How Can We Change Our Habits If We Don’t Talk About Them?

For the late nineteenth century pragmatists, habits were of great interest. Habits, and the habit of changing habits, they believed, reflected if not defined human rationality, leadingWilliam James to describe habit as “the enormous fly-wheel of society.” What the pragmatists did not adequately address (at least for us) is the role of power relations in the process of changing habits. In this article we discuss our experience of attempting to engage critique and reflection on habitual practices in music teacher education, offering the reader an article within an article. That is, we reflect on our failure to publish a critical article in a widely read practitioner journal by sharing the original manuscript and its reviews, with the hope that our experience might shed additional light on social reproduction and efforts aimed at change

Framing Ethno-World: Intercultural Music Exchange, Tradition, and Globalization

This white paper report is intended to serve as a conceptual framework to advance the research agenda for a comprehensive study of the Ethno program overseen by Jeunesses Musicales International (JMI). The white paper has been generated on the basis of a literature review and critical analysis

A re-conceptualization of jazz curriculum and instructional practices in Manitoba secondary schools

This study explores ways in which jazz education practices in Manitoba secondary schools might be redesigned to better reflect those aspects of jazz that should make it a valued part of music education and public schooling. Procedures include a selective examination of the nature and value of jazz, an examination of the value of jazz education to music education and public schooling, and an email interview with selected Canadian expert adjudicators. Jazz was found to be a musical practice that holds tremendous potential for music education and public schooling due the adaptable kind of musicianship it engenders, and its potential for outcomes that are educational in nature. Current practices, based on the observations of selected Canadian experts, often fail to reflect those aspects of jazz that should make it a valued and valuable part of music education and public schooling. An alternative, praxially-based model curriculum is offered based on the findings

Schooling the future: Perceptions of Selected Experts on Jazz Education

Aspects of both the functionalist and interactionist schools in sociology consider formal education as a form of social reproduction. Despite the large number of students that participate in school jazz programs at the secondary level, very little research examines jazz education practices at this level. This paper is a re-interpretation of data collected for the author’s Master’s thesis that examines jazz education practices at the secondary level. Interviews of selected experts revealed that improvisation is considered fundamental to jazz curricula, and yet it is largely neglected in the performing practices of school jazz ensembles. The kinds of jazz education practices that exist in schools would seem to raise several important questions. With what kind of community of practice are students engaging? What kinds of meanings are students able to construct and negotiate, given the practice of performing commercial, Big Band arrangements? What message is communicated when improvisation is largely or completely neglected in school instruction, in favour of ‘polishing’ the sound of the orchestrated passages? School jazz education practices are examined through the theoretical lens of Lave and Wenger’s ‘situated learning,’ with implications presented for culture and society

Stylizing Lives: Selected Discourses in Instrumental Music Education

As a social practice, being part of the school band stylizes our lives—individually and collectively. The pedagogical band world, a world made up primarily of school and university wind bands, is in many ways similar to the world of community/civic bands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on an examination of professional discourses, however, I argue that processes of institutionalization have altered the nature of music making via band participation. The pedagogical band world, like other bounded worlds, operates according to what Michel Foucault calls “regimes of truth”—the regulative norms that delimit what can be said and done. The specific ways in which the subject is fashioned, in other words, are a function of the truths we endorse about ourselves and, in the present case, about music making. Studying the discourses in the disciplinary practice of large ensemble (band) music making is of paramount importance for music educators to better understand the effects of disciplinary practices. Employing a conceptual framework based on the work of Michel Foucault, the following question guided this inquiry: “What ‘regimes of truth’ are fashioned in school music (bands) discourse, how did they come to be, and what are their potential effects on the subject?” Methods from the field of corpus linguistics were used to concordance the journal of the Canadian Band Association, 1978-2008. Concordance lists were used to introspectively examine each occurrence (approximately 25,000 in total) of a downsampled set of words related to subject formation in order to generate statements making truth claims. While there is no mistaking that a primary goal in music education discourse is to foster a “love of music,” this investigation suggests the kind of musicality fashioned in today’s pedagogical discourse has become a relationship to music (based on the study of music; music as something to know) rather than the kind of relationship fashioned in band participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I describe as a relationship with music (music as something to do).Ph

Vision and the Legitimate Order: Theorizing Today to Imagine Tomorrow

This chapter focuses on two distinct, but related, issues: (1) the structural forces that help to determine who gets to be a music teacher and who does not and (2) the ways in which institutional professionalization and bureaucratization may be working to disenfranchise certain groups of people. The problem we perceive is the ability of music teacher educators to respond to social change as part of a commitment to social equity within the constraints of what Max Weber called vorstellung, the belief in a legitimate order

Paideia con Salsa: Charles Keil, Groovology, and the Undergraduate Music Curriculum

Despite being a professor in American Studies at SUNY-Buffalo for most of his academic life, Charles (Charlie) Keil’s (b. 1939) career was dominated by an interest in music and music education. His scholarly contributions took many forms, such as ethnographic fieldwork that resulted in wide-ranging books (Urban Blues, Tiv Song: The Sociology of Art in a Classless Society, Polka Happiness, My Music, Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia, Music Grooves), many essays and papers on music and music education, and efforts in promoting music education in the Buffalo area through his organization, M.U.S.E. (Musicians United for Superior Education). As an amateur musician with advanced training in American Studies (studying with, among others, David Schneider, Clifford Geertz, and Alan Merriam), Keil brought a keen eye, ear, and mind, along with his rigorous academic training, to the study of how people engaged with music, how they learned music, and the value music holds in the lives of people and their communities. As an example, the first chapter of Tiv Song reminds us that Keil is one of those rare individuals able to summon enormous intellectual resources—from classical Greek philosophy to linguistics, anthropology, ecology, economics, and everything in between—to bear on the problem of music and culture

The ethics of being an editor–researcher

Although only a few months old at press time, ChatGPT has already established itself as one of the biggest disruptors of historical conceptions of authorship, reality and trust. The research community will no doubt face increasing challenges as it attempts to deal with peer review, conflicts-of-interest and publishing ethics. Readers may know that the International Journal of Community Music is a Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) member. COPE establishes ethical guidelines for the academic publishing. No doubt these will evolve in the face of emerging artificial intelligence technology. The existing guidelines are helpful but still leave many issues unaddressed, such as what researchers should do when it comes to publishing in a journal they edit. In addition to Kathleen Turner’s autoethnographic reflective essay about the challenges arising from the COVID-19 crisis on a university-based community music training programme and Anna McMichael’s study of composer/musicians involved with the annual classical Tyalgum Music Festival in regional Australia, Issue 16:1 features three articles authored or co-authored by the journal’s editors, who devised an in-house system to ensure the integrity of the double-blind peer review system. The issue concludes with a dedication to Janice Waldron (1957–2022), who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in November 2022

The Complexities of Intercultural Music Exchange : Ethno World as Cultural Change Agent

This report addresses 5 key research questions raised by the Ethno Research white paper, Framing Ethno World: Intercultural Music Exchange, Tradition, and Globalization (Mantie and Risk, 2020). How do organizers and artistic mentors describe their participation in the shaping of culture through music at local, regional, and global levels? How do organizers and artistic mentors introduce and/or facilitate discussions of cultural issues? To what extent do they feel obligated / responsible to do so? To what extent do they report doing so (and how)? How do Ethno participants and Ethno World documents describe the impacts Ethno World has on surrounding communities? In what ways and to what extent are Ethno participants actively engaged in traditional music? What additional insights can be gleaned about Ethno participants through large-scale data mining and fine-grained discourse analyses of Ethnopia and other social media related to Ethno