This paper looks at the State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Guidelines for Music Teacher Education, a governmentally defined technology of accountability for preservice teacher education. In this investigation, the author draws upon Jean-Francois Lyotard's analysis of "differends" to frame the conflict between the state-authorized technologies for accountability (DPI Guidelines) and discourses of education supporting ideals of social justice. Drawing from Lyotard's arguments, the author posits that the language of the guidelines constitutes a unique "phrase universe" that defines what (and thus whose) knowledge students need to enter the classroom as state-certified music teachers. This particular phrase universe contributes to ongoing exclusionary practices within music education. The DPI guidelines are drawn from the Eurocentric phrase universe of aesthetic education, a phrase universe that locates "music" as an object for analysis, reduces acts of music making to behavioral descriptions sometimes far removed from real life music-making experiences, and in the process creates a hierarchy of "music worthy for education" that prioritizes European and North American classical composers' output. Using critical race theory and antiracism education as lenses for analysis, the author interrogates the differend created between the DPI guidelines and music-teacher education as-for social justice--the space between the proverbial "rock and a hard place." Her purpose in this interrogation is twofold. She first wants to tease out a space between the rock of the state guidelines and the hard place of undergraduate music-teacher education as-for social justice through an analysis of selected assessment guidelines for music-teacher education, which serve not only to reproduce but also valorize a white supremacist status quo. Her second purpose for the paper emerges from newly chiseled space between the state's teacher-education guidelines and discourses of critical race theory and antiracism education. She seeks to reopen dialogue about governmentally defined technologies of accountability as they relate to issues of equity and social justice in music education. This purpose frames the differend, not as incommensurable, but as a dialectic creating possibilities for other voices to be heard. Following this line of thought, the author concludes by discussing antiracism pedagogy as an ethical and epistemological space from which to contest and work through the incommensurable. (Contains 69 notes.)