What if the music in music education was first and foremost staged for public “dramatic rehearsal” (Dewey, 1922/1932) of democratic life? What if the education in music education found its full democratizing potential in performative public engagement?Public pedagogy is a concept developed from critical pedagogy and cultural studies, focusing on how various social and cultural sites in the public sphere act as events and spaces where critical values are embedded and translated into pedagogical acts (Sandlin et al., 2011). As public pedagogy emphasizes the process of enacting human togetherness as a goal in itself, it requires that music educators expand their frames: 1) from instruction to interruption; 2) from cognitive transmissive learning logics to transformative, relational pedagogies; and 3) from the replacement of politics with education to the intersection of politics and education - prompting questions such as what is staged in music education, as well as how and why we are using pedagogy to frame public engagement.In this presentation, we argue that public pedagogy can bridge music education with political and cultural questions concerning the democratic way of life in a time of escalating conflicts, political polarisation, and societal regression, when signs of “fatigue with democracy” (Appadurai 2017, p. 7) are ever-increasing. While public concerns within music education have in the past manifested in various ways from religious or nationalistic homogenisation to social action and activism, we suggest a situational, contextual, and crisis-aware approach to reconsidering and reimagining the publicness in music education. Public pedagogy in music education does not exclude but expands beyond questions of the accessibility and quality of music towards testing the quality of the public sphere (Caris & Cowell, 2016) in and through music making. Explored through real-life public pedagogy experiments, the presentation invites the audience to consider the complex phenomenon of public pedagogy in music education and music practices and to promote its systemic potential for democratic futures.This research is funded by two Research Council of [country omitted] projects [project titles and numbers omitted] promoting public pedagogy in music and music education.