| Summary: | As a social practice, being part of the school band stylizes our lives—individually and collectively. The pedagogical band world, a world made up primarily of school and university wind bands, is in many ways similar to the world of community/civic bands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on an examination of professional discourses, however, I argue that processes of institutionalization have altered the nature of music making via band participation. The pedagogical band world, like other bounded worlds, operates according to what Michel Foucault calls “regimes of truth”—the regulative norms that delimit what can be said and done. The specific ways in which the subject is fashioned, in other words, are a function of the truths we endorse about ourselves and, in the present case, about music making. Studying the discourses in the disciplinary practice of large ensemble (band) music making is of paramount importance for music educators to better understand the effects of disciplinary practices.
Employing a conceptual framework based on the work of Michel Foucault, the following question guided this inquiry: “What ‘regimes of truth’ are fashioned in school music (bands) discourse, how did they come to be, and what are their potential effects on the subject?” Methods from the field of corpus linguistics were used to concordance the journal of the Canadian Band Association, 1978-2008. Concordance lists were used to introspectively examine each occurrence (approximately 25,000 in total) of a downsampled set of words related to subject formation in order to generate statements making truth claims. While there is no mistaking that a primary goal in music education discourse is to foster a “love of music,” this investigation suggests the kind of musicality fashioned in today’s pedagogical discourse has become a relationship to music (based on the study of music; music as something to know) rather than the kind of relationship fashioned in band participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which I describe as a relationship with music (music as something to do).
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