The Unequal Disclaimer: Why Does Modern Band Advocacy Sound Like an Attack?

I have noticed an interesting imbalance in music education. A choir director can absolutely love choir. They can talk about the incredible experience of voices coming together, say choir changed their life, tell students there is nothing quite like singing in an ensemble, wear the choir shirts, make choir jokes, tease the band people, and devote their careers to convincing students that choir is one of the greatest things they could possibly do. Nobody thinks that is strange. We understand that they love choir, and we actually expect that kind of enthusiasm from them.

A band director can do the same thing. They can tell students that band is the greatest class in the school. They can talk about Friday night football games, marching band, concerts, festivals, honor bands, and the lifelong friendships that come from playing in an ensemble together. They can joke about choir and orchestra and spend their entire professional career advocating for band. Again, we understand why. They love band.

The orchestra teacher gets to do it too. They can believe deeply in orchestra, advocate passionately for strings, and spend their career trying to get more students playing orchestral instruments. In fact, I like this about music teachers. Passion is good. I WANT choir teachers who love choir. I WANT band teachers who love band. I WANT orchestra teachers who believe so deeply in what they do that they cannot imagine their school without it.

But I have started wondering why the rules seem to change when the person advocating passionately is a modern band teacher.

When Advocacy Becomes “Anti-Band”

If I say that modern band provides students with extraordinary opportunities for ownership, creativity, collaboration, and musical independence, it can quickly be interpreted as criticism of traditional ensembles. If I point out something modern band does particularly well, I can be accused of being anti-band. If I question a common practice in large ensembles, I can be accused of attacking large ensembles. And if I get really enthusiastic about modern band and say, “This might be the greatest music classroom I have ever experienced,” somehow it can sound like I have crossed a line.

But why? Why can't the modern band teacher love modern band as unapologetically as the choir director loves choir? Why can't the guitar teacher believe guitar class is amazing? Why can't the hip-hop educator speak passionately about what becomes possible when students make beats, write lyrics, and tell their own stories? Why can't the music production teacher think the recording studio is the most incredible music classroom imaginable?

We don't require band directors to begin every statement about band with, “Of course, choir is wonderful too.” A choir director doesn't have to stop in the middle of talking about the power of singing to reassure everyone that instrumental music also has value. Yet advocates for newer forms of music education often seem expected to provide exactly that kind of disclaimer.

The Unequal Disclaimer

Imagine a band director saying, “Band is the greatest thing we do in school. There is nothing like putting 70 students together and creating something bigger than any one person could create alone.” Most music educators would understand the sentiment. They might even smile and agree. The director loves band. Nobody needs to interpret the statement literally as an empirical claim that band is educationally superior to every other subject in the school.

Now imagine a modern band teacher saying, “Modern band is the greatest thing we do in school. There is nothing like watching students choose their own music, figure it out together, create their own parts, and share something that genuinely belongs to them.” I suspect it would not take long before someone responded, “But large ensembles do that too,” or, “Why do you have to tear down traditional music education?”

But nothing was torn down. Someone simply celebrated modern band.

That difference interests me because it suggests that we do not always grant different approaches to music education the same freedom to advocate for themselves. The established traditions are allowed to be proud, biased, enthusiastic, and even a little obnoxious about how wonderful they are. Newer approaches are often expected to be more careful.

Large Ensemble Fragility

I have started thinking of this as a kind of large ensemble fragility. By that, I don't mean that band, choir, or orchestra teachers are fragile people. I mean that because large ensembles have occupied the center of school music for so long, advocating strongly for something outside that tradition can sometimes feel like a challenge to the tradition itself.

For generations, band, choir, and orchestra have not merely been parts of music education. In many schools, they have effectively defined what music education is. When one model has occupied the center for that long, an alternative does not necessarily have to attack it to feel threatening. Sometimes the alternative only has to exist confidently.

Modern band doesn't have to say, “Band is bad” to create discomfort. It can simply say, “This is really good.” It might even say something more provocative: “This does some things better.”

I think we should be able to have that conversation. Band does some things exceptionally well. Choir does some things exceptionally well. Orchestra does some things exceptionally well. Modern band does some things exceptionally well too. Acknowledging the particular strengths of one approach does not require pretending that every approach has identical strengths.

Critique Is Part of Loving a Profession

There is another piece of this that matters to me. Music educators should be allowed to critique our own profession. If I question why students spend so much time looking at notation, that does not mean I hate notation. If I question why the conductor makes most of the musical decisions in some ensembles, that does not mean conductors are bad. If I question why some music programs serve a relatively small percentage of the students in a school, that does not mean the students participating in those programs are doing something unimportant.

Those are questions about design, and asking them is healthy. In fact, band, choir, and orchestra educators ask critical questions about their own traditions all the time. They debate repertoire, auditions, seating, assessment, marching band, festivals, competition, conducting, and countless other practices. Critiquing a practice is one of the ways a profession gets better.

Modern band educators should be afforded the same intellectual space to examine the strengths and limitations of different approaches. Criticism of a practice is not rejection of the people who participate in it, and questioning one part of a tradition is not the same thing as wanting the tradition to disappear.

Modern Band Doesn't Need to Apologize for Being Modern Band

Maybe some of this is simply a growing pain. Band, choir, and orchestra have had generations to establish their identities within schools. Modern band, popular music education, songwriting, hip-hop, DJing, and music production are still fighting in many places simply to be recognized as legitimate music education. That makes advocacy especially important.

If a band director can say, “Every kid should experience band,” a modern band teacher should be able to say, “Every kid should experience modern band.” We can argue about either statement. But the person making the second statement should not automatically have to prove that they don't secretly hate the first.

Modern band educators should be able to advocate passionately for what they see happening in their classrooms. They should be able to celebrate students learning by ear, selecting music, writing songs, improvising, using technology, moving on stage, collaborating with one another, and connecting with an audience. They should even be able to say that sometimes these things happen more naturally in modern band than they do in a traditional large ensemble.

That isn't an attack on large ensembles. It is an observation worth discussing.

Make Room for Everyone to Be Biased

Maybe what I am asking for is actually pretty simple. Let the choir teacher be ridiculously pro-choir. Let the band director think band is the greatest invention in the history of public education. Let the orchestra teacher believe there is nothing more beautiful than students playing strings together. I love that kind of passion. Music education needs teachers who believe deeply in what they are doing.

But then make the same room for everyone else. Let the hip-hop educator be unapologetically pro-hip-hop. Let the songwriting teacher believe every student should write a song. Let the music production teacher tell everyone who will listen that a laptop can be an instrument. And let the modern band teacher say, without immediately having to qualify it, “I think this is one of the most powerful ways we can teach music.”

We don't have to immediately respond with a defense of band. Band wasn't attacked. Choir wasn't diminished. Orchestra wasn't threatened. Someone else just got to love their thing too.

Perhaps equity in music education isn't only about giving students access to different kinds of music making. Maybe it is also about giving educators who teach those different forms of music the same permission to advocate, question, celebrate, and even brag that we have always granted the traditions already at the center.

If band, choir, and orchestra are strong enough to be celebrated loudly, they should also be strong enough to hear someone standing next to them say, “I love what we're doing over here, too.”