The Transformative Politics of Music Education makes an important contribution to contemporary debates within music education, particularly those concerned with equity, social justice and the political nature of music education. Across its eight chapters, the book advances a compelling case for music educators not simply to seek to ameliorate or influence music education’s existing systematic and structural inequities and injustices, but rather to pursue ‘new social organisation and institutional reconfiguration, experimentation and reconstructed understandings and rationale’ (p. 1).
A central thread running through the volume, and powerfully articulated in the Introduction, is that music education is deeply entangled with the social world. Consequently, its systems, structures and distributions of power are fundamentally political. Recognising and engaging with this political dimension is presented as essential for the kinds of transformative practices that might lead to more equitable and socially just approaches to music education. Each chapter brings a different and insightful perspective to this issue.
In Chapter 1, Gert Biesta introduces key theoretical concepts that inform the rest of the volume. Drawing on previous writings (e.g. Biesta, Reference BIESTA2020), Biesta critiques the ‘learnification’ of education – the prevailing focus on measurable outcomes – which he argues has distorted educational discourse by marginalising questions of content and purpose: questions concerning what students are learning and why. He contends that this trend, driven by neoliberal utilitarianism, has sidelined critical reflections on the unique educational value that music and the arts can offer in shaping individuals’ relationships in and with the world (p. 21). Instead, music and arts advocacy has increasingly aligned itself with advocacy discourses concerning their capacity to cultivate transferable skills and dispositions that serve neoliberal economic and social agendas.
In Expanding Mental Models in Music Education (Chapter 2), Westerlund and Odendaal confront the ways in which dominant conceptions of music and musical value – partially shaped and perpetuated within music education – serve to determine who succeeds within its structures, and who is marginalised. Drawing on Foucault, the authors argue that a form of panoptic expert gaze operates as a mechanism of surveillance and control, reproducing historically entrenched systems and values that sustain the inequities and social injustices inherent in the structures and systems of music education. These regimes of visibility and judgement, they suggest, continue to privilege certain musical traditions, practices, and identities, while rendering others invisible or of less value.
To escape what they describe as the ‘panoptic prison’ of music education (p. 30), the authors call for a deeper reflexivity – another of the book’s recurring themes – to counter the systems, ideologies, and mental models that shape music education. They argue that transformative change requires critical interrogation of what counts as music, who decides, and how such decisions are legitimised. These questions, they contend, are central to understanding the mechanisms by which music education includes some while excluding others, and thus to the possibility of creating a more meaningful and socially just music education.
Several chapters ground their arguments in specific music education initiatives, projects or pedagogies. These offer particularly compelling insights. For example, Chapter 3 focuses on World in Motion, an ensemble that brought together conservatoire students with refugee and immigrant musicians. Chapter 4, by Johansen, Johansen, and Laes, employs a Bourdieusian framework to critically examine Floora, a Finnish music education initiative designed to challenge elitism and broaden access for young people from underprivileged backgrounds. Across the two chapters, the authors explore issues such as how collaborative music-making can support Biesta’s conception of education as engagement with and in the world. However, they also highlight persistent challenges – such as power imbalances, cultural differences and institutional resistance – that threaten to limit the transformative potential of such initiatives. The authors argue that while programmes may adopt inclusive strategies to widen participation, their impacts risk remaining superficial if they focus solely on mitigating the symptoms of exclusion rather than confronting the structural and ideological conditions that sustain them. Genuine progress toward socially just music education, they contend, requires more than good intentions; it necessitates a critically reflective stance from educators and the cultivation of spaces that support students’ and teachers’ capacity to question and resist dominant norms.
Professional reflexivity is a key element in Schmidt and Laes’s Policy Entrepreneurship (Chapter 5), which shifts the focus of attention to the music educator and their critical role in, and potential for, disrupting existing systems and structures of music education. For the authors, policy entrepreneurship requires dispositions towards solidarity and empathetic, dialogic ways of working – approaches that question the status quo and assumed best practices, and open up transformative possibilities for music education.
Adopting a more pedagogical perspective, Kanellopoulos (Chapter 6) argues for composing and improvising as potential sites for enacting democratic music education and resisting the encroachment of authoritarian neoliberal logics. These creative practices are framed as dialogic processes which foster and enable ‘a way of being in the world that is characterised by searching, reflecting, questioning, listening, daring, studiously playing with sounds and musical knowledge, producing momentary, unexpected ruptures as a result of creative musical practice based on the assumption of equality’ (p. 112). He argues that adopting a ‘paideia cycle of music education’ (p. 114) can challenge hierarchical models of musical knowledge and foreground equality, agency and relationality as core principles of transformative educational practice.
Chapter 7 (Laes and Westerlund) explores the challenges facing the transformative potential of music education research through a critical examination of ArtsEqual, a Finnish government-funded collaborative project involving both arts practitioners and researchers. The authors highlight tensions between the project’s advocacy-oriented objectives and the ethical responsibility to report on systemic inequities and exclusionary practices, including those within the very institutions the project aimed to improve. They argue that realising the transformative aims of such research necessitates the disruption of entrenched systems and practices that reproduce inequity. Central to this, they suggest, is the development of a ‘transepistemic synthesis’ – a forging of collaborative intent and interpersonal bonds between researchers, stakeholders and practitioners (p. 131).
The book concludes (Chapter 8, Biesta, Laes, and Westerlund) with A Manifesto for Transformative Politics in Music Education. Here, drawing on the ideas and thinking that have emerged throughout the volume, the authors propose five ‘starting points for thinking and acting’ (p. 134). These include the following: an understanding of the essentially political and social nature of music education; the recognition of music education as a social system; the crucial role of music educators as transformative practitioners; and the potentially disruptive and problematising role of music education research. In what is a relatively short volume, this final chapter might, perhaps, have been developed further.
In advancing an argument for a transformative politics of music education, the book engages with and extends long-standing discourses and debates within music education, as well as broader fields of education and social justice. For example, many of the themes explored echo Nancy Fraser’s work on social justice and recognition, and Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice – both of which have been explored in previous music education scholarship. What distinguishes this volume, however, is its sustained and multifaceted focus on the importance of developing and exploring theoretical frameworks of political transformation from diverse theoretical, practical and philosophical perspectives, demonstrating their relevance through real-world examples and practices. As such, the book makes a valuable and timely contribution to the field. It is highly recommended.
