How Should We Define Success in Large Ensembles?

There is far too much great content in this piece to distill into a riff. It’s free download - check out out for yourself! Bucura writes at length about the traditions of excellence that dominate our approach to teaching large ensembles: play the best music, have students with the best skills, earn the best ratings, win. If our students can do all of those things, we are good teachers, right?

Sure - excellence is a great thing. Of course our students want to be proud of their performance, and to appreciate all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into a perfect performance of [fill in the blank here of any great piece of literature]. But this article led me ponder: Are we in the excellence business, or the business of facilitating learning outcomes? Maybe one can argue that they are one and the same, but perhaps they are not. Of course we want rigor, but at what cost? When does rigor become a quest for [skills-based] excellence, and cease to be aesthetic education? Perhaps we can motivate students without competition or what Bucura describes as “standardized traditions.”

Bucura describes four facets of excellence in music education:

1.) Becoming the Best (at some point there are winners and losers)

2.) Visibility (Look at us! But what is “important” is not always educational)

3.) Preoccupation with a Desired Outcome (Product > Process, at all costs!)

4.) Resistance to Change (This is the way it is, it’s the way we’ve always done it).

The author urges us to move away from the business of excellence, and toward the business of intrinsic motivation, and aesthetic learning outcomes which “focuses on the long-term sustainability of a uniquely realized, personal musicianship among all students” (p. 15).

As a card-carrying member of the ideological tradition of excellence in band, I find this article fascinating and intriguing (even while being roasted). These questions remain at the front of my brain as I read and reflect on this piece: How do we sustain excellence in the field of music if we get rid of these traditions? How do we meet the needs of elite students and preserve tradition while offering diverse music education?

I don’t know the answers to these questions! But, I do have a sense that perhaps how we define success in large ensemble programs such as band is at times toxic, and ultimately unsustainable when it comes to meeting students’ educational needs. I don’t have all of the answers, but I hope that this article makes you think!