As the traditional field of music education moved to embrace community music—and therefore, new music styles—certain hurdles emerged. Professors teaching Beethoven fretted over techno beats thumping across the hall. Traditionalists balked at holding rock instruments to the same standard as woodwinds or strings. However, with time, a more fluid, contemporary, and accessible form of music education has entered the academy.

But community music—which prioritizes music’s impact on the musician and community over a dedication to form—centers activist principles and social justice ideals. How does this discipline function within the institution of higher education? Can a subject guided by grassroots values thrive within the establishment? What is gained—and what is lost?

In this final episode of the series, Lee Willingham, editor of Community Music at the Boundaries, and Mary Cohen and Stuart Duncan, co-authors of the forthcoming Music-Making in U. S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices, wrestle with the complications of bringing an activist-led discipline inside the institution of higher education. They discuss the difficulty of applying metrics used to evaluate classical compositions to different types of music—and the potential to create new assessments that widen the music education lane. To close, they dig into how community music’s principles welcome intersectionality and accessibility, while also reflecting on possible areas for improvement.

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