From the Guest Editor: Creating a Third Record for Music Education

I told my friend Melisa, “There is no way I can do that. I don’t play by ear. Plus, I have no idea how to play piano that way!” It was the summer of 2000, and I was enrolled in some general education courses at Indiana University. Melisa was the lead singer of a ten-piece Latin rock band that had gained tremendous popularity in Bloomington and the surrounding region. The band had agreed to perform at a dozen or so summer festivals and bars, and their pianist had to return to Spain for a couple of months. Convinced that this sight-based classically trained musician would be a good addition to the group, Melisa offered to teach me the basic musical concepts of salsa and merengue. She brought over a stack of cassette tapes of the band’s sets and introduced me to the pianist of the band, who gave me a fifteen-minute crash course on how to play a montuno, a kind of syncopated stylistic vamp used in many types of Latin music. It was my first experience learning by ear, and I was struggling. Melisa opened a folder full of pieces of scrap paper peppered with letters that were separated by lines. During my formal music training as a classical pianist, I had not been introduced to how chord symbols work. Melisa took the time to explain how the information on her scratch pads corresponded to my hands. Interestingly, these “new to me” musical styles and this form of notation suddenly helped synthesize and bring to light what my professors had tried to explain to me over many semesters of music theory. The first rehearsal with the band was rough—to put it mildly. My playing was like putting an awkwardly jagged and misshapen peg into a beautifully smooth and colorfully designed round hole. I was utterly embarrassed—not only because I felt like the confidence that I had in my musicianship was immediately deflated in this new setting but also because my whiteness and upper-class background was on full display in ways I had not experienced before. The interactions and discourse I had encountered throughout my musical development had led me to believe that the formal ways in which I had been trained were superior to other forms of musicianship and learning. I naïvely assumed that the codes I had learned would travel easily, translate smoothly, and serve me well in any musical setting. It was at this moment that I first came to understand not only the importance of fluency and adaptation in learning and in teaching but also the complexity involved in navigating culturally, linguistically, and musically different landscapes. It was not enough to merely acquire the codes for how to play a montuno; I also needed to acquire the linguistic and cultural codes from which the music was created and the musical codes that translate to form, style, metric pulse, and accented rhythmic feel. Those hot summer days opened a world previously unknown to me. Each rehearsal and performance revealed something new, and after many weeks of awkward struggle, I learned how to adapt my playing to match the styles of the tunes we played and—perhaps equally important—the identities, energy, and communicative styles of the musicians in the band. One of the unforeseen issues of working with a ten-piece band was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Intersectionality and Music Education SPECIAL FOCUS ISSUE