Abstract
Urban music education scholarship in the United States often operates from a damage-centered perspective, defining urban spaces by their perceived lack. As an alternative to these deficit views, in this research, I employed Tuck’s desire-based framework and critical race theory’s counternarrative, which centers the lived experiences of people of color to challenge dominant narratives that legitimize racial oppression and to create openings to imagine a more just reality. To construct counternarratives, I employed a multiple case study design to document the musical lives of four African American youths who attended public schools in a medium-sized city in the Midwestern United States, guided by the following research questions: (a) How do four African American youths make meaning of music in their lives in different learning contexts? (b) How do these youths envision their ideal school music programs? To address the research questions, I conducted three semi-structured interviews with the four participants, wherein each of their musical lives represented a single case. My cross-case analysis revealed that each participant had a rich, multifaceted musical life intertwined with popular music styles, which was supported by their parents and home environments. The participants made sense of school music offerings through the contexts of their out-of-school experiences, resulting in connections for some and disconnections for one participant. When discussing their ideal school music offerings, the participants generally appreciated traditional large ensemble offerings. However, they wished for school music curricula and pedagogies that aligned more closely with their musical lives outside school and teachers who were supportive of all their students. These findings functioned as counternarratives, challenging assumptions and identifying methodological limitations of prior studies regarding student motivation and parental support for music programs in urban contexts in the United States.
Keywords
Music education in the United States has had an often-problematic relationship with urban education. The Tanglewood Symposium of 1967 was perhaps the earliest instance of urban music education being identified as a distinct area of concern. The “Critical Issues” section of the Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium opened with “Music and the Inner City,” noting that music teachers were unprepared to deal with the “intolerable conditions” and “complex problems of the inner city” (Choate, 1968, p. 132) following the Civil Rights Movement. Shortly thereafter, the Music Educators Journal published a special issue titled “Facing the Music in Urban Education” (1970). Replete with wartime imagery referring to educators as “combat troops” (p. 33), and deficit narratives about Black 1 and Latine youth, this issue painted a dismal picture of teaching music in city school districts. Historically, music education research in the United States has deployed racist urban jungle tropes (Leonardo & Hunter, 2007), characterizing city neighborhoods as poor, dangerous, and decidedly not white. While the language has softened, concern for urban music education in the United States has persisted in music education scholarship (e.g., Fitzpatrick-Harnish, 2015; Frierson-Campbell, 2006a, 2006b; Hicks et al., 1983).
Music education scholars are not alone in characterizing urban education within deficit terms. Education scholars (e.g., Anyon, 1997; Lipman, 2011) and activists (e.g., Kozol, 1991) have documented significant challenges large city school districts face, including white flight to suburban communities, de-industrialization, disinvestment in public services, and the rise of illicit street economies. Describing framings as deficit-oriented does not deny these challenges but highlights how raced and classed social issues have come to define the term urban in the United States public’s imaginary (Leonardo & Hunter, 2007) and music education scholarship 2 (Farmer, 2015).
Even when scholars critique deficit framings, they equate “urban” with challenges associated with racial and class oppression. For example, Fitzpatrick-Harnish (2015) drew from Milner’s (2012) typology to define urban education, describing three categories: urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic. The first two categories employed common geographic and population density measures to characterize school districts as urban intensive or urban emergent. However, urban characteristic described schools that “are not located in big or midsized cities but may be starting to experience some of the challenges that are sometimes associated with urban school contexts in larger areas” (p. 8, as cited in Fitzpatrick-Harnish, 2015). Fitzpatrick-Harnish (2015) elaborated on the urban characteristic category, describing a school situated in a rural area but serving students who were multilingual, from historically marginalized populations, and low-income. This example demonstrates how urban implies a racialized and classed lack, whether in funding, student motivation, access, adequate facilities and materials, or parental support (e.g., Costa-Giomi, 2008; Costa-Giomi & Chappell, 2007). These deficits are juxtaposed with a normative vision of music education in the United States, existing in often unnamed, predominantly white, middle-class suburbia (Farmer, 2015).
Although well-intentioned, the urban music education scholarship functions as damage-centered research or “research that operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury to achieve reparation” (Tuck, 2009, p. 413). While contemporary research often contextualizes oppression to explain a perceived lack within communities, Tuck (2009) warns that damage-centered research contributes to a “pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (p. 413). As an alternative, Tuck offers a desire-based framework that is “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416). Desire resists one-dimensional, pathological portrayals of marginalized communities, challenging dominant narratives. While acknowledging structural oppression and painful histories, desire-based research recognizes humanity, hope, and the wisdom of disenfranchised communities. Desire is also temporal, “involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore” (p. 417, italics original), connecting the past to the future through a longing for what was and a striving for what could be. As Love (2019) reminds us, critiquing and tearing down oppressive structures must be complemented by freedom dreaming (Kelley, 2002) to create a vision of schooling that recognizes and celebrates the humanity of Black and Brown children and communities.
In the spirit of Tuck (2009), I employed a multiple case study (Stake, 2006) design to document the musical lives of four African American youths who attended public schools in a medium-sized Midwestern city. By centering the complexity of the participants’ musical lives and focusing on their hopes for music education, this study provides a much-needed asset-based voice in the music education literature. Following McCall (2018), I “embrace the stories of the marginalized” and “assume the position as both the listener and the learner” (p. 25, italics original). To do so, I draw from critical race theory’s counternarrative (Delgado, 1989) to address the following research questions:
How do four African American youths make meaning of music in their lives in different learning contexts?
How do these youths envision their ideal school music programs?
The musical lives of Black youth and schooling
Turning to sociocultural notions of music and identity (MacDonald et al., 2002), I conceptualize one’s musical life as the various musical selves one performs in particular contexts (O’Neill, 2017) across time (DeNora, 2017). Musical selves are not stable but contextual and temporal, where people’s conceptualizations of themselves change in response to music learning contexts. Scholars outside music education have demonstrated the importance of popular music, and hip-hop in particular, for how Black youth make sense of their identities in a racialized world (Clay, 2003; Dimitriadis, 2001; Myrie et al., 2022; Stratton, 2015). Although scholars have shown popular music as important to identity development in youth (Hargreaves et al., 2003; North & Hargreaves, 1999; North et al., 2000), the institutionalization of Eurocentric curricula and musical practices within schools may present additional challenges for Black students (Robinson & Hendricks, 2018; Thomas-Durrell, 2021). This is not to say that Black students are not interested in or should not learn Western classical music (or that all white students take to Western classical music), but to recognize how cultural patterns, identity formation, and the legitimizing practices of schools are implicated in the creation of racial hierarchies (Gustafson, 2009) rooted in anti-blackness (Love, 2019).
Despite a wealth of research in music education dealing with issues of diversity and difference in the United States and international contexts (e.g., Kallio, 2021a; Kallio et al., 2021), school-based music education in the United States largely functions as a colonial, white supremacist institution (Gould, 2021; Hess, 2015; Palmer et al., 2024; Travis & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2018; Vaugeois, 2018). The marginalization of Black music students reflects this reality (Boon, 2014; Kruse, 2016; McCall, 2021; McCall et al., 2023; Regus, 2025; Robinson & Hendricks, 2018; Thomas-Durrell, 2021). This study contributes to this body of literature by examining how African American youth make sense of different music learning contexts and centering their desires for what music education could be but is not yet (Tuck, 2009).
Critical race theory
Critical race theory was first developed by legal scholars of color who contended that class-based critiques of the law did not adequately account for race in creating and maintaining inequities (Crenshaw et al., 1995). Critical race theorists understand racism as endemic (Bell, 1992), wherein racism is a fundamental organizing structure of United States society. Voice is a key aspect of critical race theory (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006), which prioritizes the experiences of people of color in analyzing racism (Matsuda, 1987). Relatedly, these experiences inform counternarratives, which tear down prevailing wisdom that legitimizes racial oppression while creating openings for imagining a more just reality (Delgado, 1989). However, Dixson and Rousseau (2006) note that the term, “voice,” “does not imply that there exists a single common voice for all persons of color” (p. 35). Experiences of racism define critical race theory’s notion of voice, but it resists essentializing racial categories, echoing Tuck’s (2009) desire-based framework that extends complex personhood to marginalized people and communities in social science research.
Music education scholars have employed critical race theory to investigate racial inequities within various contexts, identifying how whiteness structures discourses and educational institutions and how people of color navigate these terrains. Scholars have noted that the pervasive whiteness of music education in North America frames discussions of racism as taboo, perpetuating white supremacy within the field (Bradley, 2007; Hess, 2017; McCall, 2018). Others have documented racism experienced by Black music students attending predominantly white institutions, including a lack of curricular representation, an emphasis on Eurocentric epistemologies, and interpersonal racism (McCall et al., 2023; Regus, 2025). Furthermore, scholars have investigated how students of color can create counternarratives through songwriting to challenge deficit views of their communities (Hess, 2018) and how a music teacher professional learning community informed by critical race theory might contribute to teachers’ freedom dreaming for a more equitable future (Lewis, 2022).
Methodology, methods, and data analysis
To document the complexity of each youth’s musical life, I employed an instrumental multiple case study design (Stake, 2006) in which each participant’s musical life represented a case. I conducted three semi-structured interviews (Seidman, 2013) with each participant in their respective homes, between January 25, 2019, and May 20, 2019. Following Seidman’s (2013) three-interview structure, the first interview focused on the youths’ past, addressing their prior musical experiences at home, school, and within their communities. The second interview centered their present musical lives. The third interview dealt with reflection and meaning- making of their experiences. During the third interview, I invited them to reflect upon their musical lives in and out of school and describe their ideal school music program.
For my analysis, I audio-recorded and transcribed each interview, uploading the transcripts to MAXQDA qualitative analysis software. Following Stake (2006), I began my analysis with each individual case, conducting primary and secondary coding cycles (Saldaña, 2013). I employed in vivo coding for the primary coding cycle in which the “code refers to a word or short phrase from the actual language found in the qualitative data record” (p. 91) to capture local meaning. For the second cycle coding, I utilized focused coding, grouping the first cycle codes thematically according to contexts, such as “home,” “school,” or “ideal school program.” To complete my cross-case analysis, I compared the themes across the four cases, attending to the music learning contexts each participant navigated. For the purpose of this article, I focused on youths’ home and school learning contexts and their descriptions of their ideal school music program. Finally, I examined the themes in light of the tenets of critical race theory to develop counternarratives (Delgado, 1989) in conversation with the urban music education literature.
Positionality
I am a white, cis-hetero male who was a doctoral student in music education at the time of the study. In some ways, my musical life reflects dominant school-based forms of music education in the United States, while in other ways, it complicates them. My undergraduate training on the saxophone included classical lessons and playing in wind bands, but I also took jazz lessons and played in combos, which were not curricular requirements. Furthermore, I played in rock bands outside formal contexts. After earning my undergraduate degree, I taught high school band and general music in the Chicago Public Schools, serving a predominantly Black, poor, and working-class neighborhood.
My professional experiences as an educator in a large city district inform my commitment to disrupting dominant narratives that legitimize racial oppression (Delgado, 1989). Now, as a university professor, these experiences allow me to see how the dominant Eurocentric modes of music education in the United States limit the possibilities for engaging the multiple ways young people make sense of music. Given my privileged identities, I took several steps to reduce the power imbalances between the participants and me while acknowledging that I could never mitigate them completely. Following critical race theory, I framed the participants as experts regarding their lived experiences. In addition, I met with them in their homes, sometimes with a parent or family member present. Finally, I built relationships with the participants over time, interviewing them each three times. I note these measures not to invoke an epistemological authority over the narratives that the participants shared with me, but to identify how I situated myself as a listener rather than an expert (Kallio, 2021b).
Participants
After gaining institutional review board approval, I recruited participants from a community-based drum line, the hip-hop drum ensemble (HHDE), located in a medium-sized Midwestern city. I chose this site because I knew the organization served students of color, and I wanted to include youth regardless of their participation in school music. The director of the group, James (pseudonym), founded the organization specifically to provide Black youth with access to the percussive arts. However, youth of any racial identity were welcome to join the HHDE. From this organization, I recruited four participants: Brandon, Jeremy, Jonathan, and Michael (pseudonyms). Prior to conducting this study, I gained informed consent from each of the participants’ parents and assent from each of the youths.
Brandon
At the time of the study, Brandon was 15 years old, identifying as African American and male. He was in the ninth grade and attended his local public high school. 3 Brandon was part of a large multiracial family; he was an older brother of Jeremy, another study participant. Brandon’s parents, who identified as white, encouraged their children to be involved in formal music instruction, such as drum or piano lessons. Brandon had an active musical life at school, playing percussion in concert band, and drum set and piano in the after-school jazz band. Outside school, Brandon played snare drum in the HHDE. At home, he played guitar, piano, drum set, and ukulele. He also formed a rock band with his friends, in which he sang and played guitar and ukulele. Brandon composed, produced, and recorded his own music and was interested in film scoring. According to Brandon, his musical tastes included “pretty much anything that is not country” (Interview 1). Although Brandon took drum lessons, he was largely self-taught, with no formal instruction in singing or the myriad of instruments he played.
Jeremy
Jeremy, Brandon’s younger sibling, was 12 years old at the time of the study, identifying as African American and male. Jeremy was in the seventh grade and attended his local public middle school. At school, Jeremy played percussion in concert band and drum set in the after-school jazz band. Outside school, he played bass drum in the HHDE, eventually switching to tenor drums. Occasionally, Jeremy participated in Brandon’s recording projects, playing percussion. Jeremy’s musical tastes were varied: he enjoyed individual songs and artists rather than particular genres of music. However, he did note that he was “not particularly fond of rap music” (Interview 1), citing dark themes and imagery often associated with commercial hip-hop.
Jonathan
At the time of the study, Jonathan was 12 years old, identifying as African American and male. He was in the sixth grade and attended his local public middle school. Jonathan’s family included his father, mother, and younger sister. His father identified as African American, whereas his mother identified as white. At school, Jonathan played percussion in concert band. Outside school, he played cymbals in the HHDE, eventually switching to bass drum, and took private drum lessons. He enjoyed playing the drum set and piano at home, learning his favorite songs by ear. In addition, he composed beats using his phone or web-based applications. Jonathan primarily listened to electronic dance music (EDM) and DJs, but he also enjoyed pop and rhythm and blues (R&B) from the 1980s and 1990s. He noted the ubiquity of hip-hop in his musical life—“Well, we just played it [hip hop music] all the time. That was like the only thing we’d play” (Interview 2)—which he attributed to his father.
Michael
Michael was 12 years old and identified as Black, Native American, and male. He was in the seventh grade and attended a local public charter middle school. Michael lived with his father, stepmother, and younger brother, who identified as African American. At the time of the study, Michael was not enrolled in any music classes at school. However, he studied cello during elementary school as part of a compulsory strings program. When he began middle school, the strings program did not offer cello. Instead, Michael’s music teacher suggested he learn violin at which point he decided to discontinue his participation in strings class. He subsequently took a general music class, which he described as a music “history” class, stating “that history class is just awful. I mean, it’s an easy A . . . you gotta do this packet for the day, and then you’re done” (Interview 2). Outside school, Michael maintained an active musical life, playing cymbals in the HHDE, advancing to bass drum. In addition to drum lessons, Michael sang in various church and community-based choirs. Because of Michael’s dissatisfaction with his school’s music class offerings, Michael’s stepmother actively sought out-of-school music experiences for him. Michael primarily listened to hip-hop, contemporary R&B, and gospel.
Findings
In the following sections, I present the findings from my cross-case analysis. The first two sections describe two music learning contexts: (a) music, listening, and home, and (b) music and school. The final section reports the characteristics of the participants’ ideal school music programs.
Music, listening, and home contexts
The participants listened to a variety of popular music, including hip-hop, R&B, EDM, pop, and independent (indie) rock. Music listening was an ever-present part of the participants’ lives, and their lived experiences framed how they made sense of the music to which they listened. The youths’ immediate family was an important context that informed their meaning-making. Each of the participants identified at least one family member with whom they shared music or invoked a special memory connected to a song. For example, one of Jeremy’s favorite songs was “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train, which reminded him of his mother and their close relationship. In terms of genre, rap and R&B were ubiquitous parts of Jonathan and Michael’s home life and the main genre of music to which Jeremy and Brandon’s brothers listened.
In addition, each of the participants’ parents actively supported their children’s musical endeavors. For instance, Michael’s stepmother actively sought out-of-school music activities so he could participate in performing ensembles that resonated with him, including church and community-based choirs. Jonathan’s father took him to local concerts and allowed him to have a dedicated space in their home to play drums and piano, the latter being a commonality among all the participants. Furthermore, parents drove their children to drum lessons and Saturday rehearsals, investing significant amounts of time and energy to support their musical interests.
The participants engaged with music at home in other ways beyond listening. Jonathan’s musical life was interwoven with digital technology, playing keyboard-based video games and composing songs using online digital audio workstations (DAWs). Brandon was perhaps the most involved with music at home. He started his own band, composed music using DAWs, and taught himself piano, ukulele, and guitar through a combination of listening and watching YouTube tutorials. Jeremy sometimes collaborated with Brandon on his musical projects, playing drums or percussion.
Music and school contexts
The participants made sense of their school music offerings by drawing from the contexts of their musical lives outside school. Jeremy, Jonathan, and Brandon each participated in concert band, and Jeremy and Brandon also played in after-school jazz bands. Jeremy and Jonathan made connections between playing percussion in the school band and the skills that they learned in the HHDE. Jonathan elaborated, “I do percussion in the band . . . I really like it. . .and there’s bass drums so I can improve on my skills for the HHDE” (Interview 3). Brandon was particularly enthusiastic about jazz band, where he learned about harmonic extensions, which he incorporated into his compositions, remarking, “Mainstream songs [use] simple chords . . . I kind of take the more jazzy chords, like sevens . . . to make the chord different . . . I get that a lot from jazz band” (Interview 2). In contrast, Michael, who was not participating in school music, had a difficult time connecting with what his school offered. Recalling his past experiences in general music class and orchestra, he noted that the music he engaged with at school did not reflect his tastes:
They don’t really teach what I listen to . . . it’s really basic history. Like 1980s and 1990s hip-hop. It’s the same genre but [not the music I like] . . . I just did orchestra for about a day . . . that was more like classical music. (Interview 2)
Michael was unable to relate to the content in his general music class or the repertoire played in orchestra. Unlike the other participants, he did not feel he was learning skills that supported his musical life outside school. Except for Michael, the participants on the whole enjoyed their school music experiences and had positive relationships with their music teachers.
The schools’ contexts also played a part in the participants’ engagement with school music. Jeremy and Jonathan attended the same public middle school, which offered band, choir, orchestra, and an after-school jazz band. The high school Brandon attended offered a variety of music electives, including band, choir, orchestra, guitar, world music, hip-hop studies, and an after-school jazz band. On the other hand, Michael, who attended a public charter middle school, could only choose from a general music class and orchestra. These contexts mattered as to whether or not the participants engaged with school music. For example, when Jeremy first started band class, he tried the saxophone but later switched to percussion.
I thought it [the saxophone] looked like a cool instrument. But when I got onto it, this isn’t what I thought it would be . . . I thought I was gonna do fast music like in all the TV shows. I switched to percussion, which was faster music. (Interview 1).
Jeremy chose percussion because the saxophone did not meet his expectations, constructed from other musical contexts, which informed his desire to play “faster music.” In Michael’s case, he quit the orchestra altogether because of the repertoire, as noted above, but also because he could not continue to study the cello. Instead, his teacher asked him to play violin. Jeremy and Michael’s different experiences demonstrated how the school context shaped their participation in music rather than their personal motivation.
Ideal school music program
To address the second research question of this study, I asked the participants to imagine and describe their ideal school music programs. Their responses generated three categories: (a) curriculum and repertoire, (b) pedagogies, and (c) music teacher dispositions.
Curriculum and repertoire
The participants described multiple courses they wished their schools offered, including traditional large ensembles, re-imaginings of those ensembles, and courses involving composition and music production. The central thread among their suggestions was that they wanted to engage with the music that related to their musical lives outside school in a student-centered manner. Brandon, Jeremy, and Jonathan advocated for keeping traditional large ensembles, including band, choir, orchestra, and jazz band. The youths also reimagined those ensembles. For example, Brandon described a pop choir in which students could perform “all the cool songs you listen to . . . but you’re learning it with technique” (Interview 3). Similarly, Michael desired a course modeled after the a capella group Pentatonix, which would perform vocal arrangements of popular songs, using vocalizations to mimic instrumental accompaniments.
Jeremy, Brandon, and Michael envisioned new courses, focusing on music composition. Brandon wanted courses on music production and film scoring, stating:
I would definitely offer . . . musical production. I’ve been getting better . . . at mixing and stuff . . . a little more guidance . . . would have helped me . . . And I would actually really enjoy learning how to score movies and stuff. That would be really cool for everybody. (Interview 3)
Brandon’s desire to take courses in music production and film scoring was related to his composing at home. Similarly, Michael thought a songwriting course would be attractive because “there’s always those handful of students that not only want to make music, but they would want to make their own songs” (Interview 3).
In addition to course types, each of the participants desired to study music beyond Western art music, focusing on the popular music styles they engaged with outside school. Michael suggested centering hip-hop and R&B because “it’s always around us, and it’s always there” (Interview 3). Jeremy was the only participant who explicitly stated that he wanted to study classical music, but within the context of contemporary music styles:
Well, [students should study] classical music . . . so they could learn what music was like a long time ago and how it may affect the future and how it may affect the present now. I’d also like to play, you know, modern-day music. To show them how music has evolved from the 1800s, from then to now. (Interview 3)
Although Jeremy did not listen to classical music, he valued understanding contemporary genres within their broader historical contexts. Regardless of the course, ensemble, or genre of music, each participant expressed a desire to relate their in-school music learning to their out-of-school musical lives.
Pedagogy
In addition to curriculum and repertoire, the participants described a student-centered pedagogy that emphasized choice and autonomy. Jonathan wished to study specific genres of music that interested him with his peers in small groups. To support small group learning, he suggested teachers provide curated YouTube tutorials. Similarly, Michael described a project-based approach to music history where students could research their own music, commenting that “everybody needs to know where their music comes from” (Interview 3). Brandon described a pedagogical flexibility in which teachers adapted their instruction to the interests of their students in real time:
[K]nowing . . . what the students would like and incorporating these different topics [into class]. I mean, that’s really hard . . . . But, I think that would be very beneficial . . . let’s [say] the kids . . . were really into rap or hip-hop . . . Then, being able to go, all right, well, let’s all master a hip-hop track right now. (Interview 3)
While acknowledging its difficulty, Brandon wished for a teacher who embraced spontaneity, engaging with students’ interests in the moment.
Music teacher dispositions
The participants also discussed the qualities of their ideal music teacher. Broadly, they desired someone who was open-minded, accepting of their students, and sensitive to their needs. Jeremy elaborated:
They [music teachers] would have a background in teaching, and they’d be able to understand what’s going on with their class and know their students. So then, they can give the students what they need to move on and be successful in that class. And people [teachers] who were like open to all, like everybody . . . so then people [students] wouldn’t be discriminated against or put down, so they wouldn’t be able to learn in that class. (Interview 3)
Jeremy’s ideal teacher would be open and accepting of different students and support them in their learning. The other participants echoed his sentiment, emphasizing teacher support and acceptance. Michael was the only participant to discuss musical qualifications, stating that it would be advantageous, but not necessary, for a music teacher to have professional music experience. The participants’ exclusion of musicianship could have been because they assumed that a music teacher would, by definition, have musical skills. However, the participants valued open-mindedness and a willingness to support students above all.
Discussion: Counternarratives and desire
Popular and scholarly discourses regarding racially marginalized youth and communities often rely on deficit or damage-centered perspectives (Tuck, 2009). The logic of these discourses is to highlight oppression, presumably to motivate change toward ameliorating the problem at hand. However, in documenting the perceived lack within city communities, these portrayals tend to be one-dimensional, defining them solely in terms of oppression. Deficit discourses are also present in music education scholarship, where the term “urban” signifies a lack compared to often unnamed, presumably white suburban schools and districts (Farmer, 2015). The youths’ experiences in this study function as counternarratives (Delgado, 1989) to the deficit framing of African American youth, offering a complex understanding of their musical lives, challenges, desires, and agency (Tuck, 2009).
Each of the youths in this study had a rich musical life informed by their contexts. Confirming previous studies (e.g., Lamont et al., 2003; North & Hargreaves, 1999; North et al., 2000), the youths’ music listening centered popular music, including hip-hop, EDM, and indie rock, among other genres. They made sense of the music to which they listened through the lenses of their lived experiences (Boon, 2014; Kruse, 2016). Their parents played a critical role in developing their musical tastes and supporting their interests by providing opportunities to attend concerts, participate in community-based music ensembles, and engage with music at home. The participants were highly motivated to engage with music, including Brandon and Jonathan, whose at-home music learning resembled the informal pedagogies as theorized by Green (2002) and Söderman and Folkestad (2004). Challenging the neat boundaries of informal pedagogies, Brandon and Jonathan employed learning techniques that crossed genre-specific theorizations of how musicians learn within discrete traditions (e.g., rock or hip-hop), relying on a combination of aural learning, watching YouTube tutorials, and composing within DAWs.
Regarding school contexts, the participants made sense of school music in relation to their musical lives outside school (Boon, 2014; Kruse, 2016). Jonathan and Jeremy drew connections between the skills they learned as percussionists at school and their roles within the HHDE, which functioned as a third space, bridging the technical aspects of school music with hip-hop and popular music from their homes (Ford, 2021). Brandon valued learning about new harmonies and timbres, which he could incorporate into his compositions. However, Michael did not make connections between school music and his musical life, thus he discontinued his school music participation. While adolescents of any racial identity may find disconnections between home and school music (Green, 2002; Lamont et al., 2003), limited, Eurocentric offerings frame the racial terrain of school music. Michael’s quote, “everyone needs to know where their music comes from,” revealed his desire (Tuck, 2009) to see himself in the curriculum and pedagogy of school music, which has historically pushed Black musics and epistemologies to the margins (Gustafson, 2009; Kruse, 2016; McCall et al., 2023).
The richness of the participants’ musical lives and their enthusiasm for music learning, regardless of their school music participation, served as a counternarrative (Delgado, 1989) to the perceived lack of motivation of students described in the urban music education literature. Despite being deeply passionate about music, Michael chose to discontinue his participation in school music due to a lack of connection to the repertoire and the options his school presented. Michael’s experience demonstrated how school contexts and their (in)ability to provide meaningful, culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995) encounters with music contributed to his disengagement. While the participant recruitment process no doubt selected highly motivated youth, Michael’s example challenges psychological understandings of motivation that locate the problem within the student, drawing attention to the structural and contextual factors that shape student participation.
The second counternarrative the participants produced dealt with parental support and involvement. A common discourse in urban education is that parents of youth of color are less invested in their children’s education than their white, suburban counterparts. These ideas also appear in the music education literature as possible explanations for racial inequities (e.g., Costa-Giomi, 2008; Costa-Giomi & Chappell, 2007; Elpus & Abril, 2019). While there is limited empirical evidence to support this claim besides survey research describing music teachers’ perspectives (Costa-Giomi, 2008; Costa-Giomi & Chappell, 2007), the youths’ narratives in the present study demonstrated that their parents went to great lengths to support their children’s music education. Again, Michael’s case sheds light on the problematic assumptions and methodological issues with prior studies and broader discourses. Michael’s stepmother actively sought out-of-school organizations to support his interest in music, spending time and resources to supplement the subpar experiences offered at his school. While the participant selection processes no doubt influenced this finding by recruiting students from a community-based organization, much of the parental support the participants reported happened outside the purview of music teachers. This raises methodological questions regarding the validity of teachers’ perceptions of parental support, such as their involvement in fundraising organizations or booster clubs.
Finally, I turn to Tuck’s (2009) notion of desire. When describing their ideal music programs, the youths described music offerings that more closely aligned with their musical lives. In addition to learning about and performing popular music genres, Michael and Brandon wished for opportunities to create their own music, reframing youth as cultural producers (Allsup et al., 2018) rather than simply cultural consumers. The youths imagined a flexible and culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995) that, in Michael’s words, allowed students to “find out where their music comes from” (Interview 3). Finally, the youths described their ideal music teachers as Jeremy stated, “open to all” (Interview 3). The youths focused on caring dispositions rather than notions of musical expertise, aligning with prior music education scholarship (Campbell et al., 2010).
The findings from this study have several implications for policy and practice. Regarding policy, school funding in the United States has long neglected schools and districts serving students of color in urban centers, accruing an educational debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Urban school districts would need to be fully funded to provide the multifaceted music education described by participants. This would require a massive overhauling of educational policy, directing funds toward reparation—in which those who have gained the most from racial hierarchies bear the responsibility to support the agency and self-determination of those who have been exploited and neglected by a legacy of colonialism (Mullen, 2024; Travis & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2018).
Second, teacher education must resist reinscribing deficit narratives of urban youth of color while preparing future educators to engage with popular music pedagogies in a more horizontal manner (Mullen & Luna, 2025). This would require a sociocultural approach to popular music that acknowledges oppression but also demonstrates the resilience and immense musical contributions of urban communities of color in the United States and globally. Furthermore, music education programs need to discard Eurocentric curricula and hierarchical pedagogies based on conservatory-style educational practices, replacing them with curricula that deal with contemporary Black American music and hybrid pedagogies that embody the multiple ways in which youth and popular musicians learn.
While this study documents the perspectives of four African American youths from the United States, I ask the question: what would music education look like if we centered the desires of marginalized students and communities? Critical race theorists suggest that we look to the bottom (Matsuda, 1987) to understand the perspectives of those who are least served by racial hierarchies in the United States and globally. Future research in music education should explore the desires of other racially marginalized groups, employing an intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) lens to understand how gender, class, and ability complicate single-axis analyses of oppression. A notable limitation of the current study is that I only solicited the perspectives of African American males from two middle-class (Brandon, Jeremy, and Jonathan’s) families and one working-class (Michael’s) family. Furthermore, scholars must also investigate how race operates in other countries and contexts to bring the complexity and specificity of race to the fore. By centering the desires and self-determination of racially marginalized students and communities, music education scholars could avoid further contributing to damage-centered paradigms of social science scholarship, moving toward supporting the agency and self-determination of racialized communities.
Footnotes
Author contributions
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical considerations
This study received ethical approval from the University of Wisconsin-Madison IRB (2018-1445) on 1/28/2019.
Consent to participate
Before conducting this study, I gained written informed consent from a legal guardian of each of the participants and written informed assent from the participants themselves.
Consent for publication
As part of the consent and assent process, the participants were informed that direct quotes from their interviews may be used in future publications. They were also informed that I would not share the real names or unnecessary identifying details.
Data availability Statement
Due to the qualitative nature of the data and my responsibility to maintain the participants’ anonymity in accordance with the IRB, I will not share the data set from this study.
Redundant publication
No data reported in this submission has been published previously, whole or in part.