No One True Way: Music Education Without Redemptive Truth^*

Abstract

I borrow the phrase “redemptive truth” from Rorty (2001), who argues that its adherents (wrongly and naively) “think that there is a natural terminus to inquiry, a way things really are, and that understanding what that way is will tell us what to do with ourselves.” Redemptive truth thus designates a set of beliefs “which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection,” fulfilling the kind of need that religion has traditionally attempted to satisfy. To believe in redemptive truth, Rorty asserts, is to believe in “one true description” of what is “really” going on in the world, and thereby the possibility of a definitive answer to perennial questions about how best to live one’s life—or in the case at hand, how best to educate musically. Music education’s passion for positivistic research is part and parcel of the quest for redemptive truth, but that is a topic for deliberation under another MayDay group ideal. Lest I be misunderstood: I do not share Rorty’s enthusiasm for a literary turn. My position is more Deweyan than Rortyan.

The business of reflection in determining the true good cannot be done once for all … It needs to be done over and over again, in terms of the conditions of concrete situations as they arise.

In a moving world solidification is always dangerous.

—John Dewey

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

^*I borrow the phrase “redemptive truth” from Rorty (2001), who argues that its adherents (wrongly and naively) “think that there is a natural terminus to inquiry, a way things really are, and that understanding what that way is will tell us what to do with ourselves.” Redemptive truth thus designates a set of beliefs “which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection,” fulfilling the kind of need that religion has traditionally attempted to satisfy. To believe in redemptive truth, Rorty asserts, is to believe in “one true description” of what is “really” going on in the world, and thereby the possibility of a definitive answer to perennial questions about how best to live one’s life—or in the case at hand, how best to educate musically. Music education’s passion for positivistic research is part and parcel of the quest for redemptive truth, but that is a topic for deliberation under another MayDay group ideal. Lest I be misunderstood: I do not share Rorty’s enthusiasm for a literary turn. My position is more Deweyan than Rortyan.

“Musical action that is fully mindful of musical results is the necessary condition of music-making and, therefore, of an effective music education” (see p. xxxii, this volume). So states the first of the orienting ideals that have framed discourse among MayDay Group members since the group’s inception. This entails, among other things, renouncing unreflective music making and musical instruction: the rejection of practices pursued supposedly for their own sake, the renunciation of untheorized practice in which we do what we do simply because that is what we do—out of convenience, or habit, or simply because it is expected of us. Musical and instructional activity that is unreflective or critically uninformed lacks both substance and integrity. It is more about mimicry than true musical or educational engagement. Critically-reflective musicianship and “educatorship,” on the other hand, support thoughtful, independent, and appropriate musical decisions and choices. It is imperative, then, that music educators strive to engage their students in genuinely musical actions, in actions with musical and educational integrity, and in actions guided by critical and caring awareness of the ends they serve.

It is hard to imagine a reasonable person taking issue with statements like these. The need for reflective practice has become almost a cliché, and the claim that musical practices should have integrity sounds almost circular.¹ Surely, none of us advocates the pursuit of inauthentic musical activities guided by nothing more substantial than mindless habit. If that is so, why make an issue of it?

Unfortunately, the fact none of us openly endorses unreflective practice or musical inauthenticity does not mean they are not implicit or manifest in many of our musical and educational practices. It is not only possible but fairly common for our actions to serve unintended and unanticipated ends, ends at odds with those we espouse. Despite our altruistic intentions and passion for music making, our habits (our “default settings”) and our disciplinary imperatives (the things we do because they are what people in our situations are expected to do) often serve ends very different from the ones we claim or assume. Part of what this ideal suggests, then, is that to execute one’s duties unreflectively, unthinkingly, or mechanically²—even if with considerable fluency, efficiency, and passion, and even if in ways that are widely sanctioned by the profession at large—may well be antithetical to the basic aims and purposes of music education. Music teaching and musical education are not the same thing, and they may be, under certain circumstances, at odds with each other. The success or effectiveness of music education should be gauged not by the efficiency with which we do what we do, but by the tangible and durable differences our actions make in the lives of students and society.

This ideal challenges us to do whatever we do as music educators intelligently, and in light of foreseen or anticipated consequences. But again, who would take issue with this? Aren’t all people’s actions guided by assumptions about their outcomes? Not necessarily. For one thing, the results of instructional and musical actions are seldom uniform and predictable; and, for another, results interact in complicated ways. A consequence that is desirable on one level or in one way may be quite undesirable on another. The consequences of human action, then, are seldom singular, are often entangled with each other in complex ways, and may well be at odds with each other. Musical activities do not result in the uniformly predictable outcomes promised by naïve advocacy arguments, pat instructional methods, or comfortingly universal philosophical rationales. As humanly generated meanings, the consequences of musical and instructional actions are plural, ever-changing, and contextually and personally relative. Anticipating instructional and musical consequences thus requires considerable vigilance and discernment, attention to considerations that are unique to the situation at hand. Genuinely educational or musical consequences do not follow inevitably or automatically from music-related activity or from delivery of musical instruction. Consequences are contingent, dependent upon an almost limitless range of variables.

Music educators cannot just “coast,” then, as if the achievement of desirable and appropriate ends were simply a matter of having properly executed time-tested instructional strategies or having deployed “tricks that work.” The fact that we have successfully engaged students in musical activities does not assure the attainment of musically sound educational results. There is a potentially significant difference between being a music teacher (or band director, or choir director, or orchestra director) and being a music educator: success at the former is no guarantee of success at the latter.

Nor are we justified in assuming the music simply “has” value³ of a kind that is good for everyone, equally, and in a way that eliminates the need for critical reflection and adjustment on an ongoing basis. Critical reflection is not a one-time endeavor after which one is free to act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that instructional actions will serve desired ends. They may or they may not. Or perhaps more to the point, they may and they may not, both at the same time—such ends being plural, fluid, potentially contradictory, and so on. The values of music teaching and learning are always functions of the uses to which they are put, and of the ways they become related to other things, actions, and meanings.

One of the important conceptual/practical tools to emerge from MayDay Group dialogue about issues like these is the view of music as a mode of human praxis—as distinct, that is, from formal or technical affairs whose values are simply given, intrinsic, and only marginally related to matters of use or context.⁴ Praxial accounts of music (and of education⁵) emphatically reject technical-rational models of musicianship and of music teaching and learning: the models that have come to dominate and define institutionalized music studies in many parts of the world.⁶ On a praxial view, the values of music and music education are always socially and politically modulated, and are relative to the ways they serve human living. Rather than straight-ahead affairs whose value is absolute and invariably positive, music and music education require utmost sensitivity to situational variables, and constant, critical reassessment.

In marked contrast to technical pursuits where actions relate straightforwardly to preordained ends, praxis is guided by highly refined ethical discernment—what Aristotle called phronesis.⁷ Phronesis is the ethical discernment that is required to negotiate one’s way in the realm of practical human affairs—to act rightly, in light of the potential human consequences of one’s actions. In contrast to the kind of know-how concerned with questions like “What works?” and “How well?”, phronesis is concerned with determining right courses of action where “rightness” must be qualified by answers to questions like – “For whom? Under what circumstances? Whether, and to what extent?” That is, phronesis is concerned with choosing a right course of action where “right” can only be decided in light of the particulars of a unique, human situation.⁸ Phronesis is at stake, then, in precisely those situations where prescriptions and generalizations fail—which is to say, in all matters involving human needs. Both music and education are prime examples of such situations.

Since this emphasis on “situatedness” and on knowledge and meaning as human actions (as distinct from the kind of objective generalities amenable to mechanical transfer from teacher to receptive student) is also characteristic of the current vogue called “constructivism,”⁹ it may be useful to ask how praxis, pragmatism, and practice theory differ.¹⁰ The primary difference, as I see it, is the praxial concern with achieving right results. On its own, the claim that knowledge and meaning are constructions leaves us without a way of determining which knowledge constructions or meaning constructions are warranted—a situation in which, at least potentially, “anything goes.” The point of phronesis, though, is precisely that not just anything goes: its concern is with right action, as opposed to mere activity. Praxis, one might say, is a committed orientation whose interest is not so much activity as action¹¹—the latter being intentional and to that extent grounded in concern about keeping activity on a course associated with desired ends.

To put it another way, music making is (as constructivist theory rightly maintains) an active process; only not all active processes are necessarily meaningful or in themselves desirable. Since praxis sees values as functions of use, praxis-oriented music education is concerned with the broadly human uses to which musical experiences may be put, the ways they enhance (or interfere with) human life and living. Praxial orientations are concerned that meanings and understandings be reasonable and appropriate to ends-in-view. Unlike technically oriented action whose concern is “whether what we desire is achievable,” praxis (pragmatically oriented action) asks “whether achieving it is desirable.”¹²

Praxial orientations to music education thus reject transmission/reception models of teaching and learning. They insist that genuinely musical doings are intentional—that they are mindful of musical results. Musical activity is not inherently good: It may be good or bad, and is often both at once.¹³ Again, praxis-oriented musical action (as distinct from mere activity) is mindful of the differences it makes in the lives of those who engage in it.

Similarly, on grounds advanced by pragmatist theory, what constitutes “truth” or trustworthy knowledge is not a matter of natural fact, but of habit. Because not all habits are equally desirable or useful, though, action habits must be balanced by the mindful habit of changing and revising habits in light of ever-emerging and ever-changing ends-in-view. That is what “acting in light of foreseen consequences” means in the realm of human practice, where consequences are plural, divergent, and quite often unpredictable.

The significance of these considerations for music educators is enormous. For if music is a form of human praxis, and if, like all social practices, musical engagements serve different, divergent ends—for different people, at different times, in different contexts, and even for the same people at the same time—then it is fully possible for musical and educational actions to be at once very good in certain ways and very bad in others. In fact, that is fairly common. To be musical, to act in ways that have musical integrity, and to educate musically are always contextually situated undertakings. Their meanings are always open, never fixed, or final. Claims to the contrary are attempts to entrench the status quo and the particular interests it serves, by exempting them from critical examination. Human practices are inherently fluid, ever under construction. And negotiating one’s way within them—indeed, even the task of determining what counts as a genuine instance of the practice within which one presumes to be operating¹⁴—is a matter of making fine adjustments in a domain without set tolerances. To engage responsibly in human practices like music and education, then, requires vigilance, care, creative imagination, and a deep commitment (tempered by awareness of one’s potential fallibility) to acting rightly.

The questions raised by this stance contrast rather strikingly with the pet procedures and pat prescriptions that so often guide common practice in music education. The answers implicated by praxial commitments are provisional, and the problems they raise are not temporary obstacles to be eliminated. They are, rather, constitutive features of professional practice. Indeed, on the view advanced here, professional action entails a capacity to wrestle with questions and issues to which there are no single, simple, or predetermined answers. Professional praxis makes its home amidst possibilities, not prescriptions.

Where is the boundary between the authentic and inauthentic to be drawn? In what does “integrity”—musical or otherwise—consist? What does it mean to be or to become musical? By what standard should the effectiveness of a musical education be gauged? Whose music is best suited to the educational needs and interests at hand?¹⁵ These are among the questions implicated by commitments to professional praxis.

Clearly, there is a lot more to this action ideal than first meets the eye, especially if one takes seriously the praxial and pragmatic convictions I have advanced here. These assumptions have the effect of dissolving comfortable boundaries and destabilizing categories conventionally regarded as bedrock—music, musicianship, education, and so on.

The conservatory tradition and apprenticeship models from which modern schools of music emerged were based on unwavering, unquestioned convictions as to whose music “counts” and how best to teach it. The equation of music education with school music stems likewise from largely unexamined assumptions about music education’s nature and sphere of influence. It is not surprising that technicism should thrive amidst such circumstances. Technical expertise alone, however, is not the kind of foundation from which a secure professional future for music education is likely to be forged.¹⁶

None of this is to say, of course, that the ideal under consideration here—that music education needs to be fully mindful of its results (not all of them, strictly speaking, musical)—is the last word on these matters (as if that were either possible or desirable). Indeed, a central feature of the concerns I have been exploring here is deep suspicion toward “last words” and their attendant claims to redemptive truth. After more than a decade of study and debate, this action ideal continues to point in promising directions and to raise issues of broad potential significance.

In the remainder of this essay, I will suggest some issues that warrant our collective attention and concern as we attempt further clarification of this ideal, and as we seek to act in ways more consistent with its spirit. I will then conclude with a few points that reinforce the themes we have been exploring.

• (1) Music education has lost touch with the diversity and the fluidity of its subjects,¹⁷ and their fundamental nature as human practices. When ends become nonnegotiable “givens” and means become utterly obligatory, the result is not so much disciplinary rigor as rigor mortis. Under such circumstances, professional membership devolves into discipleship. We have embraced particular modes of musical engagement (performance, for instance) as though they exhausted the range of educationally useful musical action. We have sought to universalize instructional systems and strategies that are effective only under certain conditions. This naïve faith in one true way of being musical and of implementing curriculum is rooted in an understandable human need for confidence and security. But it is not well suited (whatever its therapeutic value) to the musical needs of students in a diverse and changing society. The action ideal we are discussing here rightfully stresses mindfulness of results and critically reflective musicianship. But because music and the results of musical instruction are both radically plural, the trick is to avoid hypostasis—to allow difference to be different, plurality to be plural, and the fluid to flow—without sacrificing rigor.¹⁸

• (2) Admitting plurality and change does not imply that just anything goes: “Many” does not mean “just any.” In human practices like music and education, what keeps actions evolving in the direction of further actions that are reasonable and desirable is the social process of communication. Practical knowledge is not created ex nihilo or arbitrarily, according to purely personal predilections. The “nerve” of human practices emerges from coordinated human action, within what Dewey calls a “conjoint community of functional use,”¹⁹ and in what Stubley characterizes as a “tuning” process.²⁰ What holds practices together are shared meanings, meanings forged through coordinated action in which individual agency is modified and regulated by mutuality and responsibility to partner participants. This kind of mutuality is rooted in the inclination and capacity to communicate across boundaries, and to find common (if provisional) ground amidst diversity and change. Dogma, doctrine, and discipleship obstruct the practical intersubjectivity that brings vitality and vigor to human practices.²¹ Instructional method dispensed as a substitute for inquiry, experimentation, and communication leads not to disciplinary vitality, but its opposite.

• (3) This action ideal appears to suggest, if inadvertently, that it is professional or performing musicians²² who ground musical integrity in the context of music education—that “the necessary conditions of music-making” are the necessary conditions of “an effective music education.” Only, what of the substantial majority of the world’s musical participants whose primary mode of engagement is listening to music?²³ Is the action (as distinct from the activity) of musical listening not musical? And are there not varying degrees of listening veracity, standards of care²⁴ that distinguish intentional from incidental listening? Can one defensibly assert that what musicians hear is definitively musical, and that musicianship as generally understood by professional musicians is the point in becoming musically educated? If we concede that listening is a valid way of being musical (and how can we not?),²⁵ then it is difficult to maintain that things like “musicianly” listening and musicianship are sufficient grounds for music education. The tension between musician and “lay” listener, or between professional and amateur (which it resembles), is a function of specialization that is not a universal musical condition: societies exist in which “musician” is not a distinct category and in which “to be musical” means simply to be a normal, functioning member of the society.²⁶ The resolution of this tension requires, I believe, an embodied account of musical meaning that denies musicians’ privileged musical access and asserts a basis for valid musical cognition rooted in the body.²⁷

• (4) To be “fully mindful” does not mean simply to be intellectually aware. This is an important corollary of the pragmatic conviction²⁸ that knowing in the rational or intellectual sense is not the only or the best way of being in touch with reality, and that such knowing is not the ultimate measure of validity for all modes of human experience.²⁹ It is also congruent with the notion of a mind-body continuum, which insists that the borders between mind and body remain porous and permeable. Attempts to stress mindfulness without carefully elaborating what “mind” entails risk slipping into the flawed view that opposes mindfulness to mindlessness, which in turn is equated to unthinking habit or “mere” bodily experience. Action, habit, and the body that acts or habituates are serious omissions from our conventional understandings of music and musical experience. Concern for mind-body continuity is far from idle, since without the body and the “genius for ambiguity”³⁰ it affords, the places for creativity and imagination in our accounts of music are precarious at best. To be “fully mindful of musical results,” then, is a deceptively complex commitment: first, mindfulness entails considerably more than logical or intellectual fluency; and second, “musical results” invariably entail more than just “the music” as conventionally understood.³¹

• (5) As with the border between mind and body, the border between music and its context (between the supposedly intra- and extra-musical) needs to be kept open, for it is precisely commerce across this border that keeps music engagements vital, meaningful, purposive, and relevant. We need, therefore, to be wary of claims to music’s intrinsic value,³² claims that attempt to establish for certain musics a value domain that is not relational, but “just is, in itself.” On pragmatic convictions, all value is grounded; all goodness is goodness for some purpose and in service of some human interest. The claim to intrinsicality, then, is a sleight of hand that attempts to exempt certain realms of musical action from the social realities³³ that, as human practices, they invariably implicate. Musical value is never confined to sonic structure. Music draws its broad human significance and its power from the ways it articulates with the body, and from its cross-modal connections to other experience—what it says about the experiential world and how that world in turn informs music. To reiterate:

  • “Musicianship” consists of far more than executive skills.

  • The “musical results” of which this action ideal maintains musical action must be mindful extend far beyond the realm of “music alone.” And,

  • Education that is musical (or musical experience that is educational) must concern itself with “results” that are far more extensive in range than those conventionally presumed to be its purview.

I will conclude these remarks with a list of brief points that I believe urgently warrant our consideration as we attempt to come to grips with the relationship between critically reflective musicianship and music education:

• (a) Music is a diverse constellation of shifting practices without an essential core. With no essence, there can be no one true music, no such thing as musicianship in an absolute sense, nor one true way of teaching it.³⁴ This stance is neither solipsistic nor nihilistic: Instead, it establishes a crucial place in musicianship and music education alike for decisions, judgments, and actions made with utmost sensitivity to the particulars of the situation at hand. The pragmatic challenge, and the challenge in recognizing both music and music education as forms of praxis, is to create and sustain value amidst—indeed, in terms of—transience, relativity, and change. To act rightly while respecting and accepting the openness of rightness requires highly developed ethical capacities that are largely neglected today in music teacher education.

• (b) This capacity is not individual or private. Communication, dialogue, and mutuality are what keep practices alive. Working against such capacities within the ranks of music educators are the numerous special interest cliques vying for teachers’ exclusive allegiance.³⁵ Such insularity is a long-standing impediment to music education as a profession.

• (c) Music education is not straightforwardly the business of engaging students in sanctioned and ostensibly enjoyable musical activities. The success of a musical education can be gauged only in view of the ends to which it may be put, and these may differ profoundly according to individual, place, and time.

• (d) Thus, teacher preparation requires more than transmitting the tricks of the trade, since “what works” can be determined only with regard to ends-in-view and these are not the same for all students, educators, or communities. Indeed, “what works” judged by short-term consequences³⁶ may fail utterly in the larger task of making people’s lives and society musically richer, more vital, and more rewarding. It is essential that musically educative experiences engage students in actions that are potentially transformative: that generate meaningful engagements capable of enriching lives yet to be lived.

• (e) “Musical results” are far broader and more inclusive than what we typically envision when we use that expression. They include people’s identities, both individual and social; power relations and political influences; and students’ inclinations and disinclinations toward music in their lives outside school and beyond schooling.³⁷ Being musical includes more than musicianship. Musicianship involves (or should) more than music.

• (f) Music education practice that is mindful of results requires a central role for music education research.³⁸ Truly mindful practice is evidence-based practice. And a commitment to evidence-based practice entails, I urge, practice that is directed and monitored by educator-conducted inquiry. Thus, research should be among the basic dispositions and fluencies music educators carry into the field and continue to refine through their praxis.³⁹

• (g) Music and music education are not unconditional goods. They can harm as well as heal.⁴⁰ Detecting the difference requires discernment focused on the here and now, on this situation, and on this person. Furthermore, intended results on one level may be undesirable on another—good and bad at the same time. A commitment to wellness and to choosing the greatest good among potentially conflicting results are inevitable results of a broadened appreciation of the ethical dimensions of music and music education.

• (h) Against the acknowledged potential pitfalls of relativism, plurality, and diversity, we need to weigh the very real (and increasingly manifest) dangers of technicism in music education: of automatic, unthinking rule following.⁴¹ The very controls, uniformity, and conformity believed to enhance disciplinary rigor can lead to stasis, arrest, and irrelevance. There is no one true way to musical education, no substitute for ethically oriented action based on informed judgment⁴²—even though it would make our lives infinitely simpler were that not the case. The words of Wittgenstein resonate strongly with our current situation:

We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and… because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!⁴³

Coda

Among music education’s most significant professional needs is a renewed commitment to critical examination of the pragmatic, “if-then” thinking that seeks to ground action in imaginative, creative discernment of desirable ends-in-view. Aesthetic philosophical rationales rooted in metaphysical doctrines instead of concrete, here-and-now circumstances; the desire to establish disciplinary rigor in the face of public skepticism; and willingness to follow pied pipers rather than becoming self-reliant creators of instructional method and curricula—such influences have left us defensively “circling wagons” instead of pursing new frontiers. Our curricular decisions and instructional actions are motivated by “what has been” or “what is,” rather than “what should be.” Teacher preparation has neglected both the critical capacity and the inclination to gauge the success of our actions by the differences we make in the lives of our students, and in society at large. Our models are generally aimed at learning to do better or more efficiently or with greater precision and technical fluency what we already do.

Music education should instead be the place in the postsecondary music curriculum that focuses on questions, problems, and theory, in a vigorous effort to renew and reorient instructional practice. To the extent we have equated music education with school music, we have sold music education short.⁴⁴ We have failed to engage the majority of postsecondary music students and our colleagues in critical dialogue about the nature and aims of music and of education. We have been complicit in the marginalization of music education within music studies. And we have unwittingly exempted many of those who will eventually teach music from knowledge of the music education literature, its significance, and its imperatives.

Music educators’ beliefs in redemptive truth and pursuit of the one true way suit neither the musical nor the educational needs of a diverse and changing society. It is the potential power of music, not just its integrity, that is compromised when existing techniques and systems and the inevitably partial answers they advance take priority over questions, problems, and the ever-changing realities of the human social world.

Notes

• 1. Circular in the sense that to be a viable and sustainable musical practice would seem to require musical integrity by definition. On the other hand, what counts as musical integrity is always very much an open and controversial question—or, in light of the nature of music to be explored in this brief essay, it should be. The fact that what constitutes musical integrity is seldom a concern of music education is itself a strong indicator that not all is well.

• 2. This is commonly referred to as “technicism”—an exclusive focus upon instructional means (“how to”) and utter neglect of the ends to which they may lead.

• 3. “Aesthetic” or otherwise.

• 4. Although I choose not to dwell on it here, these latter understandings lie at the heart of the Kantian version of aesthetic experience long dominant in music education’s espousal of music education as a form of “aesthetic education.”

• 5. Note that the fact both music and education are forms of praxis does not mean what is true of music is therefore necessarily true of all valid education involving music, or that when one has resolved issues having to do with appropriate and desirable musical action, educational issues will take care of themselves—the fallacious assumption, in other words, that the study of music in schools automatically guarantees educative musical benefits. This assumption is unfortunately prevalent among musicians and music educators, due to curricular configurations at the postsecondary level in which the development of musicianship is deemed self-evidently educational. The consequence is a tendency to equate musical praxis with educational praxis, a tendency that neglects the distinctive concerns of the latter. Musicianship, even highly refined musicianship, is not a sufficient basis for informed and reflective educational praxis.

• 6. In light of my criticisms of the technicism inherent in music education’s current approaches to disciplinarity, it is well worth considering Rorty’s words: “You can have an expert culture if you agree on what you want to get, but not if you are wondering what sort of life you ought to desire” (Rorty 2001). His claim is typically hyperbolic, of course: there can, in fact, be expertise that is nontechnical in its orientation. But it is precisely my point that the music education profession neglects that kind of expertise.

• 7. This brief essay is not the place for a detailed exposition of Arisotelian phronesis. Many such expositions exist. See, for instance: Bowman (2000a, 2002), Dunne (1997), and Regelski (1998).

• 8. It may sound contradictory to question the sufficiency of altruistic intentions to the achievement of desired ends on the one hand, while maintaining on the other that what is needed is ethical discernment. However, there is a crucial difference between intentions and the kind of discernment I am calling ethical. Central to ethical discernment as I see it is an acceptance of potential fallibility. That is part of what keeps phronesis attuned to the unanticipated and the particular. Intentions that are not subject to critical review and revision in light of novel, emergent meanings cannot detect and respond to subtle, but significant things that might change the end being pursued or alter the means deemed appropriate. Intentions without fallibility and attendant critical reflection are too coarse and crude to function reliably in the service of praxis.

• 9. Although “constructivism” is, properly speaking, a concern of psychology, only roughly paralleled in social theory by what that discipline designates “constructionism,” I take the liberty in this essay (with apologies to those it may trouble or offend) of loosely subsuming both under the former term.

• 10. I use praxis and practice theory more or less synonymously here. For useful discussions of practice theory, see Schatski (2001).

• 11. David Elliott (1995, 50) and Thomas Regelski (2004, passim) are among those who invoke this distinction between activity and action.

• 12. Biesta and Burbules (2003, 78).

• 13. Support for this assertion is everywhere once its possibility is acknowledged. One serious example: the incidence of noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) among musicians and music educators—hearing loss induced, please note, by musical engagements that may be stirring and gratifying, to say nothing of authentic, stylistically appropriate, and beautiful. Leon Thurman (2004) provides an excellent overview of health-related concerns in his “eColumn” on the MayDay Group’s web site (http://www.maydaygroup.org). Link to Thurman’s “Music and Health” pages through (http://www.maydaygroup.org/php/ecolumns/musicandhealth-views.php).

• 14. This is precisely why the musical integrity at stake in this ideal is not a set or absolute state. It involves just such mindful, reflective negotiating of one’s way in terms of the situatedness of the moment.

• 15. To this list of questions I add, parenthetically, what does it mean to be a music educator, and whom should this designation exclude? Although at first gloss this question may seem to lie outside the scope of the ideal under consideration here, it is not: for a “music educator” is precisely one who asks (and bases instructional strategies upon) these former questions.

• 16. The apparent security that drives this obsession with the technical is just that: apparent and illusory. This is because “what works” is always specific to particular ends and circumstances, while educational ends and musical needs are plural, fluid, and relative. (The results of such technicism might be evident, for example, for those conservatory trained musicians who are unable to improvise or to “read” fluently in a studio recording session.)

• 17. “Subjects,” plural: meaning music and education, of course; but also the “subjects” or recipients of instructional efforts, the students.

• 18. Or to put it differently, the problem is to remain supple without becoming spineless. In a way, this question of balance is the central challenge presented by pragmatism and the idea of praxis: it is the ethical issue phronesis exists to address.

• 19. Dewey, John (1938, 28).

• 20. Stubley, Eleanor (1998: 93–105). This remarkable essay addresses the nature of musical performance. However, its discussion of the musical field and the ways it is sustained by trust resonate strongly with the account of praxis/phronesis advanced here—due to and evidence of, I believe, music’s fundamental praxial nature. What I hope to stress in drawing attention to these connections is the centrality of trust to praxis, whether musical or educational, and the devastating paralysis that ensues where trust fails.

• 21. I discuss the enemies of praxis/phronesis in a section headed “Threats to Phronesis” in Bowman (2000a).

• 22. The work of Brian Roberts (2004) sheds important light on the ways musician-as-performer identity is created and maintained in Schools of Music.

• 23. One might counter that (intentional) acts of listening amount to acts of making—which of course they are. Only, this is production of a different order than that typically designated by the phrase “music-making.”

• 24. Regelski (2002) argues that in praxis standards are properly “standards of care.”

• 25. The need to account for musical processes that involve actions beyond just performing and composing is part of what motivates David Elliott (1995) and Christopher Small (1998) to deploy the terms “musicing” and “musicking,” respectively—although the meanings they impute to these terms is by no means identical, Small’s term being considerably more inclusive than Elliott’s.

• 26. John Blacking has shown us this in his many writings based on his field study of the Transvaal Venda people of South Africa.

• 27. I have made a preliminary attempt at such an account in Bowman (2004). One of the main points of that essay is that because musical perception and musical experience have deep roots in human bodily experience, they are therefore accessible to any embodied person—not just to those who have learned to use their bodies to make music to high levels of refinement. Equally important to this line of reasoning, however, is the point that this bodily dimension of musical experience is not merely what conventional aesthetic theory has designated “sensual” or “visceral” or “emotional.”

• 28. More specifically, Dewey’s pragmatic conviction.

• 29. In Dewey’s words, “Things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized.” (Dewey 1925b, 28; italics original).

• 30. This is Merleau-Ponty’s phrase (1962, 189). See Bowman (2004).

• 31. “The music” as consisting, for instance, in “the score,” “the work,” “the sounds,” or “the performance.”

• 32. I have advanced the argument that the claim to intrinsic value amounts, from pragmatic perspective, to a kind of nihilism. (See Bowman 2005.)

• 33. Including sociopolitical, socioeconomic, sociocultural, and more.

• 34. But again, and emphatically: this does not mean that just any way goes. “The” way is at once necessarily plural and guided by rigorous, stringent standards of care that are grounded in the exigencies of the particular situation and shared by successful practitioners.

• 35. These have familiar names: Orff, Kodaly, Gordon, Band, Jazz Education, and on and on (and on).

• 36. Or, for that matter, by more mid-range results, such as when “what works” is judged only in terms of its efficacy for school music as an end in itself.

• 37. Indeed, it may well be that these so-called (wrongly, I think) extra-musical and extra-scholastic benefits are of even greater ultimate importance than those within school with which we concern ourselves so obsessively. The ultimate “musical results” may be the kind of people we become through our musical engagements.

• 38. The passing mention given research here is clearly incommensurate with its significance. However, later chapters address the issue at length.

• 39. I doubt very much that the kind of course currently typical of graduate instruction in music education research (or, indeed, the addition of any single “course” to a predominantly technicist curriculum) would satisfy the concern raised here. However, that does not diminish in the least the importance of nurturing research-oriented dispositions in preservice music educators—at very least, the idea of teaching as informal “action research.”

• 40. See Note 17 above. Note that here I refer to musical and music educational activities, as distinct from praxis. Praxis, guided as it is by phronesis, is invariably concerned with right results.

• 41. I admit to a certain fondness for the name of a “coffee house” I once passed in Amsterdam: “Rules for Fools.” That said, it would clearly be professionally irresponsible to dismiss faith in rules altogether. Dewey suggests that it is reasonable to think of the pursuit of rules for conduct of observation and inquiry—though not as prescriptions for overt action (what those preoccupied with “what works” generally have in mind). The findings of research function, Dewey asserts, “not directly with respect to practice and its results, but indirectly, through the medium of an altered mental attitude.” (Dewey 1925a, 15).

• 42. In a word, phronesis.

• 43. (Wittgenstein 1963, §107). The “rough ground” to which Wittgenstein advocates returning is emphatically not the security of “what works.” “What works” is, rather, the ice upon which we are currently sliding.

• 44. Although music in public schools is without question one extraordinarily important concern of music education. (For elaboration of these themes, see Bowman 2000b.)