Rock Narratives and Teaching Popular Music: Audiences and Critical Issues (original) (raw)
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Beyond the Narrative: Considering the Larger Pedagogical Toolbox for the Popular Music Survey
Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 2014
I n his introduction and contribution to this roundtable, David Blake offers a compelling case for challenging the dominant discourses that arise in rockfocused popular music survey courses and texts. I share Blake's opinion that the changing state of the field warrants a new curriculum. I find his call to refocus the pedagogy and make the roles of materialism and technology the central narrative insightful and worthwhile. His approach not only opens a space to include other similarly (if not more) prominent popular musics and their audiences, but it ultimately connects better with the experiences, ideologies, and interests of our newest undergraduate generation. In defending this new methodology, Blake argues that the field's immense growth has allowed popular music scholars to think beyond the mere need for justification. I agree that we are indebted to pioneering rock courses and texts for laying important methodological groundwork and for persuading universities to allow for the serious study of popular music in our classrooms. However, I think he is also correct in pointing out that the need for justification is no longer foremost among our concerns. The rock narrative that at one time appeared central to the "collective" pop cultural memory (which is in itself debatable) has become less useful and relevant to the current state of the field. Indeed, we have come a long way in the sixteen years since Robert Fink and the other "New Musicologists" fought battles both within and outside of US music departments to create a safe and productive space for popular music to be studied as "Music with-a-capital-M" (the designation previously only given to canonic "classical" music). 1 This is not to say that former approaches to studying rock are without benefit; but they do become problematic when used as the cultural, historical, and ideological lens through which we examine all popular musical styles, media, and reception. Similar reservations would certainly apply to a rationale for examining nineteenth-century French Opera 1.
Perspectives of Popular Music Pedagogy in Practice: An Introduction
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2009
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum We've all been there. Whether it's your daily gig in a classroom or a special presentation, we know that the simple act of playing popular music in a formal educational setting sparks new levels of interest among students of any age. For this reason, popular music is an appealing device that educators often use to help students connect what they already know to new concepts and ideas. Facilitating links between new and familiar concepts is a fundamental process for learning, which lies at the heart of any pedagogical practice. But the quality of learning depends on the depth of these links. If educators simply use popular music as an attention-grabber and fail to engage students in the music itself, a student's connections remain limited. Once teachers have drawn a student's attention with popular music, what do we do with it? A deeper engagement with popular music-its performances, sounds, industries, cultures, traditions, histories, technologies, social spaces, forms, and meanings-offers students and educators so much more. Academic institutions increasingly accept the validity of popular music studies. As the membership of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US branch demonstrates, faculty in disciplinary fields that once frowned upon scholarship surrounding popular culture increasingly accept popular music content in courses, syllabi, and even degree programs. Many collegiate and university-based departments even support tenured faculty who explore the history and culture of popular music with their students and publish research that speaks to critical issues in many fields of study. Certainly this acceptance is not without limits. Many continue to question the "seriousness" of popular music courses, portray them as "fun" hobby-like diversions, or reluctantly embrace them as enrollment generators. While courses that focus on popular music as a primary component may have high student appeal in high
Popular Music Education A White Paper by the Association for Popular Music Education
Journal of Popular Music Education, 2018
Popular Music Education A White Paper by the Association for Popular Music Education Introduction The Association for Popular Music Education (APME), founded in 2010, is the world’s leading organization in popular music education, galvanizing a community of practice, scholarship and innovation around the field. Popular music education (hereafter PME) is exciting, dynamic and often innovative. Music education – meaning formal schooling in music – has tended most of the time to exclude almost all forms and contexts of music, and therefore has also elided most models of music learning and teaching. Popular music is among these excluded musics. The report is based on the knowledge, perspectives and experience of APME Board members, and therefore reflects the Anglophone and largely US American orientation of the contributors. We recognize that popular music is as diverse as the world’s cultures, and that writing on popular music education is as nuanced as the languages in which it is communicated. What is Popular Music Education? Popular music is qualitatively different from other forms of music, in function and aesthetics (although there are areas of commonality). PME, therefore, may also be understood as necessarily different from Western Art Music (WAM) education. However, APME does not intend to construct or to construe PME as existing or working in opposition to existing music education programs and paradigms. PME, like popular music, is highly complex, problematic and challenging, as well as being inspiring and deeply meaningful to many people, individually and collectively. This is true of all musical traditions, their associated hierarchies, embedded practices and assumptions, and attendant educational practices. APME recognizes that change, stasis and tradition all constitute the lifeblood of popular music. As such, and to reflect that ongoing change, the authors assert that popular music education practice and scholarship must remain reflexive, allowing for and embracing constant revision and re-contextualization. As such, this paper marks a moment in time, but is not intended to codify, define or delimit PME. Popular music has a growing presence in education, formal and otherwise, from primary school to postgraduate study. Programs, courses and classes in popular music studies, popular music performance, songwriting, production and areas of music technology are becoming commonplace across higher education and compulsory schooling. In the context of teacher education, classroom teachers and music specialists alike are becoming increasingly empowered to introduce popular music into their classrooms. Research in PME lies at the intersection of the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, community music, cultural studies and popular music studies. Who are the Popular Music Educators? The following page quotes and borrows from the editorial article introducing the issue 1, volume 1 of the Journal of Popular Music Education. 1 The popular music education world is populated by two largely separate but far from discrete communities. One of these groups comprises mostly school music teachers and those who work in higher education institutions to ‘train’ teacher/musicians for the workplace. For them, music education is a high art and prized craft; PME is one part of the jigsaw puzzle of a schoolteacher’s diverse portfolio of approaches to learning, teaching and assessment. The other community primarily teaches popular music studies (including popular music performance, business and songwriting) in institutions of higher education. For them the goal is to learn (about) popular music; ‘education’ is implicit in the fact that this activity takes place in a college or university. These two communities (crudely bifurcated as they are here, for the purposes of this short paper) collide and collaborate at APME conferences. They rarely seem to bump into one another, however, at meetings of IASPM (frequented primarily by members of the popular music studies community) or ISME (attended mainly by music teachers and music teacher teachers). People’s experiences of education are frequently self-defining and life-changing – affirming, uplifting, crushing, celebratory and (dis)empowering by turns; the same can be said of people’s encounters with music. Humans’ engagement with popular music and experiences of education are vital to people’s understanding and tolerance of themselves and one another. APME believes in the necessity and transformative power of deep educational experiences that critique and enable, challenge and transform. Popular music exists at the intersection of folk and celebrity cultures, combining the everyday with the exceptional and fantastic. It merges commerce, community, commodity and the construction of meanings. People live their lives both as popular musicians and through popular musicians, realizing identities as fans, consumers and practitioners. Popular music scenes, communities and subcultures are local, regional, national and international. PME thus takes place at the cross sections of identity realization, learning, teaching, enculturation, entrepreneurship, creativity, a global multimedia industry, and innumerable leisure, DIY and hobbyist networks – online, and in physical spaces. Popular music education is business and social enterprise. It is personal and it is collective. It is vocational and avocational, and it builds and develops communities. Popular music stands as a vital part of our modern lives. A valuable form of artistic expression, it embraces all facets of the human experience. It blends art with contemporary culture and tradition to make relevant the ever changing now.
Editorial Introduction: Popular Music in Education, Special Issue
This Popular Music in Education (PME) special issue includes contributions discussing developments in several countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Singapore and the United States. It covers a range of approaches, exploring technology, hermeneutics, theory, guitars, jazz, songwriting, DIY/DIWO, politics and music industry perspectives. As music institutions have increasingly opened their doors to popular music, this has inevitably led to a greater level of interest in how you teach and learn popular music. PME is presenting a louder presence within Popular Music Studies (PMS), as the ground prepared by PMS has made space for a wave of new PME courses and students to sweep through educational contexts. In the wake of such expansion, this special issue intends to promote a further understanding of pedagogical best practice. The development of PME is something that is long overdue, and that seems likely to greatly expand and enrich the frame of PMS.
As part of a panel presentation at the 2008 AERA Conference, this paper seeks to advance a critical examination of research on the informal learning practices that are associated with the way so-called popular musicians learn. A call for a " second-wave " of research studies on the teaching of popular music in schools is made. Contra instructional practices that adopt informal learning wholesale, the author argues that a sound educational framework must be in place should teachers and teacher educators wish to " operationalize " the practices of popular musicians. Arguing that there is a distinction between " informal learning " and " informalism, " and critiquing the disappearance of the teacher in Lucy Green's new book Music, Informal Learning and the School (2008), the concept of democracy – in the form of a laboratory school – is offered as a way of locating education in the practice of teaching and learning popular music.