I want to tell you about the moment I stopped trying to get everyone on the same note.
It was years ago, in a rehearsal room, and I was doing what so many of us do: chasing unison. Same vowel, same breath, same attack — as if sameness were the goal. I was leading musicians, but I was afraid of the very thing that makes music powerful. Music was never meant to be unison. At its best, it is polyphony: independent voices, each with its own line, its own rhythm, its own story, woven into something none of them could make alone.
That idea became the heart of my keynote at the NAfME National Assembly this summer, and it has changed the way I lead — in the classroom, in the boardroom, everywhere.
Most of us were taught to lead like conductors of the old school: top-down, the conductor commands and the students comply. I call that “simple hearing.” Defending positions. Talking past each other. Silencing tension. Enforcing sameness. It can produce a clean performance, but it costs us something real.
The alternative is what I call radical listening: the active willingness to be transformed by what others say. In an ensemble, that means no single voice dominates forever. It means leaning into tension — into dissonance — as an invitation for resolution rather than something to smooth over or silence. It means honoring every voice in the room.
Bring that into your classroom. When a student phrases something differently than you imagined — do you correct it, or do you get curious about it? Radical listening does not mean abandoning standards. It means holding your musical vision loosely enough that your students’ voices can genuinely shape it. The ensemble gets better, and so do they.
Nowhere is this harder to teach than in vocal jazz improvisation — a thread I follow throughout my book Sing Vocal Jazz, Teach Vocal Jazz. When a young singer steps out to solo, every instinct says cling to the melody, play it safe. The deeper lesson is trust: trust that the rhythm section is listening as intently as you are, supporting and improvising with you in real time. The pianist’s voicings shift beneath your phrase; the bassist answers your rhythm. That trust can’t be drilled. It is built chorus by chorus, through radical listening — one of the hardest concepts to impart, and one of the most rewarding when it lands.
This is not just philosophy. Our history as American music educators is full of it. In my keynote, I traced the lineage of songs like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” — Julia Ward Howe’s new words set to the old tune of “John Brown’s Body,” carried from the abolitionists of 1861 to the civil rights movement a century later — and “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with text by James Weldon Johnson and music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, written in 1900, later recognized by the NAACP as the Black National Anthem. These songs endured because they carried many voices across generations: abolitionists, marchers, schoolchildren, each singing the same song and meaning something personal by it. Our history inspires our future — and the repertoire we choose, and the stories we tell about it, is leadership.
So how do we actually do this — in a band room, on a podium, in a department meeting? In the keynote I laid out three moves for orchestrating change. Here they are, translated for the classroom:
First, identify the paradigm. Take an honest map of your program as it actually is. Whose voices go unheard? Which students never get asked, never see themselves in the repertoire? You cannot change what you have not named.
Second, acknowledge expertise. Your students know things you do not — about their musical traditions, their communities, their lives. Empower the people in the room who carry knowledge you lack, and make it safe for unfamiliar perspectives to enter without being minimized or treated as a special project. The student who sings in church on Sundays, the one producing beats in a bedroom — they are not empty vessels. They are musicians already.
Third, create the overarching strategy. Stop running isolated, stopgap efforts — one diversity concert a year, one guest artist, one unit — and build something integrated. Align what you say your program values with what students actually experience, day after day. Effective change requires an integrated strategy, not a collection of misaligned projects.
I will be honest with you: this is harder than chasing unison. Polyphony is messy. Dissonance is uncomfortable. But here is what I have learned: harmony is not the absence of difference. Harmony is what happens when differences are heard, held, and woven together with intention.
If radical listening can create harmony in the ensemble, imagine what it can do in our profession.
That is the work. And it is the most musical work there is.