [and] critical action…” (14).

Critical pedagogy remains a central theme in considerable music education research, particularly the work published in ACT. Again, this is a labor of hope, finding possibilities for transformation within inevitable ruptures in institutional oppression and exploitation. This principle of hope appears in Paulo Freire’s 1994 discussion of institutional realities in Brazil: “The fact is that the ‘democratization’ of the shamelessness and corruption that is gaining the upper hand in our country, contempt for the common good, and crimes that go unpunished, have only broadened and deepened as the nation has begun to rise up in protest. Even young adults and teenagers crowd into the streets, criticizing, calling for honesty and candor. The people cry out against all the crass evidence of public corruption. The public squares are filled once more. There is a hope, however timid, on the street corners, a hope in each and every one of us” (Freire 2014, 1–2).

This Issue

All four articles in this issue address aspects of music education and related institutions; the first three derive from presentations at the aforementioned Gettysburg colloquium, and the fourth is a regular submission.

Juliet Hess leads with an insightful, well-researched examination of activist music education’s revolutionary potential. Her analysis draws on a theoretical framework by Deleuze and Guattari, wherein the State—“any regulated institution that functions through and imposes a particular set of rules embodied by institutions such as governments, hospitals, courts, and schools”—is opposed by the War Machine—“a nomadic body in the radical exterior outside of State control. Aiming to challenge the State apparatus, it is oppositional, but is free to engage creatively, drawing upon any tactics and strategies at any time.” Even though the State generally operates under strict regulations in “striated space,” one of its strategies is appropriating key approaches emerging from the more open or “smooth space” of the War Machine. Also drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Hess describes schools’ role in social reproduction: “In operating as a site of social reproduction, school functions to conserve the status quo through reproducing classed and raced systems, and striate any unregulated space.” Given this context, can activist approaches to music education be “truly revolutionary”? Hess explores this question deeply using three fictional vignettes and the experiences of twenty activist-musicians.

Through an institutional ethnography process, Danielle Sirek and Terry Sefton examine their professional experiences as, respectively, adjunct and tenured university music education faculty. Specifically, they consider “how systems exert control over actors”; “constraint of action—ways in which those with less power feel constrained in how they respond to directives from administration”; and “convergence—pressures exerted on faculty resulting in less risk-taking and more conformity…” They discuss the nexus of institutions controlling, constraining, and otherwise regulating their work, including universities, other government entities, and cultural or social practices. Through their experiential analysis, all these forces converge to prescribe and standardize outcomes and ensure conformity, with impacts extending beyond faculty to student attitudes: “they come to our classes expecting a course outline that has detail on assignments and assessment, and explicit success criteria. Most want no surprises and no ambiguity.” While tenured faculty tend to feel some power in resisting institutional control, adjunct faculty—given their precarious employment—are more likely to comply.

Next, Deborah Bradley compares and contrasts nationalistic and metaphorical concepts of citizenship in her analysis of artistic citizenship, demonstrating how such conceptualizations applied in music education can harm people with tenuous citizenship status. She questions why citizenship is such an appealing term and whether it is possible to “describe and demonstrate those values of artistic citizenship deemed important for education without invoking the inherent normativity and exclusion within the terminology of citizen and citizenship?” Amid global social and ecological turmoil, citizenship grows increasingly diverse and contested, with growing numbers of “non-citizens, refugees, the dispossessed, the disappeared, the incarcerated, migrants, [and] immigrants” not accorded the same rights, protections, and privileges as others. Citizenship can thus connote privilege, especially given the surge in nationalist movements and political unrest worldwide. Bradley acknowledges arts and arts education’s social responsibility in promoting socially just and sustainable societies, but wonders if better terminologies or conceptualizations exist; “educators need to practice artivism responsibly, with care and intent, in order to avoid the potentially negative implications concepts such as artistic citizenship might invoke.”

Finally, Kim Boeskov critiques the widely held belief in the socially and personally transformative function of the arts—particularly music—and questions the veracity of music practices “celebrated for their alleged success in bringing about positive social change through active music making.” While helpful in revealing music’s social dimensions, Boeskov considers the social theories of Christopher Small and Tia DeNora inadequate for capturing musicking’s full complexity, portraying musical experience too positively. He argues that “a more primary function of the musical performance is to conceal the arbitrary nature of these experienced social relationships and thereby naturalize and implicitly legitimate the existing social order.” He draws on Georgina Born for a more “adequate theory of music’s social mediation” and applies this “expanded view” to analyze a Palestinian music education program as an illustration for “the necessity of maintaining a critical perspective on musical practice.”

Failing to connect immediate social relations formed in musical performance with wider social and institutional structures risks overstating music’s transgressive and transformative potential while obscuring its normalizing or constraining dimensions. The result is not only inadequate analyses of music as a vehicle for social change; more disturbingly, such analyses also help conceal and naturalize the power relations that sustain the status quo.

With this issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, I end my five-year editorship. I am entrusting the journal to the capable joint stewardship of Deb Bradley and Scott Goble, while I stay on as managing editor. The arrangement of two editors and one managing editor simply distributes the workload so it does not burden a single person, allowing us to sustain the journal’s continuity and quality.

I want to thank everyone who has supported and worked with ACT during my time as editor. Brent Talbot, Associate Editor, served diligently and performed outstanding work on numerous issues. We also have a devoted production team—Anita Prest, Dan Shevock, Emmett O’Leary, and Naomi Leadbeater—always ready to copy edit and format ACT for publication, often at inconvenient moments. Editorial board members, both those newly appointed and those who have stepped down over the past four years, along with external reviewers, have provided thoughtful, thorough, and constructive evaluations. Above all, the many authors who have shared their insightful work with ACT and shown patience during review and revision processes deserve recognition. Thanks to everyone’s efforts, we have published an unprecedented number of articles. I first volunteered with ACT over a decade ago under editor Wayne Bowman, who has remained a thoughtful and honest advisor. Later I served as associate editor when David Elliott edited the journal; I appreciate his perpetual graciousness and encouragement. I am also grateful for Deb Bradley’s kind support and reliable insight during her recent service as editor-in-chief for MDG Publications. Finally, everyone in the MayDay Group and across music education owes a deep debt to the vision and labor of Tom Regelski, founding editor of ACT and co-founder of the MayDay Group. The journal’s continued existence stands as a lasting tribute to him.

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