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INTRODUCTION There is some sort of 'dark cloud' enveloping present history that currently affects the different generations, albeit differently--a 'heavy dark cloud' that in fact is the obfuscating fatalistic ideology [...]

Tensions between authoritarianism, pluralism, sectarianism, inclusion, diversity, and religious and national identity pervade and construct the possibilities of global discourse. In many ways, these tensions signal a retreat from reforms that require discomfort, reflexive engagements, courage. This retreat manifests in policies, both real and those we imagine to be real, that seek to neutralize public educational pedagogies and curriculum. We reside now in a perfect storm, the nexus between ideologies of politics, class, race, gender, and religion, wherein authoritarian populist movements (including those of religious factions) are reshaping society. In this article, I argue the falseness of pedagogical neutrality and explore the need for pedagogical spaces that recognize manifold layers of pluralism. I suggest that a structural blindness to values that are incommensurate with those each of us hold, particularly those that pertain to being religion-blind, furthered by democratic and secular religious "neutrality," has had a reproductive effect enabling and furthering an agenda that serves to sanction and "demarcate the intolerable" (Brown 2012, 6).

Recent initiatives by for-profit corporations and funding measures instituted by governments intend to support the preparation of students for careers in computer science and technology. Although such initiatives and measures can indeed increase opportunities for students' engagement with computer science and technology in K-12 schools, we question whose needs are being served, for what purposes, and at what cost. In particular, we ask whether music educators might be complicit in advancing technology that subordinates human needs--specifically students' interests in making music in their own creative ways--to modes of production that benefit certain dominant commercial interests in society. After discussing how current computer technology narrows students' choices, we counter this determinism by highlighting a music subculture that creates and appropriates music technologies for music-related purposes. Our example of the "chipscene" illustrates how music educators might reconceptualize "music making" through modification of existing music technology and thereby restore students' freedom to "reclaim making" in the age of neoliberalism.

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.

Even though there are multiple literacies, the preoccupation and even reliance on the primacy of functional literacy, as seen as an end-point in the formal process of schooling, masks an ideology that rarely goes interrogated throughout all disciplines. This article considers the obligation and structure of functional literacy, and, in particular, scripted curriculum, as an imposition of meaning. Broad constructions of literacy, as have been addressed in the general disciplines (including mathematics, language arts, history, and science), provide a lens through which to consider those ways sequential, scripted curriculum and pedagogy frame all disciplines, most especially music. (Contains 2 notes.)

It is the goal and the purpose on which the utopia is based that merit attention. As such, in this paper, the author engages in what Gilroy (in Shelby & Gilroy, 2008) referred to as a "utopian exercise" in order to think through one's "romance with" music as "part of the core curriculum" and as "balanced, comprehensive, and sequential". She further builds on Gilroy's suggestion that such a romance could be a representation of one's "complicity with an unsustainable social and political order in the world". In this instance, Gilroy spoke of the racially oppressed, but his point that oppression could very well "bind [one] even more closely to a particular sense of the relationship between identity and property" is one that the author follows throughout this paper. And although racial oppression certainly does not apply to the discipline of music education, a certain perception of one's status within the public institution of schooling, as made manifest externally in scheduling and space and funding allocation, can foster goal-directed activities toward the protection of these limited resources, in effect rendering music educators broken and demoralized. (Contains 5 notes.)

In this article, the author states that she supports Wayne Bowman's (2006) concern with the impact narratives can have, including their potential to legitimize "existing patterns of privilege and possibility." She argues that "there is nothing inherently emancipatory about narrative." In fact, narrative "may, and often does, legitimatize existing power relations, existing discourses, existing patterns of privilege and possibility." Narrative often leads one to the heart of action and ideals. For those who are in search of varied meanings, storied accounts can lead toward a telling of events that, in their unfolding, present ethical encounters with and for resistance; thereby giving accounts of "processes of rupture" and reinforcing how significant they may be. The wake of said stories present one with how music practices and pedagogies in urban contexts need more than the dualism between healing tales or accounts of horror--they need narratives of rupture. The author follows Kincheloe and Berry (2004), believing that the kind of "feedback looping" involved in a "point of entry" treatment of a text, functions to "expose locations of power, challenge taken-for-granted assumptions and de-center positions of authority." Consequently, this article is an exercise in how one may continuously add questions and thoughts to issues raised in the article. (Contains 1 note.)

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.

This article examines the policy implications embedded in the questions asked by music educators that frame the historical progress and evolution of music education. Further, this article posits that while these questions have seemingly worked toward solutions to problems, they have systematically preserved the inequalities we intended to dismantle. Consequently, this article investigates the complexity and contradictions embedded in history and policy beyond vague notions of linear progression. I suggest that the narrativization of music education has made us subjects in a process that not only works against "musicking," but also reproduces hierarchies and disparity. (Contains 2 notes.)

This article examines the educational function of the North American wind band program. Issues such as band education's methodological control, perceived lack of self-reflection or inquiry, its insecurity concerning program legitimacy, and the systemic fear that seems to permeate its history provide the framework for this exploration. With a philosophical eye toward the future of school-based instrumental music education each author brings perspective to the task of critiquing an institution that has taken on the seemingly sacrosanct and inviolable trappings of tradition and ritual.

The authors have chosen to move together in examining the issue of social justice because they both struggle with the pedagogical implications of what it means to be in this world. As the authors seek to embody the dialectic process of creating new understandings in their lives, and thus in their classrooms, they seek also to create this through their examination of this topic: its implications, its discourses, and its enactments. In this article, these pursuits take the form of theorethical engagement; the authors then bring this theory into the realm of music education. Consequently, this paper reflects a collaborative effort to devise a way of thinking through and creating understandings that are not wholly constrained by the written word. This article reflects how each of the authors has engaged with social justice through the voice and the ideas of the other. First, the authors explore the purpose of social justice, asking "Social justice for whom? And social justice, how?" Second, the authors want to resist the conflation or equation of equity and social justice. Finally, the authors want to examine social justice through a pedagogical lens. (Contains 14 notes.)

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 by product 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. (Contains 6 notes.)

The pedagogical strategy of students choosing their own friends with whom to work in classroom contexts (under the guise of democratic participation) because this is how popular musicians learn, has mostly gone uninterrogated in the literature. Approaching the question of how to create a common world through a critical examination of the unexamined assumptions that underpin emerging celebratory discourses on friendship, I consider the ways in which the words friends and friendship are indiscriminately used without acknowledging that the soundness of this pedagogical choice is based on data collected from people ('real life' popular musicians) who are in, more often than not, instrumental relations of utility. In doing so I call for a rereading of friendship groups in order to resist the neoliberal injunction of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and unchecked individualism. To that end I question the ways in which friendship groups in popular music groupings have become sites for developing and perfecting the neoliberal self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]