Cathy Benedict

Chasing Legitimacy: The US National Music Standards Viewed through a Critical Theorist Framework.

This study examines the US National Music Standards from two perspectives. The study situates the status of music education as a marginalized society and postulates that the standards are a byproduct of larger forces and powerful assumptions. In order to better understand how these forces might have influenced the development and adoption of the Music Standards document, the first perspective is an examination of the Music Standards through a theoretical framework provided by the critical theorists Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and Michael Apple. The second perspective compares the National Music Standards to the National Mathematics, Language Arts, Science, and History Standards in order to examine the ways in which those National Standards reflect a paradigm shift in the educational climate. While this study focused solely on the US National Music Standards document, the underlying critical theory framework provides a lens for examining the status of music education throughout the world. Freire wrote that slogans and propaganda cannot take the place of critical intervention. Consequently, while documents may seem to alter the status quo and provide basic legitimacy, in the long run, sloganeering has little do with critical intervention and transformation, and much to do with reification.

Processes of Alienation: Marx, Orff and Kodaly.

Using Marx as a lens through which to interrogate music methodology, in particular those espoused by Orff and Kodaly, this article suggests that rather than the free play and creativity Orff and Kodaly intended, the implementation of these methods in a strict and unmindful manner, often alienates both teacher and student from musicking. Thus these methods have become more real than the music itself and as such, music making within them is abstracted from the use-value of musicking and consequently exchanged as a commodity. The article explains how methods become a form of production that serves to reproduce systems of domination as well as a very particular form of cultural capital. This lens also allows us to realise that, as we move farther away from the process of inquiry originally embedded in the conception and construction of these musical engagements, the educative process becomes more and more myopic. This, in turn, determines, delineates and narrows possibilities of and for meaningful learning.

Spaces of Rupture: Wondering, Wandering, Remixing.

This response is based on my presentation at Teachers College, Columbia University celebrating the launch of Allsup’s (2016) book, Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education. I enter the text with openness, and with a willingness to ponder and consider. As such I offer the following considerations for further “thinking through.” These are considerations, given the context of the book, I feel are necessary to address: independent musician, child centered / learner centered, or constructivism writ large, learning outcomes, and finally the space in the elementary setting for the kinds of pedagogical engagements and purpose Allsup outlines throughout his text.