Episode 2.14 - Dr. Brandi Waller-Pace
Episode 14 features Brandi Waller-Pace, educator, activist, and the Founder and Executive Director of Decolonizing the Music Room. We talk with Brandi about DTMR, being informed, and where she sees the future of music education. Transcripts to all podcast episodes are created by Hollyn Slykhuis and are posted below!
To learn more about Brandi and all her favorite organizations and resources, check out the links below!
Decolonizing the Music Room Resources
Bettina L. Love’s “We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching”
Full Transcript
Carrie Blosser 0:03
Welcome to Diversify the Stand. Together we build a community to listen and learn from the stories and experiences of passionate musicians. I'm Carrie Blosser.
Ashley Killam 0:12
And I'm Ashley Killam. In our second season, we talk with musicians, performers, educators, historians, and entrepreneurs to expand how we think of the music we perform and follow non-traditional career paths. Our guest for episode 14 is soon-to-be-Dr. Brandi Waller-Pace. Brandi is a PhD student at the University of North Texas, an elementary music educator, and the founder and Executive Director of the nonprofit Decolonize the Music Room. She is an absolute icon for both Carrie and myself, and we are so grateful for the time that she gave to talk with us. We chat about her upbringing, anti-racist practices, where she sees the future of music education, and just so much more. And if you'd like to contribute and donate and help out Decolonize the Music Room, links to do so are in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 1:01
Well, wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us.
Brandi Waller-Pace 1:05
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
Carrie Blosser 1:07
We wanted to ask you how you got started in music?
Brandi Waller-Pace 1:11
Ooh, yeah. Um, I guess I'll talk formal first and then informal. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, was really fortunate that I had general music all throughout elementary school. I loved my music teacher, so I was always really into going to class and listening and doing all the things. And when I was younger, I did church choir, I was raised in United Methodist Church, and got to sing with the little ones on Kid’s Sunday or whatever they called it. And then in the home, I just had parents who, you know, they would love to hear me say I really loved their very cool music. They listened to a lot of, like, Motown-era R&B and 70s funk and, like, 80s R&B. It still really shapes a lot of my listening and preferences and stuff I hand out to my own students and kids. My kids are accustomed to a lot of what would be considered “oldies.” In middle school, I became a choral kid. And I loved being in choir. And when I got to high school—well, middle school, there were a lot of guitarists, and there were a couple of, like, really badass musicians who came out of just, like, middle school choir, still doing amazing stuff now. So in high school, I said, I'm going to play guitar and I used to, like, come to school and, like, wear this guitar on my back. And it was very dorky, but it was very fun. And I went to a high school with a magnet arts program. And did choir there and dance there and got to do, like, we did an opera, we did musicals, and all kinds of stuff. And I started just messing around on keyboard by that point. So I was able to take some piano lessons and started listening to all kinds of stuff. And when I graduated, I went to Howard University, HU—you know we’re required each time to say that—I actually went in as a Dance major. And by that time, I was, like, my body, like, my knee it messed up. I was like, I can't dance. So I switched right away to Jazz Studies and then did my undergrad and grad in Jazz Studies and went into teaching, and—this is such a multi-layered answer. I was able to still do some jazz gigging here and there. I had my kids fairly early, so there's a lot of, like, teaching and taking care of small children. And then in my early 30s I picked up the banjo and got really into it, thought I was gonna learn banjo a lot right away, but the person who wanted to teach me was like hey, we need a guitarist and a singer for our string band. So I spent several years playing with a trio that's now become the duo pacing barber, hope to be reunited with Dean Barber live soon. I mostly play guitar, he mostly plays banjo, we sing. And so there are these, like, parallel lines of old time early American music performance and learning going on, and then continuing jazz and writing my own stuff in any kind of style I saw fit, and arrangements and things, and it's just expanded from there.
Carrie Blosser 4:26
I love how so much, like, our earliest music memories really shape, like, the tone of things, like the actual tone and, like, the ensembles that go too, that's so fascinating.
Brandi Waller-Pace 4:37
Yeah, I had to talk to my mom about a good night song she used to sing to me. My mom used to sing me the good night song from the Lawrence Welk Show. And I didn't know it was Lawrence Welk until I grew up and I heard it, the full thing one day and I was like, oh my gosh. So even though, you know, my parents are doing all this other stuff like the song from Lawrence Welk Show, like, we used to watch Hee Haw when I was younger, and, like, Mama’s Family, you know, like, just all these things are like these, all these other musical things that bled in as well. And so I've always listened to everything under the sun and get in where I fit in wherever somebody wants me to play or sing, I'll do it.
Ashley Killam 5:14
And then you built this really—one of Carrie and my favorite resources, you built the Decolonizing the Music Room, we'd love to hear how how you started that and just kind of how the community you've built is so important.
Brandi Waller-Pace 5:29
So let's see, I taught in public schools down here in Fort Worth, a neighboring district, about a year and a half, and then Fort Worth Independent School District for 10 years. I taught predominantly racially minoritized students, mostly Black, mostly African Americans, some of other parts of the diaspora, or from African countries, and then Latinx children, predominantly of Mexican descent, and from other groups. So a lot of things are happening at the same time, like, my first training was Kodaly. And I started in Fort Worth ISD and was doing a lot of work just kind of mixing my own experiences with that, because I didn't have a Music Ed degree, I got certified afterward, which was kind of cool, because incorporating the stuff I learned as a jazz major, I feel like was super valuable. In addition to everything under the sun, I was like, if I can take it, I'll take it. And my district funded so much training, so I've done, like, a million things. I was very fortunate for that. At the same time, my own children were growing up. And so a couple of things happened. My oldest child, who is an eighth grader now, got to the stage where he started kindergarten, and he started in a school in my district, I don't know, maybe two miles from where I taught. Night and day. Demographics were much different, maybe 5% Black, a heavily gentrifying neighborhood that was getting wider and wider and more affluent. And I noticed things about the resources, the class sizes, all the frustrations and things I experienced as a teacher and we as a staff experience serving our students, were things that weren't an issue at my kid’s school. And I was grateful he was there because it was like a public Montessori lottery school. And we had done preschool in Montessori, so we just really liked the philosophy. But the disparities got larger and larger when I was comparing my own students, being a parent in another school versus all kinds of things where I was teaching. So, got super angry, very, very fueled by my anger to the disparities, and started doing district committee work, which eventually led to being on the Racial Equity Committee. So at that point, there was racial equity committee work, me doing even more of my own study and research, talking to people that had gone through Orff levels and started doing Gordon by then, and I was paying more attention to things that were happening in music ed among my colleagues, and then also got to the point where started playing old time music and looking at a lot of histories of songs, and just things melded together after a certain point. And I think what happened, starting the organization was I had been engaging with teachers online and in person about backgrounds of songs, and just framing of how we were looking at things and getting people to understand that, especially, you know, as a Black person, if the music is referencing my own culture, then maybe you should talk more to Black people about what it means to use certain songs or to reference certain things according to our cultural verses. Which, you know, typically, that doesn't happen. Typically, we're not being listened to in the same way. So I had a really odd interaction with a couple of educators that I feel like just, you know, kind of pushed it over the edge. I had a couple of friends, colleagues, asking if I had put any of the stuff I had been looking at online anywhere. And, you know, when this final straw happened, I had one really, really good music teacher friend who was like, I think it's time for you to start, like, an actual resource. And so he encouraged me to take a look at making a site and gathering info. And he and I believe two or three other educators were the ones that I brainstormed with a lot. I had gone ahead and gotten the site. I’d had a Facebook group that discussed these issues already, but it barely had any traction in it. Nothing was really going on. So once we were able to get things together for a formal launch, it stood out, gained some more popularity because first of all, the word decolonizing just has an impact. I have complicated feelings about my choice of that word, but I've written about it, it’s a thing. And so people started to come into the group more as well. And it just grew from there. The thing I love about the Facebook group is we've had to develop some really intentional norms and boundaries, as racially minoritized folks, that typically society is not accustomed to respecting, not accustomed to listening to, not accustomed to letting us guide the dialogue or reference our own lived experience. And there's a lot of deflection and gaslighting and justifying that happens when these issues come up. But we have an excellent team of admins and mods. And, you know, I always say, like, we're, like, building the bike while we're riding the bike. And so, you know, we've had boundaries crossed, you've had really unfortunate things happen. And so we just come together and say, what is it that we can do to be more intentional about having these things protected, not just for us, but for other people who are actually being centered in the work, because our mission is to center racially minoritized folks. And we know that white people are going to be along for the ride, along for the work. And that's the dominant group in music education. But understanding that when we are referencing our own culture and experiences, it's okay for us to be centered in them, has guided a lot of how we handle everything. And it's been such a really good source of reframing dialogue. And what's been super rewarding is there are people for whom things click right away. It's not, like, allegiance, or else! They can just, things resonate with them. But then there are sometimes people who just completely blow off and they just, like, disappear or get angry or whatever. Then, like, six months later, a year later, they'll say, you know, I left and I got super angry, and then I just sat with it for a long time, and I started looking at it, and I kind of get what the issue was. And that makes me feel really hopeful. Because sometimes things get really stressful, and really hard emotionally in the moment. But knowing that, that doesn't always mean that that's going to be an issue forever. And that the long processing that it sometimes takes really does happen. It's, yeah, it's really great.
Ashley Killam 12:22
That's incredible. And, I mean, you get so—when you get groups like that, and that's, I guess the one perk of technology, you get all of these people coming together in this space, which is a pro and a con at the same point. But having a space where, you know, people can question and reflect and take that time.
Brandi Waller-Pace 12:42
Yeah.
Ashley Killam 12:43
Just, so having spaces like this to just learn is incredible.
Brandi Waller-Pace 12:47
That's great. Yeah, and we got to a point where we had to enforce a three day listening and, you know, just observation period. And we put out all of our definitions, what things mean, exactly who we are, what the nonprofit is, because it's really important, you know everyone's not going to comment, but just being able to soak things in and process without making other people bear the burden of the processing, if that makes sense, you know? It almost makes me think about, like, how we deal with our students, because we get stressed out, upset, angry, it's okay that kids see that, but we know it's not a kid's place to take on our issues. And it's obviously not going to be an exact parallel with students, but it's similar as well, people who are grappling with these issues should be in the practice of not further burdening the people who have to live through those issues, and find ways to engage in dialogue where, you know, we can still work together, but it's not layering on additional harm. And it's been cool to see people, I guess kind of take the ego and defense out of it. Because we, you know, there's so much of like a scarcity mindset. And people sometimes come in thinking about, like, I can't do this, I can't have this. And it's almost like, you know, how dare you. I can't say this, and I can't access this, and I can't such and such, I just have to, like, sit and listen? You know, it's—sitting and listening is good. And that's why we do things like we consult and present. And when we're in presentations, we say, here's some good processing time, let's talk through this together, and then join our community. And that's kind of the next phase is, like, and now we're going to really reframe what happens after we process it. And we've had that space that, you know, we are here with intention for you in this presentation. And our, you know, our purpose here is for you to be able to talk out all of those things.
Carrie Blosser 14:41
Continuing that frame of that thought, we'd love to hear your thoughts and advice on building inclusive classrooms. Of, you know, either for music education and general music, or even in a collegiate setting, too, in regards to anti-racist practices and educating students kind of in all areas of music history, and not just a very white-centered history.
Brandi Waller-Pace 15:04
So obviously, the biggest thing is getting informed. And again, back to the group, we have people who tell their stories or point to different narratives and understanding that there are so many things in our field that need to be questioned. So I took a history of US Music Education course, and if I looked at all the readings, it was, like, no wonder it’s going to be framed a certain way. And it really gave me a lot more input on why music ed as a whole field would be framed a certain way. So, I mean, get to know other people's stories from their point of view and look for the counter narratives, and why things are considered “standard,” or they have to be this way, and what we might be missing. That's a really good start. But, one, it's going to take time. So you have to figure out what you can do when you can do it. Because, you know, I taught for eight years before I even started doing this, and had my own understanding, but it's still been processing and I'm still continuing to process. And then understanding exactly what all these issues mean, which is why we talk about foundational vocabulary first, like, what is the social construction of race? What is whiteness? What is tokenizing? You know, what are all these things anyway? And what are the actual stories behind them, and then understanding that there are so many identity intersections. So our mission focuses on race, racial minoritization, sometimes ethnicity and nationality overlap, but we focus a lot on racial construction. But then, like, then you've got to talk about ableism. And you got to talk about cisgender-ism, and you got to talk about heteronormativity. And, you know, like, you really have to dig into all that stuff, because inclusivity is going to mean all the people, right? And so there's just so so much to unpack. And so starting with understanding what things mean, understanding the history of what we're doing, understanding just, you know, you teach in the US, you need to know a lot of US society history, the history of your locality, you need to know a lot of educational history. So I teach in Fort Worth, I'm from Atlanta, but I teach in Fort Worth. So I've got to learn, like, I had—my daughter did a project and it was really helpful for me actually, but she chose it. It was really cool, because she wanted to talk about desegregation, because their dad's grandpa was the first Black bus driver in Fort Worth, which is really cool. So they're like, you know, we want to learn about great grandpa, they hadn't met him, but they know his story. There's this book called Fort Worth in Black and White. So we went through that and went through other stuff, and we learned the history of desegregation in Fort Worth, and the area in particular, and, you know, just all these things that teach you about the issues where you live. And so even me being in the district, learning things in present time, going back and understanding, like, oh, that's why in this neighborhood, B schools look like this. You know what I mean? And just, like, understanding the framing behind it all, it sounds, I feel like to someone who's new it sounds so meta, and it sounds like, but wait a minute, I need, like, a lesson plan, right? But it's really about like, how are you thinking? Where are your ideas and thoughts coming from? And when we talk about songs, I always say the song lists are the fruit not the root, right? So you have to get to the root of like, what is your thinking doing, because everything is going to grow out of that. And at the same time, connect with others who are on the same journey, maybe in your place, have gone further along, and connecting with your students and your community and finding out how that transfer means. And we remind teachers, we're all very, very heavily skilled individuals. We're well-educated, and we have to do, you know, five jobs at one time. And so applying that same level of rigor we're expected to apply when we learn our Western European classical history, or we do our theory classes, or we do, like, whatever training, whatever it is we do, just turn that spotlight in the same direction when it comes to this stuff. And then, you know, it'll lead you. I hope that doesn't sound super vague. I'm like, you know, we only have an hour but that's the general idea.
Ashley Killam 19:11
No, it's incredible. And it's, I mean, once you start on the journey, it kind of builds itself, like, I mean, or at least me, like when I start going down the rabbit hole of something, like, there's always more resources and more things to read and listen to and just follow up on, and the more you get into it, the more it's just easy to, you know, incorporate it in everything and just make it part of what you do and how you build your practice.
Brandi Waller-Pace 19:39
Right, and again, like you said, it can be like drinking from a water hose at the beginning. But yeah, just knowing we can't have that scarcity mindset and we can't think all or nothing, we can't think “Well, I can't do all this stuff, so I can't do anything,” and we also can't think like slippery slope. I think we, especially when we start talking about including other musics, other narratives, other people—I hate the word “other,” but I'm using that with intention because we other folks outside of, like, dominant whiteness, right? We get a lot of “So we can't do any Western European classical music and we can't include any white people?” And I'm like, when did anyone ever say that? And it's so frustrating, you know, being from a place where that's my lived experience where even suggesting that, like, more of someone of my identity is included, is perceived as a complete erasure of what has dominated for centuries, right?
Ashley Killam 20:33
Yep.
Brandi Waller-Pace 20:34
And erase so much other stuff. So it's really interesting. And I think a really big part of it is people understanding that there's going to be power and privilege and upfront presence. You're just not going to be able to be the things that—not necessarily you—the things that you have prized and consider the most valid things, you have to realize it's not like that for everyone. And that it's not, it's going to have to not hold the spotlight in the same way, which is really normal. It's really interesting, because the deflections will be like, you know, people should be equal, but then we talk about something as simple as like, well, then let's have the curriculum be equal for the people, and it’s like, no, all the classical music's gonna go away. And it's like, but I thought we said equal. But I don't say—I say equitable and equal are different things. But it's just a very, very easy deflection that comes up.
Ashley Killam 21:29
You're very in the education scene right now with all of this, and you're seeing a lot of these different areas and facets. Where do you see the future of music education moving?
Brandi Waller-Pace 21:40
In my head, I have three paths. One is like, I know US history. And unfortunately, this is what might happen. One is kind of in the middle, and one is like, best dream ever, right? So the first one is considering what's going on legislatively throughout the country and seeing what's happening socially, we're in the middle of a really extensive backlash, that will continue to backlash, and we'll get a lot of pushback, and there will be a lot of danger for those in their positions who would advocate for these things. And so it will kind of just get squashed down for a while. And we'll have to, there will have to be a resurgence. So that's like, overly pragmatic, worst case scenario. Who knows, history has taught us things, right? In the middle is the language and subjects we talk about will begin to be normalized, and they will become part of regular thought and consideration. But because we're still within the system we're in, there'll be a certain place they can go and things will be better than they were. But, you know, okay, depending on where you are, and then, like, the best thing will be like, the whole house will fall down. And we'll have to abolish, which people don't understand means you have to rebuild something, right. I didn't know a lot about abolitionist teaching concepts. And somebody I recommend everybody read is Dr. Bettina Love. Amazing. Her book We Want to Do More than Survive is excellent. And she has the oh, I always get the words out of order, is it Abolitionist Teaching Network, I believe? She was one who started that. And people will think abolition is just, like, destruction of a thing, right. But part of abolition is the rebuilding. So in my ideal world, we just, everything just gets washed away, we rebuild. And there are really great things in the rebuilding, and maybe there's some things that were there before that will be really valid to stick around. Or maybe it'll be 100% reimagining, I don't know, but it would be very lovely. But we'd have to give up a lot of power. Like, I myself would not have as much work if, like, if things were how they needed to be, my work would taper off. And then I would have the opportunity or necessity to be like, oh, what is my work now that, like, we've started building these things, and you know, I'd be able to turn to something that wasn't quite in the same line, I'd have to shift gears, and it'd be a really cool necessity, but it would mean I wouldn't have the same kind of attention. And the organization wouldn’t have the same kind of attention. But hey, that's the ideal. You got to give it up, right? To build a different future.
“Decolonizing the Music Classroom” would just be “The Classroom.”
“The Classroom,” but you know, we would constantly be decolonizing obviously, but yeah, we just, we wouldn't have “who gets the keynote, and who gets the special in for this conference or that conference, or who gets to be the special curriculum person,” in the way that it is now. It would be a very different scene.
Carrie Blosser 25:04
Would it be a good problem?
Brandi Waller-Pace 25:06
It'd be exciting and frightening and just all of those things mixed together.
Carrie Blosser 25:12
Do you have any projects that you are working on currently either through Decolonizing the Classroom or any other organizations that you're a part of?
Brandi Waller-Pace 25:24
Yes, so Decolonizing the Music Room right now, the biggest thing we are working on is year two of our fourth African American Roots Music Festival. We launched last year, we had to postpone due to COVID, then we had to go online due to COVID. So now you can find it on, you know, our Facebook, our website, our YouTube channel. And the mission of that festival is to teach about and show the presence of Blackness in early American music. So old time string band, jug band, early blues, early jazz, and teach about the past, talk about community that's making it in the present, because there's so much wonderful reclamation going on in the traditional music community. And it's getting Blacker, it's really lovely. And you know, what they're doing to forward the music, and where this is all going to lead. So next March, we will be—COVID, you know, notwithstanding, we will be in Fort Worth at South Side Preservation Hall with some pretty amazing acts. And they'll be playing and singing and teaching and hopefully dancing if COVID lets us dance together. And so that's kind of the biggest thing. We're still chugging along with the nonprofit and building because we're still so new. We need to get our funding together. What is really beautiful is we've had so much grassroots support, and we've had some bigger support that's been able to handle our programming, and part of our values are compensating people. So we've been able to establish norms about compensation. But now it's like, we need long term financial infrastructure. So those are the biggest things with the organization. Projects I'm working on currently, for those who don't know who are listening, I'm currently a PhD student in Music Ed at the University of North Texas. So everything is projects at this point. Classes and papers and submissions and abstracts and proposals and all kinds of stuff. I'm still trying to actively make music. So that's a really big thing. I have three children and parenting them is one of the most taxing and joyful projects of all. Oh, do you want to hear a very random nerdy project? I just—the kids don't know—I just bought tickets to a Con in my city. And so that project will be making sure we all have a really good family cosplay together.
Carrie Blosser 28:03
All right, we're in the final rounds. The last question, what is on your music stand this week? And how are you diversifying your stand?
Brandi Waller-Pace 28:13
So since I'm a student now, I, this year, have been Teacher Assistant-ing. So not quite as much leading with what I have students doing. So I've been doing a lot of my own listening. Let's see, I knew this was the one I was gonna have to think the most about. I really liked when I was in the classroom, you know, introducing a broader range of music beyond folk and classical and even notated stuff and things that would be more popular, because sometimes we look down on, oftentimes we see people look down on popular music as if they can't be quality. So there are all kinds of stuff like that in. So I've been listening to a ridiculous amount of Esperanza Spalding, which I have brought into the classroom with my students. And I got to assist in a class that's, like, elementary music methods last week, that's what I've been working with this semester. And they were doing some work and it called for them picking composers so I was like, just remember composers can mean anything. So I was like, you know, Joe Hisaishi who wrote the scores to all the Studio Ghibli movies and stuff like that, because, as I've said already, I'm a nerd. So that's kind of always floating there. And beyond that is more just, like, my own listening. And I tend to listen to an extremely broad range of music, but I think what has helped me diversify the most, I have to go back to last school year when I was teaching my own class, I, under the fellowship that I have, I got to teach my own course last semester, and one of the first assignments we did was, like, a music identity project, and they picked three or four songs, and they talked about their significance to them. And so that, for me, was a really nice point of diversification as like, what are students who were 20 years younger than me? What are they listening to? And so there were some that were connected to styles I was familiar with, but totally new stuff, or some things older that were totally new to me. And we got to talk about genres. And I learned about a couple of different styles of music that were very specific to certain communities that I didn't really know about. So I love the idea of, you know, it's like, oh, I listen to everything and then, but now it's time to listen to students. And then guess what, there's a lot of stuff you haven’t heard. And that's been really cool.
Carrie Blosser 30:43
That's fantastic. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us.
Brandi Waller-Pace 30:46
Thank you for having me. It was nice talking to you.
Ashley Killam 30:50
Thank you for listening to Diversify the Stand. I'm Ashley.
Carrie Blosser 30:53
And I'm Carrie. If you'd like to support us and our projects, find us on social media and visit our website. We now have a store where you can pick up some Diversify the Stand gear.
Ashley Killam 31:03
And as always, a huge thank you to Trevor Weston and Whitney George for allowing us to use their compositions in our podcast. The Musical introduction is Trevor's trumpet duet Fanfare for Changes, and the ending music is Whitney's Incantations for trumpet and piano. Both composers’ websites are listed in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 31:21
Until next week, what's on your stand?