Finding Purpose in Music Education with Chris Munce (Part 1) | 188

Today on Crescendo Chat, I’m joined by Chris Munce — choral conductor, educator, and host of Choralosophy, one of the world’s top music education podcasts and a leading voice in global choral education.

Chris has spent more than 20 years as a choral director at Lee’s Summit High School. He also directs Kantorei KC, a professional choir based in Kansas City. Alongside that work, he’s built Choralosophy into a space where educators explore the philosophy, purpose, and humanity behind music education.

In this first part of our conversation, we dive into Chris’s story. We talk about the experiences that shaped him as a conductor, teacher, and communicator. We also explore why he started Choralosophy and what he’s learned from speaking with some of the world’s leading thinkers in choral music and education.

This episode goes beyond rehearsal strategies and warmups. It asks bigger questions. Why does choral music matter? What does singing together do for young people? And how do we hold onto purpose when teaching starts to feel overwhelming?

Chris has a way of connecting philosophy with practical teaching in a deeply thoughtful and accessible way. So whether you teach choir, classroom music, or simply care about helping students grow through music, there is so much here to reflect on.

Connect with Chris: 

• Website
• Podcast

Where to find me: 

Crescendo Community Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/crescendocommunity
Official Crescendo Page: https://www.facebook.com/CrescendoMusicEd/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/CrescendoMusicEd
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crescendomusic
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbie-o-shea-62a3741b/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/CrescendoDeb

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Introduction

Gday, I’m Debbie O’Shea and this is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 188.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

Chris Munce’s Background and the Growth of Choralosophy

Debbie O’Shea  

You will be so glad that you joined me for this episode of the Crescendo Music Education Podcast. I’m going to chat with Chris Munce, who is a choral director and the host of the podcast Choralosophy. In this first episode of two, we’re going to talk about his background, his philosophy and some big ideas. How his podcast grew and how it began and then grew very rapidly through Covid. The importance of authenticity in teaching and in podcasting, the challenges of assessment and choir as a model for humanity and connection. That’s just some of the things that we’re going to touch on in part one of my chat with Chris Munce. Sit back and enjoy people. 

Debbie O’Shea  

I would like to welcome to the Crescendo Music Education Podcast Chris Munce. Hello, Chris.

Chris Munce  

Hello. Thank you for having me. This will be fun.

Debbie O’Shea  

I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, though across the Zoom, but still I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I’ve been having a little bit of a binge on your podcast since I’ve discovered you.

Chris Munce  

Wonderful, hopefully I haven’t offended you yet?

Debbie O’Shea  

No, we’ll have to talk about that, because I have heard you say in the few podcasts that I’ve listened to that basically look if I offend you sorry, I’m thinking, but I’m not sure what you’re worried about, what is it that might offend people. We’ll get to that because I just love listening to your thoughts and philosophy on music education and choral work, and how can it be offensive if that’s your idea on how it works?

Chris Munce  

It is amazing, but that’s the internet, I think. You can offend somebody, if you throw a rock far enough, you’ll hit somebody who’s offended.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yes, yes, yeah. I guess that’s true. Just be offended by me being me. Yeah, true. All right, now those of you who have not discovered Choralosophy yet, I’ll just do this tiny little intro. I’m sure that all of my listeners, after this they’ll all get on their players and add it to their playlist. So you are the host of Choralosophy, the world’s top music education podcast. It’s been in the top 1% choir podcasts. Over four years you’ve been doing this and it’s a top performing arts podcast too, not just music, it’s in the arts category, that’s so good. You are the director of Kantorei KC, a professional choir in Kansas City and has been a choral director at Lee’s Summit High School for 20 years. He holds a Masters of Music, sorry, Master of Music in Choral Conducting from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance. So sorry if I mucked up some of that. That’s just a really brief intro on who you are. So, what would you like to add to that snapshot of your work, Chris?

Chris Munce  

Well, thank you, I appreciate that snapshot and it’s lovely. The one thing I would say with the podcast specifically, that part of my work, I will correct one thing you said there. Actually, it’s seven years old. I started in February 2019 and have been going pretty consistently the entire time. I started out doing a show whenever I felt like it. But it was pretty darn quick into that process, probably the first year by 2020, I was going every week and it is now a weekly podcast, something that I now consider to be part of my job. So I’ve been creating it like a content generating machine, ever since about 2021 or so it’s been consistent, but the show actually started in February 2019. So a fun story for your listeners could possibly be how that really came about, which is that the podcast was there when the pandemic happened, which is really when the podcast took off because in the United States and I’m sure that you had these conversations in Australia at the time as well. In fact, I know you did, because I participated in some of them back then with Australian choral directors and music teachers, that it became a worldwide phenomenon to talk about how it is just not safe to sing during this time and we cannot sing. I felt like that was a low nuance way to look at it. I felt like there were things we could do to make it safer. There were things that we could do, short of saying, well we’re just going to shut everything down for two years until we figure all this out. I started to become very concerned with people losing their jobs, which actually did happen during that time. So what I did was on a wing and a prayer, went to one of the top COVID experts in the world, who is on our CNN news here, he is on the Johns Hopkins University pandemic preparedness plan and was advising our national politicians. I sent him a message on Twitter and I said I run this little choir podcast and my entire profession is freaking out. I don’t expect you to respond to this, but it would be amazing to me and to us, to all of my colleagues, if you would come and just tell us what, this was May 2020, tell us what is going on and will you give us a nuanced but also honest science-based perspective. I could not believe it, but he wrote back in like 20 minutes and he said, “I’ve got 30 minutes between rounds at Johns Hopkins tomorrow, if you can make time”. So I took the day off of teaching virtually and I blocked off the time, and I recorded that episode. It exploded, it was quoted by the New York Times and it brought 10,000 people to my show, like within a minute. Then from there, because he came on, a bunch of other top COVID experts were also willing to come on, because they said they suddenly saw me as like a legitimate commentator and it caused the show to explode. I got a lot of listeners that way, but it also brought a lot of controversy, because I was talking about topics that people were very passionate and afraid of at the time. Ever since then I’ve been doing a show that, because I saw how people craved and reacted to genuine, honest conversation, whether they agreed or disagreed. I kept going with that model and now I talk about music education policy. I talk about music education philosophy, pedagogy and how to teach kids how to do stuff well musically. We really run the gamut, but we don’t pull any punches and we say what we really honestly feel. Sometimes people get upset by that, but I think it’s important and I think people really appreciate the honesty that they find on the show. Then the other thing I would say for your listeners is that because people globally know me as the podcast guy, I also am mostly a music teacher, that is what I do every day. That is my main job is teaching high school choir and in the US, that means age 14 to 18 typically, so grades 9 through 12. I lead a program at the high school that I grew up in, so I was a student there as a kid, and I now teach there. We have seven choirs at the high school, four of them happen during the school day, and three of them happen outside of school. So we have beginning level, we have intermediate level, we have advanced level groups that are doing collegiate level repertoire. So it’s a really great place to teach. Then, of course, Kantorei KC is a professional choir that I founded back in 2009 and so we have a staff of 12 singers and we put on performances and clinics with kids and all kinds of things. So that’s me in a nutshell.

Debbie O’Shea  

Oh, that sounds slightly busy, but it sounds like a great working environment. You can actually practice what you preach.

Chris Munce  

Do you know that’s very astute.

Debbie O’Shea  

People must appreciate that.

Chris Munce  

Yeah, that’s very astute. I think it works for me, simply because all of my jobs cross-pollinate. If that makes sense? I’m not having to think about three different jobs really. My job is music educator, conductor, and I just do it in different ways. Then on the podcast, I talk about doing it, so it’s great.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yes, I hear you and the way I see my work. Because I work at the moment till the end of this year full time in primary schools, your elementary schools, sort of 4 to 11 year olds. My passion is Crescendo, which has the podcast and summits and webinars and workshops, all the social media. But it’s all connected and it’s the same job, just looking at it at different angles and about supporting and inspiring and helping growth in everyone from the kids you teach through to the people you’re talking to through this microphone right now.

Chris Munce  

Yeah, absolutely, that’s great.

Debbie O’Shea  

It is very busy though. If your podcast is becoming well, it’s very successful and becoming more successful. Is there a temptation to go, “Oh, I need to cut back my teaching a bit”, or don’t you feel that as a temptation?

Authenticity in Teaching and Podcasting

Chris Munce  

Not with my teaching, no. I tell you this because, of course, the kids at my school know that I’m a podcaster. Also, they sometimes make fun of me for it, or because I talk to so many great educators, and I bring on experts of the different aspects of music education, so I will come into the classroom and try a new warm-up for example for the choirs and the kids will make the joke, “Oh, Mr. Munce did a podcast again last night, he’s never asked us to do that before”. Because I’m always hearing these ideas these great colleagues have and I go into the classroom and I try it. Sometimes I try it once and I didn’t really like that, and then sometimes I go in and try it, and it just is a home run, and we now have something part of our repertoire that we can use to help kids get better. So it’s a beautiful thing I do. I also have done church music for the last 20 years in addition to that and I did cut back on that very recently. In fact, Easter Sunday was my last Sunday doing church music, that was my fourth job, so I got rid of that one and I’m very relieved. I loved the people, my church choir was a lovely group of humans. But for the exact reason that you said, it’s just getting to the point where I don’t have enough brain space to give everything the attention that it deserves. But the podcast and school are really my two things that I see as going together. I feel like I would actually lose quite a bit of the cache that my audience gives me if I was not doing it. Just talking about it is one thing and you can say interesting things and all of that, but I think people pay attention to what I say because I talk about it, and then I can also show that it works. I can show that I’m actually doing it and that gives me some credibility. So, I think I see those as going hand in hand.

Chris Munce  

Yeah, and it’s interesting because that is something I hear from audience members, is one of the things that they appreciate is because I get a lot of audience feedback, or various things on my Patreon and back channels, and other types, even Facebook instant messages. People just pop in and they do mention that sense of authenticity. They also mention that it seems like when they listen to my show they’re not getting some kind of curated, safe for a presentation, using the approved language that everyone uses, kind of thing. Which I think for some reason that shows, or that presents to people as authentic. I actually had this conversation with an administrator at one of the schools that I worked for, well current school, but different administrator that’s no longer there. She came up with an initiative one year, many years ago, where in order to make all of our students in the building feel welcome, we were handed a script of the things we will say, because they’re science-based proven things that if we say them to kids, they will feel welcome. Because there was probably a survey that was done or something and I said I’m not doing this. As soon as they hear me say the thing, they’re going to hear their English teacher say the same thing, then their PE teacher is going to say the same thing, and kids can sniff out inauthenticity faster than adults can, and they will call BS so quickly. I’m going to lose the ability to make them feel welcome, because I’m reading from this script. I’m going to talk to you exactly how I would talk to anyone else and that’s what comes through on the podcast, because I just, I don’t know any other speed. That’s partly maybe my borderline autism, where I just don’t know how to put on the BS filter, so it doesn’t come through the show, it doesn’t come through my classroom. I think in the internet curated world that we live in, that’s a breath of fresh air for some people.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I’ve been doing Crescendo for 26 years now and I know that that’s part of the reason why my colleagues respect what I do. They know I do the job and when you’re real and you are quite real, you come across as quite authentic and real. You can say, I did this, it didn’t quite work, or I was planning to do this, but you know what, its assessment time, it’s got to wait. Because we know that we’re living their life, it does make us more approachable and more real. I think that is one of the things, obviously, that really attracts listeners to you. I’m certain of it.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yeah. Oh, I love it, and I love that example you give and you know what, if you did that, you would lose so much credibility with your kids. Any relationship that you’d built, any street cred, so I’m showing my age I guess, but that credibility you have, those kids have a relationship with you, they don’t have a relationship with the script.

Chris Munce  

Right, or administrators typically. I mean, some schools, primary schools might be a little bit more where the principal or the headmaster can get in there and work with the kids. But I mean there’s 2000 kids in my school, so the principal doesn’t know all the kids. Teachers are the frontline workers, we’re the ones that have that people facing, so it’s that part of what I do is just as a passion and of course I’ve done episodes over the years about music literacy, but also philosophy and teaching the voice and all of those types of things. But I’ve also done quite a bit and it’s been in demand for me over the years of talking about relationship building episodes of how to recruit kids into a music program, how to keep them once you get them, that kind of thing. So really any topic that is a music educator’s thorn in their side, or thorn in their paw, so to speak. Then I’ll probably have an episode in my catalogue about that, because I deal with it too. That’s one of the things that I try to do and I know that for some colleagues who hear me turn on a microphone and have a platform to say my opinion, I do get a lot of, who does he think he is reaction. To me, I can’t control that. My choices there are just turn off the microphone or at least make an attempt to lead with on the show. I try to do this and I try to make it clear that I’m half the things I’m telling you, like if I say that the music education profession has done something wrong for the last 50 years, it’s because I did it wrong too and I figured out this other way that I think is better. I’m going to explain to you why I think it’s better. Ultimately some people tune out right as soon as they hear, I think that you’ve did it wrong. My show has a controversial label and that’s part of why, is because I see myself as a supporter of the profession, but also a critic when it needs it. That’s something that’s important to me, because if I think that we can serve kids better by trying something new, then I’m going to advocate for that. So it just depends on the person’s personality. Some people love that conversation, they love to like, we could reinvent music education in ways that makes our repertoire better and our kids happier and that would be wonderful. Or some people take it as, but this is my way of doing it and he’s criticising it. So you know I can’t please everybody, so I just turn on the microphone and say what I think.

Self-Reflection, Evidence and Assessment in Music Education

Debbie O’Shea  

You can’t please all of the people all of the time. Two things jumped out at me in that when you were talking, the why me, but then why not you? Because I know that’s something I think most of us who are slightly in the limelight grapple with. Why am I doing a podcast? Why did I write a book last year? Why did I write a book? Who do I think I am? Who do you think you are? Yeah, but why not me? Do you know there’s always that other side. The other thing is, and this is what I appreciate about your show, is that you seem to be, and you encourage people to be very self-reflective, and isn’t that our job? 

Chris Munce  

I would hope.

Debbie O’Shea  

Should we not all be looking for better ways to communicate, to connect, to educate, to bring our children to be risk takers, and to feel safe, and to feel growth, and all of the wonderful things, belonging. So we should always be looking for better ways to do that, shouldn’t we?

Chris Munce  

Yeah, I would think so. I would think so and you know it’s an interesting thing, because in my teaching side of my life I’ve always taught as part of a team because the program is large and so we have more than one person and we have an accompanist and there’s of course the band teacher across the hall and then there’s the orchestra teacher and there’s a lot going on in the ensemble music program at my school. I would say probably 60%, over 23 years of teaching, of the colleagues that I’ve worked with closely, kind of appreciate that exact thing about me that you just said, which is self-reflective. They see it as like I’m constantly, I speak very openly, even before there was a podcast. It was a colleague of mine who suggested I even start a podcast, because she was like, “You’re just talking about how to do all this kind of stuff in the nerdiest possible ways all the time. Why don’t you just turn on a microphone? You’re doing it anyway, like you’re talking about it anyway. This would be a great idea” and they appreciate that. They see that even though I might be very critical when I think something is wrong, that the people who know me well know that I’m turning that lens on myself way more than I am anyone else and the discoveries that I make in that way are coming from that self-reflection. It’s not coming from a place of I think I’m perfect and I’m telling you that you’re wrong. It’s I suck at so many things and I feel like I’m trying to make lemonade out of that lemon, which is that we all are bad at certain things, so why not look at it as an opportunity to learn something new to grow. So with some of the teachers that have not enjoyed working around me that is oftentimes the reason why, is because they will say things like, well, I think we should try it this way and I will say why. Oftentimes there is no answer, and I will say, but then we’re not going to switch, we’re not going to change it, because we changed it to this way of doing things, because this, because this, because this, because this, because this, because this. I’m open to the possibility of changing the way we do this in the future, but there’s going to have to be like a why, what is the problem we’re trying to solve and how do we know this new way is going to be better than the old way. You have to get there through evaluation, through experimentation. I keep a lot of data on my students and assessments and I keep like every everything I claim that works, I have evidence that it works, so l think that that’s my standard. So when new employees come in that’s basically I want to tell them on day one we can change things absolutely in the future but you’ll need evidence. So start doing the work I’ve done and we can talk and compare evidence. Every school year we can reevaluate, nothing is set in stone, but we do have to have a process. I think education in general, the field of education has not been very good at that in general, so we don’t keep very good evidence, it’s very difficult for us to say with authority that our teaching method is good in a broad sense. So many teachers do it, they say, well it works for me and then my response is, but does it work for your students, and can you prove that it works for your students? Do they know more than they did when they met you? How could you prove it? I think that teachers should not shy away from that conversation and that’s a big part of what I believe in strongly.

Debbie O’Shea  

That is a very tricky question and I’m picking up little bits from what I’ve listened to you, you do sight singing assessments and track through that way. But I know, particularly as someone who is working with 4 year olds up to 11 year olds, getting data and evidence in a subject like ours does provide a few little issues for us. For example, I judge my work in part on, are they happy to be coming into my room? Are they feeling safe and secure enough to sing by themselves in front of everybody? Can they? Well, I guess you can officially do pitch matching and beat keeping and dictations and whatever, but there is a lot that happens in the music room and we have in our job large groups of kids, half an hour at a time, once a week. It’s like a sausage factory, right? 

Chris Munce  

I was going to ask that.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yeah, as a general rule, primary music teachers would have 800 children a week, so we have classes of 25 to 30, half an hour each, then they go, then they come. So your relationships and your program builds up over years, because, as I like to tell my colleagues when they’re going, but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere fast. If you put together all of your time that you had with one class over a year, it would be less than one week full time. So my question of you is, if you can briefly give us how you keep data, and I know you’ve got older children in some ways that might make it a bit easier, but it’s one of our issues, I think, proving to people that what we do counts, and look at the improvement we’ve made, as well as self reflection. Is my program working? Is it good enough? Are they growing where they should be growing? How do I need to? That is a tricky thing, even to the point I’m a Highly Accomplished Teacher, it’s a national accreditation you’ve got to apply for and you have to provide evidence that you can positively impact students and also teachers to impact student growth positively. It’s so hard to find evidence that suits, I’m being very awkward, but you know what I’m trying to say. I think evidence and data with music is just a little problematic.

Chris Munce  

Well, okay, so I’m going to respond to that question. I’m glad you asked it, because you are diagnosing a problem, but I think you’re diagnosing it with the wrong cause. So music, just like any other language that we teach, is very easy to assess. We can assess, you mentioned some of them, we can assess whether or not a kid can keep a steady beat and we can also assess if they started not being able to keep a study beat, they were able to a year later, or two years later, or whatever it is. We can assess whether or not a kid is matching pitch with 90% accuracy, 95% accuracy, 100% accuracy. We can assess whether or not they can read certain difficulty levels of sheet music, especially for the kids that have been in music for a while, that’s a skill that takes years to learn, those types of things. So, it’s not music’s fault that it’s hard to assess, you glossed over it at the beginning. I’m not criticising you at all. I love this question. You see them for 30 minutes a week, that’s the problem. An English teacher or a math teacher wouldn’t be able to assess kids either if all they got were 30 minutes a week with the kids. That is a problem with the system that our elementary school or primary school teachers are put in. They are being asked to do something that is impossible. So, for example, to do what I do, and I talk about on my show, is this high school level, age 14-18, for the first time in their lives, in my school district, they have ensemble music class every day, so they have never had it prior to that. So I see kids for 45 to 50 minutes. Some of my kids that are in two choirs, I see them for more than that, including two hours on Monday nights, and you know all these things, so I see kids every single day for, let’s call it an average of an hour, so I’m able to do these things because I have time. I have time to talk about how the voice works, I have time to show them the aspects of sheet music that it requires to know how to read it, I have time to start them, because they’re even though they’re ninth graders, they don’t get that time with their elementary school teachers. So I actually do start with let’s keep a steady beat. I’m a Takadimi person, so we move our bodies, we sway back and forth, we swing our arms to find the beat, we connect that kinesthetic motion when we do our ta, ta, di, ta, di. it seems very elementary school to them, but because their elementary school teachers only saw them for, I think in my district that we get like twice a week for 45 minutes, but then that only lasts for like three weeks, and then their music teacher doesn’t see them at all for three weeks, and then they come back, it’s like this whole, it’s awful. Also with that, people hear me criticising this too, as like I’m criticising the system, I’m not criticising the teachers. The teachers are being asked to do something that I just, I really do think when I say impossible, I’m not using that word lightly, it takes time to get kids to know how to do music well. So if you had an hour a day with your kids, I think you could imagine that you could assess and start to show some evidence that this subject matter is being learned, and they’re actually becoming music makers, they’re becoming independent, they don’t need your help anymore, they’re independent. So because this system is true in Australia, it’s true in the United States, it’s true in a lot of ways in the UK as well, a lot of the English-speaking world, we don’t see these kids every day until they’re older. So that has created a mythology that kids are just too young to do something like sight read, for example. Ah, they’re not too young, they actually can, the earlier the better. So, anyway, sorry, that was a rant, but that’s one of my passion topics, is just how little time we get our elementary school kids with music and their teachers that are throwing themselves on grenades every day, so including yourself. So, thank you for doing what you do.

Family and What Sustains the Work

Debbie O’Shea  

Well, and we even have to fight just to keep that little bit we’ve got. That’s the ludicrous part of it all. Okay, I’m having such a good time having a chat with you, but I do want to bring it back to gratitude, because it’s just an element of my podcast that I always talk about. Gratitude and before we deep dive in your choice of your passion projects, just looking back now at your recent life, for what are you most grateful for?

Chris Munce  

So that’s difficult, because I’m grateful for so much, so then I have to choose something that I’m the most grateful for. So, I mean, it would have to be, it’s not even a professional thing, it’s my wife and two kids. I think about it every day. I talk about, I think this will surprise you and the audience so far, that stuck around. I’m very verbose, and I speak a lot. That was sarcasm. It’s not surprising to anyone. So I am that way with my family as well. So I’m very expressive with how much I care for them and we’re a very close-knit group of four. We do everything together and my daughter is in my choir at the school. My son will be in the choir at my school next year. So I’ll have two of my kids in choir next year at my school. My wife and I are best friends and we are crazy about each other, even after 20 years. So it’s by far all the things that I do, all the stresses of having a controversial podcast and a big choir program to lead, because those things are stressful. Lots of people look at me and nitpick everything I do and I’m in the limelight, in the spotlight a lot with my jobs. It just is all worth it when you have a family unit that you can do it all for and do it all with. So that’s easily my biggest gratitude moment. Hopefully, a non-music thing counts for this question.

Debbie O’Shea  

Yes, it does. It’s very difficult to do all of these tough things that you do without having a nice anchor and a support from the home. I think that’s important.

Chris Munce  

Yeah, absolutely.

Sign-off 

I appreciate you and all of my colleagues and hope this episode has been enjoyable and useful. Don’t forget, you’ll find All I can be is the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress. Don’t lose sight of the funny side of life. I told my husband he should just embrace his mistakes. He gave me a big hug.