Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:EditorialEstelle R. JorgensenIn this issue, a quartet of writers mine post-modern ideas for music education. This is the first issue of the Philosophy of Music Education Review in which a particular school of philosophical thinking has so pervaded all the essays. Although post-modernism has been around for decades in other circles, it has come relatively late to music education. Our writers in this issue do not set themselves the task of challenging the tenets of post-modern thinking. Rather, they seek to draw on its insights and contributions as frames to criticize the status quo in music education and offer alternative visions of the way things might or should be. Criticism here is construed as a means of illumining a hopeful vision of music education that is profoundly dialogical, fosters dissent, imagines difference, resurrects musical traditions and marginalized people to full participation, and rethinks its manner of thinking, being, and doing in transformative ways.Patrick Schmidt leads off this issue with an analysis of the potentiality of a particular sort of dialogue that involves deliberately "mis-listening" or intentionally hearing in ways that go counter to commonly agreed-upon understandings. This sort of dialogue provides a way of embracing dissent and conflict, and opening new understandings for music teachers and their students. Language (and languages) is at the heart of the problem of how we understand each other. Whether ordinary spoken discourse or music, the ambiguity of meaning-making leads to conflict as much as to agreement, and when pressed away from common beliefs and standardized procedures affords important and different opportunities for music education.In similar vein, June Boyce-Tillman critiques the values implicit in Western classical music in her wide-ranging exploration of the importance of its musical alternatives. Casting her analysis in terms of the "dialogic imagination," she challenges [End Page 1] the power of the dominant culture, re-envisions music, and proffers a way of teaching children the value of difference from mainstream and establishment musical and cultural perspectives. She unpacks a particular example of a performance she developed collaboratively with others in which a variety of music voices participated in their own way and time, demonstrating the potential of breaking down the monoculture to admit the Other.Writing within the specific perspective of homosexuality, Elizabeth Gould deals with the conceptual and practical realities of how some are "disappeared" in music education. Her project may be read literally to refer to the plight of homosexuals in music and music education, and figuratively, to depict the many others (and the musical traditions they practice) that are rendered similarly invisible within music and music education, even to the point of being erased and destroyed. Her critique can also be read pedagogically in terms of how things might be different in music education. As she suggests, for example, much hangs on the nature of the discourses among and between music teachers and their students.Roger Mantie extends Randall Allsup's and Cathy Benedict's critique of the American school band by examining critically the important distinction between notions of the band as a vehicle of music education and as an agent for music education. He posits that this distinction has given rise to disagreements between advocates of each view. The present paradigm of the school band as a vehicle of music education has not only changed the institution of the wind band, but must be seen within the purview of issues of legitimacy and power—matters that have important implications for how instrumental music education might be conducted in the future.Beyond these articles, in dialogue with Patrick Schmidt and drawing on her experience as a jazz performer and researcher, Patrice Madura Ward-Steinman suggests why jazz is a means of realizing musically some of the very qualities for which Patrick Schmidt is searching philosophically. It is also particularly apt that Albi Odendaal and Heidi Westerlund's In Memoriam to Christopher Small appears in this issue. For much of his life, Small remained an "outsider" to music education and musicology; he contributed much to these fields and devoted his life to challenging the music educational status quo. Westerlund and her students from Sibelius Academy in...