Sydney Seed

Charlie Frise

MUED 273

Allsup “Looking, Longing, for Moral Openings” Reading Response

Allsup proposes that educators teach the following:

1. Norms and traditions should be understood and communicated to learners as

provisional, ongoing, personal, and negotiable.

2. Although their purpose is to generalize, norms should be tested and retested

across a span of lived and evolving contexts and deemed useful or not by the

learner.

3. Norms and traditions should be continually expanded to include those voices,

ways of knowing, and emerging practices that have been hitherto silenced or

disregarded.

4. Practices that eventuate harm must be named, and then altered, repaired, or

discarded.

5. There are fields of interest and longing beyond traditional norms and authorial

intentions toward which a learner may choose to stray. (p. 107)

We interpret the points introduced above to mean that an educator is a lifelong learner

who needs to know and understand the traditions, but also needs to be flexible enough to

continue to develop these ideas. We agree with Allsup that good educators should follow these

points, and also believe that to do so we need to continuously reflection and maintain an
awareness of the negative aspects of practices we may have been taught, to counteract these

traditions and contribute to growth in our field.

Some of the norms we think need to be revisited include: the tradition of being the all-

knowing Master Director who stands on a podium and “thinks” for the ensemble, as well as the

tradition of starting a rehearsal or performance with a tuning note.

If we want to be more personable with our learners, we should remove physical barriers

such as music stands, conductor podiums, and possibly even chairs. Why must a director remain

in front of the ensemble to conduct all the time? Would it be better for the learners’

development, and for student-teacher relationships, if the teacher sometimes played their primary

or secondary instrument alongside their maturing musicians?

Furthermore, students should be taught to constantly listen for intonation. Giving a

tuning note, or walking around the ensemble with a tuner to check every single player, supports

the fallacy that tuning is a designated moment during a rehearsal or performance. As we know,

musicians need to listen and adjust pitch throughout rehearsals and performances, so this concept

should be taught and encouraged even in the beginning of the learners’ development.

We believe Allsup seeks to redefine terms like “conductor”, “master/apprentice”, and

“schooling” to be more ambiguous, less finite, and more fluid. While we agree with the concept

of having a more fluid understanding of the words and relationships between teacher and student,

in practice we think these roles should not be removed completely because there still needs to be

a level of respect and distance between the teacher and students for safety and control.