The Story of the Hedge Hog

Picture this: you've just arrived at a rustic music camp tucked into the rolling hills of Napa County, organized by the California Music Educators Association for their annual fundraiser for school music programs.

It’s late Friday afternoon. You’ve parked in a slanted field and carted your tuba to the stables. You’re ready for a glass of old vine Zin and a piece of grilled salmon.

The cabins are weathered wood bereft of technology except for USB ports, wifi, and hotspots. Practice rooms converted from stalls and lofts in old barns.

Early birds are tuning instruments under the redwoods, the late afternoon light filtering through leaves leaving scattered sheet music on the ground.

You're excited! Nervous.

Preparing for the invisible battle lines that crisscross this seemingly peaceful valley.

A tuba player in the midst of classically trained violinists, jazz aficionados, experimental synths, and folkies.

Welcome to the world of musical tribes, a world where classical purists eye jazz cats with suspicion, where folk singers think everyone else has sold out, where half the camp insists the other half isn't even playing music.

You see a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with AC/DC.

Back at the main lodge it’s not unlike the reading wars that rage in education. Phonics advocates versus whole language supporters, sliding into periods of uneasy détente.

It’s not unlike the AI wars that are bringing out resentments and old insecurities driving people into corners.

The Lay of the Land

Music camps live in social ecosystems. Competing philosophies. Territorial creatures marking their sonic boundaries.

The classical conservatory tribe arrives with perfectly pressed sheet music and decades of formal training. They know their scales, their arpeggios, their Bach inventions in their sleep—every note precisely as written. Like phonics teachers who insist every letter-sound correspondence must be explicitly taught and mastered.

No shortcuts. No guessing.

Across the meadow, the jazz ensemble is already improvising. Trading riffs. Speaking in chord progressions incomprehensible to outsiders. They trust their ears, their intuition, their ability to read the musical moment.

Like the three-cueing advocates who believe readers naturally integrate multiple meaning-making systems.

Semantic. Syntactic. Graphophonic. Trying to make peace with those who want to smash the trinity.

Then there are the others: singer-songwriters with dog-eared guitars, electronic producers hunched over laptops, blues dudes who make guitars gently weep.

Like the poets and the dreamers who resist AI because it is a part of the capitalist machine that is dehumanizing us.

Each group stakes out territory. Practice spaces. Heroes. Ways of thinking about what music should do.

The smell of rosin and rivalry hangs in the evening air.

Enter the Theoretical Hedge

Watch what happens when someone tries to bridge these worlds.

Take Sarah. Classically trained violinist who's been sneaking over to the jazz sessions after dinner. When confronted by her chamber music coach, complicated by her coach being her life partner, of course, she doesn't choose sides.

She hedges.

"Classical technique and jazz improvisation are really different approaches, very unique," she explains carefully. Each word measured. "Classical focuses on precision and interpretation of written music. Jazz? It’s more about spontaneous creation and personal expression."

Pause. Diplomatic smile.

"But they're really connected, I mean, they truly are, I believe that, I do—they're both ways of making beautiful music that moves people. I don’t want to miss this opportunity to expand my horizons"

This is the theoretical hedge: a specific rhetorical strategy that first establishes analytical distinctions between competing approaches, then immediately asserts their fundamental unity. Split, then unify. Distinguish, then transcend.

Not that it’s always wrong to see two concepts as part of the same entity. It’s just that hedging as a way of life can make life a bit of a charade.

Sarah keeps traditional distinctions firmly in play politically. Keeps the classical coach/partner happy, though perhaps a bit suspicious. Claims transcendent unity—good on her. Makes the jazz musicians feel respected. Positions herself as someone who sees beyond narrow genre boundaries.

Anti-intellectual diplomacy disguised as theoretical sophistication.

How can two things be both different things and the same thing simultaneously? Sugar and salt? Small language models and large language models?

Over in the professional development workshop, you heard identical hedges. "Phonics and whole language represent different pedagogical philosophies," a teacher explains to a mixed group. "Phonics emphasizes systematic instruction in letter-sound relationships, while whole language focuses on meaning-making through authentic texts."

The pause. The pivot.

"But common sense tells you these approaches are fundamentally interconnected. They’re complementary aspects of comprehensive literacy instruction."

The same script. Different vocabulary.

Why the Strategy Matters

At this fundraising retreat, diplomatic moves serve real purposes.

Money flows through different constituencies. The classical lobby has connections to conservatories and traditional music programs.

The jazz contingent represents contemporary initiatives gaining ground in districts.

Folk and experimental groups appeal to arts integration advocates, public art, chalk murals on buildings.

Want access to multiple funding streams? Multiple teaching opportunities? Multiple professional networks?

You need to speak multiple languages. Without seeming like a dilettante or a fake.

The theoretical hedge provides cover. Participate inauthentically in different communities while maintaining credibility across the educational spectrum. Nobody gets offended. Everyone feels heard.

You see this pattern a lot in modern reading instruction, at least from my admittedly retired perch. Districts navigate the bus around parents demanding phonics, train teachers in balanced literacy, administrators seeking research-based practices so as not to have to learn for themselves.

Students who just need to learn to read, somehow, anyhow.

The hedge acknowledges all constituencies while claiming to transcend intellectual limitations.

Safe territory. Neutral ground.

The Magic and the Trap

Sometimes beautiful music happens when genres collide. It’s no different at the music camp in the beautiful Napa Valley.

The classical cellist discovers she can bow percussively like a fiddle player. The folk singer realizes jazz chord voicings make her melodies and words salient in unexpected ways.

Real synthesis. Real innovation.

But sometimes…

The hedge becomes avoidance. Instead of deeply learning any particular substance, loosely anchored tribalists skim the surface of several.

Play a little bit of everything. Understand none of it. It’s all connected in the end.

Or you ignore the others, bury your head in the sands of increasing familiarity, keep your nose to the known grindstone without a thought for other tribes, wear blinders like a work horse.

Isn’t it the human condition? Humans must learn to participate in a multilayered, complex society whichever way you go.

Become fluent in diplomatic language. Musical fusion. Pedagogical balance.

Without developing your own distinct voice and thinking.

How does this happen?

The theoretical hedge replaces innovation when it becomes a default reaction.

Of course I’m right. My friends understand me.

Rather than creating new frameworks that make old distinctions irrelevant, the hedge claims to unite existing approaches.

Without doing the work. The actual synthesis.

It's easier to say "everything's connected but I like my way better" than to seek a principled solution you actually understand.

Finding Your Sound

The most memorable performances at camp come from musicians who've moved beyond diplomatic fusion.

They don't claim "all music is connected." If so, why the tribes?

Those who move beyond diplomatic fusion make those connections audible. Alive. They take risks. Make choices. Commit to sounds that might not work—or maybe they will.

Sometimes it really is one or the other. To blend two different entities into the same entity is logically a category error. Separating two entities that are at the same level of abstraction is also a category error.

Those who don’t buy the hedge habit to grease the wheels develop genuine expertise in helping particular children with particular challenges whether it’s reading a page of music or text or improvising an interpretation.

The theoretical hedge works as a survival strategy. Navigate social dynamics. Gain access to learning opportunities. Build political power. Avoid making enemies in professional contexts where funding and careers hang in the balance.

But don’t let it touch you where you live and breathe, where rocks are rocks and not trees, where ice cream is food and not a poison, where children are children and not miniature adults.

The Hedgehog's Shadow

As the final campfire concert winds down, someone spots a small hedgehog scuttling through the shadows at the edge of the firelight.

The theoretical hedge hog.

Finally showing itself after three days of watching everyone practice diplomatic moves, giving it a bad reputation.

But here's what the hedgehog knows that we often forget: real hedgehogs don't just curl up defensively.

They forage actively—snuffling through leaf litter, following scent trails, committing to specific paths through the undergrowth.

They survive not by appeasing predators of all stripes but by developing genuine expertise in their ecological niche.

The theoretical hedge works until it doesn't. Are language machines intelligent? Or are they not?

It works. Until you're so busy managing between camps that you forget what you came to do in the first place.

The stakes in classrooms are too high.

Watch the hedgehog: it studies the angles, chooses a direction, and commits, always aware it needs to learn more and retrench.

The most effective professionals eventually abandon the hedge for something more demanding: principled expertise.

They master their craft deeply enough to make informed choices about when phonics works best, when jazz techniques unlock classical precision, when taking a considered position actually serves learning rather than career survival. They are not politicians.

They develop authority. Not the rhetorical kind—the kind that gets results.

The theoretical hedge taught us to split, then unify. Distinguish, then transcend. We’re not all that different in camp, but in my tribe we know best because we are a strong and proud tribe.

The move beyond hedging takes dialogue and dispassionate critical thinking: studying hard, choosing logically, committing, accepting responsibility for outcomes, rethinking when something collapses.

That's harder than diplomatic language. It's also the only path to work that gets better over time.

The hedgehog doesn't care. It has found what it was looking for in the undergrowth and disappeared back into the darkness, leaving only the faintest rustle in the dry leaves.

What would happen if we all stopped managing ourselves ideologically between competing camps? What if we trusted one another to think for ourselves, with clarity and empiricism so compelling that old boundaries became irrelevant?