Composition and the Expansion of Music Education’s Convenient Knowledge

Calls for change to music education practice have been ongoing, gaining greater resonance in the last decade. Discursively, the music education profession is undoubtedly becoming more diverse and progressive, placing greater value on action toward equity and social justice (Allsup, 2016, Benedict & Schmidt, 2011; Benedict et al., 2015; Gould, 2007), decolonization and racism (Bradley, 2012, Hess, 2017; Prest & Goble, 2021), focusing on intercultural action (Karlsen & Westerlund, 2010), as well as pedagogically non-normative practice (Kallio & Lansman, 2018).

One needs not to be a radical, however, to understand that disciplines (as any consensual space of practice) tend to privilege the propositions that best serve their established scopes or parameters of action. This means that disciplines look for—and straightforwardly reward—what could be called convenient knowledge, that is, knowledge and practice that easily maps onto and fortifies established disciplinary parameters (Foucault, 1971). Today, and for the better part of the last 80 years, the convenient knowledge of music education has been made manifest through the Western, classically oriented ensemble and the structural periphery—and at times absence—of other practices such as composition.

Many have offered critiques of this model, the challenges of the apprenticeship parameters it fosters (Allsup & Benedict, 2008; Kaschub & Smith, 2013; Mantie, 2012), and the resilience of the cultural norms upon which it is built and how it can be grafted onto other practices (Dyndahl, 2013). Music education’s convenient knowledge is not empty, of course. Many still support it and have made their lives and livelihoods in and through it. We acknowledge its value even as its educational shortcomings are glaringly patent to us. It is important to clarify, then, that this convenient knowledge is not simply referent to genre, aesthetics, economic exclusion, cultural-artistic norms (and with it, whiteness).

Just as significant are practices that privilege efficiency, a certain labor ethic, and managerial capacity, among others.¹ It must also be said that the issue is not simply ideological or of professional traditionalism. The ensemble has such a hold as music education’s convenient knowledge because it aligns rather well with the general demands of schooling in late-modernity: It signals middle-class values, it functions efficiently (large groups of students with reduced time and labor cost), it inculcates norm/ rule-bound behavior, and it delivers visible/assessable outcomes. Which is to say, progressive and systemic changes will require more than dispositional shifts, as structural change demands policy activism.

Policy in New Terms. Efforts aimed at understanding the historical challenges toward openings, diversity, and renewal in curricular practice require a networked approach where the ideological, pedagogical, and content intersect with the enactment of professionally driven and personally sustained policy practice. One of us (Schmidt, 2020a) has argued that this demands a rethinking of the ways in which we understand and value the intersection between policy practice and teacher practice, highlighting the fact that “policy does not just happen. People do policy” (Schmidt, 2020b, p. 25). In these terms, we are convinced that “reclaiming educators’ identity as partners in the policy process is critical to the future of the teaching profession” (p. 26). Music educators have a history of being “adept at the political,” and as professionals we are repeatedly compelled to find “alternative solutions to constraints in curriculum, scheduling, or budgets” (p. 26), but as a field we have failed to openly portrait how and systematically argue that curricular change demands policy be seen as a form of teacher practice.

It is patent to us that composition is a needed pathway for the renewal and expansion of music education influence in learning environments. Just as apparent is that music professionals must develop policy know-how if the challenges and possibilities of reclaiming composition is to be enacted. Given the distance that currently exist between policy practice and educators, a first step is to reclaim it, understanding policy engagement as the work we do in creating the conditions for the practices we think matter most—particularly when we come to see policy practice as centrally concerned with inquiry and change (Schmidt, 2009 and 2017).

Following the sociologist and policy scholar Stephen Ball (2003 and 2016), we argue that educators can and do play multiple roles in policy practice within schooling, taking the role of, for example, policy narrators, critics, enthusiasts, transactors, and translators, while of course also of outsiders and receivers.² Erich Shieh (2020) further provides insight as to how music teachers cannot just respond to policy but also create new spaces for it in our schools, describing policy- practice strategies in the contexts of bridging, buffering, and building. This and other growing scholarship places policy practice as familiar to the most significant ideas in teaching: first, that inquiry must lead action, and second, that opportunities for change must be constantly considered, given the shifting sets of cultural, social, ideological, technological, psychological, and personal conditions on which learning takes place— see Schmidt (2020a) for a detailed discussion on this.

Policy practice in this sense then mirrors core aspects of compositional practice: 1) curiosity and inquiry, 2) imagination and play, and 3) tinkering and tweaking toward dynamic and concrete change. Facilitating spaces for composition then can also help students and teachers develop and practice the kinds of sensibilities needed to move in the world with transformative consciousness.