The form,rhythm,and orchestration of an academic career: Cultivating and navigating inner compasses within institutional terrains

Musical foundations

Music was my home base, before conscious memories. Starting at age 3 when I received my first piano, I sounded notes and traced melodies, harmonies and rhythms of Israeli folksongs, soon sharing those with the audiences of fellow preschoolers and with friends of family who gathered to sing together. The community created by singing together was an embodied, memorable experience that would permeate my whole career, from teaching to book editing and communicating research.

Starting piano lessons at nearly 6 taught me about dullness. My teacher, espousing a limited and limiting doxa of classical practices, stopped my improvisations and composition. Centered on conventional repertoire, the teacher insisted that I keep my gaze on the music sheet scribbled with her detailed instructions of dynamics and fingerings, to make sure I followed them accurately. The effect of this practice, foregrounding text and notation rather than musical meaning and communication, has conversely reinforced my academic commitment: I regard the texts of methods and theories as merely starting or reference points. In both teaching and giving talks, I perceive written texts as confining engagement with audiences and situations. I prefer bullet points, highlighting key ideas and providing space for extemporization. Reminded of Richard Shusterman’s notion of “an absence that is stronger than presence,” I note that my frustration with the lack of voice and ownership in these early piano lessons drove my research practices and pedagogies, both highly improvised (Shusterman, 2000, p. 98). In my inquiry, I have been drawn to teachers’ and students’ voice and ownership (Bresler, 1998); have focused on educational, academic, and artistic entrepreneurship that highlights ownership and the animation of projects (Bresler, 2012); and have cultivated pedagogical and methodological practices that draw on personal resonance (Bresler, 2005, 2018).

If my private piano lessons felt insular and cheerless, the institutional culture of the Music Academy provided a world of engagement, devotion, and reverence to music. These were manifested in classes and in conversations in-between classes, in the regular concerts in and outside the building with their reverent etiquette. The research culture with its performances and conferences, spaces for expansion and potential inspiration, had a similar feel to them.

As a double major in Philosophy, the differences in disciplinary cultures were striking. Still, I experienced solving problems in Logic similarly to the playfulness of composing counterpoint. The field of aesthetics, centering on erudite discourses of the nature of the arts, felt abstract, cerebral, and disconnected from the vitality of music. Hoping to find a discipline that would integrate knowledge about with knowledge of music, bridging the theoretical and the experiential, I embarked on a master’s degree in musicology. The quest for personal resonance in a master’s thesis meant a lengthy and meandering search for a resonant topic. What looked good on paper in terms of topics and research questions often felt dry and flat on a closer look. It took many months and the wise listening of my patient advisor, Eliahu Schleiffer, to identify a topic that had personal meaning. This was a historical study of the emergence of “serious” Israeli music in the 1930s and 1940s, related in its themes to the popular Israeli songs that I grew up on and continued to accompany in singing gatherings. The musical and ideological messages of this musical style, I discovered, were also evident in the visual art, dance, drama, literature, and educational systems of the time, reflecting the historical events of that time and place. While most of the thesis chapters centered on music, I dedicated a chapter to the visual arts of the time to discuss common elements among the arts.

Like Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, it was only later that I learned I was using qualitative interviews as a supplemental research method to the analysis of traditional musicology and of historical documents and manifestos. The semi-structured interviews with living composers and others central to Israeli musical life of the period contributed to my understanding of the era and its Zeitgeist, connecting the micro of the individual composer and musical piece with macro and meso cultural and institutional values.

Taking on the position of directing music activities at the Tel Aviv Museum was another musical role that shaped my future research and teaching. As part of planning and curating musical seasons, I initiated concert series that included different artistic domains, highlighting their commonalities within their historical contexts. Echoing and expanding my thesis quest, I now note that they foreshadowed the aspiration to connect siloed disciplines of arts education research and highlighted underlying commonalities while acknowledging their unique disciplinary nature, qualities, and skills.

Shifts in disciplinary cultures: A generative interplay of strange and familiar

Life is an interplay of the familiar intersected with unplanned directions beyond our deliberate planning. A move to the United States—initiated by my husband, who was looking for a combination of a top Engineering school and good weather—instigated a shift of culture and institutions. Initially experienced as a dead-end, it metamorphosed into a crossroad. The university setting of Stanford facilitated an academic path. The natural choice, given my background, seemed to be a PhD in Musicology or DMA in performance, but my inner compasses resisted the formality of the place. A chance visit to Elliot Eisner’s aesthetic education seminar became an opening. Eisner’s vibrant presence, and his course readings centering on big ideas, connected aesthetics to life and to education. Unperturbed by my lack of background in educational practice or research, Eisner offered me a research assistantship in a project initiated by the newly established Getty Center of Education, focusing on visual arts education. I took that turn.

Immersion in research preceded formal learning. Paralleling my piano playing before formal study, I embarked on this project before taking any formal courses in educational research or curriculum. This experience of research cultivated fresh seeing and meaning making, and welcomed interpretation and voice, the very things I was missing in both my formal piano lessons and aesthetics classes. Even in the role of research assistant, I was expected to be the composer of my research. The project was a veritable playground, with serious play that took everything I had and rewarded me with more. There were no prescriptive methods or revered theories except the lens of Discipline-Based-Art-Education. Fieldwork was highly improvised, inviting a tuned connection to settings and research participants, with the aspiration to learn from them. The writing of the report, in the spirit of Eisner’s (1979) educational criticism model, highlighted personal voice and communication to the reader.

A curriculum course with Eisner then introduced me to the notions of explicit and implicit curricula (Eisner, 1979). My evolving interest in values and messages that were indeed implicit rather than explicit were intensified by the shift of cultures I was experiencing. The most important things, I realized, were not explicit. The active interplay of strange and familiar allowed me to see more, to notice through differences. The idiom that “the fish is the last to discover water” acknowledges the difficulty of recognizing what we are immersed in. My move to the United States allowed me to perceive afresh my familiar Israeli behavior—body language, discursive styles. Similarly, my interdisciplinary travels invited me to perceive the familiar domain of classical music, its rituals and practices, in new ways. An anthropology course with George and Louise Spindler, pioneers in establishing the field of anthropology of education and comparative anthropology that focused on cultural differences, provided language and conceptual frameworks for my very real, non-academic grappling with the new culture. Although I had traveled abroad before coming to the United States, it was as a tourist, spending a week or a month in a different country. Living in a different country, being part of its institutions complete with its etiquette and rituals, entailed a new habitat (Bresler, 2016). Similarly, the touristic inclusion of visual arts in my musicology thesis had been distinct from newly making the area of arts education my research habitat.

School art takes many forms and shapes. Still, it is characterized by commitments, structures, and available resources in both materials and allocated time, distinct from those of the classical artworlds in which I was enculturated. It took me some time to adjust my expectations and cultivate a curiosity about the worlds of public schooling, its traditions, its driving forces, and how they fit with the bigger educational culture to which they belong.

How do we identify research questions that resonate with our inner compasses? Like the process of finding a resonant topic in musicology, it was a combination of nose, heart, and mind. Aiming to incorporate my existing interests, I considered for my dissertation the topic of a broadly conceived music education within cultural spaces or media, but these did not resonate with Eisner. ¹ I continued to search for something that would bridge new emerging frameworks with who I was. In those early 1980s, with a Unix terminal at home, the affordances and influence of computers on my writing and thinking was transformative. I chose for my dissertation to investigate a course that integrated computers into music theory, a subject I had taught at the Open University in Israel. In addition to the impact of this early technology (marginal in that it did not expand visions and goals beyond technical applications), my findings highlighted the explicit and implicit values and skills of the subject of music theory (Bresler, 1987). I also learned about the intricate meanings of success as it was reflected in grades for this course, where the students involved in performing and composing outside of class received lower grades (or dropped out of the course), whereas those who received the highest grades were sometimes tone-deaf (Bresler, 1993)!

Academic units, communities, and audiences

Academia is inherently institutional and communal. My initial audience for research comprised Eisner and the other team members in his research group, and later my advisor and my doctoral committee. In the early 1980s, I was the only musician doing doctoral work at Stanford’s School of Education. What kind of dissertation committee could and would support a hybrid work? The committee was appropriately mixed, including two members from Education and two members from the School of Music—a musicologist and a conductor—and chaired by a Sociologist. (The mix of expertise would play out again when I was promoted to full Professor 13 years later: the chair of my promotion committee, as gracious as she was conscientious, admitted to me that she did not know anything about my field and gathered University of Illinois faculty from four different colleges and eight different departments to make sure they would help identify leading people in the interdisciplinary areas of my work.)

Academic units are nested within a larger research community. Being part of intellectual communities became increasingly important in forming and developing my professional identity. I first experienced the public performance of research midway through my doctoral work, in Spring 1985 in the American Education Research Association (AERA). AERA was the mecca for a heterogeneous audience of educational researchers from a broad array of different fields including qualitative research, curriculum, and the arts. AERA became my home conference for the next 30+ years.

Multi-disciplinarity, inherent to AERA, needed to be negotiated within the structures of academic units. Completing my PhD marked another cross-road in terms of affiliation and identity. I could return to Israel to resume the kind of administrative music positions that I found so rewarding before leaving to the United States, or embark on an academic position. Alternatively, I could extend my US stay for one more year (I thought) in a post doc position. As a duo, my husband and I were drawn to Illinois because of its excellent departments in Engineering, Music, Education, and computer-based education.

At that point, my identity was (still) firmly that of a musician. My degree was in Education. Technology felt like an emerging, upcoming area. In that first year as a Visiting Professor in Illinois, I had three offices in three different colleges—Education, School of Music, and the home of the Plato computer-assisted instruction (called CERL at the time). CERL was led by Donald Bitzer, a brilliant and innovative professor of engineering who welcomed me to his lab and supported my emerging curiosities about early email communication among high schoolers at the local University high school (Bresler, 1990, 1991). Spread thin across these areas, I needed immersion in all of them to help me make informed decisions based on my inner compass rather than on my preconceived self-identity.

Within Education, Bob Stake headed the Center for Instructional Research and Curriculum Evaluation (CIRCE). CIRCE was a place of vision and mission. It housed inspiring educators like Jack Easley and Terry Denny, as humble and generous as they were brilliant, and regularly hosted international visitors including some of the greatest minds in the field of curriculum and evaluation. Several months after I joined, Stake was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts to study arts education in the United States and invited me to join. The process of conducting a series of case-studies and becoming part of a co-authored book (Stake et al., 1991) was a formative learning opportunity. Working with Stake and being involved in the decision-making and conceptualization of the study was a privilege. Exploring different forms of music, visual arts, and occasional dance and drama in the schools within their nested contexts expanded my understanding of the macro, meso, and micro forces in arts education.

Here, too, it was the interactive combination of the macro culture of education, the meso setting of CIRCE and the micro interactions with personalities that shaped my decisions. Small yet big generosities—as in Stake’s asking me to read from my case-study when we had to present to the higher-ups in the National Endowment for the Arts rather than reading his own work (referring to me, no less, as “my colleague Liora Bresler” even with my very recent PhD), or insisting that I would be first author in a chapter on qualitative research in music education in Richard Colwell’s First Handbook of Research in Music Education (Bresler & Stake, 1992/2006)—meant a lot and counted for a lot.

In retrospect, the big career (in my case, academic rather than administrative) and discipline choices feel as if they were being made for me. It took attentive listening to my inner compasses (Hearne, 2009), to what David Whyte (2009) calls the “Self” and to what the Buddhist worldview calls “Non-Self,” a fluid rather than set entity (e.g., Bodhi, 1984). Being in a School of Music conformed with my identity as a musician, but my motivating force for inquiry—aesthetic, personal interpretation inherent to qualitative methodologies—was marginal in late 1980s US music schools. I also realized that I was not interested in technology itself, only in how people use it. These decisions percolated, taking their time. I left the School of Music after a year and the Plato lab after two, for a full-time position at CIRCE—only to leave after a year when I was offered a tenure track position in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction to teach aesthetic education. The unique opportunity to create courses and a program in aesthetic education was alluring, although I still expected to go back to Israel shortly, not knowing that I would stay at UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) for more than three decades (still here!).

Although it was practical to have a full-time position in the College of Education, the possibility of reaching across academic units to other disciplines was tremendously enriching. I was pleased to be asked by Eunice Boardman, who joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1989 as chair of the Music Education Division, to hold a zero-time appointment in the School of Music. In that role, I directed a large number of Boardman’s advisees’ dissertations and enjoyed having music education students in my aesthetics and research courses. I was also listed as a faculty in the School of Art and Design, and interacted regularly with colleagues in those fields. Beyond education, I appreciated my consistent lunches with ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl. Bruno was the epitome of what it meant to cross intellectual and disciplinary borders, with an extraordinarily brilliant, lively, and generous mind. I always came out of our conversations with a broader perspective not only of ethnomusicology but of any historical, musical, or other topic that our conversation happened to touch upon. Another significantly rewarding companionship was with Eve Harwood, who did her doctorate in music education at Illinois and joined as a faculty the same year that I did. Eve conducted pioneering research on girls’ playground singing and clapping games with a focus on learning in oral transmission (Harwood, 1998). She became a lifelong friend, to bounce ideas, share perspectives, and participate in doctoral committees of each other’s students.

My work with the National Endowment for the Arts project on arts education in American schools solidified the direction of my scholarship for more than 20 years. School arts and music became an intellectual space for inquiry as I adopted an ethnographic mind-set, being outsider to the macro and meso cultures that I studied. Music and art history, appreciation and aesthetics, and the artworlds of classical artists provided a reference point which I needed to let go as the “right one.” One of the issues that I found of great interest involved the evident differences and some less evident commonalities among the various school arts disciplines—music, visual art, dance, and drama (Bresler, 1996b). Beyond content, I noted distinctions between deeply held values and aspirations, traditions, expectations, and pedagogies, as well as the particular foci of their respective research communities.

The reliance on field experience that alerted me to vital issues, evident in my earlier research projects, became more pronounced. When Stake asked me, as we embarked on our school arts project, to identify research questions for my case-studies, I dutiful jotted down a number of queries, to show him I could do it. The real issues emerged in the field, through resonance and sometimes dissonance. For example, the intriguing discrepancies among teachers’ espoused views of the arts versus how they taught it in their classrooms led me to the divergence between teachers’ private and public spaces, and to consideration of school culture and the role of the arts in it (Bresler, 1992).

Although AERA’s focus of educational research made it my primary conference starting midway in my doctoral work, I was increasingly drawn to communities in arts education. As an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction working in aesthetics, the research communities in music and art education were invaluable. Finding the right fit in conferences involved trials. For example, encouraged by Boardman, in 1992, I attended a regional Music Education National Conference (MENC) to present a talk on my research. The audience seemed friendly and interested, but I did not connect with the foci and methodologies of the conference. By contrast, the International Society of Music Education (ISME) proved to be a vital, lifelong community.

At my first ISME in 1994, I joined the more intimate, chamber format of the research commission, where I was told I was the first one to present qualitative research. The commission was chaired by Swedish psychologist and music education researcher Bertil Sundin, who had done pioneering work in qualitative research back in the early 1960s, work not widely known as he had published it in Swedish. ² Participants included leading figures such as Graham Welch, Cliff Madsen, Jane Davidson, Gary McPherson, Gordon Cox, Ana Lucía Frega, Tadahiro Murao, David Hargreaves, and Janet Mills. In addition to the stimulating presentations and discussions, there were conversations during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The power of an international network engaged in music education research provided an energizing support to my interests and evolving mission.

My focus on operational, perceived, and experienced curricula (Goodlad et al., 1979) fitted with the emerging interests of the field in the 1990s. One intriguing aspect of arts curriculum involved its integration into the general curriculum. Arts integration presented itself in our NEA case-studies of the late 1980s and became the main focus in a Getty project that I was asked to conduct in the late 1990s, centering on arts integration in exemplary high schools (Bresler, 2002). Integration created particular challenges, I realized, for the music teachers in these schools. A particular kind of dissonance presented itself in a 2002 keynote at ISME in Bergen, Norway. My data showed clearly that whereas teachers in the visual arts, dance, and drama were typically open, even eager, to integrate with other school disciplines, music teachers were reluctant, in most cases resisting this integration. A sobering message, indeed, for a gathering of music educators from all over the world! With trepidation in preparing the talk, I also realized that those music teachers who resisted integration were not simply an unfriendly and uncollaborative bunch, but that they had real and valid reasons to protect their traditions and purity of skilled performance.

I experienced this talk as particularly rewarding in terms of learning about practices of music education across the globe. I started my lecture by expressing my interest in the experiences of music integration among those in the audience. For the duration of the conference, I was approached by music teachers and researchers who told me about their practices in urban and rural Australian, African, European, and Asian settings. It was a memorable and expansive experience driving home the power of live communication even in larger talks.

Conference presentations activated my performer sensibilities: the communicative energy of musical performances played out in my talks. Just as I owned the Israeli folksongs I played as a child and the classical music I performed later on, I “played my talks by heart” (and it took me the writing of another paper on “unknowing” [Bresler, 2019] to realize the layered meaning of “by heart”). Attempting (once, but never again!) to read my talk from a paper proved a hindrance. A written text serving as an object of attention took away the energy of communication to the live people in front of me. As a speaker, I had to be free, able to move around. My conference presentations alerted me to the embodied aspect of communication, and later of inquiry (Bresler, 2006) and teaching (Bresler, 2018). The cerebral aspects, thinking and processing ideas, required that I internalized them and made them my own before the talk. Presentations, whether of music, teaching, or research, were experiential and communicative.

While conferences involved a real-time, person-to-person vitality, most performing of research happens through publications, reaching beyond the immediate audience. My venues for publications included a range of educational research, visual arts education, and music education journals. The well-established music education journals of the field—the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (BCRME) and the International Journal of Music Education (IJME)—provided hospitable venues for my writing. However, the newly established Research Studies in Music Education (RSME) journal, founded in 1993 and led by Gary McPherson, featured special freshness that championed new directions in inquiry. The awareness of the centrality of research journals as the oxygen of the profession mobilized me to support and undertake editorial roles whenever the opportunities presented themselves.

Academic entrepreneurship

The notion of academic and educational entrepreneurship suggested itself to me in a workshop I attended on the newly emerging notion of social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, a useful lens to explain impact in creating new organizational entities, was not a regular part of academic discourse. Invited to be part of the Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership on campus, with stimulating people and projects, I observed the vision and creativity involved in identifying, exploring, and creating opportunities, working to render a vision into reality (Bresler, 2009). The notion of animation as key to infusing a project with life drew on my understanding of the aesthetics of performance, the ability to transform notation into a vital aesthetic experience. Underlying these aspects were the processes of experiential learning that included learning from failures. I became sensitized to examples of people who exemplified academic entrepreneurship. I also realized that entrepreneurial qualities brought me fulfillment and joy. In this section, I reflect on some of my entrepreneurial undertakings, closely tuned to my inner compasses, that expanded my identity as an academic.

Entrepreneurial projects can sometimes be traced to a “seed situation”; in this case, a conversation with Eunice Boardman during the 1992 regional MENC, continued over breakfast with Eve Harwood, where I suggested we house a conference on qualitative research in music education. Qualitative research, my methodological home, was peripheral in music education at the time, with scarce presence in conferences and few papers accepted in the major venues of the field— Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME) and BCRME. Boardman appreciated what qualitative methods can do for teaching and learning, her passion and lifework, and Harwood’s own folklore work was qualitative. They both embraced the conference idea and tirelessly worked to make it happen, resulting in the first Illinois conference focusing on qualitative research in music education. Planning the conference, we expected a small group, and were surprised and delighted by the audience of 200 registrants—explorers of possibility. Conference presentations encompassed a range of qualitative genres, from ethnographies and case-studies to formative and action research.

Keynote speakers included leading voices in qualitative research, including my colleagues Alan (Buddy) Peshkin, Norman Denzin, Robert Stake, and Fred Erickson. An important international figure in music education was Magne Espeland, whose keynote on formative research in Norwegian schools was firmly grounded in the practice of music education, exemplifying research with direct and clear impact (Espeland, 1994). Cliff Madsen, Ed Asmus, and Rudy Radocy, invited by Boardman, engaged with qualitative methodologies from their own significant gate-keeping positions and perspectives in the field. Many of the conference papers were published in BCRME under Boardman’s editorship (Bresler, 1994b). The journal’s publications provided legitimation that was momentous, signifying that qualitative work was worthy scholarship and counted for tenure and promotion.

Smaller scale entrepreneurial undertakings involved orchestrating panels and special issues in existing conferences and journals, highlighting topics that felt vital yet still marginal in the field. For example, in the role of program chair for AERA’s tiny Arts and Learning special interest group (SIG), I chose to dedicate the one available slot to a symposium that centered on the arts in educational research. The individuals I invited were as profound and impactful scholars as they come—Philip Jackson, Sue Stinson, Norman Denzin, Fred Erickson, Robert Stake, and Elliot Eisner. The 400-person room we were given was full and I was told there were many standing in the corridors. The papers were published in a special issue in Educational Theory (Bresler & Davidson, 1995).

Animating a topic in special issues involved inviting the most vibrant minds I knew in the field, people who could provide fresh, generative, and sometimes contrary perspectives. Noting the scarcity of global perspectives on arts education and policy, in 1995, I undertook the role of editor of international issues for Arts Education Policy Review (AEPR). There I initiated 10 special issues, targeting specific geographic regions that were not well-represented in the scholarly literature, including South American, African, Asian, and even European perspectives on policy, curriculum, and arts integration.

The topic of arts integration in schooling and the theme of interdisciplinarity across the arts featured as a recurring commitment underlying my entrepreneurial endeavors. Even the multi-disciplinary AERA with its numerous divisions and SIGs consisted of relatively homogeneous audiences in each of these interest groups. My research experiences in school taught me that when I learned about the other arts, I also learned something important about music. In making the strange familiar, as the famous adage goes, the familiar became strange, noteworthy. I was drawn to support and create spaces for intellectual encounters and cross-fertilization. The existing spaces—AERA’s Arts and Learning SIG, and the journal AEPR—had already provided important spaces for multi-disciplinary engagement and I was pleased to assume editorial roles in both.

The field of research in music education is replete with fine examples of academic entrepreneurship in the establishment of innovative journals (Richard Colwell’s BCRME and the Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, Gary McPherson’s RSME, and Sarah Hennessey’s Music Education Research), Margaret Barrett and Sandy Stauffer’s launching of the Narrative Inquiry conferences, and June Boyce-Tillman in spirituality in music education conferences and book series. Each of these venues was situated in the specific time and circumstances of the field; each created a valuable space for emerging directions.

All of us have our entrepreneurial missions. Every mission comes with its story, embedded in specific contexts. The International Journal of Education and the Arts (IJEA) was motivated by the wish to create a journal that would host all the arts, allowing scholarly work to include music, visual art, and film and showcasing works in the newly formed genre of arts-based research. Tom Barone was a leader in arts-based research and narrative inquiry, and a dream co-editor. Gene Glass’s vision for free-access scholarly electronic journals (a mission that feels even more urgent now) and facility in technology and exceptional responsiveness were invaluable. The three of us co-founded IJEA in 2000, and worked together as its co-editors; a role I continued to do, after Barone left, with Margaret Latta, another exceptional co-editor, until 2014. The scope of this work was extensive, with no commercial publisher and no support from my institution. Still, the surge of submitted papers and the realization that the journal was read by many, including in countries that were not well-represented in public academic discourses, was immensely rewarding. We volunteered our time because we cared about it. This kind of work was different from working with commercial entities—for example, serving as editor-in-chief of the Springer arts education book series (“Landscapes: Aesthetics, the Arts and Education”), resonating with the mission, but also aware of affordability and accessibility.

Although all my edited volumes are dear to my heart, the project of the Handbook of Research in Arts Education (Bresler, 2007) was special in its scope and architecture. Identifying 13 themes that I regarded as compelling and timely—including Creativity, Social Issues, Child Culture, the Body, and Spirituality—I recruited leading researchers across the disciplines of music, visual art, dance, and drama with the occasional contribution from the fields of poetry and media, acknowledging the opportunity for cross-fertilization and “seeing more.” The format of Interludes in each section, authored by such figures as philosophers of education Maxine Greene and Peter Abbs, psychologist Jerome Bruner, ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, and cultural ecologist David Abram, expanded the visions of arts education. Reminded by Bertil Sundin’s example that there was excellent research not published in English, the format of international commentaries allowed a glimpse into the research and scholarship of other cultures and languages. In addition to the aesthetics of design of the volume and evocative interludes, artist and scholar Jana Mason created visual images, variations on a theme, that corresponded to the focus of each section. This handbook involved tremendous work around the clock, being in touch with more than 100 authors from many countries across five continents. It also felt like throwing a big, lively party with exceptional section editors and contributors, all committed to creating a volume in what felt like a labor of love. This kind of work can contribute to crosscurrents of awareness and potential expansion of communities.

In the role of accompanist: Advising doctoral students

Academic life engages us as soloists, conductors, chamber group members, and accompanists, each with their delights and unique types of listening. Teaching as conducting, central to academic work, is beyond the scope of this article. I do, however, want to address the area of advising doctoral students; a hybrid of teaching and facilitating research, in the words of Tom Barone (2001), aspiring to “touch eternity.” The process of advising draws on the sensitivities of accompanying, where the focus is on supporting students’ evolving research.

“Duo/accompanist” relationships apply the well-established model of guilds, apprenticeship, and instrumental teaching. Advising includes teaching, grappling with concrete issues such as how to conceptualize a theme, the use of methods to explore the theme, and the explorations of scholarship for this particular research. I refer here to a couple of examples that illustrate the advising role and its reciprocal relationships. Jackie Wiggins’s (1992) dissertation was the first that I directed in music education. Jackie’s tremendous expertise as an innovative teacher and her explorations of her teaching processes allowed me to glimpse the skillful pedagogies of an expert, committed, and insightful educator. Yore Kedem’s (2008) focus on instrumental string teaching juxtaposed Hans-Georg Gadamer with instrumental pedagogies in innovative ways, bridging the segregated artistic and scholarly communities. Koji Matsunobu (2009) brought a whole new set of sensitivities and understandings to the practices of the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, and its special qualities, and, in the process, expanded Western practices and sensitivities through the lens of Japanese aesthetics. Tawnya Smith’s (2014) dissertation ventured beyond traditional school music, drawing on expressive arts to create a new way of working in music education. Each of these researchers chose work that resonated with who they were and what they wanted to know, addressing deep and meaningful queries. In each case, the students were clearly the experts. I brought a knowledge of methods and genres that would support their queries, and a distance that allowed us to see issues from a different perspective. Each, indeed, would take the field further in compelling new directions. ³

Seeing more, hearing more: Explorations of research methodologies

Methodological genres, like theories, are sometimes presented as distinct, assuming monogamous relationships. The awareness of our methodological choices enhances possibilities and supports more informed choices in design as well as in response to a specific situation. Genres come with their distinct aims, traditions, and units of analysis. Still, genres can overlap to a greater extent than we often realize. Underlying the choice of research methodologies lies a grappling with what aspects of reality we want to study and our positioning as researchers. My methodological journey is still going strong, taking me to new landscapes.

The beginnings of my formal research in musicology in the mid- and late-1970s enculturated me to the primacy and objectivity of musical texts and to analytical musicological methods. Relocating to educational, social sciences research, I was introduced to the notion of constructed interpretive realities and the related notion of the situated researcher (Peshkin, 1988). The recurrent appearance of important relationships and topics in changing investigations and temporal awareness will be apparent in this article. Working with Eisner on several research projects and taking his courses, I was introduced to his connoisseurship and educational criticism genre with its curricular dimensions (Eisner, 1979, 1991), where the researcher was not just an insider to the field of inquiry, but an expert, akin to a visual art critic. In contrast, the researcher in cultural anthropology is (or aims to be) an outsider to the culture studied, relying on attentive, open listening to the perspectives of insiders to understand their reality. Eisner’s role as expert fitted with my classical training. Still, as a newcomer to both the country and the discipline of arts education, I was aware of entering unfamiliar territory, searching for varied lenses and ways of making sense. I sensed a counterpoint of methodological identities, but it would take me years to articulate the distinctions between insider and outsider, the strengths and the liabilities of each, and how I negotiated them in specific research projects. Noting how different situations and contexts activated my different identities, I have come to see a counterpoint—co-existing within a larger framework of situations requiring reflection and awareness.

My very first fieldwork with Eisner illustrated this contrapuntal stance. Lacking educational or sociological conceptual framework during observation of an elementary classroom, I ended up drawing on my expertise in musical analysis, using temporal form, rhythm, orchestration, melody, counterpoint, and dynamics to make sense of classroom life. That expertise, however, was applied very differently to my customary analysis of musical compositions, in that it was positioned within a nonmusical context, where I was acutely aware of my ignorance. Although I was appreciative of those musical lenses for rescuing me by providing a raft of meaning, I was fully aware of the urgent need to go beyond this expertise, to learn and to listen differently to the teaching episode and to the art education and curriculum theories. It was the contrapuntal combination of knowing/expertise within unknowing, and the quest to respond, that allowed me to see more.

Some kinds of unknowing are better accepted than others by individuals and institutions. It was only later that I realized the fortuitous acceptance of my musical lenses as legitimate within the institutional and methodological contexts of the early 1980s. Not having read any of Eisner’s work at that point, I did not realize his role as a passionate advocate of art criticism as a model for educational inquiry (Eisner, 1979) and the extent to which my lenses for that first case-study fitted well within this model. It also helped that my area of knowledge, music, expanded Eisner’s model which was based on visual arts, in attending to other “forms of representation” (Eisner, 1982). Although unconventional, my dual stance as an expert–unknower generated “music-based inquiry,” a decade or so before it was labeled and established momentum.

Working with different methodological fields opened me to the richness of possibilities within each and the need to reflect on the appropriateness of a genre to my aims and positioning. Eisner’s model of educational criticism espoused a personal, expressive voice. Ethnography highlighted discrepant cultural worldviews and the crucial humility of a researcher. Formative research (Bresler, 1994a), the genre of my dissertation, emerged because of interest in a developing educational tool and the quest of understanding its possibilities. The case-studies genre that Stake had pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s suggested intrinsic and instrumental aspects and the importance of being responsive to a setting. I realized that genres can and do overlap with the important considerations of the identity, voice, and raison d’etre of the research.

My research experience alerted me to some omissions in methodological literature. One such blind spot concerned the collaborative nature of joint interpretations involved in teamwork that I led for a project with research assistants of diverse expertise. I drew on my experience of embodied listening while playing in chamber ensembles, identifying our collaborative space as an interpretive zone (Bresler et al., 1996).

The role of music sensitivities in conceptualizing and conducting qualitative research has followed me throughout my career, before I framed it as aesthetic or music- and arts-based inquiry. Initially articulated as musical dimensions for qualitative research in the chapter for Colwell’s handbook (Bresler & Stake, 1992/2006), I grappled with the nature of “lessons from music” (Bresler, 2005, 2008), including the power of music and the arts to cultivate attuned, connected, and improvised “habits of mind”—habits that featured centrally in teaching of research methodologies (Bresler, 2014, 2018).

My methodological work, including the distinctions between basic and applied genres (Bresler, 1996a) and embodied narrative inquiry (Bresler, 2006) fitted with the broader interests of the profession over time. The discipline of education followed cultural anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s, recognizing the importance of multiple perspectives of reality and the ability of open-ended observations and participants’ narratives to illuminate shared and individual understandings. However, music education in the United States lagged behind by several decades. Until well into the 1990s, the field was largely quantitative, philosophical, and historical, as manifested in papers published in leading journals of the time as well as in the overview of existing research in Colwell’s (1992) handbook. The research culture of music education, inside and outside the United States, wrestled with the inadequacy of quantitative measures to address the richness and complexity of processes and experiences in music education. Qualitative inquiry opened up new areas of study, including informal settings, community music, and diverse cultures of institutions committed to music education. I found myself giving talks and workshops connecting underlying quests and aspirations to the cultivation of “qualitative mind-sets.” Teaching and communicating to others invariably expanded my own seeing and understanding.

If the spirit of “aesthetics-based inquiry” has been present from the very beginning of my research, I note a developmental aspect in the forms it takes. I am increasingly drawn to autoethnographic writing, allowing for observations on personal experience along with additional perspectives from a distance on both research and teaching. The important and influential work of Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner on autoethnography (e.g., Bochner & Ellis, 2016), offering methodological possibilities and illuminating examples, have extended my notions of the personal and professional. Bochner’s (2014) autoethnographic book Coming to Narrative, reflecting on the evolution of his own career, provided a compelling invitation to examine my own becoming, the readings and experiences that propelled and sparked my academic career. Betsy Hearne’s autoethnographic writing on interactions between research and personal experience (2015), and on life in and out of music (2017), provided further inspiration.

I was drawn to qualitative research because it allowed me to hear and see more. The writing of autoethnography, I find as I write this article, is indeed an opportunity to notice aspects of my career that I may have sensed vaguely but have not articulated; to identify musical-experiential compasses with a clarity that comes out of perspective. At its best, I hope this creates some resonance, in the form of consonance and dissonance, inviting others to share their own journeys.

Coda

Each academic life has its dynamic forms, chapters, or movements, shaped, perhaps, by promotions and shifting affiliations, and on a micro level, by dynamics, textures, and multiple rhythms. The rhythm of the academic year, marked by the semester calendar of teaching and committee work, is characterized by predictable periods of intensity and calm. Deadlines for edited books and special issues create intensified periods and their respective peaks. Journal and book series editing is characterized by more stable, consistent rhythms. Academic life requires some measure of planning, composing a broader tempo that is sustainable.

An essential aspect of academic paths is its counterpoint with our personal lives. For me, that counterpoint was evident in a research career shaped by my husband’s studies, redirecting my earlier trajectory; as well as the “null,” the academic positions I did not take because they did not fit with our family’s broader interests. Local counterpoints manifested in the coincidence of defending my dissertation proposal 5 days after the birth of my twins or finding myself in the unexpected position of giving a talk to 2,000 Japanese women on being a mother, wife, and a researcher.

I now write from the stage of Adulthood II (Bateson, 2010). Building on earlier academic stages, I experience this one as evolving quests and aspirations, modified rhythms and orchestrations, and shifting aesthetic visions. Viennese conductor and philosopher Viktor Zuckerkandl (1956) notes that musical principles refer to “states[,] not objects, to relations between tensions, not to positions between, to tendencies, not to magnitudes” (p. 364). These observations capture the process of academic life. I am awed by the beauty and mystery of the ever-changing process, and eager to learn about others’ journeys through different stories in different contexts.