@article{THESIS,
      recid = {515},
      author = {McBride, Meredith Rosamond Aska},
      title = {City With Lifted Head Singing: The Practice and Politics  of Music Education in Chicago},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2015-12},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {375},
      abstract = {“City With Lifted Head Singing” explores the practice and  politics of music education in Chicago within the context  of urban neoliberalism: how intersecting layers of both  formal and informal cultural policy shape, and are shaped  by, on-the-ground music pedagogy, with a particular focus  on music programs at the boundaries, and therefore on the  peripheries, of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.  The dissertation is an ethnography of cultural policy in  practice, examining the ideological, political, and  day-to-day effects of the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan and  the 2012-2015 Chicago Public Schools Arts Education  Plan.
In this dissertation, I argue that Chicago’s 2012  cultural policy interventions were primarily about  positioning Chicago as a global city. Arts education in  this context is a mechanism for bringing Chicago closer to  global-city status through training children in the  practices and behaviors of citizens of the global city. In  a neoliberal context in which policy interventions must be  justified in terms of economic utility, both policymakers  and practitioners frame music education as a response to  either of two problems (or to both): first, the problem of  unevenly distributed access to music education; and second,  to a broader set of “urban problems” in which music  education is believed to be able to intervene. This  problematization of the city, explored in the  dissertation’s second chapter, shapes the ways in which  music education programs are conceived and run, and the  terms on which philanthropists and foundations relate to  programs and their administrators, administrators to  teachers, and teachers to students and their families. The  “solutions” to these “problems” center around music  education’s purported ability to effect social mobility by  training students in middle-class behavior, as described in  the fifth chapter. The fundamental logic of  problematization also provides the ideological and  financial grounds on which Chicago’s music teaching  workforce has been privatized and destabilized; the 2012  cultural policy interventions did not initiate this shift,  but merely officialized it. In the third chapter, I examine  the rise of the figure of the “teaching artist” and  dissect, via ethnographic case studies, what the teaching  artist’s newfound prominence means for both teachers and  students. The fourth chapter, a companion to the third,  describes the working lives of music teachers as they  become destabilized. I argue that music teachers’ work  experiences are shaped by the competing archetypes of the  craftsman, the professional, and the amateur, and that the  tensions among these archetypes in practice explain many  facets of Chicago music teachers’ working lives, especially  the emotional and ethical labor that they are asked to  provide in addition to teaching musical skill attainment.  Finally, in the fifth chapter I connect discourses around  class and “classical music” to discourses around  citizenship. I argue that the performance of music  associated with the upper classes is discursively and  politically tied to the performance of social mobility and  thus, in theory, to actual social mobility. I conclude by  questioning the utility of the rhetoric of  problematization, offering alternative intellectual and  political ways forward that integrate music education into  holistic concepts of urban education.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/515},
}