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At a recent symposium examining current research on the interaction of culture with neurological processes, neuroscientist Robert Turner, a director with the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, posited that “all neuroscience is cultural neuroscience.” By this he was asserting that cultural identity is a substrate upon which all systematic observation takes place. It is impossible to detach an individual’s neural processing from the individual her- or himself and, in turn, impossible to separate the individual from a lifetime of shaping within a cultural environment. Thus, any observation of human behavior—whether it is small or covert in nature such as with neuronal activity or large and readily seen such as with gestural communication—must be interpreted with an eye toward the cultural context in which it was learned.

Much research in music education has taken place within the primary or secondary school environment. It has tended to be conducted in one of a relatively small subset of countries. Within the United States, the research has often involved students who have elected to enroll in music programs, who have demonstrated the interest to engage in types of music opportunities common to school curricula, and who have possessed the resources to facilitate their success or at least their ongoing participation. For research conducted among college-age populations, the sampling frame has been necessarily even more limited, ¹ particularly in cases where it has been confined to students who have selected and perhaps auditioned into music as a major. As a result, in much music education research, the breadth of representation of experiences, identities, values, and ways of thinking that collectively constitute cultural identity is significantly constrained; culture as a variable has been limited in its variability by compounding processes of exclusion.

Culture is universal in its presence, complex in its variability, and underexamined in its impact on musical thinking and learning. Gender is similarly universal, variable, and understudied. Earlier this summer, I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to attend the third symposium on LGBTQ research in music education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among the prominent themes underlying the studies presented were the highly complex nature of gender identity and the threat of reductionism—and, in turn, the threat to construct validity—represented by such categorical taxonomies as the simple “M/F” dichotomy or even the term LGBTQ itself (Bergonzi, 2015).

In contrast to culture, gender does not initially seem to be an underexamined topic in music education given the number of studies in which it has appeared as a variable. Virtually all music education research includes a healthy gender distribution through either careful participant selection or occurrence in a naturalistic setting. However, the inclusion of gender as a variable has generally been constrained within the binary designation of male/female. Any more nuanced indication of gender identity has been subsumed within these two broad categories, and potentially significant relationships between gender identity and the aspects of human musicality were lost.

Whereas cultural variability in research is often minimized through exclusion, variability in gender identity is lost through diffusion. In the former case, voices (responses, behaviors, measures) representing a broad range of cultural identities do not appear in the data, leaving researchers to make generalizations about music teaching and the learning process based on the observations of a relatively select population. In the latter case, a broad range of gender identities likely does appear within the data but is attenuated by an analysis construct that presumes the fulcrum of variability to occur at a single categorical division, that between male and female.

For researchers, several key questions loom. Where and when does identity matter? In which aspects of human musicality does one observe a critical impact of culture and/or gender? It remains for researchers to investigate where culture and gender identity play a critical role in the way music is made, encountered, learned, or taught. In this issue, Sarah Fischer-Croneis examined the experiences of female band teachers and makes clear that gender is a vital component in the study of music teachers’ professional identities. Future research may present similarly striking findings among teachers from yet other gender perspectives.

How is culture or gender operationalized? Regardless of the discipline, for those researching such nuanced constructs as culture and gender, there is much work to be done to tease out the subtleties of these broad yet personal constructs. Each of the various ways in which data on cultural identity may be collected presents unique empirical and ethical challenges (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009). In the case of gender, there is no agreed-upon way for individuals to identify beyond the male/female dichotomy (Wimberly & Battle, 2015), a situation that is particularly challenging for transgender students. Jason Silveira and Sarah Goff surveyed teachers’ attitudes toward transgender students and school practices intended to support them. Though their results indicated positive attitudes overall, they suggest that training and institutional support are necessary to help teachers be as effective as they are well-intentioned.

Not every study going forward should include cultural and gender identity as foreground variables, and it remains for researchers to determine where these constructs are salient. Nevertheless, the best scholarship is characterized by researchers’ efforts to include as diverse a group of participants as possible and as appropriate for the research question; in addition, these researchers recognize the limitations that a lack of diversity may make on the generalizability of results. Thorough understanding of music teaching and learning processes requires research that reaches across contexts and reflects humanity’s diversity of identities.

It is much to music’s benefit (and, I would argue, consistent with its very nature) that expressions of identity—here I write about gender and culture, though there are surely others—are fundamental to its content. Given the cultural and personal centrality of music, one might argue that the teaching of music is the teaching of identity, a fact that music education has explored knowingly or unknowingly in one way or another throughout its history and one with which we as a profession are still coming to terms.