Another Perspective
Our “Both/And” Moment
by Randall Everett Allsup
A
s 2015 comes to an end, let’s take
stock of where we are. Here’s
what I see:
We seem to have survived the Great
Recession of 2008—limping a bit but on
our way to recovery. Schools are hiring
music teachers again, and our gradu-
ates are entertaining more options. The
accountability juggernaut, so powerful
just a few years ago, is showing signs
of strain as parents, teachers, politi-
cians, and administrators exhibit star-
tling symptoms of assessment fatigue.
Stakeholders want more art and music
in their schools, not less. The values
of informal learning are blurring nicely
with the principles of schooling, remind-
ing us all over again that teachers and
teaching still matter. And then, a funny
thing happened on the way to band’s
demise. It hasn’t occurred. School and
university bands, choirs, and orchestras
are, arguably, as strong as they’ve ever
been. Young people continue to find
immense satisfaction by playing and
singing with others. Popular music? It
has not overturned our profession, only
made it more interesting.
Looking around, it is fair to say that
our course offerings have never been so
diverse, and our capacity to teach within
diverse settings has never been so broad
or so deep. Of course, problems remain,
foremost an inequitable distribution of
resources, particularly when it comes to
the public funding of music in Ameri-
can public schools. So here I am, maybe
like you, caught between my impatience
for greater change and the satisfaction
of seeing continued good work being
done by my peers. Leadership, I think,
Randall Everett Allsup is an associate professor of music and music education at Teachers College Columbia
University in New York City; he can be contacted at allsup@tc.edu.
www.nafme.org
is about more than pointing out what
is wrong or sharing irrational fears.
While the pace of change may not sat-
isfy some and while others may bemoan
the erosion of traditions they consider
invariable, school and university music
education is more creative and more
open than ever before, and more teach-
ers are entering the profession with a
larger range of skills and the disposition
to teach more imaginatively. Yes, our
state of affairs is confusing and contra-
dictory, but we can refuse to adopt a
reactionary position. This is our pro-
fession’s both/and moment, a time of
immense possibility.1
What would it mean to embrace this
particular moment in time and to refuse
to resolve the tensions of difference
and togetherness? What would it mean
to live and teach creatively within these
tensions, resisting fixes and easy end-
ings? It would require us to teach more
openly, I think. But it would also require
a dispositional change.
What if we made a conceptual
reboot, like pressing the refresh button
on our Internet browsers, and pause to
look differently at our work as music
teachers? Rather than loss, we might see
new forms of richness. I see band direc-
tors who embrace technology as a way
to create more discussion and student
ownership. I see a new set of music
standards that embrace the diversity of
large ensembles and small, traditional
musics and new. At my college, like
many others, music education majors
come increasingly equipped with multi-
ple skills and a desire to create positive
change. Maybe our worries about genres
and genre conventions aren’t equal to
larger concerns and opportunities. Let’s
celebrate the fact that students are inter-
ested in both rock bands and the wind
ensemble. Let’s profit from our moment
in time not by seeking resolutions to
perceived problems but by learning to
live with—nay, flourish within—the per-
ils and beauty of pluralism.
I have a favorite quote from my for-
mer mentor, Maxine Greene, who passed
away last year. The quote has something
to do with being open to those condi-
tions in life that impinge upon us, define
us, and nurture us. It’s about an expan-
sive sense of life and art. “To attend to
music today,” she wrote, “is to find our-
selves 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 won-
der how many remain unheard.”2 By my
reckoning, Greene was in her seventh
decade at the time this quote was made.
Like Greene, I want to keep looking,
hearing, exploring. This must be what
education is about. And like Greene, I
believe that teachers are at their best
when they are on the edge of knowing
and unknowing, learning and unlearn-
ing. This is a philosophical proposition,
a question of disposition as much as
knowledge or expertise.
I think we spend our time unwisely
when we worry too much about exper-
tise. This may sound heretical. There
are music teacher educators, after all,
who say that you should never teach
a historic style in which you are not
Copyright © 2015 National Association
for Music Education
DOI: 10.1177/0027432115613327
http://mej.sagepub.com
85
highly skilled. Maybe this made sense
a generation or two ago. But as we
become more and more aware of new
frequencies, new modalities of life and
art, it hardly seems possible that a music
teacher can be an expert in everything
that her students, and their parents and
administrators, want her to teach. As a
consequence, too many music teach-
ers spend their energy trying to protect
the things they love and the things they
do well from change. Unless we turn
schools into museums, this effort will
remain imbalanced.
Let me give you two examples. Why
is “comprehensive musicianship” so
hard to implement and sustain? Not
because of its ideals. The notion that
music should be studied holistically—via
theory, history, aural skills, composition,
improvisation, and historically governed
performance practice—makes increas-
ing sense with every passing moment.
Perhaps comprehensive musicianship
never gained a permanent foothold in
schools because too few teachers felt
equal to the expertise it was perceived
to require. Or because universities still
keep music, in all its various modalities,
bound by category (and thus hardening
our concept of what we can and can’t
do). Research has long told us that by
the time we become professional edu-
cators, we have internalized a vision of
the teacher as an all-knowing expert.3
The story goes: To teach comprehen-
sive musicianship well—or any form of
music in all its richness and complex-
ity—we have to know more than our
students. This is true in many cases, but
teachers can’t, and probably shouldn’t,
have the last word on everything.
Second, I would like to claim that a
lack of expertise can drive innovation.
My research is often associated with
popular music.4 So it may seem surpris-
ing to readers that my interest in this
form of music has nothing to do with
any particular preference for the genre
and everything to do with its potential
to influence the lives of young people.
I have always liked popular music, and
I have always liked classical music. The
former, however, is embedded with a
set of social relationships that foster
86
collaboration, creativity, participation,
and equity, so that when it is brought
into schools, popular music expands
and enriches the work we do. Simply
put, I like popular music because the
experience is meaningful to students,
including those both in and outside the
band, choir, and orchestra setting.
The problem, in my early days, was
that I had no hands-on experience as
a rock musician. For many, I suppose,
that meant I had no business “teaching”
popular music. Popular music, I guess,
would have to wait until a generation
of more “qualified” candidates took up
the charge. But my lack of expertise
(understood here as content knowledge
and skill) coupled with a disposition
to teach marginalized youth forced me
to consider and in some cases invent
new methods of teaching in which both
student strengths and teacher strengths
are shared and appreciated. Somehow I
settled on a way of teaching that I now
call democratic, but this effort started as
little more than sheer faith in my stu-
dents to work collaboratively with me
on projects we both enjoyed. Today I
insist that my preservice music educa-
tion majors invent their own methods
based on what they know and can do
well, what they can’t do well but are
curious about, and what their students
like and want.
If we are indeed in a “both/and”
moment where multiple ways of play-
ing and studying music are expanding
around us, then we must continue to
enlarge our pedagogical toolkit. We
must wear many hats: authority, facili-
tator, director, coach—and even, espe-
cially, co-learner. What’s new—what’s
required in the future—will be a rebal-
ancing of the three stances that make up
the professional educator: knowledge,
pedagogy, and disposition. Knowledge
will remain important, but the range of
information that is available to us at any
given moment requires changing how
we conceptualize expertise.5 What we
know will be less important than how
we teach.
If I could wave a magic wand, I
would have all music educators teach
five classes: three or four in their area of
specialization and one or two outside. I
would rely on the curiosity of each indi-
vidual to design his or her own class,
activating one’s unique combination of
knowledge and pedagogy toward the
needs of one’s students. In this way,
each of us should be able to facilitate
a song-writing course, coach a popular
music ensemble, or invent our own ver-
sion of comprehensive musicianship. Of
course, in this vision, the band director
will also direct the band, and we will
continue to teach the topics we love.
But my hunch is that a band director
who teaches songwriting will begin to
teach band differently. A theorist who
coaches a popular music ensemble will
begin to teach theory differently, too.
Categories may blur, but rather than see-
ing loss, we will invent forms of knowl-
edge and new ways of teaching. Music
education will be at one with our times.
And we will listen, and keep listening,
for new frequencies.
Notes
1. Estelle Jorgensen anticipated this
moment in her book, Transforming
Music Education, calling for a dialecti-
cal philosophy of music education, one
that takes as its starting point a “this
with that” approach. Estelle Jorgensen,
Transforming Music Education
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003).
2. Maxine Green, “I Still Wonder at How
Unaware I Was of So Many Frequencies,”
in Variations on a Blue Guitar: The
Lincoln Center Lectures on Aesthetic
Education (New York: Teachers College
Press, 2001), 192.
3. Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A
Sociological Study (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975).
4. Randall E. Allsup, “From Herscher to
Harlem: A Subjective Account,” Music
Educators Journal 83, no. 5 (1997):
33–36; Randall E. Allsup, “Popular
Music and Classical Musicians: Strategies
and Perspectives,” Music Educators
Journal 97, no. 3 (2011): 30–34.
5. Randall E. Allsup, “Music Teacher
Quality and the Problem of Routine
Expertise,” Philosophy of Music
Education Review 23, no. 1 (2015):
5–24.
Music Educators Journal  December 2015