Story 2: Pedagogical Risk-Taker, Songwriting Scaredy- Cat, September 2001

While teaching elementary general music in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, I developed a step-by-step, Kodaly-based approach to teaching vocal improvisation (Whitcomb, 2003). My students were improvising solfege patterns regularly and I was pleased with their achievements in both singing technique and improvisation. Although improvisation is considered a creative endeavor within the profession, the approach that I developed was rather prescriptive and yet at that time it may have been considered by some in the profession to be rebellious. Six years after my work with Drs. Reimer and Webster, I was still intent on following rules but I was now confident enough to have a hand in creating those rules, with the help of Zoltan Kodaly, of course. It felt like a creative endeavor for me and for the students, although I sometimes worried that I was going against the foundations of the Kodaly method by incorporating improvisation into the prepare-present-practice sequence.

When I published the approach and presented demonstrations about the improvisa- tional endeavors in the years that followed, my ideas were received favorably by music teachers in part because of the inherent and careful balance of creativity and teacher control within the sequence. I dare say that other music teachers were feeling the same inner turmoil with which I struggled! Perhaps we wanted to foster creativity within our students, but we had not fully embraced it in our own musical endeavors because we were too busy following the rules or preferences of our former teachers. Maybe we had only experienced musical vulnerability when we failed to play the music that someone else created and had never even been invited to share our own musical creations. My later research (Whitcomb, 2005 & 2007; Gruenhagen & Whitcomb, 2014) would confirm that factors inhibiting teachers from incorporating improvisation into their teaching included a lack of experience improvising as musicians. It seems reasonable to consider that this could be true for songwriting, as well.

Back in my suburban Nashville classroom in 2001, my instructions to elementary students during improvisational activities included supportive phrases such as, “Create something new!” or “Don’t be afraid to make a mistake!” I did my best to create a welcoming environment for them to try out their musical ideas. On the surface, that sounds rather admirable. However, I had been living in Nashville for over a year to fulfill my dream of becoming a country singer-songwriter and had not yet written a country song. Ever. As Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday says to Kurt Russell’s Wyatt Earp in the movie Tombstone, “It appears my hypocrisy knows no bounds” (Cosmatos & Jarre, 1993). Although I was willing to listen to my own instructions to create something new within my teaching, I was still stuck in a crippling state of vulnerability as a musician, which ultimately affected my authenticity as both a teacher and a musician.

My few attempts at songwriting while living in Nashville were rather academic in that I tried to approach songwriting the way I had approached music theory homework during my undergraduate studies. It was difficult to connect the emotional and expressive elements that occurred regularly when I sang country music to my creative endeavors within the style. This difficulty reminds me of how Sam Reese (1980) connected Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing to music. Reese summarizes a portion of the theory by stating, “We can know more than we can tell” (p. 77, emphasis in original). In my case, I could feel more than I could compose.

I was much more willing to interpret the music and lyrics from other songwriters than to express my own thoughts and feelings. One strength in my singing was the ability to connect with individual audience members through facial expressions and eye contact during performances. When meeting audience members after performances, they regularly told me that as I sang, they could tell how I was feeling and relate to those feelings, and they expressed how my performance allowed them to listen closely to the meaning of the song. I was touched by these comments. At that time, it was as if I was safely hiding behind other songwriters. I was in the spotlight literally but at the same time I had no need take ownership of any less-than-perfect lyrical stories or melodic choices that had been made within the songs I sang. Certainly, there are many positive aspects of performing the musical works of others. At that time, however, I was starting to realize that I had different things to say lyrically and musically, but I was not yet willing or able to authentically express them. A small songwriter identity was starting to emerge, but it was not in harmony (literally or figuratively) with my performer identity.

Teaching continued to bring me a great deal of joy, and I wanted to further my studies in music education and become a music teacher-educator. The decision to enroll in a doctoral program was one of the five best decisions I have made in my career, and I would not wish it away. However, I am convinced that part of the timing of that decision had to do with running toward the comfort of rules and structure and running away from the vulnerability of the songwriting process. My teacher identity was in conflict with my performer identity (Pellegrino, 2009), and both were in conflict with my newly developing songwriter identity. There were too many of us, and I hoped that eventually only the most genuine of us would be permitted to stay.

Lesson 2: Get real. Questions to Ponder:
- What advice do you give your students that you avoid taking yourself? Why?

- In what ways are you embracing or ignoring your true musician identities and teacher identities? In what ways are those identities in harmony or in conflict? What do you think about that? What will you do about it?
- What risks have you taken as a musician or teacher? What risks should you take in the future?