The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices 9781350049413, 9781350049437, 9781350049420

Citation preview

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY MasterClass in Music Education, edited by John Finney The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music, edited by Christopher Partridge and Marcus Moberg The Origins and Foundations of Music Education,

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

edited by Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education Perspectives and Practices

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Edited by Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, Gareth Dylan Smith, and Contributors, 2019 Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, Gareth Dylan Smith, and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifed as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xx constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Anna Berzovan Photograph © Total Guitar Magazine / GettyImages All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4941-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4943-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-4942-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To fnd out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contents

List of Figures viii Contributorsix Foreword  Joe Bennett xviii Acknowledgmentsxx Introduction: Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices  Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith1 Part I  Conceptualizing Popular Music Education

9

  1 Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice  David Henson and Simon Zagorski-Thomas11   2 Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?  Juliet Hess29   3 Considering Techne in Popular Music Education: Value Systems in Popular Music Curricula  Mark Hunter45   4 Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition  Gavin Carfoot and Brad Millard59   5 The Vanishing Stave? Considering the Value of Traditional Notation Skills in Undergraduate Popular Music Performance Degrees  James Dean73

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Part II  Musical, Creative, and Professional Development

81

  6 Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers: A Cultural Psychology Perspective  Bill Bruford83   7 Breaking into a “Scene”: Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music  Sarah Gulish101   8 What the Masters Teach Us: Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education  Kirk McNally, Toby Seay, and Paul Thompson113   9 Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists  Kat Reinhert127 10 The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach: Performance Techniques for Musicians with Learning Disabilities  Blair Kelly141

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contents

Part III  Originating Popular Music

151

11 Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education: Distance Collaboration and Reflective Teaching Practices  Andrew Krikun and Stephen Ralph Matthews153 12 Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning  Adam Patrick Bell171 13 When Is a Drummer not a Drummer? Developing Coordination, Musicianship, and Creativity through Electronic Drum Performance  Bryden Stillie187 14 Sleepwalkers, Beware: Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education  Zack Moir and John Hails203 15 Facilitating Music Video Projects in the Classroom: From YouTube to Musical Playground  Christopher Cayari219 Part IV  Popular Music Education in Schools

227

16 Music in the School: Significance and Purpose  John Finney229 17 Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning: Popular Music Education and Orff Schulwerk  Martina Vasil249 18 Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar  Steffen Incze263 19 Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators  Fraser Burke Gottlieb275 20 Popular Music in the High School: Crafting and Implementing a Curriculum  Julie Beauregard289

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Part V  Identity, Meaning, and Value in Popular Music Education

301

21 Popular Music Education: Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia  Gareth Dylan Smith303 22 “I See You, Baby …”: Expressive Gesture and Nonverbal Communication in Popular Music Performance Education  Liz Pipe321 23 Breaking Down Barriers to Participation: Perspectives of Female Musicians in Popular Music Ensembles  Bryan Powell337 24 “Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education  Lloyd McArton and Nasim Niknafs351 25 Children’s Construction of Cultural Knowledge and Musical Identity: Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study)  Karen Howard363

vi

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contents

Part VI  Formal Education, Creativities, and Assessment

373

26 Taking a Note for a Walk: Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation  Paul Kleiman375 27 “How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward  Renée Stefanie395 28 Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification  Radio Cremata415 29 Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning: Action Research via Media Technology  Daniel A. Walzer429 30 Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production  Ross Bicknell441 Part VII  Epilogue

453

31 On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever  John Kratus455

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index464

vii

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figures

  3.1 Hans Traxler (1983), “Equal Opportunity,” in Michael Klant (ed.), School Ridicule: Caricatures from 2500 Years of Pedagogy, S. 25, Hanover: Fackeltraeger 13.1 A hybrid drum kit setup containing: (1) Roland SPD-20 percussion controller, (2) Roland CY-5 cymbal trigger pad, (3) Roland SPD-SX sample pad, (4) Roland PD-85 mesh head trigger pad, and (5) Roland KD-7 kick drum trigger 13.2 The SPD-20 with pad and trigger pedal numbering. Photograph by Alexandra Duncan 13.3 Notation legend 13.4 Example of percussion controller notation to suit the electronic setup in Figure 13.2 13.5 Notation for a Hybrid kit setup 20.1 Curriculum template adapted from Penfield Central School District training documents (2015) 22.1 A framework that suggests the elements that affect the gestural and nonverbal delivery of a popular music performer 26.1 Operating on the edge of chaos. Kleiman (2014) adapted from Tosey (2002) 26.2 The RFIO continuum of creativity (Kleiman 2008a, based on Fennel 1993) 27.1 Initial thought processes when considering creativity in an assessment driven culture 27.2 Considering progression of musical skill in correlation with Fennell’s Lexicon of Creativity. © Renée Stefanie 27.3 Consideration of creativity as a set of learnable skills 27.4 A linear model of the creative process defining key activities around which to devise LTA. © Renée Stefanie 27.5 A framework for the Socratic Method 27.6 SCAMPER prompts, adapted from Byron (2006) and Passuello (2008) 27.7 Recreation of a student SCAMPER mind map from 2015—experimenting with mixing techniques 27.8 Reframing Gardner’s multiple intelligences as “what if” scenarios

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

49

188 194 197 197 197 294 325 378 381 397 398 402 404 405 406 407 409

Contributors

Julie Beauregard teaches general/classroom and instrumental music at Penfield High School in New York, and is an online course instructor at Kent State University in Ohio. She currently serves as a member-at-large on the MayDay Group’s Steering Committee and was a writing team member for both the 2014 National and the 2017 New York State Standards in Music. Her research explores intercultural music transmission, popular music education, embodied knowledge, alternative assessments, and music teacher preparation. Julie has presented at state, regional, national, and international conferences; some of her work has been published in The Journal for Music Teacher Education and The Journal of Popular Music Education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Adam Patrick Bell is an assistant professor of music education in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary, Canada. He is the author of Dawn of the DAW: The Studio as Musical Instrument (2018) and has written several peerreviewed articles and chapters on the topics of music technology in music education, and disability in music education. Prior to his career in higher education, Bell worked as a kindergarten teacher, elementary music teacher, and support worker for adolescents with disabilities. Bell has also worked as a freelance producer, creating commercial music for clients, including Coca-Cola. Ross Bicknell is an independent scholar. Until his recent relocation to Norway, Ross Bicknell held posts as lecturer in popular music at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP), London. Ross’s research mainly focuses on the role electronic dance music can play in the music production classroom; he has extensive experience and knowledge in this field having worked as a sound mixer and designer at film production houses, and as a DJ and producer. He is currently singer, producer, guitarist and songwriter for new wave band Executive Toys and organizes releases and promotes live music with his record label, Nice Nights Records. Bill Bruford is an independent early-career scholar, having acquired his doctorate from the University of Surrey in 2016. He enjoyed a long career as a musician and teacher before stepping back out of performance to investigate, currently, aspects of creativity and performance psychology. He has given lectures and seminars at multiple European and North American institutions. His academic writing includes Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer (2018) and a journal article in preparation. Bill was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the group Yes in 2017. Gavin Carfoot is a senior lecturer in music at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He has worked extensively in popular music curricula and

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

assessment at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. His collaborative work in popular music education and community service learning won a Griffith Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2012. His recent publications include contributions to The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (2017), Arts-Based Service Learning with First Peoples (2016), Popular Music, and Popular Communication. His book Making Things Musical is due for publication in 2019. Gavin is also active as a songwriter and producer. Christopher Cayari is an assistant professor of music education at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He holds a PhD and MME in music education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Christopher’s research focuses on mediated musical performance, YouTube, informal music learning, virtual communities, and online identity. His research received the Outstanding Dissertation Award 2015 from the Council of Research in Music Education. He teaches Music for the Elementary Classroom at Purdue and has developed partnerships with local elementary schools to help his students see musical education environments. He is an avid YouTube video creator. Christopher regularly publishes online performances, tutorials, and vlogs.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Radio Cremata is an assistant professor of music education at Ithaca College, New York. Radio’s research has been published in several journals including the Journal of Research in Music Education, the International Journal of Music Education, and the Journal of Music, Technology and Education. He coauthored The Music Learning Profiles Project: Let’s Take This Outside (2017). His research interests reflect his belief that broad opportunities in music education should be made available to greater numbers of students. He teaches courses, gives master classes, and presents at national and international conferences. His scholarship centers on access, equity, cultural relevance, technology, popular music, informal learning, and music teacher education. James Dean is a principal lecturer in the School of Music and Performing Arts at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, UK. James teaches modules relating to live and studio performance in popular music, improvisation and jazz, and teaches the electric guitar to undergraduate and postgraduate students. James’s research interests are primarily in improvisation technique and approaches, particularly in relation to the guitar in jazz and contemporary jazz-based styles. John Finney taught music in secondary schools in Southall, Worcester, and Basingstoke, England, before teaching at Reading University, Homerton College and the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, where John led the Postgraduate Secondary Course in Music Education. John retired in 2011. His publications include Masterclass in Music Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning (2013) and Music Education in England 1950–2010: The Child-centred Progressive Tradition (2011). His interest focuses on developing an ethical approach to music education found in the relationship between pupil, teacher, and what is being learnt, constructing relational knowledge and x

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

a music education with “human interest.” John writes a blog Music Education Now (www.jfin107.wordpress.com). Fraser Burke Gottlieb is an independent scholar based in Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the University of Oregon with a master of music in music education where he was a graduate teaching fellow in strings education. He has most recently taught both primary and secondary school music in London. His research interests include the perceptions music teacher training candidates have regarding popular music use in the classroom. His years of experience performing, composing, arranging, producing, and recording with bands, along with his formal music education has cultivated an interest in the relationships between informal and formal music-making. Sarah Gulish teaches secondary level music at Lower Moreland High School, Pennsylvania. She also serves as adjunct professor of music education at Buffalo State University and Temple University. Her teaching centers on creativity and improvisation in courses focused on new music learners. Sarah is an active researcher, writer, presenter, and clinician at state, national, and international levels. She serves as the US representative for the International Society of Music Education’s Popular Music Special Interest Group. She regularly tours and records as a rock musician with a variety of groups. Her publications include Creativity in the Classroom: An Innovative Approach to Integrate Music Education (2017).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

John Hails is a senior lecturer and reader in music at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, where he teaches aesthetics, music psychology, composition, and ethnomusicology. In 2008, he received his PhD by portfolio of compositions with Fabrice Fitch from Durham University. John’s music has been performed by the Orlando Consort, the London Sinfonietta, and Heather Roche, amongst others; and performed in the Purcell Room, South Bank; at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. At present, he is focusing on a series of chamber works exploiting various unorthodox intonations and developing fixed media and installation (real and virtual) work. David Henson is an associate professor in performance and director of London College of Music at the University of West London. His recent research interests focus on the impact of dialogic interaction on performers in relation to the performance process. He believes that critical thinking is an essential part of the toolkit for the performer in the twenty-first century and by encouraging students to think, evaluate, and improve upon their individual and creative ideas, how this impacts upon assessment, feedback, collaboration, truth, authenticity in interpretation and performance. This philosophy is identified in two musical theatre workbooks published in 2013 and 2017. Juliet Hess is an assistant professor of music education at Michigan State University, where she teaches secondary general methods in music education, principles in music education, and philosophy and sociology of music education. Juliet received her PhD in Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the xi

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

University of Toronto. She previously taught elementary and middle school vocal, instrumental, and “world” music at a public school in the Greater Toronto Area. Her research interests include anti-oppression education, activism in music and music education, music education for social justice, and the question of ethics in world music study. Karen Howard is an assistant professor of music at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. She received her BM and MMusEd from the Hartt School, and her PhD from the University of Washington. She has extensive training in global vocal, instrumental, and dance traditions. Karen has presented nationally and internationally helping music teachers around the world to make meaningful connections with music, dance, and people of diverse cultures and navigating the creation of learning experiences that promote and celebrate equity and fight racism. Her research interests and publications include works on ethnomusicology, children’s music culture, world music pedagogy, activism in music education, and global singing traditions.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Mark Hunter is deputy dean of the Faculty of Arts & Creative Industries at Middlesex University, UK. He has previously held teaching and leadership roles in a number of music and performing arts departments and institutions. As an academic and researcher, Mark’s interests wander the interstices between the ethics and aesthetics of quality assurance, the politics of arts education, and walking as interrogative social practice. A founder member, with Clare Qualmann, of the Walking Artists’ Network, Mark was principal investigator of their successful AHRC bid ‘Footwork’ (2012–2015) and has been the recipient of a number of other grants and awards. Mark is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Steffen Incze matriculated in performance and education at McGill University, Canada. As an electric bassist and a high school music teacher, he is interested in emergent paradigms of music education, especially those serving the needs of culturally diverse student populations. He currently resides in Beijing, China, where he continues to develop and implement student-centered popular music curricula at the Beijing National Day School, an international secondary school. Blair Kelly is an associate lecturer at the University of West London, teaching courses in voice, singing, musical theatre, and dissertation performance. Blair’s academic interests include disability and mental health in performance, queer utopian performance, and voice pedagogies, having completed a master’s in theatre and performance at Queen Mary University of London in 2018. Blair is currently training to become an Estill master teacher (Estill Voice International) and touring with his solo experimental cabaret performance Crippled Slut, which queers and cripples musical theatre conventions to find a mode to represent hidden disability in performance. Paul Kleiman is a senior consultant (higher education) at Ciel Associates and a visiting professor at Middlesex University, UK, and Rose Bruford College, UK. He was one of the founding tutors of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). Paul has xii

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

been at the forefront of supporting learning and teaching in higher education as deputy director of PALATINE (2000–2011) and as the Higher Education Academy’s UK lead for those disciplines (2011–2014). His national and international consultancy work focuses on arts curriculum strategies, enhancing creativity in learning and teaching, and working with institutions to develop and implement radical approaches to assessing creative arts practices. John Kratus is an independent scholar residing in Tarpon Springs, Florida. John is a professor emeritus of music education from Michigan State University, where he taught general music methods, philosophy, research, sociology, and songwriting. He has presented his ideas at conferences in Ireland, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Greece, Egypt, Japan, China, Indonesia, Canada, and the United States. His articles have appeared in most of the world’s major music education journals. He previously chaired the Special Research Interest Groups in Creativity, Philosophy, and Popular Music Education for the National (USA) Association for Music Education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Andrew Krikun is a professor of music at Bergen Community College, New Jersey, where he teaches courses in songwriting, world music, and music business. His research and scholarship have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, and he has presented his work at international conferences. In 2006, he was awarded a NISOD Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Texas. He is an executive board member of the Association of Popular Music Education, a nonprofit organization promoting and advancing popular music at all levels of education. As a singer-songwriter, Andy has maintained an active career as a performer, composer, and recording artist. Stephen Ralph Matthews is a composer, lecturer, multimedia artist, and performer in Auckland, New Zealand. He leads the development of the undergraduate and postgraduate songwriting degrees at the University of Auckland, School of Music. His academic work examines songwriting pedagogy, international collaboration, social justice, and environmental issues. His chapter “Being Heard: A Māori Community Narrative” appears in Intersecting Cultures in Music and Dance Education (2016). His semi-staged orchestral work Witnessing Parihaka, was written and performed with the people of Parihaka, and first performed and broadcast with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra at the 2011 Auckland Readers and Writers Festival. Lloyd McArton is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada. His research interests include independent music-making practices, as well as accessibility to and discrepancy in opportunities within the sphere of public music education. He has held teaching positions ranging from saxophone clinics and jazz band coaching to private lessons for electric guitar and bass. A strong passion for student-centered and individualized learning models has guided Lloyd’s philosophy of education and helped to form the basis of his academic and teaching careers. Outside of academia, he writes and performs original music in the indie rock band Lost Cousins, as their guitarist and saxophonist. xiii

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

Kirk McNally is assistant professor of music technology in the School of Music at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the program administrator for the undergraduate combined major program in music and computer science and the graduate program in music technology. Kirk is a sound engineer who specializes in popular and classical music recording, and new music performances using electronics. He has worked with artists in studios in Toronto and Vancouver, including REM and Bryan Adams. His research explores the diverse ways recording engineers and producers communicate with musicians, both verbally and through technology, to better understand how they create the music we love. Brad Millard is a lecturer in music at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is study area coordinator for music and currently coordinates all three years of core practical units in the bachelor of fine arts (music) program. He has taught clarinet and saxophone, directed and toured with university ensembles, and lectured in areas including jazz and popular musicianship, orchestration, and arranging. As a professional freelance musician he has worked across a wide range of genres, and acted as a representative on the Australian Music Examinations Board Queensland Advisory Committee to the Minister for Arts. Brad has written a range of works as a composer.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Zack Moir is a lecturer in popular music at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. His research interests include popular music in higher education, popular music composition pedagogy, the teaching and learning of improvisation, and real-time networked audio performance. He has published on the topics of popular music pedagogy, popular musicmaking and leisure, popular music songwriting/composition, and real-time interactive networked performance, and is a coeditor of The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (2017). Zack is an active composer/musician performing internationally as a soloist and in ensembles. Recent compositions include pieces for saxophone and tape, and a reactive generative sound art installation for the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Nasim Niknafs is an assistant professor of music education at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto, and the recipient of the Connaught New Researcher Award, Faculty Mobility Grant, and OMEA’s Agha Khan Initiative. Nasim’s publications have appeared in the Philosophy of Music Education Review, Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, Music Education Research, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, Pluralism in American Music Education: Essays and Narratives, The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Music Education, Punk Pedagogies, IASPM@Journal, and General Music Today. Nasim’s research interests include equity and politics of contemporary music education, cultural studies, and popular music education. Liz Pipe is a lecturer at the London College of Music, at the University of West London. Her PhD research focused on her key research interests of expressive gesture and xiv

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

nonverbal communication in popular music performance, and the integration of such elements into the curriculum of musicians from the genre. Bryan Powell is an assistant professor of music education and music technology at Montclair State University, New Jersey. Bryan previously served as the director of higher education for Little Kids Rock and the interim director of Amp Up NYC. Bryan is a musician and music educator, and has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals. Bryan is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Popular Music Education. Bryan serves as the executive director of the Association for Popular Music Education (APME) and the chair for the National Association for Music Education (NAFME) Special Research Interest Group in Popular Music Education and is an international affiliate for Musical Futures. Kat Reinhert is an experienced educator and artist. She has taught courses in jazz, songwriting, private voice, theory, and popular music ensembles. Kat has released four independent albums as well as sung on multiple projects and recordings. Kat holds a BM in jazz/commercial voice from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM in jazz performance/pedagogy and a PhD in music education from the University of Miami, Florida. Kat is the current vice president of the board for the Association for Popular Music Education and the director of contemporary voice connected to the M.A.D.E. and Bruce Hornsby Creative American Music programs at the University of Miami.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Toby Seay is an associate professor of music production and chair of the Department of Arts & Entertainment Enterprise at Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As an audio engineer, he has recorded artists such as Dolly Parton, Randy Travis, and Delbert McClinton. He has worked on multiple Gold and Platinum Certified recordings as well as eight Grammy winning recordings. Toby’s research interests include audio preservation practices and standards, specializing in multitrack recordings and the study of sonic signatures within music production. Toby is the director of the Drexel Audio Archives, which houses the Sigma Sound Studios Collection and is president of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives. Gareth Dylan Smith is a visiting research professor of music at New York University and manager of program effectiveness at Little Kids Rock, New Jersey. He is president of the Association for Popular Music Education, chair of the ISME Popular Music Education Special Interest Group, and chair-elect of the (US) National Association for Music Education Popular Music Education Special Research Interest Group. Gareth is a founding coeditor of the Journal of Popular Music Education. Gareth’s publications include Sound Advice for Drummers (2017), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (2017), The Music Learning Profiles Project (2017), and the forthcoming Eudaimonia: Perspectives for Music Education, with Marissa Silverman. Renée Stefanie is a lecturer and program designer in popular music at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, where she specializes in vocal performance, ensemble skills, and creative practices. She has experience teaching and training across multiple skill sets xv

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

and age groups, including youth choir, specialist school for at risk children, and NYJOS workshops. Her teaching and research interests include vocal performance physicality and technique incorporating core training, anatomy and emotional prosody; teaching and learning of musical concepts and theories from the perspectives of varying technical disciplines; andragogical practice and design for the enhancement of autonomous learning and self-awareness in creative endeavor. She is a songwriter and jazz vocalist. Bryden Stillie is a senior lecturer in music and academic lead for student experience in the School of Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Bryden has a BA in applied music from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and a PGCert in learning and teaching in higher education, and a PGCert in blended and online education. He has worked as an external advisor and examiner for a range of UK further and higher education institutions, and works with the Scottish Qualifications Authority as a higher education specialist on the Qualification Design Team. His teaching specialisms are in drum kit performance, music technology, music education, and musicianship skills. Paul Thompson is currently a reader in the School of Film, Music and Performance Arts at Leeds Beckett University, UK. Paul is a professional recording engineer who has worked in the music industry for over ten years. His research is centered on record production, audio education, popular music learning practices, creativity and cultural production in popular music. His book Creativity in the Recording Studio: Alternative Takes is due to be published in early 2019.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Martina Vasil is an assistant professor of music education and director of the Modern Band, Orff Schulwerk, and Dalcroze Summer Institute at the University of Kentucky, USA. She teaches courses in general music, popular music education, and qualitative research. She is a board member of the Association for Popular Music Education. Her research centers on popular music education, music teacher education, and Orff Schulwerk. Martina has an MM in music education from Eastman School of Music, a PhD and BM in music education from West Virginia University, and Orff level III certification. Daniel A. Walzer is an assistant professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Walzer received his PhD in leadership from the University of the Cumberlands, Williamsburg, Kentucky, his MFA from Academy of Art University, San Francisco, his MM from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio, and his BM from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Walzer's writings have appeared in the Journal of Music, Technology, and Education; Journal of Media Education; TOPICS for Music Education Praxis; Music Educators Journal, amongst others. Walzer has also published several book chapters and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. Walzer maintains an active career as a composer. For more information, please visit www.danielwalzer.com. Simon Zagorski-Thomas is a professor at the London College of Music, University of West London, and founder and chair of the 21st Century Music Practice Research Network. He was the cofounder of the Art of Record Production conference, now in its xvi

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Contributors

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

fourteenth year, and, until 2017, was also cochair of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. He worked as a composer, sound engineer, and producer, and at present is researching twenty-first-century musical practice. His books include, with Simon Frith, The Art of Record Production (2012), and the Musicology of Record Production (2014), winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize.

xvii

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Foreword

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Joe Bennett

Popular Music Education. These three words, even though they have been at the center of my professional life for more than twenty-five years, continue to challenge and intrigue me because each one generates questions. What do we mean by “Popular”? Popular with whom, and for how long? Popular in the sense of widely distributed, or in the sense of culturally influential? When we say “Music,” which music … and whose music? The consensus reached long ago in conservatoires about the centrality of the European “common practice period” has no easy parallel in popular music education (PME), and popular music has evolved into so many forms and subgenres that it is arguably impossible for any teacher or student to have knowledge of it all. And when we talk about “Education,” what, exactly, are we teaching? PME in high schools and in higher education deals variously with listening, performing existing music, creating original music, music technology, the commercial music industry, and (often controversially) the history of various canons, styles, and traditions. Which of these should we choose to teach? Each answer to these questions breeds further questions. If we decide that our curriculum supports creativity, then our students will probably need to be songwriters, the song being the dominant creative product in most popular music. But how does one build a suitable grading framework for songwriting, when songs represent personal expression? What if the teacher’s definition of a good song is different from the student’s? Given the dominance of “classical” music in many educational institutions, it might be tempting to look to these longer-established traditions for curricular approaches. But popular and classical music practices are too different from one other to provide reliable pedagogical equivalencies. Should popular music students read music notation, as all classical students are required to? On the one hand, this is a useful way to understand and apply music theory, and for some repertoires it may enable students to perform more easily. On the other, music reading skills may be of little use for those trying to analyze (still less create) techno or hip-hop, for example. We can infer that a musically inclusive popular music curriculum might value lyric writing, music production, and sampling as highly as a classical one might value sight-reading, voice-leading, and counterpoint. Designers of classical performance curricula can choose to focus purely on instrumental or vocal performance, sometimes cheerfully omitting composition; in industry context, we might describe an orchestra as a very large cover band. By contrast, most of popular music’s most influential performers write their own material, and a PME curriculum that focuses exclusively on existing repertoire may limit its students’ creative choices.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Foreword

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular music can even challenge what it means to play an instrument. Some higher education music institutions, including my own, are now beginning to accept students whose “instrument” is the digital audio workstation (DAW). So I guess we should add auditions, creative portfolios, and grading to our agenda at the next music department meeting. And we will need to think carefully about the criteria for what makes a good teacher; a popular music faculty member in a university once told me “I never got a PhD, because I left school when I had my first hit record.” Who teaches the teachers? And what should they teach? Like every field of artistic endeavor, popular music is constantly evolving. Since the turn of the millennium there have been unprecedented and irreversible changes in the way our art form is created, distributed, monetized, and consumed. All recordings in the commercial mainstream today are created with a DAW; record companies no longer press records; streaming audio has replaced downloads (which in turn replaced CDs, vinyl, cassettes, etc., and so on back to the wax cylinder). I suggest that these changes continue both to influence and define the art form, and the professional PME community will need to evolve new value systems to help students to navigate the contextual relationship between historical and contemporary popular musics. A classical musicologist who belittles a hip-hop recording because of its harmonic simplicity is probably not listening for its drum microgroove, vocal comping, rapper’s flow, sample usage, mix dynamics, or intramusical cultural allusions. We must address these issues if we are to serve our students as learners, as future practitioners, as music lovers or as teachers. This book represents some of the best of the current thinking in PME, with contributions from experienced teachers, practitioners, and scholars across the world—at my estimate, a total of around five hundred years of combined experience. The authors do not have all of the answers. But we’re pretty sure we’ve nailed the questions. Professor Joe Bennett PhD Vice President for Academic Affairs Berklee College of Music Summer 2018

xix

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Acknowledgments

Zack Thanks, as ever, to Gemma, Cora, and Cole for all their love and constant support. Thanks to Bryan and Gareth for being a part of this project and for the continual flow of banter and fun throughout the process. Thanks also to my friends, family, and colleagues who have provided so much help, inspiration, critique, and feedback. I would also like to thank my teachers—especially those who encouraged me to believe that it was acceptable to love popular music and to see it as a legitimate and worthwhile area of study. You know who you are …

Bryan I would like to acknowledge the guidance and friendship of Adrian and Vince, the inspiring LKR community, my gigging partner Harold, my collegial coeditors Zack and Gareth in whose company I am fortunate to be, and the unending patience and support of Liz, Ellison, and Beckett.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Gareth I would like to acknowledge the support, guidance, constructive criticism, and friendship of Liz, Esme, Lucy, Lee, Hildegard, Ruth, Carlos, Clint, Frank, Radio, Andy, and Joe, along with my collegial, companionable, comedic, and capable coeditors, Bryan and Zack.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Introduction Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith When planning this book, we were driven by a desire to create a volume that would represent something of the wide variety of perspectives on, and practices in popular music education (PME). In scholarly, peer-reviewed publications, the most frequently represented are those of professional academics and researchers and, while these are hugely valuable, they only tell part of the story of the field, inevitably leaving vital perspectives unrepresented. Educator-practitioners engage daily in excellent and diverse pedagogic practice, and have unique and valuable perspectives on PME, but may not frequently (choose to) document or discuss their work in a volume such as this, or even in writing at all. We wished to provide an opportunity for scholars, practitioners, and educators from a variety of sectors to share their perspectives and discuss their practices in a volume that presents, discusses, and celebrates the wide range of learning and teaching associated with popular music. As such, this volume is not a research handbook for the field akin to The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (Smith et al. 2017). Rather, this volume presents practical, theoretical and philosophical perspectives on PME, from educators working in this growing and exciting area. The practices and perspectives presented herein highlight some of the tremendous breadth of approaches taken and methods used by individuals teaching music from primary school through to university and college and in community contexts. Each account provides a window on to the values and meanings that music and music education have in the lives of these educators and their students. The editors wish to make clear that we acknowledge and celebrate the ambiguity of the term popular music education. The rich variety of perspectives and practices presented in the pages of this volume (themselves clearly inexhaustive) hint at the futility of attempting to define PME. The “popular” prefix is a clumsy catch-all that the field has inherited as much as it has adopted. As Smith and Powell (2017: 3) note in their “Welcome to the Journal” essay in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Popular Music Education, there has been an “ongoing balkanization of scholarship in music and education,” with popular music education widely regarded as adjunct to (normal) music education. For many people, however, “popular” music is just music, so one could be excused for wondering why music education should be so differently viewed 1

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

and construed. This introductory chapter is not the place to discuss the ontology or epistemology of our field—our colleagues do so in the following chapters, outlined briefly below, following on from pioneering work by scholars including Bowman (2004), Cloonan and Hulstedt (2013), and Hebert, Abramno, and Smith (2017). Quoting Smith and Powell again, we contend that:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

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 personal and it is collective. It is vocational and avocational, and it builds and develops communities. (Smith and Powell 2017: 5) In the introduction to The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, the editors assert that, “without wishing to claim the burgeoning scholarship around popular music education (PME) to amount to an entirely fresh paradigm, it has reached a point where it deserves recognition as its own field” (Smith et al. 2017: 5). As such, it is incumbent upon the PME community to critique our own (and each other’s) practices and assumptions in order to learn about and develop approaches to education in this area. We are glad, therefore, to include in this book a strong clutch of chapters that provide critical perspectives on a range of aspects of PME. As popular music is becoming a common fixture in many education institutions throughout the world, there is a risk that crystallization of content and ossification of practices will occur (often without consideration for the music and culture being explored). We believe it is our duty as educators to be mindful of this risk and ensure that our practices remain relevant and appropriate. It is only through honest critique and open discussion of our perspectives and practices that this can happen. We are thus grateful to our esteemed colleagues who have contributed so carefully and diligently to this volume.

Overview of the book Following the example of scholars such as Frank Abrahams and Ryan John (2015) and Tim Cain and Joanna Cursley (2017), we were keen in this book to include the 2

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Introduction

voices of those usually excluded from the peer-reviewed conversation in music education scholarship but whose outlooks, beliefs, and daily toil define experiences of music education for millions of students worldwide. As such, we have taken care to preserve the voices of authors, even (or especially) when their contributions may seem counterintuitive to readers versed in the literature and scholarship of the field. This editorial decision strikes at an issue at the core of popular music education. Lucy Green (2002, 2008) and others (Cremata 2017; Parkinson and Smith 2015) have noted issues of (in)authenticity when bringing outside music into school contexts. With regard to popular music, Barney Hoskyns (2012) warned that, “the most authentic scenes will be those we know nothing about.” It follows, then, that elision of the voices of teachers in our young field imperils our ability to advance as a community. This book is organized into six themed sections (followed by a short epilogue), each of which comprises five chapters. The first chapter in each section is longer than those it precedes and is intended to provide an in-depth consideration of the perspectives and practices discussed. In some cases this is a chapter with a scholarly focus, and in others authors provide a detailed outline of their work, projects that they have been involved in, or other examples of their practice in PME. In each section, the longer introductory chapter is followed by three slightly shorter chapters in which authors explore specific issues, ideas, or practices from their perspective as educators and academics. The final chapter in each section is a short reflective chapter in which teachers share their ideas or examples of teaching and learning.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1. Conceptualizing Popular Music Education The chapters in this section provide a range of perspectives on the nature and value of PME, and explore problems and difficulties associated with trying to conceptualize this multifaceted and variegated area of practice/study. The section begins with a chapter by David Henson and Simon Zagorski-Thomas, who frame subsequent essays by presenting a range of considerations for practice-based popular music education in undergraduate settings, challenging readers to proceed critically and reflexively. Next, Juliet Hess problematizes conceptions of PME that conform to the normative Western classical ensemble paradigm, questioning PME’s hegemonic tendencies and proposing counterhegemonic PME in which students engage with personally relevant music. Mark Hunter’s chapter follows, in which he considers value systems in PME and the relative musical and sociopolitical values ascribed to PME and classical music education, also discussing narratives around preparing students for “professional careers” as musicians. Following Hunter’s chapter, Gavin Carfoot and Brad Millard discuss innovation and tertiary PME, drawing on comparative examples from jazz education to highlight tensions between innovation and tradition. They argue that PME cannot be considered innovative by default, and outline some opportunities and challenges presented by the expansion of PME. James Dean’s chapter closes this section by discussing the value 3

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

of traditional notation skills in undergraduate popular music performance degrees, and presents implications for curriculum design for further research.

2. Musical, creative, and professional development Chapters in the second section of the book discuss issues and ideas around musical and technical development, with creativity and musicianship as recurring themes. The section opens with Bill Bruford’s chapter on expert drummers’ perceptions of their early learning experiences, including early listening habits and “hanging out,” the degree and efficacy of parental involvement, pivotal moments of sudden awareness, the availability and quality of instruction, and the extent to which lessons were internalized through deliberate practice. The second chapter, by Sarah Gulish, deals with adolescents’ musical and creative development through their engagement in and eventual stewardship of community performance events as they curate a local scene. Next, Kirk McNally, Toby Seay, and Paul Thomson present a qualitative case study exploring the use of audio archives in hands-on, investigative music production/audio engineering education at universities in Canada, the USA, and the UK. Kat Reinhert’s chapter follows, in which she looks at technical and musical development of vocal students in higher popular music education (HPME), proposes five categories of student and suggests approaches for dealing with each category. Turning to focus on techniques for vocal students with learning disabilities, Blair Kelly discusses his “Adapted Expressive Performance Approach” that helps students work toward confident, emotive musical performance.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3. Originating popular music Chapters in this section focus on teaching and learning that pertain to broad means of originating popular music. The section opens with Andrew Krikun and Stephen Ralph Matthews’ overview of an international songwriting collaboration with their students in which they critique and reflect on their practices and perspectives through four distinct lenses. The next two chapters focus on technology in the origination of popular music. Adam Patrick Bell considers what it means to be a producer at a time in which music technology is so abundant, affordable, and accessible, presenting The Song Machine project that he designed for teaching music production in a contemporary context. Bryden Stillie’s chapter focuses on drum kit education, exploring an unorthodox and innovative pedagogical approach to solo electronic drum kit performance. Zack Moir and John Hails consider teaching and learning composition in HPME, and draw on poststructuralist philosophy to critique the dominance of the work-concept and its impact on pedagogy that can lead to author-centric, work-focused approaches unrelated to cultural and musical practices in popular music. Christopher Cayari closes this section with a

4

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Introduction

chapter about the affordances of music video creation projects for undergraduate and school-age students.

4. Popular music education in schools The authors provide examples of practice, discuss challenges, and consider ways forward for the inclusion of music and practices that can, at times, feel like an uncomfortable fit in the context of school music education. In John Finney’s opening chapter he contextualizes PME within historical and contemporary policy-practice debates and discusses a rationale for PME as part of general music education for all children and young people. Next, Martina Vasil presents a case study of a music teacher who used the Orff-Schulwerk approach to include popular music, nonformal teaching, and informal learning opportunities in her general music classes in the United States. Steffen Incze’s chapter also considers PME in classrooms in North America, describing his development of a “hybrid” program for teaching Advanced Placement Music Theory using the electric guitar and drawing on examples from popular music. Fraser Burke Gottlieb reports on a research study investigating preservice music educators’ attitudes to popular music through engaging in popular music styles and practices in rock bands. The final chapter in this section is Julie Beauregard’s reflection on developing a course designed for teaching and learning of and about popular music in a high school in Rochester, NY, USA.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

5. Identity, meaning, and value in Popular Music Education In this section, authors grapple with perennial issues in music and life. Work on personhood, agency, and expression are at the core of music education and the human experience, so in his opening chapter Gareth Dylan Smith emphasizes identity realization, aesthetic experience, and eudaimonia, urging consideration of social, political, economic, and cultural power as core to the transformative potential of music education. Liz Pipe considers the role and nature of expressive gesture and nonverbal communication in PME, detailing a research project to develop teaching and learning in London. Bryan Powell examines experiences of two young female electric guitar players and the need to “claim space” in popular music settings (Björck 2011), suggesting that school-based popular music ensembles can help mitigate social and parental constraints. Lloyd McArton and Nasim Niknafs urge the application of an empowering “indie ethics” for challenging musical authority and resisting institutional pressures in the face of aesthetic and ethical issues that arise through emphasis on commercial music in PME. To close this section, Karen Howard highlights the debate regarding hip-hop in education in the United States, exploring the discussion through a critical pedagogical lens, asserting

5

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

that music educators have an obligation to represent the musical identities and cultural knowledge of their students and the broader community.

6. Formal education, creativities, and assessment This section begins with Paul Kleiman arguing that a prevalent “closed system” in HPME fosters replication and formulation over innovation and originality; he urges development of creativity in PME via a more “open” approach in which students become agents in their own learning and assessment. Renée Stefanie discusses a course that tackles creativity as a set of skills and processes in the context of a higher education environment in which students prioritize grades over engaging in exploratory and risky creative development. Radio Cremata tackles the “schoolification” of PME—meeting challenges associated with school contexts while remaining culturally responsive and adaptive to the evolving music learning ecosystem. Next, Daniel A. Walzer explores the use of digital media and open-source production software for digital storytelling to support teaching practices and inspire student ingenuity, peer collaboration, critical thinking, and inclusivity. In the final chapter, Ross Bicknell considers established DIY approaches to creativity in electronic dance music and examines how these can be incorporated in formal education contexts as an alternative to restrictive and prescriptive teaching methods.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

7. Epilogue The final chapter in the book is by John Kratus, who provides information about his personal journey in music education, both as a student and an educator, as a frame for his discussion about the nature and development of PME. Kratus draws on the other chapters in the book and uses them to reflect on ways in which his own practice, and the practice of other educators, will continue to develop as a result of progress in our field.

References Abrahams, Frank and Ryan John (2015), Planning Instruction in Music: Writing, Objectives, Assessment, and Lesson Plans to Engage Artistic Processes, Chicago: GIA Publications. Björck, Cecilia (2011), Claiming Space: Discourses on Gender, Popular Music, and Social Change, Gothenburg: Academy of Music and Drama; Högskolan för scen och musik. Bowman, Wayne. 2004. “‘Pop’ Goes … ? Taking Popular Music Seriously,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 29–50, Reston, VA: The National Association for Music Education.

6

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Introduction

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Cain, Tim and Joanna Cursley (2017), Teaching Music Differently: Case Studies of Inspiring Pedagogies, Abingdon: Routledge. Cloonan, Martin and Lauren Hulstedt (2013), “Looking for Something New: The Provision of Popular Music Studies Degrees in the UK,” IASPM@ Journal: Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 3 (2): 63–77. Cremata, Radio (2017), “Facilitation in Popular Music Education,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 63–82. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, Education, London: Abramis. Hebert, David, Joseph Abramno, and Gareth D. Smith (2017), “Epistemological and Sociological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–478, Abingdon: Routledge. Hoskyns, Barney (2012), “This Must be the Place: Holy Grails and Musical Meccas,” paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (UK and Ireland) conference, Salford. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth D. Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Smith, Gareth D., Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (2017), “Popular Music Education (R)evolution,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 5–13, Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Gareth D. and Bryan Powell (2017), “Welcome to the Journal,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 3–7.

7

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

8

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part I

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conceptualizing Popular Music Education

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

10

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

1

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice David Henson and Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Setting the scene in higher popular music education: Where are we? Higher popular music education (HPME) is highly variegated, comprised of a hodgepodge of ideas and pedagogical approaches that have emerged from classical-dominated music education (Hall 2017; Smith 2014). On the one hand this means that creativity is still defined largely in terms of composition or through a particular notion of virtuosity, which are direct descendants of nineteenth-century romanticism and the notion of the lone genius as the driver of musical creativity (Bruford 2018; Burnard 2012). While systems-based and actor-network approaches to creativity as distributed practice have been applied to popular music (Bruford 2018; Thompson and McIntyre 2013; Zagorski-Thomas 2016), this more nuanced way of thinking has yet to percolate down significantly into the nuts and bolts of tuition in higher popular music performance education (HPMPE). Indeed, the mythology of the lone genius has been perpetuated in the industry, perhaps especially the star system. There is no single, well-established, and suitable theoretical framework applied to the field of popular music education for learning instrumental/vocal technique, composition/songwriting, collaborative creativity, and critical listening/analysis. Indeed, these authors have observed the persistence of notation-based systems in highly inappropriate contexts, and esoteric performance pedagogical approaches often based on dubious pseudoscience or flawed adaptations of popular philosophy or psychology.1 The incursion of homogenized ergonomic techniques such as fingering and breath control into creative/expressive techniques such as chord/scale relationships in improvisation (Collier 1994) has been criticized for creating music schools that are “sausage factories,” mass producing musicians who all play in the same way (Parkinson and Smith 2015). Students enter HPME in the UK (where these authors are based) from a wide variety of educational backgrounds, including high school music and alternative, vocational qualifications. Others, who possibly disliked the traditional school music, have a commitment and passion for their own forms of music-making, and bring proven

11

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

academic records in other areas. Many young people’s musical experiences develop through exposure to “reality” television shows such as The X-Factor, The Voice, and Britain’s Got Talent, and thus may have a strongly romanticized conception of their potential careers. A growing marketplace of private, commercial music colleges in the UK offers courses2 with a “quick-fix” and “quack-medicine” ethos that promises to fulfill these unrealistic expectations (Parkinson 2017). This burgeoning industry impacts learning and career preparedness, for instead of exploring the “why” and understanding the complexity of making decisions and thinking creatively, students are being told “how” to react and offered master classes where stars show them the way to succeed (Hooper 2017; Jones 2017). The marketization of higher education (HE) has also created a climate where universities compete for students and the logic behind this mechanism assumes that the demand by student consumers will create the most effective portfolio of courses, i.e., that the students rather than the universities know what will suit their educational needs best (Bennett 2015; Jones 2017). This puts the onus on responsible providers to “sell” courses to students by explaining the benefits of potentially unpopular elements as well as showcasing the popular elements (Brown and Carasso 2013; John and Fanghanel 2015). Either that or we’re in a race to the bottom. Practical courses in popular music are often cited as examples of de-skilling and the lowering of standards in music higher education because one of the “core” skills in traditional music learning, i.e., expertise in music notation, is de-emphasized (Dean, Chapter 5 in this volume; Fleet 2017; Parkinson and Smith 2015). While notation skills may not loom large in many popular music performance and production courses, they feature more prominently in musical theatre since theatre “pit bands” often need to read and interpret sheet music. Educators designing and working in popular music education must, therefore, give careful consideration to the appropriate skills for students. When discussing popular music in this chapter the authors include music from musical theatre. This understanding is based on an interest in the types of theoretical and practical skills useful to students. The parallel history of popular song styles with musical theatre and the recent proliferation of “juke box” musicals (based around the material of popular music artists and bands) suggest that contemporary musical theatre students’ practice overlaps more with that of their peers studying popular music than with those pursuing the classical tradition. Popular music practices extend beyond those of classical music (i.e., score-based composition and instrumental or vocal interpretations of these) and include practices that engage with a much more detailed approach to music as primarily sound (Finney 2007; Kwami 1998). Aside from the need for popular artists to develop a unique, expressive and individual persona (rather than to conform to the narrower standards of a “good sound” that exist in the classical world), approaching music as sound means that songwriting and production utilize a much broader range of technology than typical in the classical world. To this end, the kinds of music courses discussed in this chapter include performance, songwriting, music technology, record or music production, live sound, computer game music, and sound design courses. 12

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A need for change? It is over two decades since Simon Frith wrote about the value of popular music (Frith 1996), and questions about the artistic worth of “unpopular” music have bubbled along in the background ever since (Atton 2014). Yet, as noted above, music education still seems to be plagued by the notion that classical music is somehow more important or serious than popular music. In a 2016 UK radio program (Cook 2016), one of the authors, Zagorski-Thomas, argued that, “It seems to be up to the younger universities to take the lead in analysing musical forms that live outside of the world of the classical score and to create a musicology that is more relevant to our experience of music now.” Many responses represented this as an attack on classical music rather than an attempt to develop a musicology more appropriate to popular forms (e.g., Pace 2016). Of course, there is a three- or four-hundred-year history of notated Western art music and barely over a century of recorded popular music, so there is a huge difference in the quantity of repertoire to study (Rodriguez 2004). On the other hand, far more of what might be described as art music by its audience, is being created in popular music, yet musicological tools deployed in its analysis are designed to study a different type of artifact that utilizes entirely different techniques, assumptions, and thought processes (Moore 2001). Having said that, the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), for example, recently began several initiatives designed to develop research into popular music education practices, in addition to their more usual areas of specialism in cultural theory, history, and sociology. This follows a report by Cloonan and Hulstedt (2012) for the Higher Education Academy which highlighted some of the problems faced by academics teaching practical HE popular music courses in the UK. Conferences such as those organized by the Art of Record Production, the Association for Popular Music Education, the Musical Theatre Educators Alliance, and Innovation in Music, plus the newly formed Twenty-first Century Music Practice Research Network and, indeed, publications such as the Journal of Popular Music Education, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (Smith et al. 2017) and the current volume are all symptomatic of a developing research culture in this area. It seems, then, that there is both a need for change and a momentum driving change. There is an ontological debate (evident in our colleagues’ work in chapters throughout this volume) about two fundamental issues that need to be addressed if the change is to be positive and meaningful: 1 What are the characteristics of popular music practices, and what kinds of skills are necessary to produce them? 2 What kinds of learning processes and environments are necessary to allow students to acquire these kinds of skills? 13

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Two closely related features of popular music practice inform the first of these questions: the performed rather than notated traditions from which practices emerge, and the nature of compositional tools that allow creation of pieces that can be more complex than can be kept in a single person’s head at any one time. The first feature highlights the fact that notation guides and constrains the ways musicians think about performance. Some of these are: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

There is a single “right” thing to play at any given moment in a piece. The structure of the piece is determined before the performance (or recording). Music is made up of discrete and stable pitches. An instrument produces a single (desirable) timbre. Rhythm is perceived with reference to a single metric framework. Choices about expression should be in the hands of a composer or conductor rather than performer. Composition is a more highly prized activity than performance.

The identification of these constraints was mostly facilitated by thinking about the ways in which popular music practice diverges from reliance on notated music rather than by thinking about notation in isolation. Popular music practices have grown out of folk traditions where the core content of repertoire provided a vehicle for the real business of creativity: interpretation and improvisation (Egenes 2010). They have also grown out of traditions based on expression through gesture and action that produce unstable and dynamic sounds that reflect particular energy trajectories (see Chapters 18 and 19 in this volume). The second feature, relating to compositional tools, is strongly connected to the first in that notation is the composition tool in classical music that allows a composer to represent and keep a record of more than they can keep in their head at a single time. As with any representational system though, the record is schematic—a simplified reduction of the sounds that a composer wishes to hear. Popular musicians have long deployed two alternative and complementary compositional tactics that afford increased access to complexity (although various forms of notation have also been used—particularly in the first half of the twentieth century). The first is collaboration—adding complexity by multiple performers working together and memorizing or improvising their parts. The second is sound recording— particularly multitrack recording where fragments of performances can be assembled as a kind of collage through an ongoing process involving critical assessment. In some ways this resembles the non-“real-time” and nonlinear techniques afforded by notation, but the basic components are sonic rather than instructions for making sound. These two systems encourage entirely different working methods, ways of thinking about music and musical results from a notation-based approach. We contend that the above amounts to a need to turn traditional learning approaches in HPME inside out, and for educators to rethink their relationships with the environment and their students. Educators need to be students of their craft and share their learning 14

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

with others so that there is a greater emphasis on collaborative learning within the learning situation. We can only presume that, as we move further into the twenty-first century, the world will move even faster for our students in terms of both technologies and career structures. It is, therefore, incumbent upon educators not only to share what they know from life experience and learning, but, moreover, to engage collaboratively with students to understand the world through their eyes (Robinson and Aronica 2015: 118–123). This must be done in the context of relevant and effective pedagogical theory. University education methods, though, lag behind those in schools, and HPMPE is a case in point.3

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Where do we want to be? Attempts to create a generic set of core musical skills that inform documents such as the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Music Benchmarks (Quality Assurance Agency 2016) are admirable, but such generic approaches to “quality” preclude the provision of the necessary detail for specifics of course design and present significant challenges for application in HPME contexts. For example, one of the descriptions of practical skills reads: “Demonstrate the ability to recognize and use essential components of a musical language (intervals, rhythms, modes, metres, timbre, texture, instrumentation)” (Quality Assurance Agency 2016: 19). A first step for the HPME community is to establish a consensus of what these “essential components” might be. Indeed, it seems very likely that, although there is likely much common ground, answers will be differentiated for styles that involve song-based ensemble performance (e.g., rock, reggae, and soul), sequencer- and digital audio workstation (DAW)-based electronic music (e.g., electronic dance music [EDM] and hip-hop), and tightly scripted music for multimedia applications (e.g., musical theatre, film, and gaming). There are a range of types and levels of technical skill, improvisation, expressive interpretation, ensemble-based interaction and engagement with technology involved in different styles of music. To some extent, existing courses have started to engage with this process,4 but it has been a very piecemeal process thus far, and one other critical issue has been ignored—namely, that practices in popular music are not static. Instrument and vocal technologies, musical styles, performance conventions, production aesthetics, and the modes of presenting music (and multimedia experiences) to audiences are constantly in flux. One challenge, then, is to try to articulate a range of “essential components” that are specific enough to reflect the unique characteristics of popular music styles, and yet which provide enough scope to accommodate perpetual technical and technological innovation (Bell 2015; Thompson and Stevenson 2017). Another challenge is to identify and define the types of situations and learning environments in which students can most effectively acquire skills relating to these “essential components.” Acquiring

15

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

practical skills is best achieved through placing students in a range of situations in which they not only have to perform tasks that utilize the skills they are seeking to acquire, but in which they can also come to understand how and why things can go wrong and, therefore, how and why particular skills are necessary. Courses also have to be structured to provide students with opportunities to develop a sufficient level of general skills so that they can understand the context of their chosen area and make informed decisions about setting their own particular goals. There may be a complex balancing act to be undertaken here as the acquisition of general skills can often require the creation of situations unlike those that students tend to seek when selecting courses. Asking students to accomplish musical tasks with minimal resources can help them to focus on the principles of the process and provide powerful learning experiences. Nonetheless, in our experience, students place access to high-quality and cutting-edge resources high on their list of priorities when choosing a program of study. A glance at university websites demonstrates that many institutions pander to these superficial factors in course selection.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Core skills This chapter proposes three areas of core skills that reflect the differences (and connections) between the practices and skill sets of popular and classical musicians: (1) technique, (2) collaboration, and (3) creativity. Identifying these three areas requires some explanation, since important areas may appear to be excluded, such as “theory,” “business/career,” and “context”—forms of knowledge that lie behind or alongside practical skills. A majority of HPME courses in the UK include some aspects of these— one or more music theory modules, industry modules, and history/cultural theory/stylistic analysis modules. These authors contend that theoretical or contextual knowledge (historical, cultural, stylistic, or industry-related) should be approached through the lens of practice. Let us consider the three categories in more detail by breaking them down into a series of subheadings that should be addressed in an effective popular musicology.

1. Technique Although instrumental and music technology teachers may address many of the following issues already, the fact that they have to do this outside of “music theory” bolsters our contention that theory and practice are not connected. HPME requires practice-focused theory that can be used both to understand the history of popular music styles and to help students to perform and write in those styles. Rhythm and Timing—While pulse and tempo are hugely important in popular music forms, viewing popular music rhythm through the lens of notation creates distortions. 16

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

On the one hand, sounded pulse is often uneven—both in terms of swing, which creates uneven subdivisions, and in terms of some timelines (for example, the subdivision of eight pulses into three/three/two in raga, salsa, and reggaeton), which create other forms of uneven pulse. On the other hand, thinking in terms of bars is often unhelpful; an understanding of hierarchical phrase divisions and how they change within a piece or song is often more useful. Students should be encouraged to think about the ways in which the music technology “grid” (of a computer sequencer’s timeline) and the tools of recording and sequencing are built around a very limited assumption and yet also offer myriad creative possibilities for working “around” and “against” the grid. Pitch—To a large extent, lead lines in popular music are not about the fixed pitch of a notated scale. A gestural shape toward or away from a specific (or approximate) pitch is often where interest lies. Melodies reduced to the fixed pitches that might be extrapolated from a gesture, tend to be simplistic and devoid of the meaning that inheres in this type of pitch shaping. Thinking in terms of notation misses the point. Of course, real-time performance is not the only way to shape notes: both pitch and timbre can be manipulated through technology, but students should also be aware of the ways in which soft- and hardware interfaces influence their thinking and practice. Timbre—Dynamic shaping of acoustic, electric, and electronic timbres is a hugely important area of technique that is (in these authors’ experience) largely left to students to develop on their own. The development of recorded music throughout the twentieth century, and the way in which it produced a lasting record of previously transient performances, helped to put performance on an equal footing with composition, as something lasting that could be endlessly studied and deconstructed. Timbre needs to be incorporated into popular music education theory and there are promising signs that this is starting to happen.5 Structure—While humans may have a physiological predilection for cyclical structures of equal and subdivisible lengths, the visual stimuli of notation and music software can be said to have encouraged this further. The relationship between structure, anticipation, and aesthetics provides the potential for a far deeper understanding than music theory seems currently to provide. Obvious stylistic developments are often noted, for example, thirty-two-bar song form, twelve-bar blues, and the gospel turnaround, but this needs to be taken much further. Tonality and Harmony—Functional harmony is widely used within popular music, but it needs to be understood in a wider context of tonal centers and ways in which it is often simplified within popular music to “make space” for unstable pitches and timbres with nonharmonic partials. There is also a huge number of examples of popular music where harmony is simply a matter of setting up a tonal center and then alternating between the “stable” home chord and some other. The classical study of harmony encourages students to accept the idea that more complicated equates to being better, whereas understanding needs to be placed in appropriate stylistic contexts. Improvisation—Theoretical models of improvisation have centered on chord/scale relationships that, even in a jazz context, constitute limited ways of construing a highly 17

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

complex phenomenon, and which demonstrates, again, a default reliance on notation as the basis of theory. There are many potential avenues of analysis that relate to gestural shape and stylistic conventions that should be incorporated into this area. Not least among them is the idea that economy—of developing a sense of the right moment to “say” something and the right moment to stay quiet—is often as important as, and a component of, eloquence.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

2. Collaboration The topics of business structures, gender, race, class, and other tropes of power are central to understanding collaboration, both in a general sense and in the ways they unfold in popular music practice. It is central to this educational model that these issues be designed into practical activities so that their real meaning and relevance can be appreciated. Notions of authenticity are also exhibited through these types of activity as well as through individual practice, and they vary greatly across styles of music, periods of history, and geographical and social groupings. Groove and Entrainment—For popular music performers and DAW/electronic composers of popular music, the ability to create an appropriate sense of momentum through both interaction with other performers and an appropriate reaction to sequenced or recorded performances is crucial. Performers should be sensitive and able to react to subtle shifts in mood that different types of entrainment and groove can suggest. Attributes such as loose/tight, calm/edgy, or lazy/strident are reflected in group timing and individual gestures, and students should be cognizant of how to project these different types of impression. Group Improvisation and Variation—Popular music has a relationship with improvisation that might be seen as closely connected with early jazz, in that group improvisation often consists of small variations and embellishments of a “head” arrangement, rather than the freer forms of expression usually associated with the term. Developing an appreciation of the links between hooks and variation in different styles of music is a key skill in this area. Collaborative Devising—A crucial aspect of collaborative activity is the origination of new works. A key way in which popular music differs from music in the classical tradition is the prevalence of group and collective composition/production practices. These kinds of collective activity occur on a variety of levels—songwriting, arranging, group repertoire development, recording projects, shows, tours, and entire career trajectories. Aside from the purely musical contributions, there is also a whole range of roles to do with design, technology, management, promotion, marketing, and brokering. Rehearsal—Because collaborative popular music practice does not always produce clear lines of control and power structures, the processes of rehearsal can often be very different from those found in classical music. Even taking that into account, rehearsal 18

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

is not a practice that is very heavily theorized and is often (as with much collaborative activity) learned through experience rather than through structured learning experiences. Working with Technology—Working with technology can be considered, in effect, as working with the developers and designers of that technology. Whether the technology relates to instruments, sound reinforcement, sound manipulation, or recording/ sequencing (or combinations of these), the ways that technology influences music result from both makers and users. There is a long history of users repurposing or “misusing” technology that has created complex feedback loops between these two groups. Understanding their roles in the social construction of technology is an important part of a student’s education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3. Creativity The field of music education needs to move beyond arguments about what creativity is and whether it can be taught, and instead engage with expert theory that has developed on the topic (Boden 1994; Csikszentmihalyi 1997; Deliège and Wiggins 2006; Glăveanu 2010). It is also important to understand creativity as a process that happens within a social context and not purely within an individual’s head: even a solitary singersongwriter is drawing on a cultural heritage and a broad range of influences, no matter how small-scale. Recognition of this can be used to spur creativity and develop creative tools. Producers, designers, sound engineers, theatre directors, managers, and A and R (artist and repertoire) people have all, at various times, played pivotal creative roles in the development of music, and each of these roles involves deploying a range of musical creativities. If we consider both actions and experiences to exist on a continuum between newness and conformity to expectations, creativity can be explored in terms of recognizing and exploiting the affordances of a given situation or process; some of those affordances will be familiar, well-trodden paths and others will lead students and educators into new territory. Effective creativity is a matter of balancing the use of both types of affordances such that one is neither entirely lost or entirely bored. Individual Expression—It is a central theme in popular music that the interpretation of existing repertoire is a key site of creativity. This has been true of, for instance, performance and arranging to a variety of extents in different styles of music and periods. Understanding why particular forms of expression are impactful in different contexts is a crucial skill in popular music. These authors—and we suspect we are not alone in this—have witnessed students who completely misjudge some notion of authenticity or aesthetics, and either produce an inappropriately virtuosic interpretation of something or a performance that is stylistically mismatched with a particular piece. Writing and Composing—A deep understanding of style is essential both for composing within a given style and for “breaking the rules” in meaningful ways. This is a complex and subjective area because there are many examples of popular music where musicians without formal training have “broken rules” in ways that trained musicians 19

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

have considered naïve and gauche, and yet have produced important developments. This, though, is another example of how the inappropriate straitjacket of traditional music education can be restrictive and unsuitable for HPME. A “deep understanding of style” does not have to be one grounded in Western classical harmony and form, but, moreover, should be grounded in the full range of techniques found in popular music. Troubleshooting and Problem-Solving—The cornerstone of assessment in education is often students demonstrating that they can do something “right.” However, the processes during which people learn the most are when things go wrong and they have to sort them out. Troubleshooting and problem-solving provide a springboard for creativity although they must work in conjunction with goals and aesthetics: one needs to know what one wishes to achieve (e.g., writing a song) and to make judgments about its quality and/or how appropriate or effective it is. Students generally do not aim to produce work in public that might be considered “wrong” or deficient, even if a good critical analysis of it might allow them a strong grade and provide opportunity for valuable, constructive feedback. It is, therefore, important that some combination of learning experience design and formative assessment allows students to “fail” in a safe environment and to learn through processes of troubleshooting and problem-solving. Devising Projects—A key feature of effective learning is that students should be able to recognize where they are and where they want to be, i.e., that once they are sufficiently self-aware and informed, they can understand the logic of their next step and will develop both the motivation and a sense of the plausibility of their plans: this is captured in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky 1980; Zaretskii 2009). Building this into the process by which students devise projects helps students to succeed and to ensure that they are neither engaging in something that they already know how to do, nor setting themselves unrealistic targets. By turning the process of devising a project into an extended and assessed act of learning, and where possible curating it as a collaborative process with others (such as management or marketing students), it can be opened up to a wider range of formative assessment, troubleshooting and problem-solving opportunities.

What kind of learning environment? Robert Barr and John Tagg (1995) identified a shift from the paradigm of “teaching/ instruction” to “learning,” which has been much discussed within HPME (Gaunt 2010; Lebler 2007; Lebler and Hodges 2017). There are benefits to incorporating pedagogical approaches from both sides of this coin, but for them to be fully reflected in HPME curricula and pedagogical practice, we need to address the more basic issue of who students are, with a particular emphasis on moral, social, cultural awareness, and tradition (Barrett 2011; Froehlich and Smith 2017; Green 2008). How have they come to love the subject that they now might want to study for life? What skills do educators and institutions wish to impart to students of this age range with their particular experiences 20

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

of the world? What is the learning journey to be taken so these minds and bodies can engage fully, and their studies be relevant to their needs and future interactions with society? What styles of teaching and learning are going to be more relevant to students’ needs? How are interaction and meaningful dialogic discourse going to take place between all within the learning environment, such that the ideas of all are embraced and where “the beautiful, the decent and the serious [can] form a circle with hands joined” (Freire 1998: 31–32)? Recalling Axtell, Fautley, and Nicklin’s call for “meta-pedagogy” in popular music education (2017: 357), we urge educators to enact an understanding of “meta-learning” in order that students develop the habit of critically engaging with their respective and collective HMPE journeys as reflexive cultural process (Dewey 1916, 1938; Friere 1998). Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978; Zaretskii 2009), otherwise referred to as the scaffolding process (developed and clarified by Wood, Bruner, and Ross 1976; Bruner 2009) is also a valuable pedagogical point of reference. Scaffolding refers to help and guidance to achieve a task offered to one member of a group from a more able member (an alternative understanding of scaffolding from that offered in the PME context by Burstein and Powell, forthcoming). This may appear to be a simple and effective manner of learning but it entails challenges for students understanding when and how to proceed once a task has been completed. Without “meta-learning”—being aware of what, why, and how they learn—students are being trained rather than educated. Barbara Rogoff (1991) suggests that “guided participation” and “apprenticeship” reveal valuable aspects of partnership, while Lave and Wenger (1990) recognize the value of all participants—teachers and students—learning from each other by exploring the social and cultural aspects of the agreed socially situated learning environment. Learning in this context is about everyone within a group sharing their knowledge and skills to benefit the entire learning community. Wenger’s four components of learning have been criticized by some (Aubrey and Riley 2015: 175–176) as being a naïve and somewhat simplistic development of Vygotsky’s work, but they demonstrate the importance of dialogue and modes of communication: Meaning:  

 a way of talking about our (changing) ability—individually and collectively—to experience our life and the world as meaningful. Practice:     a way of talking about shared historical and social resources, frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in action. Community: a way of talking about the social configurations in which enterprises are defined as worth pursuing and our participation is recognizable as competence. Identify:     a way of talking about how leaning changes who we are and creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities.            (Wenger 1998: 5) 21

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Educators in HPME should aim to create curricula that assist and encourage all potential performers/musicians to develop skills from within the world they will be part of. The musical practices of the twenty-first century are changing rapidly and in many instances students may be better apprised of new developments than faculty members. A learning partnership thus requires the lecturer to use their experience to guide the student toward critical reflection on new developments rather than always insisting on control of the content and context. Alongside these considerations, sits the issue of teaching creativity, perhaps best considered as an active learning process of where educators are “teaching for creativity”—assisting and celebrating the development of students as thinking artists, and nurturing their creative engagement with the future (Conway and Hodgman 2009: 161). Some critics and cultural theorists utilizing discussing “high” and “low” art in higher education (Carey 2006; Eaton 2001; Willis 1990) would suggest that a popular music curriculum is, by definition, controlled, and even restricted, by the current commercial climate and the demands of the industry. If, on the other hand, we consider that all music and art is socially constructed and that therefore the notion of a strict determinism by aesthetic, commercial, or technological forces is naïve, then it is incumbent upon the professional community to educate students about the ways in which musicians interact with these forces, and to design courses that are flexible and not tied to some specific technological or organizational model. We also need to discover in what circumstances students are not engaging with the learning process. The current situation (at the authors’ institution) where faculty aim to find different ways to assess work, refine teaching methods, negotiate the amount of time spent in study, change assessment formats, and improve the speed in returning feedback, can be improved upon. These are managerial rather than primarily pedagogical issues, and only faculty are going to have the opportunity to imagine and curate inspiring learning environments, encouraging students to be aware of and engage with creativity in their thinking. Students need to understand learning as a shared collaborative activity viewed from a variety of perspectives, depending upon the nature of particular collaborations and the organization of individual learning situation. It is up to the HPME community to embrace this collaboration, in the hope that teaching for creativity will enable it to prepare the next generation of students in an effective manner.

Conclusions: Setting the agenda In developing this chapter, it became clear that a largely unaddressed issue needs resolving for educators in HPME to be able to set the agenda. Alongside the continuing pedagogical discussion another, more radical, shake-up needs to occur. If the subject area of popular music practice is to break its ties with the traditions of

22

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

classical music pedagogy, scholars have to develop a new strand of musicology that recognizes fundamental differences between an analytical system focused on notation and composition, and one based on musical sound and performance. The authors hope that this chapter contributes to the discourse outlined above and continued in various chapters in this volume—and that the study of popular music practice is starting to develop a more coherent theoretical basis.

Developing the content The theoretical position that we have used to underpin this chapter is not something that is integral or necessary to the divisions (technique, collaboration, and creativity) that have been adopted or to the subdivisions that were outlined in each of those sections (rhythm and timing, pitch, timbre, structure, etc.). Indeed, the fact that a strand of musicology suited to popular music analysis and practice should include those divisions and subdivisions is more important to us from a procedural standpoint than the theoretical position. While we would advocate strongly for the power of this theoretical model, we consider it an imperative for the development of this academic field that this typology or something similar forms the basis of both analytical and pedagogical approaches to popular music practice.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Developing the environment To recap, we see four types of activity as being necessary in the development of an effective learning HPME environment—although, of course, the specifics would necessarily be determined by the type of content. There may well be extensive crossover between the content of music production, music management, popular music performance, live sound, recording, and musical theatre courses, and our ethos is that the students of each should work together on large-scale projects as frequently as possible. Local learning environments and individual student journeys will differ. They would, however, each involve similar principles and types of activity: 1 providing students with the necessary context to make informed decisions in situations where it has been decided that they should set their own learning agenda; 2 training-style activities that develop specific skills for specific contexts; 3 generalized problem-solving activities that situate learners in a broader range of contexts that force them to think about the nature of the problem; and 4 meta-learning skills where students explore theoretical understanding about the types of knowledge and skills they need and why they need them.

23

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Next steps This chapter arguably reads like a call to arms, and thus the question arises: whither now? There are many initiatives already in progress, including the one in which we are involved: the Twenty-first Century Music Practice Research Network. There are also several people, to our knowledge (including these authors) working on funding bids to undertake research in this area. As noted above, Cloonan and Hulstedt (2012: 31) suggested several years ago that academics in this field were calling for “the provision of best practice guides, regular conferences, the development of benchmarks, links to the music industries/employability and the development of research networks.” With the annual conference of the Association for Popular Music Education running for ten years now and the Journal of Popular Music Education in its third year, there is clearly not only a growing appetite for knowledge in this area but also a burgeoning body of research and an increasing willingness to recognize the need for the discussion. There seem to be considerable grounds for hope.

Notes 1 For example, problematic notions based on the “lone genius” model of creativity are often framed around misunderstood ideas about left-hemisphere/right-hemisphere brain activity. 2 “Courses” refers to any sequence of learning activities from a single module/unit of study to a full program. 3 In the UK, this can be seen in the much more systematic and rigorous application of teacher education and pedagogy theory in the school system, while many university lecturers teach without any formal pedagogical training.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

4 For example, London College of Music Examinations’ music ensemble, popular music instrumental, voice, and theory graded exams are a step in this direction. 5 For example, Robert Fink, Mindy LaTour O’Brien, Zachary Wallmark’s edited collection The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre in Popular Music (2018) and the Timbre Conference at McGill University, Montreal, July 4–7, 2018.

References Atton, Chris (2014), “What Can We Learn from ‘Unpopular’ Music and Its Audiences?,” paper presented at Studying Music: An International Conference in Honour of Simon Frith, University of Edinburgh, April 10–12. Axtell, Ian, Martin Fautley, and Kelley Davy Nicklin (2017), “Popular Music Meta-pedagogy in Music Teacher Education,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 357–368, Abingdon: Routledge. 24

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

Aubrey, Karl and Alison Riley (2015), Understanding and Using Educational Theories, London: SAGE Publications. Barr, Robert B. and John Tagg (1995), “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education,” Change, 27 (6): 13–25. Barrett, Margaret S. (2011), A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, New York: Oxford University Press. Bell, Adam P. (2015), “DAW Democracy? The Dearth of Diversity in ‘Playing the Studio’,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 8 (2): 146–160. Bennett, Toby (2015), Learning the Music Business: Evaluating the “Vocational Turn” in Music Industry Education, London: Music for Youth. Boden, Margaret A. (1994), Dimensions of Creativity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Roger and Helen Carasso (2013), Everything for Sale? The Marketisation of UK Higher Education, New York: Routledge with the Society for Research into Higher Education. Bruford, Bill (2018), Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bruner, Jerome Seymour (2009), The Process of Education, revised edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burstein, Scott and Bryan Powell (forthcoming), “Approximation, Differentiation, and Scaffolding in Modern Band,” Music Educators Journal. Carey, John (2006), What Good are the Arts?, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cloonan, Martin and Lauren Hulstedt (2012), Taking Notes: Mapping and Teaching Popular Music in Higher Education. Higher Education Academy. Available online: www.heacademy. ac.uk/system/files/cloonan_2012.pdf (accessed January 6, 2017). Collier, G. (1994), “The Churchill Report on Jazz Education in America,” Jazz Changes Magazine, 1 (1) (Spring): 1–44. Available online: www.geneaitken.com/sites/geneaitken. com/files/articles/Churchill.pdf (accessed November 20, 2018). Conway, Colleen M. and Thomas M. Hodgman (2009), Teaching Music in Higher Education, New York: Oxford University Press. Cook, Sheila (2016), “Dead White Composers,” Four Thought, London: BBC Radio 4. Available online: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078c9l2 (accessed January 6, 2017). Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Collins. Deliège, Irène and Geraint A. Wiggins, eds. (2006), Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, Hove: Psychology Press. Dewey, John (1916), Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, Text-book Series in Education, New York: Macmillan. Dewey, John (1938), Experience and Education, The Kappa Delta Pi Lecture Series, New York: Simon & Schuster. Eaton, Marcia Muelder (2001), Merit, Aesthetic and Ethical, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Egenes, John (2010), “The Remix Culture: How the Folk Process Works in the 21st Century,” PRISM, 7 (3): 1–4. Available online: www.prismjournal.org/fileadmin/Social_media/Egenes. pdf (accessed January 30, 2017). Finney, John (2007), “Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires,” in John Finney and Pamela Burnard (eds.), Music Education with Digital Technology, 9–20. London: Continuum. 25

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Fleet, Paul (2017), “‘I’ve Heard There Was a Secret Chord’: Do We Need to Teach Music Notation in UK Popular Music Studies?,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 166–176, Abingdon: Routledge. Freire, Paolo (1998), Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage, Critical Perspectives Series: a Book Series Dedicated to Paulo Freire, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Frith, Simon (1996), Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Froehlich, Hildegard C. and Gareth D. Smith (2017), Sociology for Music Teachers: Practical Applications, second edition, New York: Routledge. Gaunt, Helena (2010), “One-to-one Tuition in a Conservatoire: The Perceptions of Instrumental and Vocal Students,” Psychology of Music, 38 (2): 178–208. Glăveanu, Vlad-Petre (2010), “Principles for a Cultural Psychology of Creativity,” Culture and Psychology, 16 (2): 147–163. Green, Lucy (2008), Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, Education, London: Abramis. Hall, Rich (2017), “Rock On or Sign On? A Critical Evaluation of the Popular Music Degree for Performers in the UK,” PhD diss., Coventry University. Hooper, Emma (2017), “Do the Stars Know Why they Shine? An Argument for Including Cultural Theory in Popular Music Programmes,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 153–165, Abingdon: Routledge. John, Peter and Jöelle Fanghanel (2015), Dimensions of Marketisation in Higher Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Jones, Michael (2017), “Teaching Music Industry in Challenging Times: Addressing the Neoliberal Employability Agenda in Higher Education at a Time of Music-Industrial Turbulence,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 341–354, Abingdon: Routledge. Kwami, Robert (1998), “Non-Western Musics in Education: Problems and Possibilities,” British Journal of Music Education, 15 (2): 161–170. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger (1990), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lebler, Don (2007), “Student-as-Master? Reflections on a Learning Innovation in Popular Music Pedagogy,” International Journal of Music Education, 25 (3): 205–221. Lebler, Don and Naomi Hodges (2017), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Dual Perspectives on DIY Musicianship,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 272–284, Abingdon: Routledge. Moore, Allan F. (2001), Rock: The Primary Text—Developing a Musicology of Rock, second edition, Farnham: Ashgate. Pace, Ian (2016), “Responses to Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s Talk on ‘Dead White Composers’,” Desiring Progress, April 27, 2016. Available online: https://ianpace.wordpress. com/2016/04/27/responses-to-simon-zagorski-thomass-talk-on-dead-white-composers/ (accessed January 6, 2017). 26

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

Parkinson, Tom (2017), “Dilemmas of Purpose in Higher Popular Music Education: A Critical Portrait of an Academic Field,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (2): 133–150. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth D. Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) (2016), Subject Benchmark Statement: Music, Gloucester: Quality Assurance Agency, October 2016. Available online: www.qaa.ac.uk/docs/qaa/subjectbenchmark-statements/sbs-music-16.pdf?sfvrsn=1f9af781_10 (accessed January 6, 2017). Robinson, Ken and Lou Aronica (2015), Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up, London: Allen Lane. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), “Popular Music Education: Toward a New Conception of Musicality,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 13–28, Reston, VA: MENC Publishing. Rogoff, Barbara (1991), Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context, New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Gareth D. (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Graham Welch and Ioulia Papageorgi (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigation in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth D., Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman, eds. (2017), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Thompson, Paul and Alex Stevenson (2017), “Missing a Beat: Exploring Experiences, Perceptions and Reflections of Popular Electronic Musicians in UK Higher Education Institutions,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 203–216, Abingdon: Routledge. Thompson, Paul and Phillip McIntyre (2013), “Rethinking Creative Practice in Record Production And Studio Recording Education: Addressing The Field,” Journal on the Art of Record Production, (8). Available online: www.arpjournal.com/asarpwp/rethinkingcreative-practice-in-record-production-and-studio-recording-education-addressing-the-field/ (accessed January 30, 2017). Vygotsky, Lev S. (1978), “Interaction between Learning and Development,” in Mary Gauvain and Mivhael Cole (eds.), Reading on the Development of Children, 34–40, New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. Vygotsky, Lev S. (1980), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wenger, Etienne (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willis, Paul (1990), Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Wood, David, Jerome S. Bruner, and Gail Ross (1976), “The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving,” Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry & Allied Disciplines, 17 (2): 89–100. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (2016), “The Influence of Recording Technology and Practice on Popular Music Performance in the Recording Studio in Poland Between 1960 and 1989,” Polish Sociological Review, 196 (4): 531–548. Zaretskii, V. K. (2009), “The Zone of Proximal Development: What Vygotsky Did Not Have Time to Write,” Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 47 (6): 70–93. 27

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

28

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

2

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony? Juliet Hess

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction As music educators reimagine the Western classical ensemble paradigm of music education, scholars suggest popular music education as a possible way forward (Bowman 2004; Green 2001, 2008; Snell 2009; Westerlund 2006). Discourse surrounding popular music education often relates to its democratic potential (Allsup 2002, 2004; Rodriguez 2004; Snell 2009). Others challenge popular music pedagogy’s purported democratic underpinnings (Hebert and Heimonen 2013; Kallio 2015). Ideally, however, popular music education fosters democratic and creative decisions, and the development of technical and aural skills. It also potentially immerses students in their preferred musical genres. Considering characteristics of the much-critiqued Western classical ensemble paradigm (see for example Bartel 2004b) alongside the learnerled popular music pedagogy put forward by Lucy Green (2008)1 reveals interesting alignments. Predominantly teacher-centered, (classical) ensemble-based learning typically prioritizes music staff notation over aural transmission, privileges Eurocentric composers and repertoire, and does not always provide autonomy to participants. As we fashion popular music education as a way forward for music education, recognizing the ways that this pedagogy looks surprisingly similar to the ensemble paradigm of classical music will help us avoid hegemonic models of music education. Educators often enact popular music pedagogy as a replication model of education through which students reproduce or “cover” music that already exists (Campbell 1995; Green 2001, 2008; Snell 2009). While students may not be responsible to a teacher/conductor/director as they would be in classical ensembles (Bartel and Cameron 2004; Garnett 2005; O’Toole 1994), popular music education students still frequently strive to replicate musics that perhaps are not any more “their” musics than classical music. Many popular music programs do focus on original composition and creating covers of student-selected songs. My challenge is to programs and curricula more focused on teaching a “canon” of musical styles2 rooted in particular identities. In imagining a popular music education that is not simply a “new hegemony,” we might consider how culturally responsive teaching may help ensure that students work with 29

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

musics related to their lives. Culturally responsive teaching in music education attempts to center music that speaks to youth’s realities and interests (Gay 2018; Hess 2015; Koza 2006; Lind and McKoy 2016). Popular music education proponents often assume that popular music relates to students’ realities. In actuality, however, popular music education sometimes involves imposing music from 1960s and 1970s rock genres—music rooted in specific raced, classed, gendered, and sexual identities. This chapter explores the hegemonic possibilities of a replication approach to popular music pedagogy and offers practical suggestions for counterhegemonic popular music education in which students engage in music relevant to their lives. We thus move beyond a replication model of popular music education toward a model that encourages students to articulate their lived realities through styles that resonate with them. This chapter employs the theoretical framework of anti-colonialism to consider the colonialism inherent in Western classical models of music education, and to point to colonial underpinnings of some models of popular music pedagogy. Dei (2006) defines colonialism as “anything imposed and dominating rather than that which is simply foreign and alien” (3). Extending colonialism’s meaning beyond imperialism increases its applicability across multiple contexts, including music education. I explicate this framework in the next section. Subsequently, I explore what typically constitutes “normative” North American music education (the Western classical ensemble paradigm), followed by what popular music pedagogy frequently entails, drawing on Green’s (2008) work in particular. After focusing on the colonial potential of particular enactments of popular music education, I outline a culturally responsive popular music education as a way forward for music education and offer practical suggestions for enacting such popular music teaching.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Anti-colonialism: A theoretical framework Following Dei’s definition of colonialism above, we might consider the dominance of Eurocentricity across music education ensembles in US and Canadian contexts as an extension of colonialism. The dominance of Western classical music suggests the need for a theoretical lens that explicitly addresses (and resists) colonialism and its inherent power relations. Coloniality, as an ongoing, distinctly place-based process, deliberately marked certain land territories as primitive, justifying the subjugation of their human occupants (Wynter 2003). In music education, coloniality involves elevating Western classical music above so-called “other musics” and marking those other musics as inferior, rationalizing their exclusion. An anti-colonial analysis facilitates critique of the Eurocentricity and implied superiority present in normative North American music education. Anti-colonialism is: an approach to theorizing colonial and re-colonial relations and the implications of imperial structures on 30

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

the processes of knowledge production and validation, the understanding of indigeneity, and the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics. (Dei 2006: 2) Examining the effects of imperial structures on knowledge production facilitates understanding an education system predicated on colonialism. An anti-colonial framework prioritizes different epistemologies (particularly indigenous epistemologies) and ways of knowing music (and the world). It also resists the imposition of Eurocentric paradigms. Key anti-colonial thinkers including Fanon (1963), Césaire ([1972] 2000), and Memmi (1965) identify resistance as vital to anti-colonialism. I mobilize this framework to address the Eurocentrism in music education, its presence rooted in imperial violence toward indigenous musics. Colonialism directly shaped the imposition of Western classical music and musical epistemologies on systems around the world, thus making anti-colonialism crucial for analyzing dominant power structures in music education curricula and pedagogy. Coloniality operates in the normative music education paradigm through the dominance of Western classical forms and Western standard notation. Prioritizing consideration of power and race helps address this Western privileging in music education. This analytical lens illuminates structural inequities within music education and potentially offers something different. Considering colonialism as an imposition rooted in power (Dei 2006) facilitates focusing on both normative Western classical music education and popular music pedagogy.

Coloniality and music education: Considering normative and popular music education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Western classical music education as normative Situated within a precarious context of budget cuts and the Global Education Reform movement (Sahlberg 2011), the dominant paradigm of US and Canadian music education I critique usually follows a teacher-directed rehearsal model in which students rehearse repertoire determined by the teacher.3 The teacher controls the activities, repertoire, and pedagogy, typically within a Western classical sensibility (Bartel 2004a). Teachers/ directors often prioritize technique over expressivity or musicality (Bartel and Cameron 2004), and emphasize cognitive approaches over more playful and improvisatory possibilities (Kennedy 2004: 67). Teachers often require still comportment from students, even when listening or performing music (Gustafson 2009). Emphasizing classical music further privileges Western standard notation over oral tradition as the means of transmission. Music curricula in this paradigm often emphasize replicating “existing music prescriptions—i.e., learning to read and perform music created by someone else” (Bartel 31

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

2004a: xii–xiv). Prioritizing replication often limits improvisation and composition—a comparatively neglected aspect of the curriculum (Kennedy 2004: 69). In selecting ensemble performance repertoire, teachers frequently privilege artistic exemplars over culturally familiar repertoire (Bartel and Cameron 2004: 46–47)4 and highlight Western classical aspirations. Moreover, normative music education often assumes that students are “blank scores” (Peters 2004) who require certain skill sequences upon entering school. Teachers do not necessarily recognize, or acknowledge, that students enter the music classroom with profound musical knowledge (Bartel 2004a; Peters 2004). Despite the often rich music listening lives of students, normative music education “does not legitimize listening for pleasure” (Bartel 2004a: xiv). Instead, “guided listening activities” require students to “listen for” teacher-identified elements of music. Teachers do not necessarily contextualize the social or sociopolitical aspects of music,5 although emphasizing Eurocentricity and ranking students into ensemble positions implicitly reinforce social hierarchies. Normative ensemble instruction also often limits social interactions between students. Educators rarely engage in social justice conversations or critical pedagogy in ensemble contexts. Outside political forces, however, shape the inability to engage the sociopolitical and center students’ own musics. National curricula, standardized testing in “core” subjects, and state and federal policies greatly restrict both curriculum content and time allotted to teaching. Teachers are bound by national regulations, and the lack of ability to attend to some of these concerns is deeply (and perhaps intentionally) systemic. Considering the colonial as imposition and domination (Dei 2006: 3), colonialism evidently influences normative music education. Classical music, and thus Eurocentricism, dominates, and the Master-apprentice model (Allsup 2016) dictates the power of the teacher alongside the primacy of Western repertoire. This model does not necessarily account for youth’s interests and vibrant musical lives. Narrow repertoire prescriptions and emphasis on technique over musicality limit creativity. When this form is incongruent with students’ preferences (and even sometimes when it is congruent), music education becomes imposing and dominating, forwarding a Eurocentric agenda at the expense of other musics and epistemologies. In this form, music can become more important than the individuals who make it.

Popular music pedagogy Popular music pedagogy following a particular model can similarly enact issues identified as colonial in normative Western classical music education. The suggestions Green (2008) offers for popular music pedagogy emphasize the sociality of music, often grouping students with friends and encouraging them to work collaboratively to musically solve problems on instruments and through arranging. Students choose music of interest and replicate it through listening—a process called “song-lifting” or 32

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

copying (Campbell 1995; Green 2001; Snell 2009). They also enact similar listening and “lifting” strategies on less familiar and assigned musical material. Today’s students have replaced listening and copying by ear with accessing chord charts and tabs online for collaborative learning.6 Green offers “informal” music learning strategies based on strategies used by popular musicians (Green 2001). Her suggestions do not rely on or privilege staff notation. In sharing these informal strategies, Green (2003) notes: it is one thing to bring a variety of musics into the classroom, but if the learning methods of the relevant musicians are ignored, a peculiar, classroom version of the music is likely to emerge, stripped of the very methods by which the music has always been created, and therefore bearing little resemblance to its existence in the world outside. (269)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular music pedagogy thus involves enacting learning strategies of popular musicians. Teachers and scholars often promote popular music teaching and learning as more democratic than normative ensemble music education (Allsup 2002, 2004; Snell 2009). Democratic popular music education often involves youth sharing in decision-making, engaging in musical problem-solving, and developing technical expertise as needed (Green 2008). Popular music students combine aural and visual skills to learn music. Ideally, popular music education centers musics youth passionately associate with their identities.7 Practically, however, popular music pedagogy may manifest differently than its supporters contend. Kallio (2015), for example, wonders: Has introducing popular repertoire to the classroom achieved the intended goals of democratic music education? Or has it in fact reverted to a peculiar form of school music (Regelski 2006, 11), which does not reflect the musical world outside classrooms, where a large portion of repertoire is disregarded as inappropriate for young students? (207) Drawing on informal learning strategies of musicians in her 2001 study, Green puts forward learning strategies of a homogenous sample of predominantly white, male, rock musicians to generalize a broader popular music pedagogy (Rodriguez in process), a limitation Green acknowledges. Drawing upon these musicians’ informal strategies (Green 2001), popular music education may replicate rock bands from the 1960s or 1970s, and center the music of predominantly white men and utilize guitar-based styles featuring guitar, bass, and drum kits.8 Green’s (2008) suggestions place students in friendship groups to collaborate and problem solve musically, utilizing and developing their aural skills, and attempting to cover a chosen song. After developing their aural skills, their next activity involves more structure as the 33

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

teacher selects the music—a strategy Väkevä (2009) calls “reverse fading” wherein the teacher “takes more responsibility as basic skills are internalized” (15). Green suggests students may apply new skills to decode classical music and manipulate it more informally. I assert this approach shares many of the same colonial underpinnings as normative music education. Normative ensemble music education in North America follows a replication model wherein students reproduce or replicate existing music through using sheet music. In popular music education, the recording assumes the role of the music to replicate. Rather than replicating composed works from notation, students employ “purposive” and “attentive” listening (Green 2001: 23–24) to reproduce what they hear. The recording effectively becomes notation in this model—the “score” to replicate and execute. The assigned task of copying and replicating may require students to engage the rehearsal model. While more informal, students nonetheless rehearse the piece and repeat difficult sections. The rehearsal model occurs differently and is student-driven, but nonetheless present, relying on the recording as both “instructor/director” and “score.” Scholars commonly critique the teacher-directed nature of the classical ensemble paradigm of music education (Bartel 2004a). While Green’s (2008) beginning stages are more student-centered than preliminary stages of learning new classical ensemble music, later stages involve more teacher control (Väkevä 2009). Recordings or chord charts can serve as teacher and dictate activity. In programs that focus on more of a “canon” of popular music, after students initially select music to copy, teachers may choose the music, shifting the student-centered dynamic into a teacher-controlled activity wherein both teacher and recording shape what students produce. In normative classical ensemble music education, teachers set challenges for the students that match their level of musicianship (Elliott and Silverman 2015), possibly delimiting possibilities to extend beyond restrictions placed by the challenge (Allsup 2016). Like its Western classical counterpart, some models of popular music pedagogy can limit what is possible. Green (2008) challenges students to develop aural skills and informal learning strategies to successfully replicate what they hear. While she identifies ways that students have extended and creatively altered the popular and classical music they covered, the recording (and later chord charts) both serve as the challenge and can simultaneously delimit what is possible. This delimitation, however, is not intrinsic to popular music practices. Many artists create covers of songs in ways that extend the original version.9 Viewing this model through an anti-colonial framework highlights similar concerns to those raised about the Western classical model. If we conceptualize colonialism as something “imposed and dominating” (Dei 2006: 3), some popular music education simply privileges recordings or chord charts over classical scores for students to replicate, developing particular skills through the process. Like its Western classical counterpart, popular music pedagogy does not necessarily focus on creativity but rather on replication, with an emphasis on the learning process. The formal structure, 34

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

replication focus, and limits to creativity are no less hegemonic than the classical paradigm (Georgii-Hemming and Westvall 2010; Moir 2017). Moreover, in sometimes privileging the informal musical processes of predominantly white, male, rock musicians, the replication approach parallels the classical model’s focus on reproducing the music of white, male composers, neglecting the contributions of women and people of color and reinscribing coloniality through clearly demarcating superior and inferior musical styles, practices, and musicians.10

Culturally responsive teaching: A possible way forward

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Acknowledging the hegemonic and colonial potential of some popular music pedagogy, I assert that culturally responsive teaching can both honor students’ own musical practices and help ensure students work with musics related directly to their lives. In music education, culturally responsive teaching centers musics that reflect youth’s realities and interests (Gay 2018; Hess 2015; Koza 2006; Lind and McKoy 2016). The model of popular music teaching outlined above relies on the assumption that the selected music will be more relevant to youth’s realities than classical music. Pedagogies that copy recordings, and privilege both rock band instruments (guitar, keyboard, bass, and drum kit) and the music of rock musicians of the 1960s prioritize particular raced, classed, and gendered subject positions. As such, the music privileged in this type of popular music pedagogy does not necessarily relate more directly to youth’s lives than classical ensemble music. In their book on culturally responsive teaching, Lind and McKoy (2016) call on music educators to recognize who “we” are. In focusing on identifying our subject positions, we might recognize the popular music strategies Green (2008) shares as drawing on practices and traditions of predominantly white men—a point Green acknowledges. Lind and McKoy (2016) argue: We have a responsibility to recognize that most of our learners have vibrant and significant musical lives beyond the four walls of the music classroom or the ensemble rehearsal room and that the ways they learn in the environments beyond school are often non-formal and highly motivational. (55) Reshaping classical music education toward popular music education looked to remedy the failure of classical music teaching to effectively serve all youth (Green 2008). Green’s work challenged music educators to shift both form and content of music education through centering informal learning processes rather than engaging popular music in classical ways. As educators, we must again examine the populations whom different popular music pedagogy may not serve. Subsequently, we might extend this model through looking explicitly at how youth learn presently and the musical practices 35

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

in which they currently engage. Such contextual practices might include many genres and digitally based practices alongside acoustic or electronically produced music. Green (2009) acknowledges the lack of digitally based practices in her work, noting she began this research in 1996. Culturally responsive teaching involves “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for [students]” (Geneva Gay, Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice [2010] cited in Lind and McKoy 2016: 17). To put forward popular music pedagogy that is neither colonial nor a new hegemony, teachers must center students in their own experiences in music classrooms (Froehlich and Smith 2017; Hess 2015)—a process that involves ensuring musics chosen for the classroom resonate with the students themselves. In her book, provocatively entitled Multiplication is for White People, Delpit (2012) wonders about the motivation of a child who repeatedly returns to the basketball net after school to practice, despite continued failures. She asks her community for thoughts on why that child keeps coming back in the face of failure. The community suggests several possible motivations: He comes back because it is fun: it is engaging because he uses his mind and his body; he can monitor his own progress, adjusting his attempts to match his assessment; it is connected to his interests. He comes back so that he can be a part of a culturally rewarded community activity: he wants … the praise of his peers; his entire community supports basketball; he wants to fit in. He comes back because he believes he can get better: he knows that people who look like him have been successful … He comes back because he believes he might get financially rewarded for getting better: he sees people on television who look like him get high salaries for being good at basketball. (154)

●

●

●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

Delpit (2012) challenges readers to consider why these same students do not similarly persevere in the classroom. She asserts: They don’t think school is fun. The students can seldom assess themselves; the teacher is the one who calls all the shots. What they are asked to learn is not connected to their interests. The people they most care about—other students—seldom reward them for school efforts. … Doing well in school might make them less likely to fit in with their peers … They don’t really believe that they can improve their school achievement. Most of the people they identify with aren’t achieving either. … Many stereotypes … say

●

●

●

36

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

that black people are better at sports than academics. They don’t know or see adults on a regular basis who are both “cool” and academic achievers. School achievement is weakly connected in their minds to financial gain. (154–155)

●

To address these issues, Delpit suggests a contextualized education that draws on significant black academics historically and presently. Delpit’s words have implications for popular music teaching. A culturally responsive popular music pedagogy might engage students in activities they consider fun, relevant, and “culturally-rewarded” by their communities. Moreover, when youth select classroom musics, they may select role models significant to both themselves and their communities. Detroit youth participants in the Verses Project, for example—an after-school songwriting and literacy program through the Michigan State University Community Music School—shared hip-hop music they wrote locally. Their communities valued their contributions, which were, in many cases, culturally congruent with musics typically enjoyed both by youth and their communities (Hess, Watson, and Deroo in press). Popular music pedagogy offers potential to address the issues Delpit (2012) raises in her basketball analogy. In culturally responsive popular music education, however, neocolonialism becomes a possibility. Society often stereotypes youth of color, particularly black youth, as either sports figures or rappers (Bragg 2010). In opening up musical possibilities through popular music pedagogy, educators must avoid delimiting youth’s musical choices or reinscribing stereotypes of the types of music and performer roles that youth of color in particular may choose to enact.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Practical implications: Practicing culturally responsive popular music pedagogy In putting forward culturally responsive popular music pedagogy, I offer educators four practical strategies to help our music programs work for the students we teach.

Ensuring the music selected is actually culturally relevant First and foremost, as music educators, we must ensure the music we select or have students select for school use is actually relevant to the students. There is a danger in music education to make assumptions about the musics youth relate to based upon their cultural backgrounds (Hess 2018b). Rather than making assumptions, educators can offer youth agency in selecting classroom music. Green’s (2008) strategies enable multiple styles, although students may be hesitant to put forward 37

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

what they consider their own “cultural” music (Green 2009: 122). If culturally responsive teaching involves “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay 2010: 31), then music chosen for popular music pedagogy must not be as distant to youth as its Western classical counterpart. In my work, I complicate the notion of “culturally relevant” music for reasons rooted in my own experience. As a Jewish Canadian living in the United States with German (Holocaust) heritage, I relate solely on a limited basis to musics to which I am theoretically “culturally” connected. I do, however, have a strong affinity for Ghanaian (Ewe) music, musics from the Americas with strong West African roots, and popular musics across many styles. I thus always include affinity when considering culturally relevant music (Hess 2013). As a pedagogue, it matters greatly to me that students can engage with music they appreciate, whether that music relates to their heritage or speaks to them on other levels. Given my own preference for and long-term engagement with musics rooted in West Africa, I note that as educators, we also must remain mindful of the dangers of appropriation.11 As a general principle, however, I expand the definition of “relevant” to include music beyond music strictly related to heritage. The depth and meaning added to my life by musics that are theoretically culturally distant from me, provoke a hyperawareness of the possible benefits of connecting to music across identity categories mindfully with attention to power dynamics.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Moving past covers Covering already-existing music provides a vital means for youth to develop their musicianship. Youth, as Green (2001, 2008) notes, often draw upon recordings outside of school to teach themselves music of interest. In facilitating these informal learning strategies in school, youth acquire skills they deem important. Replication provides a vehicle to pursue musical interests and align one’s musical voice with musicians for whom youth have affinity. Simultaneously, however, covering draws upon the same principles of replication the classical ensemble model reinscribes. Instead of the score and the director dictating the reproduction, in some popular music education, youth ascribe this role to the recording. Culturally responsive popular music pedagogy then may involve beginning with covers but moving toward creative work. In Green’s (2008) model, songwriting proved rewarding for students. Covering helps youth develop their confidence, musicianship, and musical identities and comprises an important first step toward asserting their own voices.12 Making it the goal, however, misses valuable opportunities for youth to share their own stories. Many popular music programs presently prioritize students’ original work and such programs provide models for centering creating music.

38

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

Songwriting to speak to lived experiences As we facilitate youth to create music, we can also encourage them to use music to speak to their realities in ways they find meaningful through genres and styles that resonate with them. In the Verses Project mentioned above, Detroit youth spoke to their experiences in their schools and neighborhoods in ways that were significant to them and their communities. They produced powerful music about Detroit and their lives (Hess 2018a) and demonstrated ways that songwriting enabled them to assert their literary and musical presence and engage in their communities as civic participants (Hess, Watson, and Deroo in press).

Expanding our own knowledge Finally, as educators, we can work to expand our own knowledge of musics. Elsewhere I have advocated for engaging a wide range of musics across music classroom practices (Hess 2013, 2015). Expanding the genres with which we are familiar may help us better facilitate students’ engagement with musics they appreciate. In doing so, we can look to our specific school contexts and the musics particular to our school communities to inform our musical listening practices. Listening and engaging with the full range of musics youth select for listening and performance creates possibilities for offering a more culturally responsive popular music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion In many ways, popular music education often replicates the same colonial and hegemonic relations of its classical corollary. In engaging anti-colonialism to examine popular music pedagogy, the manifestations of colonialism and coloniality become apparent. In exposing these possibilities, I offer strategies for a culturally responsive approach to popular music pedagogy as a way forward for music education13 through addressing these neocolonial tendencies. This type of music education would facilitate ways for youth to engage in musics that resonate with them and their communities and address the imposition of specific raced, classed, and gendered models of music on youth who occupy vastly different subject positions. In putting forward this model, I note the colonial potential of stereotypes and assumptions that may emerge in a culturally responsive model alongside the coloniality of any privileging of musics in alignment with dominant groups. At this juncture, however, it is crucial to offer music education that encompasses musics drawn from many more groups than white, male, rock musicians. Moreover, when engaged mindfully, culturally responsive popular music education allows for deep recognition of the lived experiences and rich musical 39

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

practices youth bring to the music classroom and creates a space for them, drawing on Delpit’s (2012) basketball analogy, to further develop musical skills they deem important both for themselves and their communities. Given the diversity of both school populations and musical genres coupled with the increasing presence of digital musical cultures, it is time to reshape popular music pedagogy to better resonate with the populations our institutions serve.

Notes   1 These strategies are based on Green’s (2001) research about the ways that (particular) popular musicians learn.   2 Smith (2014) raises concerns about this so-called canon of popular music.   3 I draw upon my doctoral thesis to describe the normative paradigm of music education (Hess 2013). Chapter 1 extends the discussion of both anti-colonialism and the normative paradigm. In describing this Western classical ensemble paradigm as normative, I point to a particular model of music education. Many music educators of classical ensembles deliberately work against the structure I describe.   4 Bartel and Cameron dichotomize “artistic exemplars” and “culturally-familiar repertoire.” In doing so, they negate the artistic value of “culturally-familiar” music and deny the possibility that “artistic exemplars” may be culturally familiar.   5 Bradley (2003), for example, discusses the manner in which choristers may imagine contextual information when it is not provided, noting that not providing context is standard practice. I further broach these limitations in my doctoral work (Hess 2013).   6 Online sites like Ultimate Guitar did not exist at the time of Green’s (2001) initial research. See Ultimate-Guitar.com (2018).   7 This assertion draws on centricity (Asante 1991; Hess 2015).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

  8

See, for example, models of education put forward by Little Kids Rock (2017) and Musical Futures (2018).

  9 See, for example, the manner in which Greg Laswell’s cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” changes the meaning of the original song (Bystrak 2008). 10

Lamb (1987) critiques this practice in schools and offers ways to be more inclusive. Older students may increasingly privilege popular music of predominantly white, male musicians when they wish to cover or replicate what might be seen as the “canon” of popular music (e.g., Led Zeppelin).

11

See Young (2008) for an extensive discussion of cultural appropriation and the arts.

12 It is important to note that many popular music classrooms already feature songwriting, and programs such as Little Kids Rock (2017) include composition as a core value. In suggesting moving past covers, I mean to encourage the programs that predominantly focus on covers to extend their work to composition.

40

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

13

Green (2001) put forward her pedagogy as “a way ahead for music education.” In extending her work through envisioning culturally responsive education, I note the significance of her 2001 volume for the entire field of music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Allsup, Randall Everett (2002), “Crossing Over: Mutual Learning and Democratic Action in Instrumental Music Education,” PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Allsup, Randall Everett (2004), “Of Concert Bands and Garage Bands: Creating Democracy Through Popular Music,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 204–223, Reston, VA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Allsup, Randall Everett (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Asante, Molefi Kete (1991), “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” Journal of Negro Education, 60 (2): 170–180. Bartel, Lee (2004a), “Introduction: What Is the Music Education Paradigm?,” in Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, xii–xvi, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Bartel, Lee, ed. (2004b), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Bartel, Lee and Linda Cameron (2004), “From Dilemmas to Experience: Shaping the Conditions of Learning,” in Lee Bartel (ed.), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, 39–61, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Bowman, Wayne D. (2004), “‘Pop’ Goes …? Taking Popular Music Seriously,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 29–50, Reston, VA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Bradley, Deborah (2003), “Singing in the Dark: Choral music education and the other,” paper presented at the Fifth International Symposium for the Philosophy of Music, Lake Forest College, IL, June 4–7, 2003. Available online: www.researchgate.net/publication/267624308_Singing_in_ the_Dark_Choral_Music_Education_and_The_Other (accessed November 27, 2018). Bragg, Keia Janese (2010), “We’re Not Thugs and Rappers: An Examination of African American Male Athletes’ Perceptions of the Media,” MA thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Bystrak, Rosemary (2008). “Greg Laswell ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” YouTube, August 3, 2008. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0w_nPe8bVw (accessed November 16, 2018). Campbell, Patricia Shehan (1995), “Of Garage Bands and Song-getting: The Musical Development of Young Rock Musicians,” Research Studies in Music Education, 4 (1): 12–20. Césaire, Aimé ([1972] 2000), Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press. Dei, George J. Sefa (2006), “Introduction: Mapping the Terrain—Towards a New Politics of Resistance,” in George J. Sefa Dei and Arlo Kempf (eds.), Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance, 1–23, Rotterdam, NY: Sense Publishers.

41

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Delpit, Lisa D. (2012), “Multiplication is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children, New York: The New Press. Elliott, David J. and Marissa Silverman (2015), Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, second edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press. Froehlich, Hildegard and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), Sociology for Music Teachers, second edition, New York: Routledge. Garnett, Liz (2005), “Choral Singing as Bodily Regime,” International Review of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 36 (2): 249–269. Gay, Geneva (2018), Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice, edited by James A. Banks, third edition, Multicultural Education Series, New York: Teachers College Press. Georgii-Hemming, Eva and Maria Westvall (2010), “Music Education—A Personal Matter? Examining the Current Discourses of Music Education in Sweden,” British Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 21–33. Green, Lucy (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, New York: Ashgate Press. Green, Lucy (2003), “Music Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Group Identity,” in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 263–273, New York: Routledge. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, London: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2009), “Response to Special Issue of Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education Concerning Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 8 (2): 120–132. Gustafson, Ruth I. (2009), Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hebert, David G. and Marja Heimonen (2013), “Public Policy and Music Education in Norway and Finland,” Arts Education Policy Review, 114 (3): 135–148. Hess, Juliet (2013), “Radical Musicking: Challenging Dominant Paradigms in Elementary Music Education,” PhD diss., Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Hess, Juliet (2015), “Upping the “anti-”: The Value of an Anti-racist Theoretical Framework in Music Education,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 66–92. Hess, Juliet (2018a), “Detroit Youth Speak Back: Rewriting Deficit Perspectives through Songwriting,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 216 (Spring): 7–30. Hess, Juliet (2018b), “Troubling Whiteness: Navigating White Subjectivity in Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 36 (2): 128–144. doi:10.1177/0255761417703781. Hess, Juliet, Vaughn W. M. Watson, and Matthew Deroo (forthcoming), “‘Show some love’: Enacting Literacy Presence and Musical Presence as Civic Engagement in the Verses Project,” Teachers College Record. Kallio, Alexis Anja (2015), “Drawing a Line in Water: Constructing the School Censorship Frame in Popular Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (2): 195–209. Kennedy, Mary (2004), “Put the “play” Back in Music Education,” in Lee Bartel (ed.), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, 62–73, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. 42

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music Education: A Way Forward or a New Hegemony?

Koza, Julia Eklund (2006), “‘Save the Music’?: Toward Culturally Relevant, Joyful, and Sustainable School Music,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 14 (1): 23–38. Lamb, Roberta (1987), “Including Women Composers in Music Curricula: Development of Creative Strategies for the General Music Classes, gr. 5–8,” PhD diss., Teachers’ College, Columbia University, New York. Lind, Vicki L. and Constance L. McKoy (2016), Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education: From Understanding to Application, New York: Routledge. Little Kids Rock (2017). Available online: www.littlekidsrock.org (accessed November 16, 2018). Memmi, Albert (1965), The Colonizer and the Colonized, translated by Howard Greenfield, Boston, MA: The Orion Press, Inc. Moir, Zack (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Bloomsbury Singer Songwriter Handbook, 35–39, New York: Bloomsbury. Musical Futures (2018). Available online: www.musicalfutures.org (accessed November 16, 2018). O’Toole, Patricia Ann (1994), “Redirecting the Choral Classroom: A Feminist Poststructural Analysis of Power Relations within Three Choral Settings,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Peters, Jennifer Buller (2004), “They are Not a Blank Score,” in Lee Bartel (ed.), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, 2–20, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Regelski, Thomas (2006), “Reconnecting Music Education with Society,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 5: 2–20. Rodriguez, Adrienne (in process), “On Lucy Greens’ Informal Music Learning Pedagogy: A Philosophical View of Advantages and Limitations,” unpublished course paper, Michigan State University, East Lansing. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier, ed. (2004), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, Reston, VA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Sahlberg, Pasi (2011), Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?, The Series on School Reform, New York: Teachers College Press. Smith, Gareth D. (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Ioulia Papageorgi and Graham Welch (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Snell, Karen (2009), “Democracy and Popular Music in Music Education,” in Elizabeth Gould, June Countryman, Charlene Morton, and Leslie Stewart Rose (eds.), Exploring Social Justice: How Music Education Might Matter, 166–183, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Ultimate-Guitar.com (2018). Available online: www.ultimate-guitar.com (accessed November 16, 2018). Väkevä, Lauri (2009), “The World Well Lost, Found: Reality and Authenticity in Green’s ‘New Classroom Pedagogy’,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 8 (2): 7–34. Westerlund, Heidi (2006), “Garage Rock Bands: A Future Model for Developing Musical Expertise?,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 119–125. Wynter, Sylvia (2003), “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3 (3): 257–337. Young, James O. (2008), Cultural Appropriation and the Arts, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

43

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

44

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

3

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education: Value Systems in Popular Music Curricula Mark Hunter

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction This chapter seeks to problematize the value systems attached to multivalent forms of making and playing music in popular music higher education curricula. Specifically, I seek to interrogate the application or “overlaying” of traditional conservatoire values and aesthetics onto popular music education. I argue here that whilst we might expect the advent of popular music as a realm of study and practice in higher education (HE) to precipitate a different ordering of knowledge (including its practical application), what has in fact occurred is the importing of values, practices, and aesthetics from the Western classical tradition. There is both an epistemic and socioeconomic challenge in higher popular music education (HPME). Specifically, the problem is one of the professionalization or academicization of an essentially informal and amateur music-making—what is popular music and what tools does one need to teach/learn it? The normative expectation that candidates wishing to study music in higher education in England and Wales are equipped with Western art music instrumental performance skills and music theory, is intimately bound up with the cultural mores and financial capacity of a specific and limited socioeconomic group.1 Conversely, popular music in the public imagination is the realm of the youthful amateur, even when framed within the high-production values of twenty-first-century talent shows, that is, X-Factor, The Voice, etc. Indeed, it is the essentially “raw” or untutored voice or act that is presented and valorized as “authentic” in such shows. Immediately then, in HPME, we appear to be colliding the aesthetic and political values of the conservatoire with those of the amateur realm and have not yet been able to reconcile the two. Traditionally, the academy valorizes and rewards displays of technical proficiency and expertise that can be framed within specific bodies of theoretical knowledge (e.g., Western music theory and notation), and yet many (successful) popular musicians claim or even make a badge of honour out of explicitly not “knowing what 45

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

they are doing” in terms of naming and describing their music through music theory. The binary of being able to read music staff notation or not is a key example of this, which then colors the learning, content, and focus of HE popular music programs. What criteria are applied to the construction of curricula and awards is tightly bound up with specific (but often unspoken) aesthetic, cultural, and political values. How popular music can be, and is, taught tells us a lot about the tensions between what different types of music learning and teaching are for, and which aspects of our cultural milieu they are in service to. Broadly, the traditional conservatoire (whose etymology is fairly obvious) seeks to develop an individual’s instrumental virtuosity in order to perform and thus conserve a canonical repertoire. Further, complexity and tension arises when subfields within popular music assume the same epistemic drive as the conservatoire—that is, whilst pop music’s production and consumption is of a different history and order to Western art music, or “classical music,” the models of music theory and repertoire can be applied (if so desired) in pop music; and with the same focus on the individual student-musician as the site of proficiency and virtuosity. What end does the realm of popular music education that mimics the conservatoire serve? This being “in service” is important given the explicit instrumentalism (political rather than musical) that is at play in UK HE and beyond. The introduction (or in many countries, simply the existence) of tuition fees—which for the majority of students means taking on significant loan debt—has challenged traditional formulations of “education for education’s sake.” The use-value of degree-level education is now explicitly equated with cost and “value for money” in terms of career readiness and industry alignment. Yet another, older, value-system also abides; as Parkinson has noted “the practices, behaviours and ethos of the conservatoire are underpinned by beliefs regarding what a conservatoire is for” (Parkinson 2017: 145; emphasis in the original). This use-value is freighted with centuries of accrued status and social capital that is, I would argue, even in this rarefied domain, positioned ultimately in terms of the status not of the performer—however virtuoso—but of their audience; their expertise is in service to the approving discernment of the listener. The audience of Western art music is essentially a person of high status, and their consumption of this music is a performance of status defined in terms of taste and discernment. What then does it mean to be preparing our graduate student-musicians for “professional” careers? Is our aim to enable new or better music to be made, and, if so, to whose criteria? Or are we preparing our student cohorts for a career as session musicians (these questions are also discussed by Moir and Stillie 2018).

The cultural realm HPME is prone to a very public social instrumentalism in ways that other disciplines are not. There is a broad cultural understanding, however partial, of what a musician is and therefore what they should do. This cultural understanding exists in ways that do 46

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

not exist, for instance, with other humanities subjects such as geography, history, or classics. Popular cultural understanding of the term “musician” is freighted with notions of performance as opposed to making (i.e., composition) borne out of a long history of the (classically trained) musician as a performer of canonical repertoire. One only has to consider examples such as the BBC Young Musician of the Year to see that what is being valorized in the musician’s toolkit or skill set is techne, “a practice of knowing by making manifest or bringing forth” (Gough and Wallis 2005: 7) in the ability to successfully render others’ work. Thus techne—the skills used in service of performance—is a, if not the, key criteria for prestige and “quality.” There is a passing nod in this realm to “interpretation” but this is more about the subtleties of phrasing, weight, tension, and release, rather than the wholesale (re)interpretation of canonical repertoire. The codification of both the “quality” and “qualities” of UK music degrees has its most explicit location in the Quality Assurance Agency’s Subject Benchmark Statements (QAA 2016).2 I was invited to be a member of the 2016 review panel in order to broaden its representation to include both popular music and alternative providers (APs).3 The work of the advisory panels to QAA Subject Benchmark Statements is both a political and ethical task. The broadening of recognized attributes and practices relating to music curricula is reflective of an expanded understanding and acknowledgement of what constitutes UK higher education music curricula. By including additional areas of content and forms of assessment to include more focus on both the process of making and self-reflection on this process, I would argue the panel challenged, to some degree, the received wisdom and orthodoxy of the discipline. The postwar advent of popular music as a cultural phenomenon was, at least in part, a reaction to the stifling of the middle-class grip on taste and aesthetics, and was received or rejected in various quarters as very much so. The structural bias outlined above manifests as status anxiety in post-92 universities4 and APs, with one of the responses being not only to mimic the “rigours” and “professionalism” of the conservatoire but also of the aesthetic and cultural values: “Musicology should be about trying to discover why we like the things we do and how music works. Too often though, it is based on the assumption classical music is, by definition, of value, and that musicology’s job is simply to demonstrate why”(Zagorski-Thomas 2016). This anxiety is to some extent understandable, given the very public manifestation of the skills acquired through arts education; the arts being entwined in a braid of expectation, prestige, value, and reward. Ironically then, instead of opening up pop music education as a sociocultural place of difference, much of the philosophy of the APs of popular music education in the UK has is roots in a rote learning “rehearse and repeat” model of instrumental proficiency, borne out of a traditional “master/pupil” relationship of instrumental training, as opposed to a broader music education that seeks to question, test, and redefine what and how music is made and consumed. Techne here is proscribed and reductive rather than expansive and mutable; put simply “knob twiddling” or other forms of making/performing music are not considered within the realm of physical technique. 47

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Music education pre-HE Outwith the HE academy, but very much borne of and in service to the conservatoire, is a well-established system of music performance and theory examination. The exam models of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM), and latterly Rockschool Ltd, are exactly that tool; reinforcing and valuing particular realms of knowledge and skill borne of a very particular musical realm, with the examiner cast as a gatekeeper whose role is to preserve and reiterate the values of the ABRSM through assessment of the candidate. What is striking is that the expectations and values in play through the Rockschool exams are exactly those of their classical conservatoire peers. This formalization of informal music-making brings with it an inherent conservatism. The surface aesthetic is altered—you play electric rather than Spanish guitar—but the form and content are essentially unaltered: perform rehearsed pieces, perform site-reading tasks, play scales and arpeggios. At no point does the Rockschool exam attempt to move the frame of reference for what is valued. There is no expectation of creativity—no interpretation, let alone performance of original work. I would argue that one of the reasons that the conservatoire-style music examinations shy away from assessing original creative output is that the binary of right note/wrong note is removed. The competencies on display in the performance of original work cannot be codified in such a simple way, and therefore the authorization and classification of a candidate having met a threshold standard is both more difficult and of less value. Likewise, the expectation placed on student musicians at school leaver level to have a working knowledge of a specific lexicon of Western art music, through which to describe and scribe their music-making, represents another codification and systemic exclusion. Given music’s elision from many countries’ national and local school curricula, there is little opportunity or provision for the training and scaffolding of learning needed to acquire this language and skills. For example, the UK GCSE (school-leaver) music syllabus requires candidates to have a working knowledge of terminology and feature such as: chromatic, continuo, drone, fanfare, ground bass, major/minor/modal, ornamentation, ostinato, pentatonic, sonata form, ternary, tesitura, etc. (Pearson Edexcel 2016). The privileging here of Western art music traditions fails to recognize and value a lingua franca of music players and makers from different traditions. The lack of parity of esteem for different epistemologies of music means that this is essentially esoteric and inaccessible to those candidates not in receipt of private lessons (see Chapter 14 in this volume). It could be argued that popular music, and especially electronic or computer music, has its own, equally complex, lexicon, but this “other” (in every sense) music is elided in the traditional realm of musical knowledge. One has to go to publications that specifically address the “otherness” of electronic music in order to locate this list. What we find is a lexicon that would leave most GCSE woodwind players floundering: accelerometer, ADSR attack, decay, sustain, release, amplitude, auxiliary send/return, band width, beat mapping, channel path, compression, DSP, equalization, gates, impedance, 48

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

Figure 3.1  Hans Traxler (1983), “Equal Opportunity,” in Michael Klant (ed.), School Ridicule: Caricatures from 2500 Years of Pedagogy, S. 25, Hanover: Fackeltraeger.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

mastering, phase, and sampling (Shadow Producers 2017). If the above makes clear that we are talking here about different realms of knowledge, then the question must therefore be of parity of esteem. This is clear when we consider that the advent of electronic music programs in HE have been seen as “simply a means for attracting and holding onto less able students” (Pace 2015, quoted in Parkinson 2017). It is certainly the case that some applicants to HE will be “less able” to perform the traditional Western art music canon, but what of these other abilities, to make and perform other music? This scenario brings to mind the well-known cartoon critiquing “fairness” in assessment.

The social realm The socioeconomic space necessary for access to and acquisition of particular skills, language, and sensibilities of the academy is ostensibly that of the middle classes. A cursory look at the key findings around socioeconomic data published in the UK’s UCAS5 End of Cycle Report for Conservatoires (UCAS 2015) offers stark evidence of the asymmetry of those applying to study at a UK conservatoire (including music, dance, and drama), revealing that “those from the most advantaged areas, who were aged 18 in 2014, were 4.8 times more likely to apply to undergraduate courses through UCAS Conservatoires by the time they were 19 than those from the most 49

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

disadvantaged areas. This is an increase from 4.2 times more likely for those aged 18 in 2013” (UCAS 2015). The UCAS End of Cycle Report demurs from offering any comment or analysis on the structural reasons behind this disparity. Likewise, “differences by background persist for UCAS Conservatoires applicants to the courses in UCAS Undergraduate with the greatest appeal to UCAS Conservatoires applicants,” i.e., the same division along social, economic, and ethnic lines can be observed in applications to those nonconservatoire music course, including popular music, which ostensibly retain the curricula of the conservatoire but writ in pop (scales, sight-reading, repertoire, music theory, canon, technique):

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The music, dance and drama courses in the UCAS Undergraduate scheme may be different in nature to those in the UCAS Conservatoire scheme, and may appeal to different applicants. Nearly three-quarters of applicants who apply through both UCAS Conservatoires and UCAS Undergraduate schemes in the same cycle make at least one application to a set of 20 courses in the UCAS Undergraduate scheme … these could be considered to be the courses with closest appeal to applicants considering applying to UCAS Conservatoires. (UCAS 2015) Interestingly, the former, with their focus on instrumental prowess aligned with music reading skills, position students as performers of a musical canon, whilst the latter— partly because of the tools used and partly because of a different politic—have no part of their curriculum which valorizes repetition and interpretation of a canonical repertoire in performance. Yet, this world, of digital or computer-based music, is often characterized as being unoriginal and plagiarizing (through the use of sampling). There is a categorical difference between the production of new music which sounds “unoriginal,” i.e., that it is overly derivative, and the removal of the expectation of originality and, indeed, the valorizing of the performance as facsimile. If music teaching and learning is elided in the compulsory education sector then individuals and groups will purse the music education that they know and valorize— with the corollary that the aesthetics, value systems, and materials of those different social and cultural groups will be reified. Whilst this might be considered “natural” or even desirable, the concomitant effect is that, when mobilizing the skills, aesthetics, and values of those groups to gain access to a formal HE setting, the threshold competencies, expectations, and abilities will be brought to the fore. The systematic removal of music (and the arts in general) from the UK compulsory education curricula (Burns 2017) leads to segregation, and the asymmetries inherent in that term, of both aspiration and access to music education and practice. HPME then is unable to build access for all, because the threshold standards necessary to gain access to, for instance, a traditional conservatoire program will only have been developed in students from a particular 50

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

socioeconomic milieu. This clearly does not mean that certain groups do not have the individual capacity to acquire certain skills or knowledge, but that this knowledge realm is probably occluded from them, in general, due both to a lack of agency and capacity to afford (in money, time, social value), and a lack of interest (i.e., value placed in) acquiring those skills.6

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The performance realm An analogy of the argument herein can be drawn with sports, and their place in both the amateur and professional realms, and the different aesthetics and expectations, regarding their value and use, within and outwith education. Both sport and the arts (music, in this context) have a place in popular culture as amateur pastimes; from ancient Greece to post-Blairite instrumentalism, idea(l)s of self-improvement, sociability, and staying out of trouble are reworked as being “useful” and contributing to society; especially when focused on young people. At the other end of this spectrum of sociocultural understanding of sport and music is the notion of “high-performance” as located in the professional realm, not as a cultural act to be framed and observed through the lens of ethnography or sociology, but as a space freighted with values of performance most often linked to numerical proxies, whether a world-record time or a chart-topping hit, it’s the numbers that ascribe and describe success. Here then we find performance inscribed with excellence, industry, and capital. The question (as with its cultural relation, sport) of what music is for, and thus how it is measured, is paramount in developing our cultural understanding of use-value. This use-value plays a significant role in how and where we locate and identify music in our society, cultural milieu, and educational contexts. The reward (and concomitant threat) in understanding performance not as a diverse ecology and differing practices and outputs, but as a hierarchy of quality is, I would argue, carried through in a double meaning of “performance” in the context of traditional HE music programs; most explicitly in their criteria for entry. As the title of John McKenzie’s book commands: “Perform or Else” (McKenzie 2001).7 What then, in this context, does it mean for the musician to “perform” twice-over, or in two realms? Is the performance of music, by itself, enough of a performance, or does the imperative for “high-performance” (through either technical prowess or commercial success) color the first, essential, sense of playing music? The suggestion here is that the binary amateur/professional might actually be describing “performance” (in McKenzie’s terms) outwith music. Moir (2016) considers the binary of amateur/professional an unhelpful delineation, as “there is no contradiction in amateurs mimicking the behavior of professionals” (234). But which “behaviors” are we discussing—if the behaviors are those of placing one’s music in a commercial context, then surely it is not the musicianship or stagecraft which are being mimicked but the business behaviors of “professionalism”?

51

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Within this, second McKenzian “performance” we might consider the commercially inclined imperative of sharing ones “amateur” music output via gigs, recordings, and other media. Moir usefully describes this as “the phenomenon of young people (particularly those in full-time education) voluntarily using their free time to engage in activities that are generally undertaken as part of the employment obligations of professionals in the creative industries” (234). We see here that is it the context of music-making and dissemination that ascribes professionalism, not the standards and levels of techne on display. Let’s look further at these contexts of music-making and the values ascribed to their different loci.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular music techne and habitus The places and environments of music production and performance, and the differing cultural status of these places, are extremely important in signaling, both to the musician and their audience, what realm of the professional we are in. The small gig venue is a key site of the formative experiences and initial steps on the journey of the popular musician. The aversion of policy makers to taking this place seriously as a cultural site of production is related, at least in part, to their often being in or part of pubs (Parkinson et al. 2015). The pub is not a serious place for serious things to happen, but is the watering hole of the working class and, importantly, young people. Put simply, how can young people in a pub be doing anything culturally worthwhile? In our report Understanding Small Music Venues (Parkinson et al. 2015) the experiences of promoters in these contexts is clear—they are up against a tide of gentrification, housing development, and licensing laws which, if not designed directly to undermine and threaten such venues, certainly do not valorize them as important sites of cultural engagement and production. We see above that the value placed on the loci and habitus of the production and reception of music—in the social, economic, and cultural context in which we live—is unevenly distributed. This asymmetry highlights a lack of parity of esteem for certain skills and ways of doing in the realm of popular music, which is also present in our formalized learning and teaching of popular music. Teaching popular music in higher education has been braided together with expanded notions of the tools and techniques required to make and disseminate music—a more explicit focus on the vocational context of popular music can be seen to both encompass the project of (1) widening participation, and (2) employability—the student as an independent (yet networked) self-starter: the implicit message is that participation in HPME comes with the responsibility to accrue industrial skills and commercial nous. HPME’s roles as a champion of widening participation, and as a driver of economic 52

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

growth, can thus appear woven together. HPME’s overwhelming representation in England and Wales’ Post92 sector, which has accounted for the bulk of widened participation and is also associated with industry-facing disciplines, foregrounds this dual purpose. (Parkinson 2017: 14)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The conservatoire turns a blind eye to this—producing players of the highest technical quality who can then fight it out amongst themselves for the few openings and opportunities that exist in a limited field; however dynamic the repertoire, the orchestra is often framed as a place of, at the very least, steady state behavior, with little change and dynamism in terms of continuing professional development. In a Guardian article from more than ten years ago, Morris Stemp, then second violinist with the Halle Orchestra reported that “he may have loved the heat of performing live, but he didn’t like the lack of prospects for promotion and the anti-social hours. Or the pay, of course. After 15 years at the top of his profession, four years at music college and a lifetime of playing the violin, his salary was £25,000” (Price 2006). This anecdotal story not only recounts a depressing story about the economic value placed on professional musicians but also highlights the failure of professional orchestras in their social and public responsibility to build diverse and dynamic communities, ecologies, and practices of music where a plurality of roles, repertoire, and audiences can exist. If this is the case for a highly unionized workforce employed in a locus of high cultural capital, then what chance is there for the popular musician? the employability agenda dictates that undergraduate degree programmes should simultaneously equip students for financially sustainable careers and meet the demands of industry. In the case of HPME, this might be seen to favour curricula orientated towards the economic logics of a commercial industry that thrives on that which is “popular” in the quantitative (profit-generating) sense, as opposed to curricula that prioritize aesthetic and cultural value, understood in intrinsic terms. (Parkinson 2017: 14) But what of those musicians who are making music and developing entrepreneurial and industry skills outwith the academy? The dynamism of the early-millennial east London grime scene is a case in point—built around self-starter collaboration, informal economies, and quotidian making-do, which saw the creation of a vital new musical genre and scene, none of which explicitly or systematically touched or was touched by HE pop music. Whilst working at the University of East London from 2006 to 2013 this explosion in new music production and consumption, or indeed the creation of a new and vital habitus,8 was going on right under our noses. Yet I would argue that we, along with other higher education institutions (HEIs) failed to fully engage and take account 53

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

of this burgeoning scene. The university’s role in “the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004) revealed that the academy found it difficult to bridge both the physical and conceptual gaps between the institution and its locus (and habitus). Grime music might have been being made in the immediate vicinity of the university, yet we failed to authorize this new genre as it occurred, never mind being part of the ecology that enabled it to flourish. The music sociologists and cultural theorists—interestingly, those people who were at the forefront of the introduction of pop music to HE (ZagorskiThomas 2016), albeit from the critical distance of “studies”—failed to properly account for grime in their archaeology of the recent past. A truly dialogic engagement with an emerging form proved too challenging, even when faculty members were wellestablished label owners and producers. This suggests that the academy has a structural issue with community engagement were the community might be more adept in its practices and habitus than the institution. What does this mean then for both the setting of threshold standards for entry to a HPME music program and its concomitant curricula focus? As a tool for the selection of applicants to HE music programs, the audition is the shibboleth of the traditional HE music programs in both conservatoires and other music and popular music programs, which place emphasis on traditional instrumental prowess and knowledge of music theory. Whilst it may be desirable to build student cohorts with similar baseline competencies, the lack of both equality of opportunity and parity of esteem perpetuates a systemic violence. A curriculum to which only those students with the resources to access private music lessons are granted entry is not inclusive. Whilst the proliferation of music programs might be seen to mitigate issues of access, the lack of parity of esteem for different sorts of music-making is troubling. Popular and electronic music courses are seen as the “easy” option, “mopping up” those unequipped with a very partial and particular “other” (better) musical skill set (Parkinson 2017). This lack of parity of esteem across different types of music program is replicated in the attitudes and opinions regarding the “quality” of different universities.9 Regardless of the ever-increasing regulatory and quality assurance burden placed on HEIs, the narrative persists that the post-92s are simply poorer (in every sense) versions of those universities that do not have a history as polytechnics. The Labour peer Lord Adonis is, as I write, engaged in a provocative media campaign slurring the post92s and attempting to influence the (Tory) government’s narrative by proposing that “former polytechnics should lose [their] university status” (Adams 2017). The damage that this public betrayal of the contemporary UK university ecology does is both at an institutional and subject level. Fortunately there are opposing voices to this provocation, from The Guardian’s own Peter Scott (Scott 2012). However, we can see from the date above that Adonis and his ilk are, in some respects, in the ascendancy. Claims of quality are masking deep-held beliefs about exclusivity and exclusion, and norm-referenced access to a limited HE pool. This insinuated removal of opportunity for many students would of course adversely affect those in the lowest socioeconomic groups. 54

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

Two challenges thus present themselves here—firstly, the limited capacity to build a truly broad and inclusive HE music curriculum with access for all; secondly, the types of music being made and the skills necessary to make such music are being segregated and, thus, esteemed in differing ways, and quite explicitly reinforcing cultural and socioeconomic asymmetries present in broader society.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions Returning to the challenges laid out in the opening of this chapter, what conclusions might we draw from the description of a divided and divisive music education sector in which HPME is seen in pejorative terms in relation to its authorized sibling of classical music? If we are to properly value both the diversity of prior experience of the music candidate and of a music curricular offer which responds to that diversity, we need to reimagine the scene not as a competition but as a festival. This more ecological approach enables differing scales, registers, and practices of music to be valued in co-relation to, rather than competition with, one another. This ecology must be both horizontal (i.e., acknowledging and developing differing practices and aesthetics at the same time) and vertical (i.e., acknowledging and developing differing practices and aesthetics through time). However, what this does not capture is the potential or desire for mobility across and between practices of music-making and education; not as a standardizing agglomeration but as true diversity—a salad not a soup! One of the major challenges to this cross-pollination and interplay is that music is an embodied practice, its techne explicit and on display. We have seen above that the “how” of making and performing music reifies certain sensibilities and aesthetics, which emerge from differing contexts and value systems. These diverse ways of manifesting and valuing music need to be supported and interrogated through music education in our schools’ curricula; its elision is an act of structural violence that at once resigns the development of particular (classical) musical skills and sensibilities to a lifelottery, whilst also devaluing music-making outside of the classical paradigm. It is essential that the opportunities to engage in music-making are scaffolded right through compulsory education, and that the value systems in play recognize different manifestations of music, musicality, and musicianship.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to my friend and colleague Professor Paul Kleiman for tracking down the image credit for the “Equal Opportunity” cartoon on Lisa Rosa’s blog (2009).

55

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Notes 1 Whilst we might include Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs) in general here, they are prone to a different school curriculum and higher education quality assurance regime. 2 The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is the UK’s HE quality assurance body. It is an independent, not-for-profit organization that acts on behalf of HE providers and the government to ensure academic standards. Two main areas of practice are the Quality Code and the Subject Benchmark Statements. See QAA n.d. 3 “Alternative Provider” is the UK nomenclature for privately owned higher education institutions. 4 The Further & Higher Education Act 1992 enabled former polytechnics to attain university status and degree-awarding powers. All did, with only Anglia Polytechnic University retaining the word “polytechnic” in its title. In 2005 it became Anglia Ruskin University. 5 UCAS is the UK Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, which operates the application process for UK higher education. Their annual End of Cycle Report analyzes a range of applicant data, including socioeconomic status (known as POLAR3 methodology). 6 The inverse of this is the democratizing effect of the comparatively cheap and easy-to-access tools—both hardware and software—necessary for computer music-making (or production, as common HE parlance confusingly calls it). 7 McKenzie traces the ascendancy of “performance” as a term in business, technology, and beyond, and interrogates the links between the ethnographic imperatives of performance studies and the imperative assigned to abstract cultural objects (including pharmaceutical, technologies, and businesses) to “perform.” 8 Habitus might be considered as “embodied ways of being”—our physical, mental, moral, and attitudinal dispositions—that are shaped through habituation. See Bourdieu 1984.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

9 As divided down the Russell Group/post-92 paradigm.

References Adams, Richard (2017), “Former Polytechnics Should Lose University Status, Says Adonis,” The Guardian, October 10, 2017. Available online: www.theguardian.com/education/2017/ oct/10/former-uk-polytechnics-should-lose-university-status-says-adonis (accessed February 12, 2018). Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Burns, Judith (2017), “Music ‘Could Face Extinction’ in Secondary Schools,” BBC News, March 9, 2017. Available online: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39154242 (accessed February 13, 2018). Gough, Richard and Mick Wallis (2005), “On Technē,” Performance Research, 10 (4): 7. McKenzie, Jon (2001), Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, Oxford: Routledge.

56

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Considering Techne in Popular Music Education

Moir, Zach (2016), “Popular Music Making and Young People: Leisure, Education and Industry,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 223–240, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moir, Zach and Bryden Stillie (2018), “Haphazard Pathways: Students’ Perceptions of Their Routes to Music Study in Higher Education in the United Kingdom,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 2 (3): 199–216. doi:10.1386/jpme.2.3.199_1. Pace, Ian (2015), “To Do Justice to Arnold's Enviable Legacy, We Should Reverse a Tendency Towards the De-skilling of a Discipline,” Society for Musical Analysis Newsletter, 27: 28–29. Parkinson, Tom (2017), “Dilemmas of Purpose in Higher Popular Music Education: A Critical Portrait of an Academic Field,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (2): 133–150. Parkinson, Tom, Kimberley Campanello, Mike Dines, Mark Hunter, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2015), Understanding Small Music Venues, London: Music Venues Trust. Pearson Edexcel (2016), Level 1/Level 2 GCSE Specification in Music, London: Pearson. Price, Anna (2006), “Pit of Despair,” The Guardian, February 2, 2006. Available online: www. theguardian.com/music/2006/feb/02/classicalmusicandopera3 (accessed February 12, 2018). Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) (n.d.), “About Us.” Available online: www.qaa.ac.uk/about-us (accessed January 9, 2018). Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) (2016), Subject Benchmark Statement for Music, Gloucester: QAA. Rancière, Jacques (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated and introduced by Gabriel Rockhill, London: Continuum. Rosa, Lisa (2009), “Gedanken zum ‘individualisierten Unterrichten’,” Shifting School (blog), February 19, 2009. Available online: https://shiftingschool.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/ gedanken-zum-individualisierten-unterrichten/ (accessed January 9, 2018). Scott, Peter (2012), “It’s 20 Years since Polytechnics Became Universities. And There’s No Going Back,” The Guardian, September 3, 2012. Available online: www.theguardian.com/ education/2012/sep/03/polytechnics-became-universities-1992-differentiation (accessed January 9, 2018). Shadow Producers (2017), Good Musician: The Biggest Glossary of All Music Production Words, EDM and DJ Terms, and Sound Engineering Terminology, self-pub, CreateSpace Independent Publishing. UCAS (2015), UCAS Conservatoires End of Cycle Report, Cheltenham: UCAS. Available online: www.ucas.com/file/62881/download?token=OnRaBaAy (accessed November 27, 2018). Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (2016), “Dead White Composers,” Four Thought, London: BBC Radio 4, April 20, 2016. Available online: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078c9l2 (accessed February 10, 2018).

57

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

58

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

4

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition Gavin Carfoot and Brad Millard

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction This chapter examines how discourses of innovation and tradition play out in popular music education (PME) today. Drawing on comparative examples from the history of jazz education, we describe the ways that institutionalized music education tends to rely on genre-based models of pedagogical innovation, which in turn create binary oppositions between innovation and tradition. Like jazz education, PME has undergone an intense period of institutionalization—from the “street” to the “ivory tower”—where it has been defined in relation to the normative or traditional pedagogies of Western classical music (Nicholson 2005; Parkinson and Smith 2015). In contrast, we try to understand notions of innovation and tradition in more nuanced ways, in the hope of addressing some of the pedagogical pitfalls and crises that have faced jazz education; what Wilf has referred to as the paradoxes of institutionalized creativity (Wilf 2014) whereby jazz education has struggled to balance tradition and innovation (Kearns 2015). In particular, we suggest that the integration of PME in the tertiary environment can no longer be understood as innovative by default, or based on assumptions about musical genre (see Moir and Hails, Chapter 14 in this volume, for more discussion on this issue). Rather, we present a critical reading of the relationship between innovation and tradition, and how this might inform an “integrated” music pedagogy and educational practice in the twentyfirst century, charting some of the challenges and opportunities that are presented by the rapid expansion of PME as a field of practice. The incorporation of both jazz education and PME in higher education (HE) contexts has presented various challenges, particularly in cases where more traditional music education has been well established; as Krikun notes, many early incarnations of jazz or dance band education could more accurately be described as PME at the time (Krikun 2017b), and many examples of this occurred in institutions more closely aligned to vocational training such as community colleges (Krikun 2017a). In the contexts of HE, both jazz education and PME have faced elitist musical discourses that emerge from high-low art oppositions, whereby the validity of jazz education and PME has been questioned or treated with suspicion. While this might be assumed 59

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

to reflect the relationship between Western art music and jazz or popular music, the relationship between jazz education and PME also reinforces these divisions and practices of exclusion. As Krikun notes, “as jazz was gradually embraced as a highbrow art form by American critics and institutions, jazz education began to flourish in post-secondary institutions, which eschewed contemporaneous popular music styles such as pop, folk, country and R&B” (Krikun 2017b: 38). In this regard, Parkinson and Smith describe how popular music educators “are still called upon to defend the academic validity of their now twenty-year-old fields” due in part to the fact that “popular music has traditionally been a non-academic cultural form” (Parkinson and Smith 2015: 97–98). This is especially true in the case of Western art music programs, where pedagogical approaches have been accepted as more or less standardized until the emergence of recent critical work (Carey and Grant 2015; Creech and Gaunt 2012). The incorporation of informal learning approaches has formed a contrast to this, presented as innovative in contrast or opposition to teacher-as-master, repertoiredriven approaches (Lebler 2007). Our personal understanding of these challenges and opportunities is underpinned by our research, our experiences of program design, and our own extensive practice as educators in various Australian HE settings. Carfoot was trained at undergraduate and graduate levels in classical music, musicology, and the humanities, with performance experience in jazz and popular music, teaching extensively across various curriculum areas at three different tertiary music institutions since 2001. Millard was classically trained and largely self-taught as a reed doubler (saxophone, clarinet, and flute) in jazz and popular music, and his breadth of experience across popular music, big bands, jazz, symphony orchestras, and musical theatre has been beneficial in the design of the music degree program at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Our backgrounds, observations and reflections on PME have led us to examine the underlying models and discourses that underpin this area. Having written previously about the different models at play when PME enters the HE environment (Carfoot et al. 2017), we have noted that themes of innovation and tradition are often invoked in these contexts, where the “innovative learning environments” of PME are emphasized in advertising materials presented to potential students, and in PME research that emphasizes the concept of innovation (Lebler 2007). While discourses of authenticity play a prominent role in this regard (Parkinson and Smith 2015), notions of innovation and tradition are also important: drawing on Allsup’s concept of “the silent power of tradition and the habits of mind” in music education (Allsup 2010: 14), Smith and Shafighian have written about the difficulties in working across musical traditions “without leading to the reification of a limited and limiting knowledge of music constrained by labels of style” (Smith and Shafighian 2014: 257–258). With these issues in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to examine how discourses of tradition and innovation are articulated in institutionalized PME, and to better understand how our perspectives and practices as popular music educators are underpinned by such ideas. 60

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Innovation and tradition Innovation and tradition are terms used and understood in various musical, curricular, and pedagogical contexts in music education. The concept of “musical innovation” is often used to refer to the history of composition and performance in Western art music, where the story of musical innovation is told through the changing styles, techniques, and language of Western art music; as Merker describes, “the crest of a historical travelling wave of gradual change diversification of musical patterns for which the substance of tradition provides the moving mass and for which the innovative musical imagination supplies impulses for directional change” (quoted in Burnard 2012: 36–37). Walker employs this definition of innovation in his infamous Adorno-like treatise on the state of music education, cultural values, and innovation (Walker 2007). His definition of musical innovation underpins a modernist narrative of musical progress, which he recounts in order to denigrate popular music as a regressive intrusion upon music education as a field; “Education is not entertainment, and music for partying is not music for studying: the two are mutually exclusive. Beethoven is for studying: Britney Spears is for partying” (Walker 2007: 17). This is the way that innovation and tradition have tended to be understood in music education, enacting a “perceived opposition between tradition and innovation in musical terms” that leads to “a greater reinforcement, preservation or valuing of the traditional in pedagogy” (Creech and Gaunt 2012: 703). Following recent debates about these issues in the UK, Parkinson offers a way of thinking beyond the tradition-innovation binary by mapping innovation-tradition and mastery-enjoyment as continua on x and y axes, creating a model through which instrumental teachers can reflect on their practice (Parkinson 2016, 2017b). In other definitions, innovation is synonymous with technological or material developments in music and music education, both in historical terms (such as the early introduction of staves on chalkboards, see Karpf 2012) and in the impact that various forms of “digital disruption” have had on music education (Hughes et al. 2016). Western art music is often aligned with musical and pedagogical traditions rather than innovations; traditions that are preserved through education practice, following the etymology of the conservatoire, to preserve. However, as Burnard notes, discourses of “invention, originality, imagination, entrepreneurialism and innovation” have become important for the “people, programmes, and practices” found in such institutions (Burnard 2014: 213). The tradition-innovation binary has been particularly influential on the ways that PME has entered the academy, relying on what we might call the “innovation myth”: the idea that the informal pedagogies associated with PME are innovative by nature of their contrast to the formal pedagogies of Western art music. In the social and cultural learning contexts of popular music, such pedagogies are not usually considered innovative as such; perhaps more accurately, they can be understood as the “traditional” ways that popular music learning occurs. In this sense, the positioning of PME as innovative only occurs at the institutional level, functioning as a myth that serves the institutional imperatives described by Burnard. This scenario emerges from what Parkinson describes as the “dilemmas of purpose” 61

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

in tertiary PME; that is, the sense that PME is constructed as a field of practice across the overlapping discourses of popular music, PME, and music education more broadly (Parkinson 2017b: 145). In such institutional contexts, PME is rarely positioned alongside ideas of the “traditional,” although there is an implied tradition in the idea that pedagogical approaches should be based on methods that emerge specifically from popular music, “rather than uncritically adopting methods from Western European Art Music (WEAM) or other existing educational models” (Till 2017: 24). This perspective is important because it has encouraged critical challenges to the predominant models of curricula, pedagogy and assessment associated with Western art music in HE institutions. However, the critique of such traditional pedagogies on genre terms has significant limitations, and popular music learning is in its own ways “institutionalized” from a sociological perspective (Hebert, Abramo, and Smith 2017). As Till writes (echoing Green 2008), non-genre-specific pedagogical approaches are often “interpreted as advocacy for inclusion of guitar-based popular music ensembles,” despite qualifications that PME has “much to learn from existing musical pedagogy, including that of WEAM and other formal musical traditions from around the world” (Till 2017: 24). Parkinson and Smith (2015) acknowledge this as a problem where “interpretations of authenticity [are] contingent upon a dualism of formal and informal learning” (108). In this regard, they suggest a hybrid learning model where authenticities “do not merely co-exist in a shifting compromise of intentionalities and understandings, but are constructs that require and are comprised of merged, shared, and relentlessly negotiated, hybrid authenticities” (Parkinson and Smith 2015: 116), an approach to the authenticinauthentic binary that is also important in understanding tradition and innovation. This binary has been a pervasive, underlying force in the development of PME, defining its initial novelty and models of innovation in terms of genre (Smith and Shafighian 2014). While research on PME tends to invoke the coarse comparisons with Western art music described above, it is less common to bring the discourses and practices of jazz education and PME into critical dialogue. Krikun notes how early examples of postsecondary jazz education—at early incarnations of the Berklee College of Music, and Westlake College of Music in 1945—were in fact examples of PME in that they were focused on vocational education in popular dance band music of the time (Krikun 2017b: 38–39), and how two-year community colleges have contributed to this history (Krikun 2017a). As Frith noted regarding music scholarship, “in the academy ‘jazz studies’ and ‘popular music studies’ have evolved as different and rarely overlapping research and teaching areas … the separation of jazz and popular music studies is an indisputable fact of academic life, and the reasons for this are an interesting topic for the sociology of knowledge” (quoted in Brennan 2017: 4–5). The rise of PME as a distinct paradigm may indicate a similar separation from jazz education, at least in institutional settings where the relationship between jazz and popular music degree programs can be ambiguous: an ambiguity that existed both at the time when jazz could be considered the popular music of the day, but also today where PME may cross over into jazz repertoire and approaches in fluid ways 62

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

(Smith and Shafighian 2014). By referencing jazz education in the sections below, we hope to illustrate a number of common issues and discourses, highlighting how these discourses underpin our perspectives and practices as popular music educators.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Innovation and tradition in jazz education and PME Discourses of innovation and tradition have been central in jazz, which has been seen as both an expression of anti-establishment individualism and collective democracy: simultaneously an expression of innovation or “flight from the status quo,” and also as evidence of heritage, tradition, and a “flight back” to tradition after hard-fought battles for artistic and cultural recognition (Nicholson 2005: 3). Music education has played a well-documented role in these discourses, and HE’s assimilation of jazz has been accused of emphasizing doctrines of tradition at the expense of creativity and innovation (Kearns 2015; Wilf 2014). A key example of this has been the abundance of graduates from jazz education programs, often associated with jazz’s neoconservative turn in the 1990s, what became known as the Young Lions era where Wynton Marsalis sought to “influence the future course of the music through an idealized representation of the past” (Nicholson 2005: 27). Critics of this movement have questioned “whether the cost of increasing the prestige of jazz within American cultural institutions has been too high, placing the future of the music in jeopardy” (24). The tradition-innovation binary invoked here has been expressed in similar ways in the institutional settings of punk pedagogies (Dines 2015; Parkinson 2017a) and other forms of institutionalized learning; as Strange notes, Art Schools have been particularly associated with this, and there are correspondences between Art School pedagogical characteristics and the values of PME as a field of practice (Strange 2017: 278; Parkinson 2017b). This scenario can also be understood alongside concepts of popular music as cultural heritage, where popular music is increasingly framed as tradition, articulated through canonization, and documented in the material collections of museums. In these settings, combinations of real and imagined nostalgia highlight the ways that “tradition” is made and remade in popular music (Baker and Huber 2013, 2015; Bennett 2009). In a sense, popular music studies’ increasing interest in cultural heritage coincides with the consolidation of PME in tertiary education, in a similar way to the heritage-making in jazz and jazz education associated with Marsalis. In both jazz and popular music, the pull to pedagogical innovation coexists with heritage discourses, rearticulating and reinscribing a tradition-innovation binary. Gabbard has written about these issues of tradition and innovation in the institutionalization of jazz; processes inseparable from concepts of aesthetic autonomy and high-low art divides. He describes the ways that jazz’s artistic and aesthetic legitimacy was constructed through the formation of a canon and what he calls an “arduous path to institutionalization,” noting how “the canonization of jazz artists

63

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

has almost always been the major thrust of jazz scholarship, regardless of whether the writers take their methodology from traditional musicology or from social science” (Gabbard 2012: 10, 18). He refers to these processes as unique to jazz, although most of these cultural scenarios are common to popular music too. The formation of a canon and processes of institutionalization have been equally important in popular music’s entry into the academy; such canons replicating the ways that cultural and aesthetic power is articulated through a Western high-low culture divide. These discourses shape how music is taught and learned, and, in a sense, the formation of genres and canons creates the conditions in which tradition and innovation are constructed in music education; the frameworks through which the idea of tradition becomes valuable in music, society, and culture, creates the possibility and value of innovation as a break from this tradition. Regarding the formation of genres, Brennan (2017) makes an argument about jazz and popular music on historical terms, noting that “we cannot take for granted the fact that jazz and rock would ultimately become separate musical cultures” (2).1 These innovation-tradition models remind us that the fields of jazz education and PME share common discourses with music education in the broadest sense, and we should be critically aware of the ways that genre-based approaches and tradition-innovation binaries are articulated and rearticulated. In our practice as popular music educators, we often collaborate with students in learning activities that are not well contained within notions of musical genre (Smith and Shafighian 2014), and where ideas of innovation and tradition in learning and assessment are highly contingent on student perspectives. In such scenarios, concepts of innovation and tradition are dislocated from musical genre and pedagogy; that is, the emphasis shifts away from defining some pedagogies as inherently traditional or innovative. Our critical reading of tradition, innovation, and genre creates the conditions for a more radical or integrated music education more broadly, where genre, curricula, and pedagogy are fluid and constantly revised and revisited in practice. However, despite the potential for this critical reading of the tradition-innovation binary to inform undogmatic approaches to music education, in practice there are institutional imperatives that influence our practices as educators: the conservatoires’ imperative as a preserver of musical heritage that controls and contains innovation within prescribed limits, or PME’s institutional imperatives toward industryfocused educational innovation. In this sense, the contexts of institutionalized music education constantly inscribe and reinscribe boundaries on our perspectives and practice as educators; boundaries that are defined in part by the innovation-tradition binary.

Constructing value in jazz education and PME Following these ideas about the relationship between genre, innovation, and tradition, we now draw on Whyton’s work on how value is constructed in jazz education and how such patterns of value creation are shared with popular music. In particular, Whyton identifies five bases on which jazz education is “discredited or neutralized” that are familiar in 64

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

PME. The first of these is the “double bind” created by education’s role between “art” and “society,” meaning that jazz education must reside in a place of conflict “incompatible with both music as social phenomenon and music as autonomous art” (Whyton 2006: 72; emphasis in the original). Second, he identifies how anti-intellectual discourses in jazz function to devalue institutionalized jazz education, whereby theorizing jazz “goes against the grain of the music’s fundamental tenets of intuitions and impulse” (73). Third, Whyton notes a celebration of an imagined world before jazz performance and education was the subject of institutionalized education, an attitude that stems from the rapid uptake of jazz in music education settings in the late twentieth century, idealizing the authentic, natural, intuitive, soulful—and innovative—values that supposedly preceded. Fourth is the discourse that pits music education pedagogy against individualism and creativity, laying some of the blame for music’s perceived lack of vitality at the increasing institutionalization of jazz education. Fifth and finally, Whyton notes how jazz education is devalued through discourses that restate and reinforce the centrality of a traditional jazz canon, viewed as an expression of power and a “neutralizing force” on the possibilities of a subversive or critical imperative in jazz studies (75). Whyton’s final point is particularly relevant at a time when the study of heritage-making in popular music is gaining momentum. The concept of the rock canon has been the subject of some work in popular music studies (Regev 2006), and the expression of canonizing forces persists through the rise of heritage studies and popular music archiving, as mentioned above (Bennett 2009); that these forces have not penetrated PME more deeply is an interesting sign of the separation between practical and scholarly approaches to popular music in HE (Cloonan and Hulstedt 2012; Rodriguez 2004), something Whyton also notes in the case of jazz studies and jazz education. Overall, each of these issues is also important in PME; Whyton’s argument that these areas of significance spring uniquely from jazz music cannot be supported on their nature alone. Whyton is critical of any binaries that emerge—such as those between aesthetic autonomy and social context, or between tradition and innovation—although his appeal to the uniqueness of jazz reinscribes genre-based discourses and a binary between jazz music and non-jazz music. Rather than demonstrating how jazz education faces unique challenges, Whyton actually reinforces how much jazz and popular music have in common; or perhaps more critically, his identification of these issues reminds us that jazz and popular music are articulated as genres through common social, cultural, and musical discourses. As Hebert, Abramo, and Smith (2017) note: Jazz studies, which gradually, across more than five decades, came to be accepted in many HE programs around the world, shares many features in common with rock music, and these two broad genres comprising diverse sub-styles can even be taught using some similar techniques. It remains to be seen how jazz studies will respond to the emergence of PME, and whether the two fields might merge to some extent, or remain distinct. (466) 65

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Hebert, Abramo and Smith highlight the ambiguity between jazz education and PME that we have referred to above, echoing Brennan’s broader historiographic argument about genre (2017). The commonalities are compelling, even at a time when practice and research in PME are flourishing and the place and value of jazz in HE is somewhat uncertain. Whyton’s themes in jazz education substantiate this uncertainty, depicting a narrative struggle with the academy, where jazz education has had to fight for legitimacy on multiple, complex levels. In the attempt to be recognized as legitimate, the institutionalization of jazz music created a bind, and rather than revisit or relive those constraints and tensions that could define PME, popular music educators have often moved into parallel structures outside of jazz education, or scenarios where jazz education has been supplanted by PME (Carfoot et al. 2017). And while popular music educators have looked to models that privilege student-led learning in hybrid musical genres, this too has often relied on the separation of pedagogy based on genre. In a sense, these issues remind us that popular music educators can follow lines of flight away from the binds that institutionalized jazz education faced, but also that this pull to the innovation myth relies on binary notions of tradition and innovation defined according to musical genre. Where jazz education faculty have been reframed, or reinvented themselves within PME, the genre term “jazz” tends to be omitted, replaced with references to improvisation. While this might also reflect the complexities of contemporary jazz and its hybrid identity, it also provides an example of this disjuncture in education practice. If PME has avoided—or wishes to avoid—the pitfalls of these oppositional narratives, then it might be on the basis of new ideas in educational practice and research that were not prevalent at the time that jazz education was first entering the academy, such as the ideas of informal and formal learning that we explore below. Rather than reinscribe the centrality of genre, these perspectives in the informal-formal learning continua actually encourage us to rethink the separation of jazz education and PME, and to imagine how more integrated approaches might emerge.

Informal learning and discourses of innovation The theoretical frameworks of informal learning (Green 2008), peer learning (Lebler 2008), and authentic learning (Wiggins 2007) have emerged contiguously with the entry of popular music into tertiary music education, an alignment that has benefited PME as a field of practice, most notable in non-American contexts more so than in the United States (Mantie 2013). The critical understanding of the relationship between formal, informal, and nonformal learning (Green 2001) has been fundamental to the development of PME, providing a strong conceptual grounding in how musicians learn outside of formal Western art music contexts. This grounding in education research was not established when jazz education first entered the academy, and as such the changing paradigms of education and education scholarship have an important influence on 66

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

institutions and educational practice. Perspectives that value self-directed or autodidactic learning—including scenarios where the learner may not be consciously aware of their music-making activities as learning—also challenge the distinctions between learning, work, and leisure, something that Moir finds important in the aspects of play, casual and serious leisure that influence much learning in popular music (Moir  2016). As mentioned above, such approaches have been understood as innovative by default as they have entered formal music education, on the basis that they form a contrast with the models of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment more common in Western art music education. Combined with definitions of innovation based on genre, these assumptions underpin many claims to innovation in PME and research (Lebler 2007): although as Till notes, hybrids of informal, nonformal, and formal learning methodologies are increasingly likely (Till 2017: 24). Informal learning practices overlap with the concept of “authentic learning” (Parkinson and Smith 2015; Wiggins 2007)—the notion that learning environments and activities should reflect the specific artistic or professional concepts associated with the field of practice. According to Parkinson and Smith (2015), “authenticity, then, can correspond to ideological and practical proximity to the professional context” (104). This concept has been influential across genres and disciplines even when it goes unnamed, as typified in Askerøi and Viervoll’s description of the relationships between the commercial record industry and record production pedagogy. As they write, “Traditionally … studio production and engineering have been learned in the studio itself, through master/apprentice relationships in which the student/assistant would typically start off as a so-called runner” (Askerøi and Viervoll 2017: 234). Turning to jazz for a comparison, Askerøi and Viervoll describe the process of learning studio production through deep listening as comparable to how “a jazz performance student might learn the relevant tradition by transcribing and analyzing solos, because the phrasing of Charlie Parker represents a crucial conduit to the characteristics of bebop” (235). Here again we can see the nuanced ways in which the term “tradition” is used, and how music learning can be considered “traditional” when situated within its sociocultural setting but “innovative” when the same learning practices are situated in more formal learning contexts; that is, both formal and informal learning styles can be defined as “traditional” according to context. For students with a learning history steeped in the “informal tradition,” a shift in emphasis to a teacher-directed approach may affect the relative autonomy to which the student is accustomed and conversely, students with a background in formal pedagogies may encounter informal learning of music as a challenge of innovation. The point of this discussion is to reinforce that informal learning is not disruptive or innovative on its own terms, despite the oppositional discourses that have led music educators to argue for it as such. This is also represented in the impact of neoliberalism in music education as critiqued by Allsup, along with his call for an “open” approach to “study” in a “remixed classroom” (Allsup 2015, 2016). In this sense, maintaining a distinction between informal and formal approaches to learning “represent[s] missed 67

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

opportunities to invite … students to engage with and across difference—to experience new ways of learning, creating, and making music—a critical role of a democratic mutual learning community” (Allsup and Olson 2012: 17). With Allsup’s critique in mind, an approach that critically positions informal and formal pedagogies outside of the tradition-innovation binary is important in conceptualizing an integrated approach to PME that creates the conditions for dynamic and sustainable approaches to pedagogy (Kearns 2015: 12). That is, thinking beyond PME as “innovative” is important if students’ learning is to move across difference in transformative and democratic ways. In our practice, the design of curricula has involved a push toward integrated music education where flexible, student-defined models de-emphasize active teaching and explicit instruction. But to label these practices as innovative burdens them with genre and pedagogical implications that are not always useful: that is, distancing studentdriven approaches to PME from the innovation-tradition binary, or the “innovation myth,” is a key way of enacting sustainable and integrated ideas of music education as democratic. For example, in the past our teaching of musicianship has reinforced a distinction between what was explicitly described to students as “trad” and “non-trad” skills; terms that were later reconfigured as “tonal” and “sound” musicianship. These differences reflected a curriculum that was underpinned by assumptions about musical style and genre. Moving beyond such assumptions has meant seeking more integrated approaches where combinations of informal and formal learning emerge through students’ learning practices, generated in democratic, dynamic, and undogmatic ways in collaboration with students. In this model, we have shared agency with students about how informal and formal learning are integrated and expanded, combining explicit and implicit forms of learning, and looked for opportunities to enact critical pedagogies beyond musical style and genre.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion The similarities between jazz education and PME are marked, and the merger of these areas has already taken place in subtle ways as faculty members with expertise in jazz education (and, indeed, Western art music education) transition into PME roles. That the idea of a convergence or “merger” (Hebert, Abramo, and Smith 2017: 466) is being tabled now is telling, especially given the distinctions and oppositions between jazz and popular music in the academy as noted (Frith cited in Brennan 2017: 4–5). In an overall sense, a key lesson to be taken from this consideration of jazz education alongside PME is that we should be critical about discourses that justify pedagogical approaches on the basis of musical genres and their supposed particularities. As Smith and Shafighian write, while genres can be “useful learning tools,” PME practice may call into question “the validity and relevance of an educational paradigm that canonizes contemporary musics by grouping them according to historically popular ‘styles’” (Smith and Shafighian 2014: 263): 68

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

Contemporary music ought instinctively to refuse and to deny canonization, but responsible education in popular music performance cannot perhaps altogether ignore its complex roots. The difficulty for educators, then, is to engender respect for and understanding of popular music’s rich cultural heritage without leading to the reification of a limited and limiting knowledge of music constrained by labels of style. (257–258) Despite these critical perspectives, there remain many barriers to the realization of such hybrid models in the tertiary context, or what we have referred to elsewhere as “integrated” approaches of PME (Carfoot et al. 2017; Feichas 2010). One of these barriers is the persistence of discourses that construct a tradition-innovation binary, where different pedagogies are defined in opposition with one another. As we have deconstructed these discourses of “tradition” and “innovation” in PME, we have been prompted to break down such barriers, challenging ourselves to think of our practice in original and undogmatic ways beyond the innovation myth.

Note

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 Brennan’s main point is to undermine the historical and musical essentialism that separates jazz and popular music, relying on a “narrative of revolution rather than evolution” that “privileges discontinuity over continuity” (Brennan 2017: 183). Brennan’s argument is also relevant in music education, where pedagogical disruption and change—positioned as educational innovation—is increasingly privileged, if more so in non-American than American contexts (Burnard 2012; Mantie 2013).

References Allsup, Randall E. (2010), “On Pluralism, Inclusion, and Musical Citizenship,” Nordic Research in Music Education, 12: 9–30. Allsup, Randall E. (2015), “The Eclipse of a Higher Education or Problems Preparing Artists in a Mercantile World,” Music Education Research, 17 (3): 251–261. Allsup, Randall E. (2016), Remixing the Classroom, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allsup, Randall E. and Nathaniel J. Olson (2012), “New Educational Frameworks for Popular Music and Informal Learning: Anticipating the Second Wave,” in Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä (eds.), Future Prospects for Music Education: Corroborating Informal Learning Pedagogy, 11–22, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Askerøi, Eirik and André Viervoll (2017), “Musical Listening: Teaching Studio Production in an Academic Institution,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran,

69

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 231–242, Abingdon: Routledge. Baker, Sarah and Alison Huber (2013), “Notes Towards a Typology of the DIY Institution: Identifying Do-It-Yourself Places of Popular Music Preservation,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 16 (5): 513–530. Baker, Sarah and Alison Huber (2015), “Saving ‘Rubbish’: Preserving Popular Music’s Material Culture in Amateur Archives and Museums,” in Sara Cohen, Robert Knifton, Marion Leonard, and Les Roberts (eds.), Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, 112–124, New York: Routledge. Bennett, Andy (2009), “‘Heritage rock’: Rock Music, Representation and Heritage Discourse,” Poetics, 37 (5–6): 474–489. Brennan, Matt (2017), When Genres Collide: Down Beat, Rolling Stone, and the Struggle Between Jazz and Rock, New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnard, Pamela (2014), “Leadership Creativities and Leadership Development in Higher Music Education,” in Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education: International Perspectives and Practices, 213–222, New York: Routledge. Carey, Gemma Marian and Catherine F. Grant (2015), “Teacher and Student Perspectives on One-to-One Pedagogy: Practices and Possibilities,” British Journal of Music Education, 32 (1): 5–22. Carfoot, Gavin, Bradley Millard, Samantha Bennett, and Christopher Allan (2017), “Parallel, Series, and Integrated: Models of Tertiary Popular Music Education,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 139–150, London: Routledge. Cloonan, Martin and Lauren Hulstedt (2012), Taking Notes: A Mapping of HE Popular Music and an Investigation into the Teaching of Theory and Analysis. The Higher Education Academy, May 2012. Available online: www.heacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/ Cloonan_2012.pdf (accessed). Creech, Andrea and Helena Gaunt (2012), “The Changing Face of Individual Instrumental Tuition: Value, Purpose and Potential,” in Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 1, 694–791, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dines, Mike (2015), “Reflections on the Peripheral: Punk, Pedagogy and the Domestication of the Radical,” Punk & Post-Punk, 4 (2–3): 129–140. Feichas, Heloisa (2010), “Bridging the Gap: Informal Learning Practices as a Pedagogy of Integration,” British Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 47–58. Gabbard, Krin (2012), Jazz among the Discourses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Green, Lucy (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Aldershot: Ashgate. Hebert, David G., Joseph A. Abramo, and Gareth D. Smith (2017), “Epistemological and Sociological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–477, London: Routledge.

70

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Tertiary Popular Music Education: Institutions, Innovation and Tradition

Hughes, Diane, Mark Evans, Guy Morrow, and Sarah Keith (2016), The New Music Industries: Disruption and Discovery, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Karpf, Juanita (2012), “The Last Dramatic Instructional Innovation? The Chalkboard and Music Education in a Historical Prospective,” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, 34 (1): 62–80. Kearns, Michael (2015), “Inclusivity and Adversity in Jazz Education: A Case Study of Paul Read,” Canadian Music Educator, 57 (1): 9–13. Krikun, Andrew (2017a), “Teaching the ‘People’s Music’ at the ‘People’s College’: Popular Music Education in the Junior College Curriculum in Los Angeles, 1924–55,” Journal of PME, 1 (2): 151–164. Krikun, Andrew (2017b), “The Historical Foundations of Popular Music Education in the United States,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 33–45, London: Routledge. Lebler, Don (2007), “Student-as-Master? Reflections on a Learning Innovation in Popular Music Pedagogy,” International Journal of Music Education, 25 (3): 205–221. Lebler, Don (2008), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Peer Learning in Practice,” Music Education Research, 10 (2): 193–213. Mantie, Roger (2013), “A Comparison of “Popular Music Pedagogy” Discourses,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 61 (3): 334–352. Moir, Zack (2016), “Popular Music Making and Young People: Leisure, Education and Industry,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth D. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 223–240, New York: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, Stuart (2005), Is Jazz Dead? Or Has It Moved to a New Address?, New York: Routledge. Parkinson, Tom (2016), “Mastery, Enjoyment, Tradition and Innovation: A Reflective Practice Model for Instrumental and Vocal Teachers,” International Journal of Music Education, 34 (3): 352–368. Parkinson, Tom (2017a), “Being Punk in Higher Education: Subcultural Strategies for Academic Practice,” Teaching in Higher Education, 22 (2): 143–157. Parkinson, Tom (2017b), “Dilemmas of Purpose in Higher Popular Music Education: A Critical Portrait of an Academic Field,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (2): 133–150. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth D. Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Regev, Motti (2006), “Introduction,” Popular Music, 25 (1): 1–2. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, Reston, VA: The National Association for Music Education (MENC). Smith, Gareth D. and Atar Shafighian (2014), “Creative Space and the ‘Silent Power of Traditions’ in Popular Music Performance Programmes,” in Pamela Burnard (ed.), Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education: International Perspectives and Practices, 256–267, New York: Routledge. Strange, Simon (2017), “What Lessons Can Higher Popular Music Education Learn from Art School Pedagogy?,” in Julia Merrill (ed.), Popular Music Studies Today: Proceedings of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music 2017, 271–280, Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. 71

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Till, Rupert (2017), “Popular Music Education: A Step into the Light,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 14–29, London: Routledge. Walker, Robert (2007), Music Education: Cultural Values, Social Change and Innovation, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Whyton, Tony (2006), “Birth of the School: Discursive Methodologies in Jazz Education,” Music Education Research, 8 (1): 65–81. Wiggins, Jackie (2007), “Authentic Practice and Process in Music Teacher Education,” Music Educators Journal, 93 (3): 36–42. Wilf, Eitan Y. (2014), School for Cool: The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized Creativity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

72

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

5

The Vanishing Stave? Considering the Value of Traditional Notation Skills in Undergraduate Popular Music Performance Degrees James Dean

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction In this chapter, the word “notation” is used to describe music presented in a traditional visual representation on a stave, or which is clearly derived from it. This understanding of notation therefore includes single melody line lead sheets through to more detailed full scores, as well as any representation of music based on this method such as using standard rhythmic figures to show rhythmic placement on a chord chart, or the use of conventional structural indications on such charts, for example, bar lines, repeat signs, coda markings, etc. Although the term “notation” could legitimately be taken to include any visual representation of sound, it is used solely in this chapter to describe conventional pitch, rhythmic, or structural information as it would appear on traditional stave-based representations of music. Personal experience as a music lecturer and guitar tutor in higher education (HE) for over twenty years has demonstrated to me that students of popular music tend not to prioritize notation skills in their learning. Instead, students generally prefer informal learning methods1 that have been shown to be dominant in popular music practice (e.g., Feichas 2010; Folkestad 2006; Green 2002, 2004, 2008; Gullberg and Brändström 2004; Robinson 2012), and which rely on the “ear” and the use of audio recordings as the primary means for learning. If any forms of written music are used at all, these are commonly shorthand forms such as (often rudimental) chord charts or lyric sheets. Guitarists might use tablature (often without any rhythmic information) if learning a more involved part such as a riff or solo. It is usual for such students to be self-taught for the most part and they often have personal musical goals which don’t include learning to play from notation. Consequently, they largely prefer to develop their performance skills independently of stave notation, perhaps using shorthand forms as supporting materials for learning. Recent developments in online resources have also given students 73

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

many more options for self-directed2 learning away from a page. With this in mind, this chapter considers the value of notation skills in popular music performance degrees, with a particular focus on student perspectives. I consider what value students place on learning and using notation, and whether there is a place for teaching notation on popular music performance HE programs. Following a background discussion regarding the use (or not) of stave notation in both “real world” popular music practice and HE settings, the chapter presents a summary of views from students studying on a popular music performancebased degree program. Students were interviewed to find out about their attitudes toward using notation, primarily in relation to their development as instrumentalists/ vocalists but also in terms of general notation literacy—by which I mean the ability to “read” notation as it is traditionally presented, on a stave—in this definition, reading notation can be thought of as understanding notation in both non-performance (e.g., analysis, composition, theory) and performance settings (e.g., sight-reading, learning repertoire, rehearsing). Through these interviews I hoped to better understand how relevant the students consider this skill to be to their practice, motivation, and ambitions, with the intention that the findings would be instructive for future curriculum development. The focus on performance students (of popular music) was deliberate, since such students might necessarily be expected to be conversant with notation as part of their instrumental studies. The chapter concludes by presenting some points for further consideration, briefly reflecting on the following discussion and interview findings.

Background

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Green (2008) states that: By far the overriding learning practice for most popular musicians, as is already well known and is also clear from existing studies, is to copy recordings by ear … It is well known that notation plays hardly any part in the popular music world, although it is used in a few cases such as highly professional function or theatre bands, or in an occasional manner such as when a musician scribbles something down on a piece of paper (usually to be screwed up and binned as soon as the instruction is internalized). Session musicians are more likely to have constant work if they can read. (6–7) As Green comments, the use of notation in popular music is well recognized not to be the primary means of learning among popular musicians, but there are occasions when notation can be an important tool for a musician working in popular music, as in the 74

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Vanishing Stave?

cases mentioned by Green, above. For instance, in an article in Guitarist magazine, session musician Adam Goldsmith discusses his experience of playing with the house band in the television show The Voice, amongst others: “In terms of skills, Adam says that in his line of work being able to sight-read fluently is a must” (“Session Guitarists” 2012: 74–75). Although popular music is predominantly created without use of stave notation, these two quotes demonstrate that performances of popular music also occur using notation, both referring to a connection between being able to read music and particular areas of popular music practice. Whilst it is widely appreciated that popular music is rarely composed or performed using stave notation (unlike Western classical music), performing popular music from notation does not make it any less “popular,” in terms of style and reception. Along with creations and performances of popular music that don’t use notation at all, this understanding of popular music therefore also includes the creation or re-creation of popular music from notation. Examples might include pop/rock cover bands using quite basic forms of notation, through to some types of musical theatre that, although they may draw on popular music styles such as pop, rock, blues, soul, and hip-hop, for example, are often heavily reliant on detailed stave notation for performance. It is this understanding of popular music and of popular music performance (encompassing popular music created without or with notation) that I am thinking of in this chapter. Paul Fleet in his consideration of whether notation should be taught in UK popular music programs, observed a variety of approaches. Following a survey of fifty-seven institutions offering undergraduate degrees in Popular Music, Fleet stated, “there is an interesting matrix of those who do and those who do not ask for fluency in reading and interpreting music notation as part of their entry requirements, and those who do and those who do not go on to teach music notation as part of their programme” (Fleet 2017: 168–169). A similar finding, related to this area of “interpreting music notation” is supported by Cloonan and Hulstedt. Following interviews with some program leaders they found that, “In general respondents were aware that many popular musicians lack formal training in music theory and analysis and were willing to take this into account at application stage where a portfolio of musical experiences was often more important than a firm grasp of music theory” (Cloonan and Hulstedt 2012: 24). Although this statement is specifically about music theory, these skills tend to be strongly related to a knowledge of traditional notation—it is difficult for most students to develop a sound theoretical awareness without being notation literate, since this is the language on which most music theory is based. These findings chime with Fleet’s observations, suggesting that popular music students often approach theory and notation reading after they have developed instrumental performance skills; theoretical awareness and notation literacy is commonly sought by students, or required by their HE program, often once they have reached quite a high level of technical facility on their instrument. It can therefore be frustrating for students to feel they are “starting from scratch” again when it comes to learning how to read music on their instrument. Therefore, 75

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

whilst students of popular music are often highly skilled in areas such as performing, songwriting, playing and learning by ear, improvising, or composing/producing music using technology, it is perhaps understandable that of the fifty-seven institutions Fleet considers, that only “10 institutions asked for some level of musical notation as an entry requirement,” and that a “significant number of popular music degrees do not ask for any evidence of a student’s understanding of music notation and do not go on to consider this area within their programme of study” (Fleet 2017: 169). This suggests that (1) there is an awareness among these programs that students don’t necessarily have notation skills at entry stage, and (2) that not all institutions consider it a priority. There may be some good reasons for a program not to consider notation, such as where it might be described as a Popular Music degree in title whilst having a focus on music business, music production, or in cultural studies, for example, where notation skills may be considered of less relevance (Bennett 2017).3 However, these variable approaches possibly paint a confusing picture for students, suggesting that music notation is not uniformly valued across the sector. With this in mind, I was interested to find out what students thought about using notation themselves. The following section presents some findings from a selection of interviews.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Student interviews I interviewed twelve performance students (students A–L) on a Commercial Music degree. Although the degree is titled “Commercial Music” it is essentially a popular music program that considers other forms of music which are “commercial” alongside the (popular) performance aspects, such as music for film and media, and songwriting, for example. Smith (2014) discusses how institutions also use different terms such as “contemporary,” “modern,” and “vernacular” as alternative ways of describing popular music curricula, and in this case “commercial” is another term that is used to incorporate the study of popular music and to differentiate it from the study of music of the Western classical tradition. This issue with terminology is summarized by Joe Bennett: “the only reason we might use the term ‘popular music degree’ is to differentiate its content from that of a ‘music degree’—not ‘classical music degree’, but ‘music degree’. That is to say, the default semantic in higher education is to assume that ‘music’ means ‘classical music’”(Bennett 2017: 285). The current predominant use of the term “music” for degree programs which focus on Western classical and art music traditions in HE has, therefore, left many institutions searching for a way to describe themselves as not being such, whilst often not wanting to label themselves explicitly as “popular music” either, hence a diversity of terms for degrees which are often actually dealing with similar curricular content. Of the students who were interviewed, seven of them were second-year students and five were third-year students. The students studied a mix of instruments including

76

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Vanishing Stave?

vocals, drums, guitar, and piano/keyboard as their main instrument. Some had another main instrument (e.g., drums and guitar), or played a second instrument (e.g., a vocalist who also plays guitar). Interviews with each individual student lasted approximately 45–60 minutes and worked through a list of set questions asking about notation in a number of areas. For the purpose of this chapter I have focused on one area of the interview, namely the value students place on notation in terms of their development as performers and career ambitions. As is typical with students from popular music backgrounds, these students primarily learnt using informal learning for the most part, prior to starting university. On this particular program, the students take a notation/ music theory module4 in their first year of study. In their second year, they choose from a range of modules, some of which do use notation and others which do not. However, all performance students will be exposed to notation in their instrumental lessons as part of their performance module, to a greater or lesser extent depending on their individual tutor. All students take a relatively minor assessment (in terms of module percentage weighting) in their third-year performance module, which requires them to demonstrate notation literacy on their instrument. Some students did not think that notation skills were important. Student A commented, “I feel like I don’t need notation.” This sentiment was shared by student B who said, “I don’t think it’s that important … for what I actually want to do I don’t think I need that.” Student C also thought that notation wasn’t important: “With so many resources online … I don’t think you need notation … it does open other avenues for other work, but then at the same time, I think that those avenues … are a bit of a sort of niche.” Student D responded specifically in thinking about her role as a vocalist, stating that “it’s not as important for singers … they can just listen to something and pick it up.” For these students, relating notation skills to their career aspirations did not feel relevant, so they did not regard it as important. For example, student D stated that “I kind of want to go more into publishing so it probably wouldn’t be that important.” Student C likewise wasn’t able to make this link, “whether it be pit work or even like down to studio work—there’s not a lot of studios that will expect someone to come in on the day and give them a score now … I can’t see myself using it in a working environment.” Unlike student C, student G regarded notation skills to be important specifically in thinking about a session musician role: “I personally think it’s important because … for my career—it would be a session musician or going on tour, you know, like theatre bands … and obviously for all of that you do need to be able to read music to a certain level.” Student H thought likewise, stating that “it is quite important … it really depends what I want to do. If it’s session I’d have to have it nailed.” Student J seemed to agree with this, stating “I think it’s pretty important … If I was ever working in a studio and they did give me a piece of sheet music I would like to have a very good knowledge of it … Also I was thinking about doing teaching … I feel like it would be very important for me to learn notation.” The aspiration of teaching was raised by a number of students and in each case they were more positive about the need to be notation literate. For instance, student A, having said that she didn’t need notation, caveated this by saying “The only 77

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

reason why I do contemplate it is because I do want to be a music teacher.” Other students who felt notation was important also demonstrated an interest in teaching. Student E stated, “I think it’s, yeah, really important … being able to teach someone else would be really good,” and student F: “I do think it’s important to do it because it’s helped me with my performing and singing … I definitely want to go in to teaching so obviously it’s quite important to study more notation.” Student I was more ambivalent about the need to read music saying “ … it would depend on what you kind of want to play, but the more knowledge you have in the field has got to be better … so I would say, that yeah, I would say it probably is … but at the same time it’s not … a complete necessity … to do that and have a career in music.” Student K also felt that it was important, believing that “the only way I could be the most thorough is if I can read.”

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion As has been discussed, traditional music stave notation is not used in informal learning or in a good deal of popular music practice, and Fleet (2017) suggests that teaching notation in HE popular music programs is not a priority in many cases. Of fifty-seven undergraduate degrees in popular music “31 did not list it as an entry requirement and did not list the teaching of notation on their programmes” (Fleet 2017: 169). Are programs that are teaching notation fighting a losing battle then? They appear to be in a minority amongst an “opting-out” trend. Although a number of students did feel notation to be unnecessary for their current practice and future ambitions, some employment opportunities seemed to motivate the students to develop notation skills more than others. Teaching music seemed to be a clear motivation for doing so, where some students felt it would be important to be able to teach notation to others, even though they might have thought it to be irrelevant for other areas of their practice. Another motivator for students to develop notation fluency was careers in session and theatre work. If students are not offered the chance to develop notation skills in a HE curriculum though they are likely being denied some of these opportunities, or will need to pursue this learning in their own time, in addition to their degree requirements. One student commented “I actually think it’s really important … I think it just opens up so many doors” (student L). I agree with this, and my own opinion is that notation skills should be an important part of popular music performance degrees, at least as an option for students who want to develop these skills on their instrument in a HE environment. Of course, there are limitations to what can be achieved during a three-year degree where students have many competing priorities on their time and learning, and where they might be starting with limited prior experience of using notation. However, I believe that HE providers should be “opening these doors” for the students in order to present them with the range of opportunities that having notation skills can allow, thus allowing students to make their own choices about whether they want to develop these skills, or not.

78

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Vanishing Stave?

The findings from these student interviews presented here have been revealing in beginning to understand the value students place on notation skills, and in presenting a range of student views for and against notation that may be commonly felt across the HE sector in other similar programs. Further research could involve a project across a range of UK institutions and popular music programs investigating how/if student attitudes and expectations vary depending on HE provider and program. It might also be interesting to consider in more detail which careers act as motivators for developing notation skills and how an awareness of this might inform curriculum development. For instance, might there be a particular “type” of notation approach that would be a best fit for these students. In thinking about a wider implication, another research question might consider how students are being prepared for HE popular music study in schools and colleges, examining how this impacts learning notation and student expectations of HE. Such research might aid the way in which notation is taught (or not) in HE popular music programs in informing the development of curricula that might best serve the aspirations of these students within the broader context of developing well-rounded practitioners in popular music.

Notes 1 Lucy Green summarizes informal popular music learning characteristics as “(1) allowing learners to choose the music; (2) learning by listening; (3) learning in friendship groups with minimum adult guidance; (4) learning in personal, often haphazard ways; (5) integrating listening, playing, singing, improvising and composing” (Green 2006: 249). 2 For instance, Don Lebler states: “It is normal for people outside formal education to learn popular music in an interdependent way, mainly through individual self-directed work” (Lebler 2008: 195).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3 Also see Cloonan 2005; Cloonan and Hulstedt 2012; Smith 2014 for issues concerning range and scope of Popular Music degree programs. 4 A module is a discrete element of a program. Typically students will take a range of modules in each year dealing with different areas of study. On this particular program students take six modules per year.

References Bennett, Joe (2017), “Towards a Framework for Creativity in Popular Music Degrees,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 285–297, Abingdon: Routledge. Cloonan, Martin (2005), “What is Popular Music Studies? Some Observations,” British Journal of Music Education, 22 (1): 77–93. 79

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Cloonan, Martin and Lauren Hulstedt (2012), “Taking Notes: Mapping and Teaching Popular Music in Higher Education,” Higher Education Academy, 1–46. Available online: www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/cloonan_2012.pdf (accessed October 13, 2016). Feichas, Heloisa (2010), “Bridging the Gap: Informal Learning Practices as a Pedagogy of Integration,” British Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 47–58. Fleet, Paul (2017), “‘I’ve Heard There Was a Secret Chord’: Do We Need to Teach Music Notation in UK Popular Music Studies?,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 66–76, Abingdon: Routledge. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Green, Lucy (2004), “What Can Music Educators Learn from Popular Music?,” in Music, Education as Critical Theory and Practice, 211–216, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Green, Lucy (2006), “Popular Music Education in and for Itself, and for ‘Other’ Music: Current Research in the Classroom,” in Music, Education as Critical Theory and Practice, 248–259, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Gullberg, Anna-Karin and Sture Brändström (2004), “Formal and Non-formal Music Learning amongst Rock Musicians,” in Jane W. Davidson, The Music Practitioner, 161–174, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Lebler, Don (2008), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Peer Learning in Practice,” Music Education Research, 10 (2): 193–213. Robinson, Tim (2012), “Popular Musicians and Instrumental Teachers: The Influence of Informal Learning on Teaching Strategies,” British Journal of Music Education, 29 (3): 359–370. “Session Guitarists” (2012), Guitarist, July 2012: 74–78. Smith, Gareth D. (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Ioulia Papageorgi and Graham Welch (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–47, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing.

80

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part II

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Musical, Creative, and Professional Development

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

82

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

6

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers: A Cultural Psychology Perspective Bill Bruford

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction This chapter explores the perceptions of the formative music learning experiences of a subset of expert popular music instrumentalists—drummers—and how the effects play out in the subsequent creative actions of the participants. It starts from the presumption that the experience of musical learning undergone by individuals who later develop as internationally recognized performers might warrant examination by virtue of the proven success of its outcomes. Most studies that focus on musical learning have done so within the context of Western classical music (Barrett 2011a: 265) and within that of student or early-career practitioners on pitched instruments. The learning experiences of high-level, peak-career experts on unpitched instruments in nonclassical traditions have been much less examined, and it is the perceptions of such a group that provide the setting for this analysis. Evidence provided here will help demonstrate that (1) informal learning may be more productive in some areas of music practice than formal learning; (2) calls for the refocusing of the notion of practice to accommodate something more than solitary confinement with the instrument should not go unheeded; (3) the somewhat under-sung value of nondeliberate practice demands equivalency with the acknowledged value of deliberate practice; and that (4) parental involvement in learning may have both negative and positive impacts. Elements of action theory1 are used to situate learning in the context of drummers’ “community of practice” (Wenger 1998), itself embedded in a cultural system characterized in part by the unpitched nature of the instrument (Boesch 1987; Cole 1996). The community both shapes practitioners’ engagement and colors perceptions of action-choices.

83

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Methodology The methodological approach was framed within a constructivist, interpretivist epistemology and an ontology in which reality is not external or objective; rather it is just the sense we make of things. Sense-making is a core activity shared by researcher and participant: in a double hermeneutic approach the researcher attempts to make sense of the participant making sense of his or her perception (Smith, Flowers, and Larkin 2009). A common qualitative sampling strategy was adopted, of studying a relatively small number of special cases of expert practitioners—a good source of learned lessons. Semi-structured research interviews were conducted in the expectation that a focus on experience rather than career might encourage a high level of forthrightness and disclosure. Nine participants, selected to achieve a broad representation of contemporary practice, were identified as experts by virtue of their having (1) extensive internationallevel collaborative performance experience with acknowledged popular music “stars” or leaders; (2) led a music ensemble of any size in the performance of their own music; (3) directed the production of at least one commercially available recording that embodied their own performances. One exception to these criteria was permitted in the interest of covering the broadest possible range of practice; Ralph Salmins eschewed the nurturing of a parallel solo career in the interest of his development as a studio drummer. Peter Erskine, Cindy Blackman Santana, Mark Guiliana, and Chad Wackerman are North American. Martin France, Dylan Howe, Ralph Salmins, Asaf Sirkis, and Thomas Strønen are European. The participants are, by permission, referred to throughout by first name. The interview data illuminated participants’ perceptions and experiences of creativity, some of which described earliest memories of engagement with music at a point where learning and creativity were closely allied. The current paradigm emphasizes the development of music expertise as residing in benign environmental conditions and appropriate education “critiqued and monitored by an expert other” (Barrett 2011b: 13). While undoubtedly that may hold good in some cases, my research suggests that expertise is also achievable within less stable learning and in less than benign conditions, a scenario characterized by engagement and struggle with the haphazard, the stochastic, the partial, the muddled, and the interrupted, in an ever-present overcoming of obstacles to progress.

Cultural psychology in action Cultural psychology is the study of the human mind through studying its cultural products. It is concerned with what Bruner calls the “meaning-making process” that plays a central role in all human action and experience. Drumming is a cultural artifact with, arguably, different meanings for, for example, Chinese and Western practitioners. 84

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

In the Western culture, old associations of the pitch of an instrument with music and beauty, and the absence of definite pitch with noise and ugliness, not only persist (Brennan 2013) they continue to be heavily promoted to children globally through, for example, Roger Hargreaves’ “Mr. Men” series of books, in which “Mr. Noisy: The Musician” (Hargreaves 2014) is, somehow inevitably, a drummer. While I do not intend to examine the multiple causes of this, the pitched/unpitched distinction remains one dimension of the culture of instrumental practice and one aspect of the cultural psychology that in part determines the actions of Western kit drummers. Viewed through an action-theoretical lens, learning is both experienced and assigned meaning through goal-oriented action in context (Bruford 2018). To summarize, the essence of this principle is that the human mind comes to exist, develops, and can only be understood within the context of meaningful, goal-orientated, and socially determined interaction between human beings and their material environment (Boesch 1987; Cole 1996; Vygotsky [1974] 2012). Action is the means by which we understand the individual in culture: we are what we do, and what we do is embedded in a complex social matrix of people and artifacts. Theorizing drummer action from this perspective, the cultural tool (music) is mediated by the action (learning) of the agent (learner) using the mediational means of the Western drum kit (Boesch 1987, 1991; Wertsch 1998). Tools and their use may be psychological or physical; adopted, learned, adapted, or invented from scratch and passed on to succeeding generations. For participants in this research, tools exist at the physical level (drums, cymbals, electronic processing devices, multiple types of strikers), at the skill level (stick control, sight-reading, metrical, and temporal skills), and at the conceptual/ideational level (for instance, in research participant Dylan’s case “to help or to express the intangible idea”) and are acquired through learning. Their use is permitted, predetermined, and/or constrained to varying degrees by the extenuating parameters of the situation, and mediated by multiple ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical considerations. Tools may preexist the users or be originated by them as their conscious or subconscious selves may dictate. Skills are developed to use the tools, acquired at some effort, wisely and appropriately, in pursuit of significant cultural action. They are developed in relation to the particular mediational means from the level of competence, through proficiency, to mastery. Drummers acquire more or less haphazardly a generic set of tools sufficient to play to a standard; the more creative go on to devise their own tools in pursuit of significant cultural action (Bruford 2018). The dominant discourse around acquiring the tools and skills to achieve expressive performance addresses experiences of formal and informal learning and training. The formal aspect of a drummer’s education typically resides in regular or occasional drum lessons from more or less qualified instructors with variable outcomes, following which the student is generally expected to practice a certain amount alone until the next lesson. Informal practices, by contrast, might include “learning by doing” (Schank et al. 1999) and “hanging out”—one way of becoming a 85

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

“cultural being” through enculturation (Cole 1996: 109). Boundaries between formal/ informal and practicing/playing/working tend to be perceived as fluid and blurred. Karin Johansson refers to Yrjö Engeström’s argument that theories of learning often presuppose the learning content to be stable, and as such are consequently inadequate for explaining “transformative processes in which the learning content is not yet known or defined” (Johansson 2012: 221). Notwithstanding the instability of the learning content in drumming and the variable quality of instruction received by those within the research group, all participants recognized the need for “deliberate practice,” a focused set of activities designed to improve performance in some skill (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993: 367). This was deemed crucial to the development of the information embodied in their formal lessons or acquired informally.

Analysis

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Tool acquisition through informal learning Research participants’ early listening habits tended to be formed by the music taste groups (Mulder et al. 2007) associated with their localized versions of the popular music of the day. Mark, for example, was influenced by the North American popular music of the early-to-mid-90s (Soundgarden, Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers); Cindy by the grand masters of her African-American rhythmic heritage (Art Blakey, Tony Williams, “Philly Joe” Jones). Asaf listened to “a lot of Balkan music, a lot of Middle-Eastern music, a lot of classical music, a lot of rock music: I heard a lot of Yemenite music when I was a kid.” Instrumental in the development of a more directed listening were teachers (Chad, Mark, and Peter), friends and other musicians (Thomas), and parents and family (Dylan, Chad, Cindy, and Peter), with Chad, Cindy, and Peter benefiting from exceptionally proactive family members. These people directed young ears to community “movers and shakers” in classic patterns of knowledge transmission within “communities of practice” (Wenger 1998). Invaluable knowledge was further gained by the musicians’ quintessential informal learning technique of hanging out, described by Thomas: I was always playing with older people, I was learning a lot. People from that mini big-band that I played in were much more established on the music scene … I was given advice all the time. (They were giving you advice … you were learning about music from those guys (yes) not from a drum teacher?) Not from a drum teacher (fine). These guys were giving me loads of records, and I would sit at home and listen … I would try to copy it. 86

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

In a similar manner Cindy’s enculturation by an informal learning circle of internationally known community elders exemplifies the transmission from community senior to junior of what Glăveanu calls a “culturally impregnated” resource:2 “Art Blakey used to tell me stories about him hanging out with Chick Webb.” Hanging out provided “confidence” (Mark), “inspiration” (Martin), “a way of being unique or being special or developing your own sound” (Asaf), a bridge into creative music (Cindy), and a perspective from outside the domain. As Asaf observes, an individual’s listening history is always unique because “no one will have the same influences … of these millions of different experienced moments.”

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Parental involvement Recent research on exceptional musicians within the classical tradition identifies no cases of individuals reaching very high standards of performance without substantial support and encouragement from family (Howe 1990). Michael Howe has pointed to a large body of empirical evidence that testifies to the value of early stimulation and parental encouragement to learn (Howe 1999: 435). From this he concludes that there is a close relationship between “the way youngsters experience the activities that make them unusually competent and their family backgrounds” (433). Participants saw tool acquisition as reliably and invariably facilitated by positive parental involvement, thus buttressing existing evidence. The skill resides in the effective application of the tool. The skill is in turn informed and constrained by experience, by what Peter characterizes as “a seasoning, of knowing maybe the best option, a note-to-self, don’t try that one again.” Once committed to the idea, most parents gave generous support to the young drummers, at least in the beginning. Most participants were from musical families, loosely conceived as one or more parents or siblings playing an instrument at amateur level or above, so the rigours of being a parent in such a household were not entirely unknown. Chad states that his parents were “100 percent supportive”; he and his father, a music teacher and drummer, even shared the same teacher. Parental involvement included but was not confined to spending long hours arranging and transporting the student to and from concerts, lessons, and auditions sometimes hundreds of miles away (Martin, Peter, Chad, Ralph), altering the garage to make soundproof space (Chad), and providing financial support toward early equipment purchase (Asaf, Ralph, and Peter). With music on both sides of her family, the support Cindy received was central to her development of a set of moral values that “certainly helps you keep your focus and stay true to your core.” Dylan’s less than perfect experience of parental support may well have been colored by his father’s position as a celebrated rock guitarist: “They did try to take me to a couple of teachers,” he said, but they were hesitant about “grooming” him for success. While perceptions of the quality and consistency of family support were variable, participants testified to its high importance in their development as expert performers. 87

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Parental involvement, however, may transmit conflicting, unhelpful, or regressive messages. In the eyes of some parents, drums, for example, may not be a “proper” instrument, nor music school a “proper” education, nor music a “proper” occupation. One of the first obstacles to overcome was to persuade parents to look favorably upon early musical endeavor and, if not actively support it, at least not willfully obstruct it. Young Thomas demonstrated a remarkable level of determination at age 5 in insisting to his mother that getting him a drum he had seen in a shop window was “the right thing to do.” He had never mentioned drums before. He did, however, suffer overt parental obstruction for a period before he left home:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I tried to get into Musikkhøgskole3 but my father, who was in the Marines, wouldn’t let me. He said I have to have a proper education. Having begun at the same age on the violin, Ralph was compelled to strike a Faustian bargain with his parents when he proposed a move to a drum kit. They insisted that “you need to learn a proper instrument, with music … but they weren’t sort of denigrating the drums … that’s how they perceived it.” Such episodes appear typical of the rather grudging engagement with unpitched instruments, seen as in some way insufficient or incomplete and, as such, unlikely to provide employment. This attitude could be explicitly endorsed by the drummers themselves. In Ralph’s case “My parents said you’ve got to study other things first before you do drums, very wisely.” A prejudice in favor of pitched instruments may thus be embedded in the informal learning methods by which knowledge is transmitted within and outside the community. A relationship might be hypothesized between the perceived shortcomings of the unpitched instrument and the adoption and practice of a pitched instrument. It was almost uniformly suggested that developing participants should simultaneously study a second (pitched) instrument, the latter being seen as helpful in support of a career on the former. All did so to some degree. Understanding his drum kit as inherently limited and limiting, Dylan taught himself rudimentary piano, in part because he feels “the drums and piano are just kind of an extension of each other.” Britons Ralph and Martin had an early start at primary school with piano and/or violin, in an educational system that allowed that to drop away at secondary level.4 In comparison, the mid-twentieth-century North American educational system (at the time these drummers were beginners) offered less formal music education at primary level (although it could, of course, be purchased privately) with good percussion instruction available more at college level.

Turning points Having spent some time acquiring and using tools in a rudimentary fashion, participants typically reported one or more moments of awareness about the creative potential of music, the action of drumming and the potential for change. Windows of perception opened, 88

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

however briefly, and precipitated abrupt change in their respective approaches to learning. All participants experienced one or more pivotal moments in their development as performers. These included hearing the playing of a critical other at the right time for his or her own development, someone who “gave me the confidence to start thinking like … everything is fair game” (Mark); the imparting and receiving of critical technical information from an older practitioner “that just opened me up and the more I got into creative music” (Cindy), or an unforgettably negative teacher assessment of capabilities after a disappointing test result at 9 years of age (Thomas). These turning points were further seen as being beyond individual control. Numerous incidents were perceived as having a fortunate or lucky outcome: Chad and Martin were “lucky” to play with creative bands and leaders; Cindy was “blessed” to have been taken under the wing of elders like Art Blakey and allowed to “sit in” with his band; Thomas was “very fortunate” to have played “loads of concerts” at a young age; Mark “got lucky” with a “really inspiring” nationally renowned drum teacher. What links these examples is that all were assigned meaning as powerful agents of change, as pivotal events on the path to achieving expertise in music performance.

Tool acquisition through formal learning

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A cultural divide: Availability and quality of instruction Accounts of formal learning experiences evidenced an unexpected division along geographical and cultural lines, falling either side of a surprisingly deep gulf between North American and European participants. Broadly conceived, the former drew more from a greater availability and a higher quality of formal instruction than the latter.5 While effective instruction was facilitated by supportive and stimulating parents in both groups, it was taken to be more available, particularly in the early years, in North America. Peter, for example, had his first drum lesson at 5 years old, was ferried hundreds of miles to jazz band camps, and performed with a national jazz orchestra at age 7. Emerging from a fife and drum corps background, Cindy was similarly immersed at a young age: I think I was about 11 or 12 … We had to play them [the rudiments] at every speed from dirge to lightning fast … and we had to be able to control everything that we played. Chad appears to have had the sort of educational development more typically associated with elite classical musicians; that is, the maximization and careful monitoring of deliberate practice with “the explicit goal of improving some aspect of performance” (Krampe and Ericsson 1995: 86). The son of a music-teacher father, himself a drummer, Chad was a keen and disciplined student capable of handling a stiff practice regime at an early age. He was tutored by excellent nationally known teachers

89

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

who had taught previous generations of emblematic creatives. Together with supportive parents and siblings, these elements reduce the chances of failure. This atypical level of attention to his development was appreciated:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I loved it (mmm). I loved it, and especially when I … especially with the private teachers (yeah), it was so focused and so methodical. These experiences contrast sharply with the variable quality of the formal instruction undergone by some of the European participants. Dylan’s development in the UK was somewhat arrested by insufficient and/or poor guidance (“neutral encouragement”) from teachers and parents (“they did try to take me to a couple of teachers”), and fewer opportunities for collaborative learning. While Martin and Thomas both had to navigate degrees of domestic friction as parental encouragement waxed and waned, a substantial hurdle for Asaf was the long weekly bus trip for instruction in the only drum school at the time in his native Israel. Similar obstacles were far less evident within the North American group. Prioritizing the informal over the formal, the European cohort tended to highlight that aspect of informal learning known as “learning by doing.” This, broadly, means the fostering of skill development in the situated context of its use (Custodero 2012; Schank et al. 1999). This group preferred to be out playing with others, learning by doing it on the job, and tended to denigrate those who had a more focused application to practicing alone. Martin, for instance, knows musicians who “have their little routine and they can sit at home for hours and work through it, but I can’t do that.” More than their North American colleagues, the Europeans conveyed a sense that if you had a gig there was less need to practice. Ralph “wasn’t really a super-hard worker” because he was playing in his teacher’s rehearsal band. As a young professional, Martin was playing so much at that time, “you could literally … I mean, not not practise, but it did feel like you were playing all the time, particularly as some of the situations it was almost like experimenting and practising at the same time (yeah) as doing a gig.” This seemingly cavalier treatment of someone else’s musical situation (“practising on the gig”) appears to be more indicative of the European approach to informal learning than the North American and may have its roots in the high value accorded to learning by doing with others. Important aspects of performance such as style and appropriateness were seen as acquired at least as effectively on the bandstand or in the rehearsal room as the classroom.

More tools in the box: Deliberate practice Reports revealed a linear relationship between the quality and amount of formal drum instruction and focused individual practice; the greater the availability of quality instruction, the longer the hours spent in deliberate practice. Having already noted lower 90

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

levels of the former in the European cohort, a concomitant level of engagement with the latter was not unexpected. European participants indeed all showed, at least initially, an indifferent attitude to practice. On his own admission, Ralph was “lazy.” As a beginner, Martin didn’t practice very much: “maybe fifteen minutes in a day or something. (Now and then after school?) Exactly.” In striving to avoid sounding like another particularly successful drummer, Thomas maintained that “I thought if I practised a lot I would end up sounding like that. That was actually something I believed at that stage.” Presumably that approach informed his attitude to deliberate practice: “I wasn’t practising anything er … systematic at all … I was just playing.” Reflecting on his early years as a young musician, Thomas described the difficulty of life without a sufficient skill level. Ultimately his ideas were stillborn:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I think I had an understanding of music, but not skills to, you know … (execute it?) Yeah … I had loads of ideas but I couldn’t fulfil them. Sparked into belated action by an eventual realization of the centrality of practice to the achievement of proficiency or mastery, the Europeans all subsequently stepped up the time spent in that area of their development. At the relatively late age of 20, Thomas “started rehearsing never less than six hours a day, seven days a week … making a plan of what to rehearse.”6 Sharp words from Dylan’s teacher eventually brought home to him the need for action: “That actually kick-started my whole approach to obsessive … like … having to practice in a timetable, and split hours up, and then exercise into this and then into warming up.” The Europeans, then, downplayed the importance of overt effort in the acquisition of tools and skills, adopting a more consistent, focused approach to deliberate practice only much later on in their development than the North Americans. The latter group, by contrast, characterized the deliberate practice vs. performance issue not as an “either/ or” but rather as a “both/and” binary, assigning equal importance to both. This was inculcated at an early age and developed within the framework of a more disciplined approach to learning: Chad Yeah, but … (two hours a day on top of your schoolwork?) Yeah, you did an hour in the morning before school and an hour after—it’s not that much (okay). So one lesson I came in and I didn’t do enough and he could tell right away, then the conversation was like “so why are you wasting my time” and then he offered to fire me as a student. Cindy I love playing drums so practising for me is a joy; I love to practise … It’s not a chore to play my drums. 91

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Other participants joined Cindy in strongly associating the experience of drumming with fun and pleasure for themselves and others: “I looked at the drummer and thought this looks fun.” The strong emphasis on these last three words of Ralph Salmins’s youthful observation indicates a bottom-line appraisal of how drumming should be for both practitioner and listener—an aspect of performance that should be present as much of the time as possible. Fun is identified as an attraction to the art of drumming in the first place, as inherent in the action of drumming, both alone and in the company of others, and as attached to various dimensions of drumming, such as its unpredictability and capacity for surprise. Fun is frequently associated with the primary processes of acquiring the tools for creative performance; namely, drum lessons and practice sessions. Ralph’s early teacher “used to sit down and play ‘Lady Be Good’ … get me to jam along with him, which was fun.” Describing how he spends his time with a few precious hours in a quiet house, Thomas will “compose music just whenever I want to, as long as I want to, and I will play the drums. That’s what I love to do. I might not talk to any people … I would just do that.” Mark’s radical change of both instrument and approach to his practice sessions only made practice more fun: “It was the most fun I’d had in a long time, actually, at the drums … and it was bringing out new ideas, and I was able to play more fluently and more quietly.” The clear linkage developing here between having fun and being creative is underscored by Peter Erskine. If Peter is not having fun, there is little likelihood of a creative outcome. Referring to the preparation of some new music, he is:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

having as much fun or more playing it in the solitude of my studio than I anticipate I’ll have … I mean it is just part of the gig, I have to do it. I’m having more fun just kind of working on it. It is commonly accepted that to become expert in any field, one is going to have to learn from mistakes, failures, and errors. The few early disappointments that arose in part from poor or nonexistent teaching appear to have had little permanent effect upon participants’ creativity, as evidenced by the measure of success in evoking the phenomenon in later life. The North American cohort had few complaints in this area; all spoke of the consistently high quality of the instruction they received, frequently from nationally known teachers or older musicians. All interviewees stated that they had undergone the lengthy period of knowledge and skill acquisition without which some propose that no one can make contributions to a domain,7 even if they had done so by paths differentiated by culture and geography. However, the very idea of deliberate practice was seen as in some need of amendment to accommodate something more than solitary confinement with the instrument. Peter calculated the number of hours in terms of his overall practice as well as his professional playing time, and claimed that “the person who has put in the time has a much better chance of succeeding.” This pragmatic approach was mirrored by other participants, who saw deliberate practice as but one component of skill development, two more being 92

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

rehearsing and performing with others in a musical situation. Mark felt that he also had probably clocked 10,000 hours alone, but: I was always much more excited about being in musical situations and I felt like I would always grow much more in those environments than I would just practising alone. So, if those hours would count, then I certainly hit that number. Deliberate practice was perceived as a means to reduce or minimize the time between the thought and its expression, thus allowing concentration on something other than the mechanics of drum performance. In Peter’s perception, it also gives you “a lot more in your toolbox.” Ralph evokes notions of the psychological Flow state8 when he tells his students: “Look, I’m not thinking about anything to do with the drums when I’m playing music, at all. I’m just playing.” Practice has been elaborated by Weisberg in contrast to two other activities: work and play. Work, identified as involving “performance or competition for external reward” tends to preclude deliberate practice. “Indeed, problematic aspects of the skill would probably be actively avoided at such times” (Weisberg 1999: 233). An activity may start out as play but change to practice as the practitioner becomes more serious about a career in the discipline. Both the European and North American sets of drummers recognized the need for deliberate practice and its purpose and potential benefits, principal among which were:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 2 3 4 5 6

to economize and enhance the functionality of physical movement on the drum kit to afford greater choices and options to have a better chance of succeeding to facilitate the communication of creativity on stage to enhance versatility and unfetter expression to facilitate a smooth-flowing execution of choice-decisions and thus effective delivery of the expressive idea.

Three caveats concerning the quantity of deliberate practice emerged from participant responses. First, excessive time spent alone at the drum kit (generally taken to be an instrument of accompaniment and usually played with others) might have a negative effect on collaborative performance. Peter evidenced those musicians who practice: so much alone that they don’t know how to open themselves up through the collaborative or interactive experience. So, let’s redefine the 10,000 hours. If that doesn’t include a healthy combination of performance experience and collaborative experience (absolutely) then … If he wants to be another Segovia, great; 10,000 hours in the practice shed will be terrific.

93

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Second, some participants touched on a suspicion that a “natural feeling” for the instrument would be lost in the face of too much practice or “academic exercise”:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Dylan Whereas if I had had that [drummer] Tony Williams type of thing “I’m going to practise eight hours a day as a teenager and just appear,” then who knows? But maybe it might have stymied a kind of natural feeling for the drums instead of seeing it as a kind of academic exercise. The consequent delayed start to serious study may be related to the lack of selfesteem and considerable self-consciousness reported throughout Dylan’s narrative. The suspicion that deliberate practice might have a detrimental effect on one’s “natural” abilities was exclusive to the European cohort and chimes with my experience as an educator. Third, overt dexterity should not be an object of attention, but concealed and employed invisibly, lest the manner of its use distract from the communication of the thought. A high skill level is widely considered among experts to be best employed in the service of the music rather than in any overt display for either its own sake or the aggrandizement of the practitioner. In this view, the art is to conceal the art. Peter’s understated approach finds creative expression in his own minimalist trios where “every single cymbal pulse starts to carry a lot of meaning.” Everywhere implied, although not explicitly examined, is the unstated axiom that the music should not exist to serve the musician but, rather, the musician should exist to serve the music. What emerges here is a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the classical music tradition of instrumental development, which sees a clear demarcation between deliberate practice and performance; and, on the other, a purposeful blurring of borders between work, play, and practice in popular music performance. All musicians play (in the sense of generating music with their instruments) when they go to work, but expert drummers tend to do more playing (in the sense of toying with something) at work than their classical counterparts. Creativity theorists (and expert drummers) might argue precisely that the problematic aspects of any skill should be engaged by toying with them, pulling them apart and playing with them in performance, contrary to Weisberg’s formulation (above). When Thomas is practicing nothing “systematic at all” and he is “just playing,” he is thus indulging in a nondeliberate version of practice that may have equal potential to improve performance as the deliberate equivalent.

Findings Approaches to and experiences of learning among the research group tended to divide along cultural lines. North American participants were considerably closer than 94

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

their European counterparts to the benign environmental conditions and appropriate educational approaches that support Barrett’s (2011b) somewhat idealized modelling of music expertise development noted earlier. Such conditions were only sporadically available to the European cohort in particular, who made do with whatever mode of learning they could locate in the development of their expertise. The two foremost objections given to any deliberate practice were (1) “it’ll make me sound like everyone else,” and (2) “it’ll prevent me from being ‘natural’.” These two questionable premises underpinned the perceptions of several European participants, while their North American counterparts appeared entirely unaware of them and their potentially corrosive effect. The slow development of formal learning in the popular music tradition may have heightened dependence upon informal learning actions, such as hanging out and learning by doing. “Perfect-world” views such as those of Barrett have necessarily less to say about the imperfect world of scrabbling and scratching that is the lot of many drummers, whose learning is of necessity driven to the informal with moments of enlightenment as likely to come from hanging out with significant others as from any kind of drum instruction. The data suggest that the experiences of the two sets were qualitatively different in five key respects: 1 Effective formal instruction was generally more available to North American participants than European. 2 A level of commitment comparable to that of the classical conservatory was expected of those who studied with nationally known North American instructors. A lower level was expected from European instructors. 3 The North American cohort experienced failure in performance less frequently than the European. This was ascribed to better preparation for performance. 4 The European experts downplayed the importance of overt effort in the acquisition of tools and skills, adopting a more focused approach to deliberate practice only much later on in their development than the North American group. 5 The North American cohort seemed to enjoy and benefit from formal study, which in turn reinforced deliberate practice. In contrast, those Europeans with little capacity for focused application and lacking effective formal instruction to counteract any negative consequences, tended to valorize informal learning over any formal instruction. A further group of observations emerged from the data set across both cohorts: 1 There is a linear connection between the availability of quality instruction and the hours spent in deliberate practice. 2 Findings supported evidence from the literature connecting the learning of popular music to Flow, fun, and enjoyment (Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Hytönen-Ng 2013). 95

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

3 Expert drummers continue to teach and learn from others in the community of practice throughout their lengthy careers, exemplifying a “growth mindset” (Dweck 2006). 4 Tool acquisition is facilitated by positive parental involvement. While seen within the academy as central to expert development, the engagement of friends, family, or teachers may have negative consequences unique to the drum community. 5 A pitched instrument prejudice renders an unpitched musical instrument insufficient or incomplete in some way. 6 Some aspects of performance are better acquired through informal rather than formal learning. 7 Expert drummers tend to evaluate the stochastic incidents in the development of learning as positive turning points. 8 While the value of deliberate practice within formal learning is acknowledged, the somewhat unsung value of nondeliberate practice within informal learning demands equivalency. 9 Reports suggest that some amendment to ideas surrounding the quality and quantity of deliberate practice might be necessary. The notion of practice itself might be refocused to accommodate something more than solitary confinement with the instrument.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Concluding remarks The context of the original research from which this chapter has drawn was creative performance among mature performers rather than the manner in which we educate students. Those experts’ experiences of learning have been carefully drawn upon to cast light on how we educate. Formal/informal learning should not, perhaps, be regarded as a dichotomy but, rather, as the two poles of a continuum. Both these aspects are in various degrees present and interacting in most learning situations (Folkestad 2006; Green 2002). Evidence in this chapter supports that position, with some aspects of effective performance, such as matters of style and appropriateness, better acquired through informal rather than formal learning. Within the drum culture, the balance between the two thus becomes critical to effective learning. Institutionalized education tends to privilege formal music learning over its informal counterpart; whether that is because the outcomes of the former are more easily quantified than those of the latter is beyond the scope of this chapter. The research here strongly indicates that skill development through the interaction and “interthinking” (Mercer 1995) associated with informal learning must combine with tool acquisition through the high-quality instruction associated with formal learning, to produce the balanced combination that is crucial for expert performance. From this one might propose that a greater appreciation of what it means and feels like to collaborate musically should be inculcated within popular music education: too

96

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

heavily geared to the acquisition of technical ability as a creative tool, too little geared to the acquisition of the collaborative skills without which that tool is rendered far less potent.

Notes 1 An action-theoretical perspective takes action as intentional and goal-oriented. It relates the mind to the cultural setting and links the individual to the situated context; here, the drummer to the drum culture. Through action, the individual transforms and is transformed. 2 Glăveanu identifies such resources as the “symbolic resources (signs and tools from a Vygotskyan perspective) used in creative acts” (Glăveanu 2010: 11). 3 At age 15 Thomas wanted to transfer from regular high school to one with a specialist music program but was denied entry. 4 Limited opportunities for music creation in UK secondary schools have been noted in successive Ofsted reports (Cook 2012: 387). The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) is the statutory body that oversees education in English schools. 5 Only recently have British conservatories undertaken the teaching of drum kit. A majority (75 percent) of North American participants and a minority (40 percent) of European participants studied some form of percussion at college or conservatory level. 6 Thomas, a native Norwegian speaker, uses the word “rehearse” and its derivatives to mean both collective and individual practice, as opposed to the more generally used and separate ideas of “practice” as individual and “rehearsal” as collective endeavor. 7 The “ten-year rule” has been investigated by Hayes (1989) and popularized by Gladwell (2008) as the “10,000-hour rule.” The majority of participants considered that they had indeed completed 10,000 hours or more of deliberate practice.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

8 As identified most notably by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) and Hytönen-Ng (2013).

References Barrett, Margaret S. (2011a), “On Being and Becoming a Cathedral Chorister: A Cultural Psychology Account of the Acquisition of Early Musical Expertise,” in A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, 259–288, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Margaret S. (2011b), “Towards a Cultural Psychology of Music Education,” in A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, 1–15, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boesch, Ernst E. (1987), “Cultural Psychology in Action-Theoretical Perspective,” in Çiğdem Kağitçibaşi (ed.), Growth and Progress in Cultural Psychology, 41–51, Lisse: Swetts & Zeitlinger. Boesch, Ernst E. (1991), Symbolic Action Theory and Cultural Psychology, Berlin: SpringerVerlag.

97

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Brennan, Matthew (2013), “‘Instruments of a Lower Order’: Historicizing the Double Status of the Drum Kit and Drummers,” paper presented at the seventeenth Biennial Global Conference, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, University of Oviedo, Spain, June 24–28, 2013. Bruford, Bill (2018), Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cole, Michael (1996), Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, Nicholas (2012), “Beyond Creativity?,” in David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald (eds.), Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception, 451–459, New York: Oxford University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper and Row. Custodero, Lori A. (2012), “The Call to Create: Flow Experience in Music Learning and Teaching,” in David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald (eds.), Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance, and Perception, 369–384, New York: Oxford University Press. Dweck, Carol (2006), Mindset: How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, New York: Random House. Ericsson, K. Anders, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer (1993), “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, 100 (3): 363–406. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Gladwell, Malcolm (2008), Outliers: The Story of Success, London: Hachette. Glăveanu, Vlad-Petre (2010), “Paradigms in the Study of Creativity: Introducing the Perspective of Cultural Psychology,” New Ideas in Psychology, 28 (1): 79–93. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Hargreaves, Roger (2014), Mr. Noisy: The Musician, Paris: Hachette Livre. Hayes, John R. (1989), “Cognitive Processes in Creativity,” in John A. Glover, Royce R. Ronning, and Cecil Reynolds (eds.), Handbook of Creativity, 135–145, Boston, MA: Springer. Howe, Michael J. A. (1990), The Origins of Exceptional Abilities, Oxford: Blackwell. Howe, Michael J. A. (1999), “Prodigies and Creativity,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 431–446, New York: Cambridge University Press. Hytönen-Ng, Elina (2013), Experiencing ‘Flow’ in Jazz Performance, Farnham: Ashgate. Johansson, Karin (2012), “Organ Improvisation: Edition, Extemporization, Expansion, and Instant Composition,” in David J. Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald (eds.), Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance, and Perception, 220–231, New York: Oxford University Press. Krampe, Ralf Th. and Karl A. Ericsson (1995), “Deliberate Practice and Elite Musical Performance,” in John Rink (ed.), The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, 84–102, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, Neil (1995), The Guided Construction of Knowledge: Talk amongst Teachers and Learners, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

98

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Learning Experiences of Expert Western Drummers

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Mulder, Juul., Tom Ter Bogt, Q. Raaijmakers, and W. Wilma Vollebergh (2007), “Music Taste Groups and Problem Behavior,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 36 (3): 313–324. Schank, Roger C., Tamara R. Berman, and Kimberli A. Macpherson (1999), “Learning by Doing,” in Charles M. Reigeluth (ed.), Instructional-Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory 2, 161–181, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Smith, Jonathan A., Paul Flowers, and Michael Larkin (2009), Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research, London: Sage Publications. Vygotsky, Lev S. ([1974] 2012), Thought and Language, edited and translated by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Weisberg, Robert W. (1999), “Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 226–250, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, Etienne (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, James V. (1998), Mind as Action, New York: Oxford University Press.

99

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

100

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

7

Breaking into a “Scene”: Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music Sarah Gulish

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“What would you like to order?” A young barista stares at me from behind a coffee counter, scribbling notes on a pad while others frantically bustle around her, making smoothies and lattes. I balance my 2-year-old son on my hip and look around the packed café. As a high school music teacher, this scene is a far cry from my music classroom. The lights are dimmed and the plum painted walls make the tiny space feel smaller yet. There are colorful paintings, made by my students, surrounding us. To my left, the first act of the night is setting up. Kids are plugging guitars into amps, testing microphones, and adjusting a keyboard to make everything “just right” before they begin. The café is packed. People sit in chairs, on couches, and line the perimeter of the room. There is a nervous excitement amongst performers while showgoers laugh and smile. I grab my smoothie and move to a seat with my family as I watch Ruth approach the microphone in the middle of the “stage.” A few hours ago, she was playing upright bass in my orchestra classroom. Now, she is emceeing a show. Calm and collected, she begins welcoming the crowd, “Our first performer this evening …” When I was a young musician, a night like this would have been a dream—performing my music in front of my peers. This event is something I never imagined starting when I began my teaching career over a decade ago.

Setting the stage: Background This chapter details the way in which a regular community performing event can enhance the music education for a group of adolescents.1 I began teaching in 2007 in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States. My place of employment, Lower Moreland, is a public high school in the town of Huntingdon Valley. Huntingdon Valley represents a small community with only one high school in the district. There are roughly 750 students enrolled in the school each year. Of these students, many are involved in large ensembles: band, choir, and string orchestra. Students not involved in large ensembles have few opportunities to perform at the school. When I began teaching,

101

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

there were two events in which any student in the school could participate: Battle of the Bands and “Java Jam.” Students looking to perform shows in the community had an even bigger challenge as Huntingdon Valley lacked a music scene for adolescents. There were no exclusive music venues within the township and few bars showcased live music. If students ventured to the city of Philadelphia looking for shows, they noted that many clubs were not welcoming to younger musicians. This situation—the prevalence of large-ensemble instruction and need for alternative music-making experiences—was not unique to Lower Moreland. While the majority of music-making experiences in secondary schools in the United States tend to be centered on large-ensemble performance (Elpus and Abril 2011), some researchers and practitioners are calling for alternative experiences (Kratus 2007). In a 2008 study examining the principals’ perspectives on musicmaking at the secondary level, Carlos Abril and Brent Gault (2008) found that many principals in the United States would like to see an increase in creative music-making in the classroom. David Williams (2011) considers the prevalence of traditional, largeensemble instruction to be one of the main factors inhibiting curricular progression within the field of music education. The lack of diversity in musical offerings is compounded by a dearth of diversity among students served; many music programs underserve minority students and populations with a low-socioeconomic standing (Elpus and Abril 2011). These limiting factors have made it ever more necessary to create alternative approaches to music education that are inclusive in both types of music and students served (Clements 2010). One such area of need in terms of curricular expansion is popular music education, that is, the teaching and performing of popular music styles. Popular music education has received a heightened emphasis globally in recent years with organizations such as Musical Futures and Little Kids Rock providing professional development for music teachers seeking to expand curricular options. Furthermore, scholarship in popular music education is continuing to grow with publications such as the recently founded Journal of Popular Music Education and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education (Smith et al. 2017). Both the Association for Popular Music Education and the International Society of Music Education’s Popular Music Special Interest Group (ISME) have been pivotal in disseminating such research, and bridging the gap between research and practice. Through regular publications and research driven conference presentations, these organizations have provided a space for the discussion and application of popular music education. And, while these organizations make a strong case for expanding popular music education, bringing popular music into the formal music classroom poses specific challenges. Aside from challenges related to general curricular reform, some have argued that authenticity is lost when popular music is taught within a school context (Allsup 2003; Davis and Blair 2011; Green 2006; Karlsen 2010; Parkinson and Smith 2015; Väkevä 2009). Performing popular music styles in the classroom can often isolate the associated music-making activities from the spaces they occupy in the 102

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music

“real world.” Lucy Green argues that the authenticity of popular music in the classroom should relate more to the process of popular music learning than the performance of the music (Green 2006). In addition to challenges associated with authenticity in the music classroom (Smith et al. 2017), there are concerns with the applicability of school music-making beyond the K–12 years (Shuler 2011). A goal of music education should be to not only benefit students while they are school-aged but to prepare students for musical lives beyond their school years. Students should be prepared to continue both music creation and consumption. In my experience as a music educator, I have seen the ways in which students have had prior engagement in activities such as music listening and concertgoing. However, a vast majority of these students who consider themselves to be active music consumers do not consider themselves to be musicians. It is equally important to provide students with experiences in both music-making and consuming that may influence their musical lives beyond formal schooling. Much of music-making outside of the classroom relies heavily on skills such as entrepreneurship and marketing to make connections, book gigs, and find ways to perform (Bennett 2018, 2013; Burnard 2012; Moir 2016). These skills, authentic to popular musicians among other types of music performers, are often neglected when popular music-making is brought into the institution in conjunction with formal music education. Although I was formally taught as a classical pianist, I likewise spent my adolescent and college years performing with various rock and pop groups. Working with musicians from both formal and informal backgrounds, I experienced a range of music-making—from club shows with my rock band, to orchestral concerts at our city’s esteemed concert hall. During my first year of teaching, I was amazed at the number of students in my music appreciation course who were active musicians outside of the classroom but had no connection with school music-making. As I began to connect with these “out of school” musicians, I realized many of them struggled to find spaces to perform their music. Our school is located close to the large city of Philadelphia, and yet it was challenging for these students to find performance spaces both in the community surrounding the school as well as in the city. I identified a handful of students who were desperate for help booking shows and establishing connections—who hoped to break into “scenes” relative to their chosen genre of music-making. There was Evan, the drummer who played in death metal bands, in search of venues and promoters who would allow his band to play. There was Josh, the singer-songwriter, hoping to find a coffeehouse-type space to perform original music. I did my best in those early years to help students. I connected them to promoters and gave them advice for recording, songwriting, and branding. Still, I felt that it was not enough. Could there be a way to bridge the gap between school and community by promoting a regular performing event in which students could take part? Prompted by the passion of these students seeking performance spaces, I began searching for local businesses that would host regular music nights for Lower Moreland students. 103

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Building bridges in the community Our first step was finding a space that would work as a regular performing venue. I began to engage with local businesses, assessing their potential. I knew that we needed to find a multipurpose space that was close to the school and could accommodate a variety of musical styles. Shortly after my fourth year of teaching, a coffee shop around the corner from Lower Moreland changed ownership. I noticed that this coffee shop, Be Well Bakery and Café, was beginning to promote live music. The café began hosting a monthly “Art, Music, and Pizza” night following regular business hours. I visited the café frequently and sought to develop a relationship with the owners to inquire about using their space to perform. Husband and wife team Ryan and Adriann acquired Be Well Bakery and Café (Be Well) in 2011 with a mission to be community minded—seeking to not only sell coffee and bakery items, but to celebrate local artists and musicians and create regular events for community members. Upon opening, they sought to learn about their local community members in tangible ways—from memorizing customer names to identifying passions within the community. For example, they began a biking club when a large number of patrons came to the café after bike rides. And, when they heard that a local author had published a novel, they held a public reading and book signing. I admired their focus and care for the people who walked through their doors. When I first approached Ryan and Adriann about hosting a Lower Moreland music night, they were excited about the idea. Having noticed growth in regard to their younger clientele, they felt that working with local schools could help build relationships outside their immediate sphere. Both owners expressed a desire to provide a space in which students could perform in a supportive environment (Ryan and Adriann Glunz, pers. comm., October 11, 2016). My students and I decided to pilot our first music night at Be Well during the 2013/14 school year. One of my senior students, Tyler, helped to spearhead that first event. He had played guitar for years and hoped to find a space outside of the school to perform. Tyler was currently enrolled in my advanced guitar course and had been working on playing and singing simultaneously. We decided to open the pilot show to all of the current advanced guitar students before launching it with the rest of the school. That way, we could plan show logistics and work on material during class time. Tyler and the other eight students in my class worked to plan every aspect of that initial show—from designing flyers to post on social media, to developing a set list for the night. On the day of the show, Tyler and the rest of the class hauled all of our gear (including a sound system) up the hill from our school to the café. An art teacher from Lower Moreland hung student work as we prepped the space. The positive energy during that first event was palpable. At school, these students performed for each other on a daily basis, and yet this night felt different. Parents, friends, and café patrons all listened intently to my students’ music. And, they truly ran the show, helping each other set up gear between each set and emceeing the night. Their performances were nervous and energetic. Students with aspirations for music-making 104

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music

beyond high school, like Tyler, told me how exciting it was to play in that space for strangers. Other students, less comfortable performing in front of others, remarked at how nervous they were, yet excited to have mustered the courage to perform. Parents were thrilled at the performances and grateful for the opportunity. And the café staff remarked at how successful the night was in terms of numbers of patrons served. It felt like a true success on all accounts and became very clear that this event would be something that could be and should be replicated in following years.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Sustaining momentum In the years following that initial performance, the shows at Be Well have become regular performing events. My goal in sustaining this relationship is to not only provide students with an experience of performing outside of school but to provide tools for continuing performing careers after graduation. When I was a young musician playing in rock bands, I struggled to learn the valuable entrepreneurial skills needed to book shows, promote music, and navigate the politics of performing at a variety of venues. Having an experience such as this in high school would have set me up for success and helped me bridge the gap between school music-making and music-making in other spaces. In many contexts of school-based music performances, students are merely expected to “show up and play.” Performing at Be Well gave students the opportunity to exercise autonomy and to manage an event that they controlled. After the pilot show in 2013, excited students worked to promote and continue the momentum for the following year. From that initial group of advanced guitar students, we decided to set up multiple shows and to open them to the entire student body. Student leaders managed the shows for 2014/15, gathered contact information for all potential performers, and organized set lists and gear sheets for the performances. On the day of the show, students ran sound checks, helped load gear, set up the space, and operated the show. The promotion for the events were largely word-of-mouth. Soon, a core group of students developed that performed at every Be Well show and became an integral part of the planning and execution of future events. Since 2014, Lower Moreland students have hosted an average of four shows per year and have maintained a positive relationship with the café. After a few years, the Be Well shows have helped students create a new scene in Huntingdon Valley. These shows are not only attended by Lower Moreland students. They are open to community members, families, and Lower Moreland staff. The students who benefit most from the shows, those seeking to perform as much as possible outside the school walls, have helped define the culture of these shows and keep them going. Every September, there is always at least one student visiting me during the first week of school, asking, “When can we have our first Be Well show?” It is clear that there are students who continue to see this event as a priority and help sustain the momentum behind it. In 2015, the café became so successful that it began to outgrow its 105

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

space. The owners decide to secure a larger space a few doors down from their original location and expand the business. Consequently, they have increased business hours and are hosting many music events each month, including community open mic nights and regular concerts for local and touring musicians. The success of the Be Well shows has extended beyond my immediate students. Alumni (including students whom I helped when I first began teaching) have become involved in the event. Some of my former students who have achieved success in our area have returned to Huntingdon Valley to perform. They are excited that the event is happening and also serve as inspiration to current students. I reached out to a few of those alumni connected with the Be Well shows to receive their feedback and reflections. Tyler, that student who spearheaded the very first Be Well show, has returned on a few occasions to perform after he graduated. He provided me with his thoughts on the value of this event: There isn’t much of a music scene in Lower Moreland. There is only one bar, out of the three in Lower Moreland, that have open mic nights … Playing at Be Well prepares you for other shows … It’s a great experience to get comfortable in a “non-school” setting. It forces you to have to be comfortable working with a crowd that isn’t just your friends. And, not to mention that playing while using amplification is different than unplugged so it gives you more experience playing like that. (Tyler McCaffery, pers. comm., September 15, 2016)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

For a student like Tyler, performance events such as this were critical to his high school experience. He did not perform in a large ensemble at school yet still felt the desire to perform: I personally love playing at Be Well. The environment is great and since it’s a small place, it gets packed easily … I think it’s great to get all the musicians from the school who don’t always get the limelight ‘cause they don’t play in the jazz band or whatever, it’s great to give them an opportunity to showcase their art. (Tyler McCaffery, pers. comm., September 15, 2016) Tyler also underlined the importance of performing for strangers in a small setting and receiving applause. He stated that praise and applause in a school setting did not seem as “authentic” due to the fact that student attendance may be compulsory and his peers knew him in another context. When he performed for strangers, he felt that the applause was genuine and provided validating feedback given that the audience did not have a prior connection to him or his music. He noted that this experience could provide students with the confidence to perform in larger settings. If a student could 106

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music

perform successfully at Be Well, they might be more inclined to take on shows with larger audiences and less-familiar faces. Tyler had done just that upon graduating from Lower Moreland. While he does not intend to pursue a career in music, he does hope to keep performing as a guitarist and has booked shows at other venues in the years since his time at our school. Current students and alumni are not the only performers at Be Well. Teachers have also made appearances onstage. An English teacher, Kimberly, was approached by a student to sing at a Be Well show in 2014. She chose to perform to: take a personal risk … I always encourage my students to work through new (and sometimes difficult) tasks. I push them to be brave and to risk absolute failure. I chose to perform because I wanted to show them that it is a philosophy I personally pursue as well. (Kimberly McGlonn, pers. comm., September 20, 2016)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

When asked about the experience itself, Kimberly noted that it was uncomfortable but that she was proud of herself and pleased to witness the students’ pride. She felt that the “inversion of roles,” putting herself in a vulnerable position among her students, provided insight into her students’ lives in a new way. Her perceptions highlight the importance of reciprocity in education and music education specifically, in which “the teacher learns from students, just as students learn from the teacher” (Allsup 2007: 56). The community involvement in the Be Well shows—teachers, students, community members, and families—all coming together to make and support music, helps to build and sustain relationships for those involved. Kimberly felt this sense of equality amongst herself and her students, which then translated to the classroom. She said: that experience made the students I taught that year (and perhaps students whom I had taught before and the year after) feel more comfortable being vulnerable as learners with me, because they knew I was willing to be “exposed,” too. (Kimberly McGlonn, pers. comm., September 20, 2016) When we first developed this performing event, I wondered whether current students would feel that alumni and teacher performances “intruded” upon the event. On the contrary, I have been surprised to witness students inviting teachers and alumni to perform on a regular basis. This finding, the desire for faculty to participate in a student-led music-making activity, falls in line with findings from my doctoral dissertation (Gulish 2014). While studying the function and significance of a music performance event at my school, I noted that students often invited staff members to participate in the event either with them or as a separate performance. Students felt that this connection between staff and student increased a sense of community within the school and helped them connect better with teachers through watching them take risks and show vulnerability. 107

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Making a mark The Be Well shows emerged directly from a need that was present in the community of my school. The need was to find a performance space for students to move beyond the walls of the classroom and develop their musicianship. It also served to bridge gaps between our school and others in the community. While I originally imagined these performances would benefit students seeking a career in music, I did not anticipate ways in which this opportunity would serve all students involved. I have been surprised to see the diversity of students that have benefited from this night. Some rarely perform music in other spaces, while others are serious about their careers and frequently perform in other settings. In a sense, it does mirror the culture of open mic nights I have witnessed as a participant. People come for all reasons: both personal and musical fulfillment. Adam Behr details this finding in his ethnographic study on open mic nights in Edinburgh, Scotland (Behr 2012). He notes that this unique activity allows contact between musicians that are both amateur and professional in the same space. The Be Well shows have allowed for a safe space that is inclusive of musicians that are just beginning their musical journey and those who have been performing in public throughout their high school years. Meghan, a 16-year-old student who played violin in the orchestra, performed at Be Well on multiple occasions. She said her motivation stemmed from the joy of sharing music: “My friends and I just love music and we love to share it. I really enjoy playing my ukulele, too, and when my friends sing along, it just feels really great” (Meghan Choi, pers. comm., May 10, 2016). She also commented on the ways in which this performance differs from other school events: “Performing at Be Well is more up-close and personal. It’s more intimate. Performing at the winter/spring concert, for example, is much different because you can’t hear anyone individually” (Meghan Choi, pers. comm., May 10, 2016). Meghan was not the only student who underlined the importance of personal voice at this show. Performing outside of the school environment was listed as a chief motivator for many students. Carley, a guitarist, stated that she liked performing “somewhere new rather than performing at school” (Carley Sibick, pers. comm., May 10, 2016). The nature of the environment was also important to students: “Be Well is more ‘laid back’ and not as strict as other school events” (John Kim, pers. comm., May 10, 2016). Meghan noted that “everything is so chill and everyone is really supportive, even when you mess up!” (Meghan Choi, pers. comm., May 10, 2016). This supportive, relaxed atmosphere appeared to help students take risks and work through issues such as stage fright. Whether or not each student planned to perform at other spaces in the future, this event in and of itself seemed to hold value for developing important performing skills such as confidence and perseverance. Be Well Bakery and Café has benefited from the relationship with Lower Moreland students. Ryan and Adriann cited the increased exposure among Lower Moreland families who otherwise would not have visited the café. When questioned on the benefits 108

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music

of the relationship between the café and the school, Ryan mentioned the importance of gains that were not monetary in nature, but centered on the conviction of “giving back” to the community and providing a positive experience for all involved. Both Ryan and Adriann would like to continue to host more music performances in the future. They believe that their business is a valuable space that can be used by the community (Ryan and Adriann Glunz, pers. comm., October 11, 2016).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Applications Though this event has largely been about music-making outside the classroom, it has provided valuable lessons for music-making within the classroom. If we are to promote autonomy, leadership, and encourage our students to take risks in a performance setting such as a local coffee shop, we must be encouraging the same student-centered practices inside the classroom (Scott 2011). Music educators and their students could benefit from starting a local event such as the Be Well shows in multiple ways: through connecting with community and strengthening their own teaching within the classroom. Research on informal learning and popular music-making has shown ways in which exercising autonomy can positively affect growth in music learning and collaboration with others (Evans, Beauchamp, and John 2014; Green 2006; Gulish 2014; Parkinson and Smith 2015; Tobias 2014). In the case of the Be Well shows, I have witnessed students benefiting from running performances and taking charge of a product that they are passionate about. This has transformed the way I view my classroom, including my “traditional” music classes. For example, my string orchestra is no longer a place in which I dictate what we learn and students blindly follow my lead. Instead, my student leaders are essential in planning performing opportunities, in branding and promoting our group, and in leading performances. I have literally and figuratively stepped off the podium in favor of a more democratic music classroom in which all students have a voice. Other music educators could benefit from taking a similar approach. Just as the Be Well shows stemmed from a genuine desire among my students, so should our curriculum follow those passions and desires of all of our students, no matter the type of music being learned. Approaching our traditional classrooms with such a mind-set will increase student interest and enjoyment and will help us grow as educators. Music educators would also benefit greatly from connecting their school to the community in a tangible way. In my situation, a local café was a fitting solution for a need for students seeking to perform music outside of the classroom. In other settings, depending on the individual need, another space might have been more appropriate. The most important piece is to know your population’s needs and to help bridge the gap between those needs and possible solutions. As an educator seeking to promote lifelong learning, I hope that the Be Well performances help students connect with musical worlds after high school. I look forward to seeing if, in fact, this performing experience shapes future music performing opportunities beyond high school. Whether performing 109

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

for others in a sold-out hall, or simply playing ukulele with roommates in their dorm rooms, I hope that participation in the Be Well shows will positively affect the musicmaking behaviors of my students for years to come.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Closing thoughts Many of the skills needed to develop a new program, event, or collaboration in education could be considered enterprising. When I began teaching, I felt that many of these skills were attained in areas other than my undergraduate preparation. Playing in rock bands taught me how to make community connections, advocate for myself and others, and learn valuable skills to manage on a show. I was able to begin this particular community collaboration because I had done so before as a rock musician. However, I do not know if I would feel so equipped had I never experienced music performance outside of a school setting. As music educators are being prepared to conduct ensembles, teach general music, and manage the politics of a school, they must also be prepared to engage and create. They must be prepared to be entrepreneurs in their own school communities and build bridges to further music engagement beyond the classroom walls. While this may feel foreign to many, the solution may begin not only with instruction but with experience. Engaging with local music communities is something equally important for us to consider as music educators and musicians (Higgins 2012). If our goal for students is experiences with popular music both in and out of school, we must first have those experiences ourselves. Music educators should not only be involved in the music scenes within their schools, they should be supporters and participants in the music scenes within their communities. As one who has spent years developing relationships in the music scene of my city, I notice the lack of music educator involvement. Many music teachers I work with in and around Philadelphia have rarely gone to nonschool concerts and know little about the local music industry. As more students seek to incorporate their music-making into long-term, sustainable music careers, we must be able to help guide them and connect them with others who can bridge the gap between school and community.

Note 1 This chapter contains expanded material from the article: Roger Mantie, Sarah Gulish, Greg McCandless, Ted Solis, and David Williams (2017), “Creating Music Curricula of the Future: Preparing Undergraduate Music Students to Engage,” College Music Symposium 57, 1. doi:10.18177/sym.2017.57.fr.11357.

110

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Creating Spaces for Adolescents to Make Popular Music

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abril, Carlos R. and Brent M. Gault (2008), “The State of Music in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 56 (1): 68–81. doi:10.1177/0022429408317516. Allsup, Randall Everett (2003), “Mutual Learning and Democratic Action in Instrumental Music Education,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 51 (1): 24–37. doi:10.2307/3345646. Allsup, Randall Everett (2007), “Centennial Series: Democracy and One Hundred Years of Music Education,” Music Educators Journal, 93 (5): 52–56. Behr, Adam (2012), “The Real ‘Crossroads’ of Live Music—the Conventions of Performance at Open Mic Nights in Edinburgh,” Social Semiotics, 22 (5): 559–573. doi:10.1080/10350330. 2012.731899. Bennett, Dawn Elizabeth (2013), “The Role of Career Creativities in Developing Identity and Becoming Expert Selves,” in Pamela Burnard (ed.), Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education: International Perspectives and Practices, 224–244, London: Routledge. Bennett, Dawn Elizabeth (2018), Understanding the Classical Music Profession: The Past, the Present and Strategies for the Future, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clements, Ann (2010), Alternative Approaches in Music Education: Case Studies from the Field, Lanham, MD: MENC/Rowman & Littlefield Education. Davis, Sharon and Deborah VanderLinde Blair (2011), “Popular Music in American Teacher Education: A Glimpse into a Secondary Methods Course,” International Journal of Music Education, 29 (2): 124–140. Elpus, Kenneth and Carlos Abril (2011), “High School Music Ensemble Students in the United States: A Demographic Profile,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 59 (2): 128–145. Evans, Siân E., Gary Beauchamp, and Vivienne John (2014), “Learners Experience and Perceptions of Informal Learning in Key Stage 3 Music: A Collective Case Study, Exploring the Implementation of Musical Futures in Three Secondary Schools in Wales,” Music Education Research, 17 (1): 1–16. doi:10.1080/14613808.2014.950212. Green, Lucy (2006), “Popular Music Education in and for Itself, and for ‘Other’ Music: Current Research in the Classroom,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 101–118. Gulish, Sarah Anne (2014), “Lessons Learned from Java Jam: An Alternative Music Making Event at the High School Level,” PhD diss., Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. Higgins, Lee (2012), Community Music: In Theory and in Practice, New York: Oxford University Press. Karlsen, Sidsel (2010), “BoomTown Music Education and the Need for Authenticity—Informal Learning Put into Practice in Swedish Post-Compulsory Music Education,” British Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 35–46. Kratus, John (2007), “Music Education at the Tipping Point,” Music Educators Journal, 94 (2): 42–48. Moir, Zack (2016), “Popular Music Making and Young People: Leisure, Education, and Industry,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 223–240, New York: Oxford University Press. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth Dylan Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 111

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

14 (1): 93–127. Available online: http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/ParkinsonSmith14_1. pdf (accessed October 15, 2017). Scott, Sheila (2011), “Contemplating a Constructivist Stance for Active Learning within Music Education,” Arts Education Policy Review, 112 (4): 191–198. Shuler, Scott (2011), “Music Education for Life: The Three Artistic Processes: Paths to Lifelong 21st-Century Skills through Music,” Music Educators Journal, 97 (4): 9–13. Smith, Gareth Dylan, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (2017), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, New York: Routledge. Tobias, Evan S. (2014), “Crossfading Music Education: Connections between Secondary Students’ In- and Out-of-School Music Experience,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (1): 18–35. Väkevä, Lauri (2009), “The World Well Lost, Found: Reality and Authenticity in Green’s ‘NewClassroom Pedagogy’,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 8 (2): 7–34. Available online: http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Vakeva8_2.pdf (accessed October 15, 2017). Williams, David (2011), “The Elephant in the Room,” Music Educator’s Journal, 98 (1): 51–57.

112

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

8

What the Masters Teach Us: Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education Kirk McNally, Toby Seay, and Paul Thompson

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Studies have shown that the recording studio sector has suffered a significant decline within the broader musical economies (Leyshon 2009), which has in turn affected popular music education and specifically the area of music production. For example, the continued loss of many larger recording studio facilities has resulted in fewer internship and apprenticeship opportunities for students, once a pillar of many music production programs. Perhaps more important is the fragmentation of the knowledge capitol that was traditionally found in larger recording facilities. Evidence that this knowledge is still valued by the broader community abounds on the internet, with any number of tutorials by commercially successful and historically significant engineers or producers on “how to give your mix more punch” or “tips on recording drums like a pro.” Indeed, entire business models are built upon providing a virtual studio experience and allowing consumers to access the knowledge, skills, and materials associated with that space. A prominent example of this practice is the Shaking Through online series offered by Weathervane Music, a recording studio based in Philadelphia. Their multimedia website consists of episodes centered on an artist or a band as they record a new song, and subscribers can watch documentarystyle videos of the band recording in the studio, along with a traditional music video (Weathervane Music 2014). The multitrack audio from the sessions is available to download alongside other material such as mix stems and recording notes. The recordings are advertised by Weathervane as “high-end” and “professionally recorded,” and subscribers are encouraged to create and share their own mixes of the song so they can receive feedback, critique, and encouragement from the studio’s in-house mix engineers.

113

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Identified as both a temple (Cogan and Clark 2003) and laboratory (Hennion 1989), the recording studio was historically the place where the very best musicians, producers, and engineers came to create music recordings. The apprenticeship model of learning within the commercial recording industry allowed student engineers to learn from the masters of their craft and created famous lineages of music producers and engineers; the family tree of George Martin, Geoff Emerick, and Ken Scott at EMI’s Abbey Road is perhaps the most well known. Interviewed for this chapter, Ken Scott represents one way that popular music education can tap into this well of historical knowledge, and how moving a “master” into the classroom makes access to their knowledge and ways of working more accessible. However, employing an engineer or producer, such as Scott, in the classroom is a rare opportunity, and beyond the issue of availability of experienced practitioners, there is also the increasing likelihood that they will retire, or join those who have already left us, before their knowledge and experience can be passed on. When a recording is viewed as a cultural, musical, and social artifact, what cultural knowledge remains when the masters are gone? The legacy of their work is found in the music that they have helped to create. This music exists in the forms we commonly associate with recorded music: vinyl records, CDs, or digital downloads. Of course, these versions stand alone, and are polished and pristine in their presentation of the music, but they have a limited ability to help us understand how the recordings were actually made. Primary sources that can help us to understand the creative and technical approaches used during the recording process are the multitrack audiotapes from the recording sessions. A multitrack audiotape contains separate channels of audio and allows the engineer to record sound sources independently from one another. Using this format, a guitar may be recorded onto one track, with bass, keyboards, and vocals each being recorded to other audio tracks and later manipulated and combined during the mixing process. These primary sources, the multitrack audiotapes and the archives that hold them, are an emergent resource for both scholars and students in the field of popular music. This chapter spotlights the way in which three institutions, Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA, the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, and Leeds Beckett University in Leeds, UK, are using multitrack materials in the classroom as part of their music production programs.

Study design The chapter uses a qualitative case study design (Yin 2013), principally because it provided a unique way of exploring empirically the use of multitrack master recordings within three specific educational contexts (Dubois and Gadde 2002: 555). Using multiple sources of evidence enables cross-case patterning (Eisenhardt 1989) to determine common structural, historical, cultural, or educational issues within each case. The research data for the three cases includes course materials, student work, student

114

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

feedback, responses from semi-structured interviews, author and instructor reflections and introspections, and a range of multitrack master recordings. As stakeholders within the process, each of the authors presents their specific case, within the context of their particular location and at their relative higher education institution (Eisenhardt and Graebner 2007; Silverman 2006). However, to ensure consistency in analysis of the study’s outcomes, each case was constructed using Patton’s (2002) three-step model. This first involved arranging the data for analysis and determining the research questions. Next, the data was grouped and organized in an attempt to develop themes for analysis. Finally, each case was structured and presented in relation to the themes identified at the second step. Where possible, and for ease of comprehension, the research data has been integrated into the discussion within each case.

Case study 1: Drexel University

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Drexel University Audio Archives and Music Industry Program The Drexel University Audio Archives is home to the Sigma Sound Studios Collection. Unique to university archives, this collection contains approximately 7,000 popular music productions from the legendary, but now defunct, Sigma Sound Studios, which operated in Philadelphia from 1968 to 2003. Sigma was the predominant site of music production in Philadelphia and where Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, Thom Bell, and many others created what became known as “Philly Soul.” The collection contains recordings from luminaries such as Teddy Pendergrass, Pattie Labelle, and Grover Washington, Jr., but also recordings of unreleased tracks, out-takes, obscure artists, and from a diverse range of musical styles and genres. Traditionally, materials of this type would not be available to researchers, as they would be held for commercial exploitation (Caw 2004: 50) by record labels and are therefore rare. This collection was donated to Drexel’s Music Industry Program with two goals: to preserve the materials and to serve as research sources for music production students. Roughly half of the collection are multitrack audiotapes ranging from four to forty-eight tracks, and the ability to dissect these recordings into their individual sonic elements can offer valuable insight into record production practices (Seay 2011). This collection provides many research opportunities for students to explore, such as explorations of music production practices over time, instrumental arrangements, technical practices, audiovisual preservation issues, and many others. The Sigma Collection is under the purview of Drexel University’s Music Industry Program, an undergraduate program with approximately 250 students, which offers music and business education, and allows students to focus their studies on either music business or music production. Multitrack materials have been used in two music production courses with very different goals.

115

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Uncovering the Philly Groove One of the first music industry courses at Drexel to use multitrack materials was Mixing and Mastering.1 Since the acquisition of the archive, multitrack materials from the Sigma Collection are utilized by students to practice mixing, and stereo recordings from the Sigma Collection were used by students to practice their mastering skills. A variety of recordings were selected from the audio archives (by staff) to give students a choice of material to work with (Drexel University, Westphal College of Media Arts & Design n.d.). Students completed assignments in a variety of ways, including mixing within a digital audio workstation (DAW), mixing with analog tape, and mixing in surround. Whilst useful in providing material to mix and master, unsurprisingly students who have taken this course showed more interest in the iterative processes involved in mixing and mastering (as these processes are taught as part of their program) rather than exploring the content of the multitrack materials.2 The intent was to use multitrack recordings from the Sigma Collection “as a means to provide aspiring sound engineers with access to knowledge and experience that studio apprenticeships once offered” (Porcello 2004: 737). However, this knowledge and experience can be difficult to explore, as the specific recording process captured on a 40-year-old tape remains hidden. One can speculate and posit theories of production from track organization, leakage (microphone spill), and track bouncing but any “findings” are always based on educated guesses. It was for this reason that a more encompassing project was sought for the use of the archive’s multitrack materials. In 2014, a partnership between the audio archives, MAD Dragon Music Group (Drexel University’s entertainment services group, incorporating a record label, a media/marketing arm, a live promotions arm, and a music publishing service), and Reservoir Media (a private media and publishing company based in New York) led to the creation of a new independent study course (Mad Dragon Music n.d.; “Drexel Unveils New Philly Groove Mixes (+ video)” 2015).3 This new course “Uncovering the Philly Groove” involved eight music production students and the MAD Dragon Music Group class and our intention was for it to explore rare recordings within the audio archives (owned by Reservoir Media) from technical, commercial, and cultural perspectives. This course was structured so that the music production students provided mixes for Reservoir Media (for their internal purposes), while the MAD Dragon Music Group students created a marketing plan and narrative for the recordings as if the mixes were a commercial album release. The result was engagement with the local recording community (through panel discussions, professional visits, and public lectures by the engineers, musicians, and artists who created the original material that the students were working with). The music production students were each given two songs to mix. During the course, they were required to perform file management, capture metadata (for cataloging purposes), and work on their mixes with weekly critiques from music 116

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

production faculty. Student comments were garnered from a survey upon completion of the course and were overwhelmingly positive: This was one of the more interesting classes/projects I was able to participate in. Projects in some of my other classes aren’t completely relevant to the music industry outside class, but being a part of this project allowed me to be a part of mixing a record that might have actually come out. (DU student one) I enjoyed the change between having isolation and having more of an ensemble feel only having so many tracks to work with in having a full arrangement. It’s a lot nicer to mix that way as everything exists together. (DU student two) These student comments differ greatly from the following comments about the Mixing and Mastering course, which are generally more negative and unfocused:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Maybe pick some sessions (if you can get them) of songs that we already know very well (popular) so we can mix/ master them differently. (DU student three) The in-class critique was nice, but why doesn’t our program have more one-on-one with a professor, ripapart-our-mix time? (DU student four) These differences in student comments point to the Uncovering the Philly Groove course as having a more successful approach in making a connection between technique and the audio content. The instructor noted that students were willing to spend significantly more time on each assignment in the Uncovering the Philly Groove course than in Mixing and Mastering. The more focused approach to mixing and each student’s engagement with a larger team created a high amount of “buy-in” to the assignment. Due to the one-on-one critiques, it was much easier to delve into recording practices as evinced by the multitrack recordings. For instance, many students struggled with drum tracks where the overhead mics, tom mics, and snare mic were combined to one track. Students often wanted to manipulate one of these elements but did not have the isolation to do so. This situation initiated a discussion about priorities and compromises (often imposed by technical or financial limitations) that exposed such relationships within the music production process. Additionally, a common point of discussion was in regard to the level of reverence for the materials and whether or not the students should employ modern mixing tools that were unavailable at the time of creation, or whether they should try to stay true to a vintage production aesthetic. While many of the students tried to be more modern with their mixes, most felt that the multitrack recordings led them to a more vintage approach, thus solidifying the concept of a sonic signature of the recording practices utilized at Sigma Sound Studios (Davis 2009; Seay 2016). 117

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Case study 2: University of Victoria

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The School of Music and the KLÖ audio archive Located in Victoria, British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, the University of Victoria is a public research university that is home to the School of Music and the KLÖ audio archive. The school has a student body of approximately 250 students made up of both undergraduate and graduate students. The undergraduate curriculum design is based on the conservatory model, where individual studio instruction is supported by musicianship, music theory, and music history courses. The music production courses that utilize the KLÖ archive and are examined in this case were designed with undergraduate and graduate students in mind whose majors may include: music composition, performance, music technology, or music and computer science. The band KLÖ was a prominent member in the burgeoning art-rock scene in Toronto in the early 1980s, and became known for their angular rhythmic style and experimental use of percussion instruments. The band had the good fortune of a benefactor who funded recordings in New York and San Francisco at Skyline Recording Studios (Skyline Studios n.d.) and CD Present (Records),4 respectively. These recordings were made with significant engineers and producers, and this work is represented in the archive.5 The KLÖ archive was donated to the School of Music in 2014 and includes ephemera and a collection of multitrack and half-inch stereo master tapes, which represents the majority of the band’s recorded history. Now digitized, the entire collection includes recording sessions undertaken in Toronto, Hamilton, San Francisco, and New York. The recordings span the lifetime of the band, from their inception in 1979 to their break-up in 1986, and while the commercial success of KLÖ was admittedly limited, the access and associations made possible by the financial support of the band’s benefactor makes for an interesting and useful archive. With KLÖ working at significant studios, and with engineers and producers that represented the popular sound of an era, music scenes, and geographic location (Gibson 2005) the archive provides unique opportunities for study and use within the context of music production education.

KLÖ in the classroom The KLÖ tapes are used at the University of Victoria as both a source for analysis as well as a practical ear-training tool. This approach builds upon both the technical eartraining (TET) methods (Corey 2012), or the so-called Golden Ears (Moulton 2013) eartraining programs, and the apprenticeship and critique-based training model historically used in the industry sector. By measuring objective audio features and creating new ways of visualizing this data, the method attempts to reveal the training, craft, and artistry of the engineers and producers captured on the master tapes, using this to guide 118

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

student learning and skills development. Where TET systems train for identification and replication in isolation (frequency and equalization, dynamic range, reverberation, and technical errors), the University of Victoria approach focuses on performance and technical changes made over the course of—or between two—music productions. It is an epistemological approach, providing the student with information that helps reveal what the intentions of the engineer and producer were. Within the KLÖ archive it is possible to follow the entire production timeline, from demo recordings, through basic takes and overdubs, to the final product. The intermediary in all these steps is the engineer and producer and their sonic signature—the culmination of their training and experience at that time—is leveraged for educational purposes in a number of ways. A useful example of this approach is a fourth year music production assignment where students are tasked with replacing the drums on one of the KLÖ multitracks. An instructor-led discussion precedes the recording session where students are first encouraged to listen critically to the audio material. They are then given visual aids showing the tempo analysis of the drum performances for three takes of the same song. In this way they see the performance and then listen for performance features such as rhythm and timing. When repeated for multiple takes patterns develop that help students understand the engineer, producer, and band’s decisions as to what constituted the “best” performance. Delving further into the material, comprehensive audio analysis (Peeters 2004) is used to characterize the different drum sounds found on the original recording. Again, the progression of the sound across the three takes is visualized and used to guide student listening. The students are given evidence of how the production team arrived at their final sound, as well as a clear, measurable set of parameters and a useful framework that they can use when they approach re-recording the drums. For example, seeing and listening to how the tempo becomes more consistent with subsequent takes, or perhaps that the snare drum sound becomes increasingly focused in a specific frequency band, provides students with a virtual apprenticeship experience, which hopefully helps them to better understand the processes of decision-making in the recording studio and how experienced engineers and producers work through an iterative process to achieve a desired sound in a music production. Evidence of the students’ engagement and their subsequent development of new skills using this approach was seen in student comments, taken from course experience surveys administered at the conclusion of all courses offered at the University of Victoria: Going to the studio and working with real recordings (KLÖ) was really fun and felt relevant. (UVic student one) Availability of multitrack archive recordings presents a concrete, exact example of recording techniques in popular music for the students to use and manipulate, offering more insight into the techniques and sound for

119

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

individual audio tracks than simply analyzing a fullymastered and mixed down pop music recording could. (UVic student two) I think more of a focus on contemporary techniques first would help contextualize the KLÖ tapes and make it easier for the students to see the relevance of the skills to their pursuits. (UVic student four) It was clear from student comments that they saw the value of having a concrete example of a music production for the sake of analysis and manipulation. Having access to multiple takes of a song was commonly discussed and identified as a very positive feature of this archive, with students expressing an increased appreciation for how much a seemingly small change, either technical or in the performance, can have on the larger musical work. A number of student comments focused on the historical nature of the archive, where they identified that the era specific production techniques and approaches were either difficult to emulate, incorporate, or were not relevant to their own contemporary music productions. Relating to this point, the drum re-recording assignment (mentioned above) was both identified as a highlight and frustrating for students, as they struggled to match the drum sounds—admittedly a very difficult task given the number of variables present. While not the primary goal of this assignment, discussion regarding the differences between contemporary recording technology and the equipment used on the archival recordings further engaged students with the material, and again points to the value of using primary sources for music production education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Case study 3: Leeds Beckett University Audio and music programs at Leeds Beckett University and Ken Scott’s audio archive As with most educational institutions, Leeds Beckett University does not have a dedicated archive of physical or digital multitrack recordings. Rather, historic and notable multitrack recordings within the popular music canon are introduced to students through associate lecturer Ken Scott. Beginning his apprenticeship at EMI’s Abbey Road recording studios in 1964, Scott began working in the studio with artists such as Manfred Mann, The Hollies, and Judy Garland. In 1967 Scott was promoted to engineer and worked most notably with The Beatles. After leaving Abbey Road to work as a freelance engineer and producer in 1969, Scott worked with Elton John, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, David Bowie, and Supertramp. Working with so many commercially successful and critically acclaimed artists has allowed him to develop 120

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

his own multitrack recording archive. Scott’s personal archive provides a unique opportunity to introduce students to the multitrack recordings of well-known records by the person who directly contributed to their creation. Scott lectures on audio recording and studio-based modules that are contained within Leeds Beckett University’s suite of audio and music programs (BSc Audio Engineering, BSc Music Technology, BA Music Production, and BA Music Production and Performance).6

The use of multitracks Scott has developed his multitrack archive over the last thirty years and some items have been digitized (often for remix projects) during this time, notably David Bowie’s “Life on Mars.” The multitracks form part of the historic knowledge at a particular point in time in British record production, as Scott states: I was working in Abbey Road with Duran Duran on the “Thank You” album and me and the maintenance guy were chatting and he said “do you remember when we first started we were told all of these incredible stories by the old timers”, I said “yeh, it was amazing”. He said “well now we’ve become them, the younger ones want to hear our stories” and that got me thinking … Multitracks can teach students what it used to be like, in every way, from a performance standpoint to an engineering standpoint.7

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Ken views mutlitracks as a useful tool for audio education to gain a different perspective on sound recordings: People have heard the finished recording, but the engineers, the students and the fans want to hear what the finished product comprises of, and hear it in a way that only us in the studio have ever heard it. The stories that accompany the creation of the multitrack recording are also a fundamental part of using multitracks: I use stories to give some background and to make a particular point. It’s not necessarily that I can teach any more than anyone else with a multitrack because I’ve spoken to enough educators to know that we’re all trying to push the same agenda, but because I was there they [students] tend to listen that much more and it means more to them.

121

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Using multitracks in the lecture theater Scott’s approach to using multitracks in the lecture theater focuses on listening to snippets of the multitrack with a particular focus on one specific topic. This is done for two reasons: (1) some of the rights holders for the multitracks were concerned that parts of it could be sampled if the lecture was recorded in some way. Using short sections, or adding a commentary over the section of audio, satisfies the rights holders, and (2) using one part at a time helps to focus the discussion on one specific element of the multitrack. For example, Ken might focus on one instrument in a production such as electric guitar: Soloing a guitar brings out some of the noise of the amp and students are always amazed at how noisy it is. I use these examples to show that any hum from guitars is generally cancelled out by the bass, any hiss is cancelled out by cymbals so you don’t hear it when it’s in the mix. This approach also allows him to focus on some of the musical aspects of the recordings such as arrangements and performances: It’s the performance side of things that technology is pulling away from people, y’know “I’ll sing the chorus once and you can copy and paste it” … being able to play one of David Bowie’s vocals, one-take from beginning to end, really helps to put across the importance of performance.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Using multitracks in the recording studio In the recording studio, Scott uses the multitracks with an analog mixing console in order to show students how he works on the desk: I know from my perspective that more is learnt by seeing me work than by anything else. That’s why, in the studio, I bring up the multitracks through the desk whilst students are watching. He uses multitracks to emphasize the importance of getting sounds before they are recorded to tape or Pro Tools: In my mixing class I use the multitrack for “Rock n Roll Suicide.” I told them beforehand that one of the reasons that I get the finished product that I do is because I get the sounds I want right from the beginning. I EQ going onto 122

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

tape or into Pro Tools. It’s great, it means I can pull up “Rock n Roll Suicide,” play them the whole thing and it sounded almost like the record without any EQ, nothing. The only thing I did was ride the vocal a bit. Scott also uses multitracks to teach his process of mixing, focusing on his use of the console as a performance: I can’t mix in the box, it’s just not what I’m used to. A mix for me is a performance and I think it’s important to reiterate to students that the mixing desk is my instrument and it can be used as an instrument. In each situation, however, multitracks are not used on their own, they are often used alongside the finished recording: As long as you move on and play the final thing, that’s important. For me the drums on “Life on Mars,” they’re dead and I added single repeat tape echo to them, which gives them a bit more life. So, get back to the finished recording, make sure they [students] hear it that way.

Outcomes

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Scott’s use of multitracks in both the lecture theater and the recording studio has had some useful positive outcomes. Importantly, students identify that it is not only the materials but the interaction of an experienced engineer with this type of resource that provides significant learning opportunities: One of the students at the end of one session came up to me and said “I took one of your classes last year and you said about looking versus listening.” He said that he’s now started listening as opposed to looking. “It’s made such a difference to my mixes, thank you so much” and that makes it all worth it. While it is clear that not every program will have access to a Ken Scott figure, the learning possibilities that multitrack materials provide can be found in unlikely ways: In my mixing class, there’s a girl who was a singer and she noticed I was riding the fader for the vocal. After the class, she came up to me and asked about it. It’s doing things like that, that students get more from just talking about it, and they get to see how I work.

123

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Analysis and conclusions The three cases presented here show that multitrack materials can be used in various contexts for different educational purposes and outcomes. Primarily, they can be used in the development of practical skills such as mixing and mastering. The Drexel University case highlights how the use of high-quality multitrack recordings can provide students the opportunity to practice mixing with well-engineered recordings. However, students benefited most when the mixing process was part of a larger project involving multiple stakeholders within a notable historical context. In that context, they were able to develop a deeper appreciation for the relationships that exist between the initial stages of recording and the final processes involved in record production such as mixing. Multitrack materials can also be used for the purpose of analysis. For example, the University of Victoria case shows how multitrack materials, in combination with analysis frameworks, can be an effective way of engaging students in critical listening. By placing analysis at the front of the production process, and listening to different takes of the same song, the students can begin to develop a more critical approach to their own recordings when trying to achieve a particular sound. The “Uncovering the Philly Groove” project at Drexel University and Ken Scott’s work at Leeds Beckett University show that students gain a more comprehensive picture of the production processes behind the recordings when they have a connection to the creators who contributed to the multitrack materials. It shows that engaging the voices and perspectives of those involved with the productions has helped to uncover processes that are not evident in the final recording or within the multitrack elements. Finally, these three cases show that there is a strong historical element to the current institutional multitrack holdings. With an equal focus on the performances captured on the multitracks, and the techniques employed by the engineers and producers who made them, it is possible to illuminate some of the nuances of music production at specific geographic locations in the history of recorded music. Consequently, there exists a real opportunity to both learn from our past masters by using the methods identified in the individual cases and to use them to inform production practices in contemporary contexts. Nearly all existing multitracks were never intended for educational use—rather, these materials were archived within a commercial creationproduction process that was not concerned with making educational or historical resources. With an eye to the future, and in response to the call from students, the development of contemporary multitrack resources should be a growing priority for educators involved in music production education. Attention must be given to creating diverse multitrack collections that can represent the voices of multiple master engineers and producers from all genders, genres, and cultures. Unlike the majority of openly available multitrack resources, any new resources should include out-takes or alternate versions of recordings. As was illustrated in the University of Victoria case, this commonly omitted material can provide a far richer learning experience for students when it is included in 124

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Multitrack Audio Archives and Popular Music Education

the archive. With so many commercial and practical constraints, it may be a tall order but with enough institutional, economic, and educational impetus, the authors believe that this can be achieved. As the economy of the popular music industries continues to shift, so too should the educators and programs that teach the next generation of music production students.

Notes 1 MIP481 Mixing and Mastering. Description: “The art of mixing and mastering music is covered in depth. This is an advanced audio engineering course that will focus on the mixing and mastering process. Proper equipment usage, methods, formats, and production goals are covered” (Drexel University 2018). 2 An interesting observation: students often found the archival multitrack recordings rather easy to blend musically. The useful lesson here is that the process of mixing starts at the beginning of the recording process, in the selection and placement of microphones to capture a welldelivered performance. 3 An independent study course is a self-directed module within a specific area of study requiring intermittent consultation with a designated instructor. 4 David Ferguson founded CD Presents as an independent concert production company in 1979, transforming CD Presents (Records) into a powerhouse independent label and recording studio in 1981, with releases from bands including: The Avengers, Circle Jerks, D.O.A, The Subhumans, and Butthole Surfers. 5 For example, Jack Nuber, engineer on the Skyline recordings, has engineering credits including The Talking Heads, Dire Straits and Robert Palmer. 6 There are approximately 500 undergraduate students studying across these programs and a focus on studio recording and production is common throughout.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

7 All quotes for this case are attributed to Ken Scott, taken from an interview with the author, November 24, 2017.

References Caw, Tom S. (2004), “Popular Music Studies Information Needs: You Just Might Find …,” Popular Music and Society, 27 (1): 49–54. Clark, William and Jim Cogan (2003), Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios, San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Corey, Jason (2013), Audio Production and Critical Listening: Technical Ear Training, Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Davis, Robert (2009), “Creative Ownership and the Case of the Sonic Signature or, ‘I'm Listening to this Record and Wondering Whodunit?’,” Journal on the Art of Record Production, (4). 125

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Drexel University, Westphal College of Media Arts & Design (n.d.), “Drexel University Audio Archives.” Available online: http://drexel.edu/westphal/academics/undergraduate/MIP/ SigmaSoundArchives (accessed November 16, 2018). Drexel University (2018), “Search Results: MIP 481 Mixing and Mastering 3.0 Credits.” Available online: http://catalog.drexel.edu/search/?P=Mixing+and+Mastering (accessed November 17, 2018). “Drexel Unveils New Philly Groove Mixes (+ video)” (2015), Reservoir Media, March 3, 2015. Available online: www.reservoir-media.com/news/post/MTM5NzYtZjNkM2Fi (accessed November 16, 2018). Dubois, Anna and Lars-Erik Gadde (2002), “Systematic Combining: An Abductive Approach to Case Research,” Journal of Business Research, 55 (7): 553–560. Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. (1989), “Building Theories from Case Study Research,” Academy of Management Review, 14 (4): 532–550. Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. and Melissa E. Graebner (2007), “Theory Building from Cases: Opportunities and Challenges,” Academy of Management Journal, 50 (1): 25–32. Gibson, Chris (2005), “Recording Studios: Relational Spaces of Creativity in the City,” Built Environment, 31 (3): 192–207. Hennion, Antoine (1989), “An Intermediary between Production and Consumption: The Producer of Popular Music,” Science, Technology & Human Values, 14 (4): 400–424. Leyshon, Andrew (2009), “The Software Slump?: Digital Music, the Democratisation of Technology, and the Decline of the Recording Studio Sector within the Musical Economy,” Environment and Planning A, 41 (6): 1309–1331. Mad Dragon Music (n.d.). Available online: www.maddragonmusic.com/ (accessed November 16, 2018). Moulton, David (2013), Golden Ears: An Audio Ear-Training Course for Recording Engineers, Producers and Musicians, KIQ productions, 8 compact discs. Patton, Michael Quinn (2002), Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods, third edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Peeters, Geoffroy (2004), A Large Set of Audio Features for Sound Description (Similarity and Classification) in the CUIDADO Project, Paris: Ircam. Porcello, Thomas (2004), “Speaking of Sound Language and the Professionalization of SoundRecording Engineers,” Social Studies of Science, 34 (5): 733–758. Seay, Toby (2011), “Primary Sources in Music Production Research and Education: Using the Drexel University Audio Archives as an Institutional Model,” Journal on the Art of Record Production, (5). Seay, Toby (2016), “Sonic Signatures in Record Production,” in Jenns Gerrit Papenburg and Holger Schulze (eds), Sound as Popular Culture, 347–354, Boston, MA: MIT Press. Silverman, David (2006), Interpreting Qualitative Data: Methods for Analyzing Talk, Text and Interaction, London: Sage Publications. Skyline Studios Pro (n.d.), “Skyline Studios, NYC (Studio 6 Shown).” Available online: www.skylinepro.com/skyline_studios.html (accessed November 16, 2018). Weathervane Music (2014), Shaking Through. Available online: https://weathervanemusic.org/ shakingthrough (accessed November 16, 2018). Yin, Robert K. (2013), Case Study Research: Design and Methods, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications Inc.

126

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

9

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists Kat Reinhert

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Over the past several decades, popular music has been found increasingly in schools, universities, and conservatories, with programs continuing to be added and expanded (Smith, Dines, and Parkinson 2017). This brings singers to higher music education who need specific training endemic to popular music. In the same way that classical music vocalists require mastery of specific skills, techniques, and sounds appropriate to, for instance, arias and art songs, popular music vocalists need to master attributes particular to the styles and spaces in which they work. They need unique and tailored guidance and training in contemporary vocal technique and broad musicianship. Vocalists are musicians and need similar training to their instrumentalist counterparts. However, the vocalists’ instrument is biological, rather than “just” played or manipulated. The voice consists of a combination of muscles, ligaments, cartilages, and tissues coordinated by the mind and body, with their primary function being to protect the airways and lungs. Their secondary function is to provide stabilization during weight bearing activities, and the tertiary function of the voice is to make sound. Thus, while all humans with functional vocal folds are capable of making sound, it takes training, practice, and dedication to learn how to use the voice effectively in artistic spaces. Vocalists can be regarded as “vocal athletes” (LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014). The voice teacher, then, can be viewed as a kind of personal trainer and/or coach, guiding vocalists into understanding their unique instruments and helping them to function. I will be using the notion of the “vocal athlete” throughout this chapter to help discuss ways of working with different kinds of vocalists based on a range of needs. All athletes use their bodies to play sport, but the training that each requires is different. Similarly, while there are overlaps and similarities, training to front a heavy metal band, for example, is different from training to sing in acoustic singer-songwriter settings. I suggest that all vocalists and voice teachers can benefit from knowing about how the voice works biologically; contemporary sources include Somatic Voicework™, Estill™, Complete Vocal Technique™, Speech Level Singing™, Vocology, Voice Science, or any combination of these or numerous other vocal pedagogical texts. It is 127

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

my opinion that the more one combines and learns about these techniques and methods, the more complete a singer and voice teacher one can become. Although I am familiar with some of these methods and techniques more than others, it seems that a shared goal among them is to provide vocalists and voice pedagogues with access to techniques and knowledge of biology, as well as healthy voice function and practices that allow vocalists autonomy and agency in their artistic expression and vocal individuality. Many vocal pedagogues believe it is necessary to work with all contemporary vocalists in a similar way—that they should all be able to belt, sing softly, shift gears from one genre to another, and be skilled in multiple styles of singing simultaneously (LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014). For some singers this is certainly a goal, and they may have the biology and drive to learn these skills. However, in this chapter, I offer an alternative—to work with vocalists based on who they are and what they wish to achieve with their artistry. This chapter explores a brief historical overview of vocal pedagogy, proposes five categories of popular music vocalists, discusses general musicianship skills for these vocalists, and suggests ways in which these skills and this knowledge can be provided within a higher popular music education performance (HPMPE) program and popular music voice curriculum.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Background and changing landscape Before modern classical singing pedagogy emerged in the nineteenth century, much singing was taught through aural tradition (Keskinen 2013: 35). In 1855, with the invention of the laryngoscope, Manuel Garcia paved the way for a burgeoning scientific approach to vocal pedagogy (Harrison and O’Bryan 2014: 4). The establishment of conservatoires around the same time led to the emergence of classical vocal pedagogy and methods in higher education (Keskinen 2013: 35–36), and voice programs in higher education have mostly been rooted in this tradition ever since (35). More recent technology and research into voice science, physiology, and acoustics have increased understanding of how the human voice is shaped, how acoustical properties affect tone and resonance, and the overall physiology of the voice. Voice pedagogues across styles and genres are often part researcher, scientist, and artist, able to provide their students with a rich understanding of the voice and its myriad possibilities (Harrison and O’Bryan 2014: 2–5). Singing styles such as those found in jazz, blues, and rock evolved independently of classical styles. Due to a lack of formal instruction,1 many nonclassical singers were, and remain, self-taught (Potter and Sorrell 2012: 245), often adopting and adapting available voice science to their practice. Nonclassical styles, including jazz, musical theatre, pop, rock, heavy metal, hard rock, indie, folk, R&B, hip-hop, rap, gospel, funk, singer-songwriter, country, and Latin (anything not considered classical music; LoVetri and Weekly 2003: 207) became known by a term coined by voice pedagogue Jeannette

128

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

LoVetri: contemporary commercial music, or CCM (LoVetri 2008: 260). Access to, and instruction in, voice science, vocal function, and pedagogical techniques related to CCM has been disseminated at voice conferences and developed through individual pedagogical voice methods and courses such as those taught by Jeannette LoVetri (Somatic Voicework™), Jo Estill (Estill™), and Ingo Titze (Vocology). In 2008, the American Academy of Teachers of Singing (AATS) published a position paper in the Journal of Voice entitled “In support of Contemporary Commercial Music (Non-Classical) Voice Pedagogy.” The paper advocated for the inclusion of CCM under the larger umbrella of voice pedagogy and performance, and stated that “while all singers must breathe, phonate, resonate, and articulate, they do not necessarily approach these technical elements in the same manner” (AATS 2008: 7). This paper brought into focus the continued shift in attitude toward pedagogies that include CCM styles, and advocated for changes in voice pedagogy, acknowledging specialized knowledge, training, and competence in CCM styles by those who teach them (Harrison and O’Bryan 2014: 35). Popular music singing is a subset of CCM singing. For the purposes of this chapter, a popular music vocalist is one who sings music that does not fall easily under the categorization of classical, jazz, or musical theatre (with the caveat that jazz and musical theatre overlap with popular music in many vocal techniques, skills, and history). As popular music styles have made their way into curricula in higher popular music education (HPME), discussing how to coach, guide, serve, and train popular music (PM) vocalists is paramount in helping them become individual, creative, and autonomous artists and musicians (Bartlett 2010; Edwards 2014; Hughes 2010; LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014; LoVetri and Weekly 2003). In the following section, I separate PM vocalists into five overlapping categories based on each groups’ needs and goals. I offer additional, general categories for inclusion in all PM vocalist education courses within popular music programs and curricula, so as to best prepare students for long, healthy, and individually unique artistic expression and careers in music.

Five categories In my experience as an educator, teacher, and researcher, I have found that vocalists across PM styles generally fall into five broad categories, which I offer as tools for explanation rather than definitive boxes in which to compartmentalize vocalists, who often move between categories. These can be used for exploring pedagogical strategies, based on the needs and desires of individual students. Each category of vocalist has been in my studio at some point, and the categorization has helped me to create educative experiences that are creative, flexible, challenging, holistic, and student-centered. Each category, and the group of categories, serves the purpose of helping to understand the particular skills, techniques, and knowledge required of PM vocalists and how these can

129

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

be addressed by voice pedagogues and teams, in creating and encouraging educational journeys that are each holistic and specific, rather than rigid and generic.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Category one: Chameleons As noted in the introduction, chameleons are what many contemporary voice pedagogues feel PM vocalists should aspire to be. As vocal athletes, chameleons have large, flexible vocal ranges with myriad timbral possibilities. They possess excellent musicianship and artistry as well as advanced technical vocal ability, enabling them to be lead singers or artists (e.g., Christina Aguilera, Freddie Mercury, Sara Bareilles). They also may choose to be a club date, session, or backup singer (Jo Lawry [bgv. Sting], Lisa Fischer [bgv. The Rolling Stones], Shayna Steele [bgv. Kelly Clarkson]). Many chameleons develop their own individual sound, alongside mastering the wide range of sounds and skills typical of their type. Freddie Mercury could sing operatically, Sara Bareilles has performed on Broadway, and Christina Aguilera has sung everything from jazz to R & B and powerhouse belting.2 When chameleons work as session or backup singers, they are able to blend seamlessly with the artist they support. This type of singer often specializes in the ability to sing in all genres within, and sometimes outside, PM. They may well sound like themselves but will be genre appropriate. They may be the songwriter or composer, or the interpreter of a songwriter’s work. They have the physiology, desire, and motivation to delve into a thorough understanding of vocal technique, function, science, and pedagogy. While they may not initially approach the voice and their artistry from this perspective, I argue that eventually, in order to understand how to use their voice fully, they will have to learn about these aspects of vocal use. Although many chameleons have learned through trial and error, there is no longer a need to rely on intuition and informal learning, for there are many resources available to them. This being said, chameleons benefit from extensive listening, emulation, and imitation, as many of the nuances of style and genre are found extant performances and recordings. Songwriting ability or lyric-writing skills are an asset. Skill in dance or movement is also advised, for incorporation into PM stage performances. Since chameleons often possess extensive technical skill and knowledge of the voice, vocal pedagogy classes can be an asset should they wish to pursue teaching at some point in their career. Specialized knowledge and skills that can be most beneficial to chameleons are: (1) flexible and malleable instrument with the ability to expertly execute myriad of timbres, speed, range, and volume; (2) ability to harmonize; (3) advanced knowledge of vocal function, technique, and application; (4) extensive repertoire knowledge; (5) familiarity with stylistic and technical underpinnings of many CCM genres; (6) strong aural and sight-singing skills; (7) ability to memorize quickly. 130

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Category two: Singer-songwriters Singer-songwriters often spend equal amounts of time learning the crafts of songwriting and singing. As vocal athletes, they need to have flexibility and range of the voice, but not necessarily as wide or deep as chameleons. They will most likely sing within complementary genres and will want to develop their own unique sound. Examples of this kind of singer include John Mayer, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Norah Jones, and Regina Spektor. Singer-songwriters often desire knowledge about vocal technique but do not want the technique to interfere with or affect their individual sound. This tension can be challenging to address, but it is important to have these vocalists explore the different sonic “palettes” in which their voice can move, leading to an ability to express themselves more fully in the music they create. This can be especially challenging when the vocal quality is defined by something that would traditionally be considered bad vocal technique, such as excessive breathiness. In such cases, I find it most beneficial to make the student aware of what is happening and discuss ways to mitigate the potential threat to healthy vocal production without completely changing the vocal sound. For singer-songwriters, individuality is one of the key aspects to keep in mind in their preparation. While not chameleons, they need nonetheless to be capable of timbral or stylistic changes with a flexible and capable instrument that will enable them to share and create music with the desired expressive output. Personal motivation to experiment in these timbres and styles is encouraged and celebrated. Within a PM program, access to songwriting courses and ensembles that allow singer-songwriters to arrange and realize their original music with bands are important. Specialized knowledge and skills that can be most beneficial to singer-songwriters are: (1) skill on a secondary instrument; (2) ability to sing riffs and runs if the genre calls for them as part of the style; (3) exploration of diverse sounds made by the voice; (4) vocal technique and application; (5) knowledge of performing rights organizations knowledge (PROs); (6) skill using a digital audio workstation (DAW) and music notation software.

Category three: Songwriters Vocalists in this category are primarily songwriters. This is not to say they do not sing, but that they are not generally interested in singing publicly and use their voices primarily for the purpose of music origination. Many musicians take some manner of private instruction as part of their coursework in higher education. In my experience, the number of private songwriting relative to private voice instructors in higher education in the United States is small, so by default, songwriters are often placed in a voice studio for their private instruction with teachers who may be required also to provide instruction in songwriting. 131

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

As vocal athletes, songwriters need functionality of the voice as well as skill on an accompanying instrument. Examples of this kind of singer are Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Linda Perry, and Paul Anka. Songwriters are not unlike their singer-songwriter peers; however, they may or may not desire to be in front of an audience. Helping them to be confident within their range and instrument can be helpful to their development as songwriters. Voice functionality and technique enable songwriters to write songs in a range of styles and for different kinds of artists. Encouragement to experiment with vocal timbres and singing in different registrations with ease, can facilitate composition and creativity. Similar to their singer-songwriter counterparts, songwriters need access to songwriting courses, cowriting, commissioned writing, recording studios, and ensembles where they can realize their original work. Specialized knowledge and skills that can be most beneficial to songwriters are: (1) facility on a secondary instrument; (2) intimate knowledge of PROs and publishing; (3) skill using a DAW and music notation software; (4) songwriting acumen.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Category four: Educators and therapists Educators and therapists are hybrids, as they need the ability to perform, demonstrate, and teach many skills. I think of vocalists in this category as leaders or coaches. They self-identify as singers, but the main use and goal of their voice education is to prepare them to teach and connect with others. As noted above, there is currently only one American university granting a graduate degree in CCM pedagogy, and most music education and therapy programs still exclude popular music singing and education from their curricula. Therefore, the voice studio is one of very few spaces where singers can learn PM-specific skills. Educators and therapists need extensive repertoire knowledge and the ability to demonstrate in multiple styles. Songwriting and PM ensemble leadership skills are an asset, especially as PM becomes more prevalent in music therapy programs and secondary music education, with more voice teachers doubling as songwriting teachers. Experience singing in PM ensembles is especially valuable, and psychology education, often central to music therapy and education degrees, benefits singers in this category. Specialized knowledge and skills that can be most beneficial to educators and therapists are: (1) excellent facility and function of their voice across a wide variety of styles; (2) ability to demonstrate techniques and sounds across PM styles; (3) facility on a secondary instrument for accompaniment purposes, with excellent transposition ability; (4) well-developed CCM vocal pedagogy; (5) ability to read traditional, nontraditional, and iconic notation (chord symbols, Nashville numbers, tablature, etc.). Since educators and therapists will most likely teach and work in therapeutic settings with others, these skills must be well developed so as not to get in the way of their primary goal—be it teaching or therapy. 132

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

Category five: Instrumentalists Instrumentalists self-identify as DJs, drummers, guitarists, bassists, pianists, laptop-ists, or other instrumentalists; they share the desire to sing back-ups with their band, to write and sing on their own music, or to sing for their own enjoyment. Frequently these singers experience extreme vulnerability when asked or expected to sing, and are uncomfortable with their voices. Private lessons can provide a safe space for them to explore their voice. Simple exercises to increase the strength and range of their instrument can be very beneficial. Slow and steady guidance and encouragement to enjoy making sound are tantamount to their gaining vocal facility. Overall, this category of singer can benefit from continued use of their voice in a manner comfortable and appealing to their ears. Small group classes, choir, and various comfortable places for integrating singing with their playing can be valuable additional assets for development of, and confidence in using, their voices. Specialized knowledge and skills that can be most beneficial to instrumentalists are: (1) willingness to explore being uncomfortable; (2) understanding of basic vocal technique; (3) knowledge of specific exercises to help their voice grow in strength; (4) awareness of posture in relation to singing and playing their instrument.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A toolkit of skills Embedded in the skill sets listed above, is learning in the overlapping areas of entrepreneurship, instrumental performance, leadership, music business, social interactions, artistic citizenship, performance, pedagogy, technology, vocal health, and voice science. This knowledge, when developed, can bring immeasurable insight into all aspects of a musical life and career, and serve to deepen purpose, engagement, passion, longevity, artistry, and marketability (Harrison and O’Bryan 2014: 44). For PM vocalists working throughout the music ecosystem, these skills and knowledge are not only advantageous but necessary.

Entrepreneurship Moir (2017), discusses skills for PM graduates that focus on; “the qualities, attributes, and skills required by music graduates to function and participate in a multitude of different creative environments” (39). Scholars increasingly refer to such skills as entrepreneurial— i.e., the ability to work creatively, seek out multiple opportunities, and create a livelihood and career that support one’s life choices in a manner consistent with one’s identity (Bennett 2007, 2009; 2012; Burnard 2012; Hallam and Gaunt 2012; Hughes 2010, 2014; Smith 2013; Smith and Gillett 2015). As the industrial component of the global music ecosystem has shifted from conglomerates and record deals to more independent and 133

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

self-released products, musicians need to possess diverse knowledge and skills in career entrepreneurship (Bridgestock 2012; Hughes 2010, 2014; Hughes et al. 2016; Smith 2013; Smith and Gillett 2015). Vital knowledge here includes leading a band, managing a tour, negotiating contracts and disputes, navigating performing rights, communicating with venue owners, and promoting and marketing a music product or brand. Students can develop entrepreneurial insight through specific entrepreneurship or business courses on music programs, from master classes and guest speaker engagements, and from experiences in other courses at the collegiate level. Opportunities may arise through collaboration with music business programs, classroom or online courses; ensembles can serve as fertile ground for many entrepreneurship skills, providing spaces to learn leadership, negotiation, and collaborative skills in a peer-learning environment. From here, students can develop competence in autonomy, self-efficacy, and self-assessment that can lead to rewarding music careers (Lebler 2007: 207; Lebler and Hodges 2017).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Instrumental performance Many PM vocalists are interested in and/or required to create their own original music, as well as to accompany others, and the ability to play a secondary instrument is an invaluable skill (Bartlett 2010; Hollingsworth 2013). In general, the most common instruments vocalists play are piano and guitar; however, any instrument can be a valuable asset. For example, learning drums or percussion can increase rhythmic acumen, learning Ableton or working with looping pedals can increase the ability to be a self-sufficient performer, and learning bass can often help in the understanding of harmonic motion. Encouraging creativity on different instruments can also lead to multiple musical creativities (Burnard 2012) that foster awareness, understanding, appreciation, and communication between themselves and other singers, music directors, producers, and instrumentalists. Instrumental skills can be addressed within separate private instruction, peerlearning ensemble environments, or in other groups on a PM program. Group classes can accommodate different ability levels and can help students gain autonomy over their learning process, since they can also be peer-learning environments and informal learning spaces, a hallmark of some popular music learning (Green 2006: 106; Lebler 2007: 207; Smith 2014).

Musicianship While one might reasonably construe all of the skills discussed in this chapter as pertaining to musicianship, some are more music-specific than others; these, I term musicianship skills. Many traditional and even some CCM vocal programs (or tracks

134

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

within PM programs) do not include skills that PM vocalists need, I include them here as I contend they are necessary to all PM vocalists’ education. These skills include: (1) ear-training, with emphasis on the ability to hear and create harmonies on the spot, often without written notation; (2) fluency in relevant CCM theory; (3) chart writing, with emphasis on lead sheet and chord chart writing for both ensemble performance; and (4) ability to play a chordal instrument. In the twenty-first century, basic musicianship skills have evolved to include facility with a range of technological software and hardware (LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014: 271). Technology skills include the ability to record and work within a DAW; familiarity with a range of microphones, live sound manipulation, and auto-tuning programs and their effect on the voice (Edwards 2014: 167; Hughes 2015: 587; LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014: 288–289); video editing capability; and navigating social media and other online platforms. Many of these musicianship and technology skills can be acquired in courses on PM programs, with the private voice studio setting serving as a space to employ, use, discuss, and enhance these skills.

Pedagogy Although they are not being educated specifically as music teachers, many students in HPME programs will seek and/or find work as teachers or facilitators. As such, it can be valuable to provide PM vocalists with skills to run a private voice studio, work in community music environments, run successful master classes, manage classrooms, and design lessons. Unfortunately, there are at present few avenues in the United States for developing popular music pedagogies for voice or more broadly (Baldwin, Reinhert, and Edwards 2017).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Performance Performance skills include how to work with, understand, and overcome musical performance anxiety; the development of a brand or appearance; live and studio microphone knowledge; and how to navigate a stage environment. Instruction in dance, especially modern and contemporary styles, is beneficial, especially for vocalists interested in live stage performance in, for example, mainstream contemporary pop (Edwards 2014; Hughes 2010, 2014; LeBorgne and Rosenberg 2014). Alongside being developed in the private studio environment, many performance skills can be explored in ensemble settings. Ensembles are an integral part of PM education and offer communal settings in which to practice performance skills, including interaction and assessment with peers and mentors (Gaunt and Westerlund 2016; Green 2002; Harrison, O’Bryan, and Lebler 2013; Hunter 2006; Lebler 2008; Westerlund 2006). By observing others in spaces where experimentation and creativity are encouraged and celebrated, ensembles experience enables students to acquire and practice performance skills in an

135

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

enjoyable, engaging environment (Baker and Krout 2012; Boud, Cohen, and Sampson 2001; Lebler 2008; Reid and Duke 2015).

Social interactions and artistic citizenship As popular music in its many forms has the potential to reach diverse demographics, HPME programs have the potential to instill students with an understanding of the complex relationships between music and society (Carey 2005; DeNora 2000; Hooper 2017; McLaughlin 2017). Courses in musicology, community music, sociology, pedagogy, and (music) history can all contribute in this regard (Smith, Dines, and Parkinson 2017), creating artistic global citizens, “committed to engaging in artistic actions in ways that can bring people together, enhance communal well-being, and contribute substantially to human thriving” (Elliot, Silverman, and Bowman 2016: 7). Often placed in leaderships and role-model positions, musicians have the ability to unite people through music and to enrich and empower communities (IFPI and Music Canada 2014: 10).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Vocal health and function A high number of singers suffer vocal injuries and vocal health issues (Hughes 2014). The vocal demands of the PM vocalist are particularly challenging due to the intensity, length, and “extended” vocal techniques that are often employed (Edwards 2014: 59). Therefore, it is important that all PM vocalists learn about voice function, anatomy, and general voice health, including around diet, hydration, warm-up, technique, and voice usage (Ziegler and Johns 2012: 531). Much understanding of the voice, its use, and pedagogies in CCM styles, is grounded in physiology (AATS 2008: 8–10). Students can learn about this in the private voice studio or in courses on voice science, anatomy, vocology, and CCM vocal pedagogy. These courses could take the shape of, for instance, exploratory voice classes where multiple vocal styles are explored and learned for their unique and shared qualities, or they might be internships and collaborations with clinical voice teams and otolaryngology departments. Many student vocalists may become pedagogues later in their careers, so this understanding can help them develop a solid basis for their own future work as educators.

Conclusion Given the increasing inclusion of popular music and PM voice programs in higher education, it is important to be aware of the ever-changing landscape of popular music 136

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

and to consider how all facets of HPME programs can influence, and be influenced by, these changes. We need flexible teachers, curricula, music departments, and program structures that are largely student-centered, with continuing collaborations between all the component habitats, structures, and inhabitants of the global musical ecosystem. Although the parameters and extent of training for PM singers laid out in this chapter are ambitious, it is my view that PM vocal curricula should be designed to enable students to achieve unique and shared artistic, communal, educational, musical, personal, and professional goals. While not exclusive to vocalists, knowledge in entrepreneurship, instrumental performance, musicianship, technology, pedagogy, performance, interactions, artistic citizenship, and vocal health and function are additional valuable assets to the PM vocalist. Skills in these areas bring immeasurable value to all aspects of musical lives, and have been largely left out of most traditional voice curricula (Baldwin, Reinhert, and Edwards 2017). Including them can help to ensure an education that meets personal and professional needs of twenty-first-century PM vocalist/musicians, and that encourages participation in an evolving and vibrant global community of popular music vocalists, educators, researchers, and practitioners—one that will continue to grow in ways we cannot yet imagine.

Notes 1 At the time of this chapter, there is only one program in the United States that offers a graduate—but not terminal—degree in contemporary vocal pedagogy. However, many higher education programs require a terminal degree in order to be eligible for employment (Baldwin, Reinhert, and Edwards 2017).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

2 Belting is a technique of singing that is loud and strong and generally in the mid to upper range of a voice. It is often heard in music sung by artists such as Whitney Houston, Carrie Underwood, Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera, and Beyoncé.

References American Academy of Teachers of Singing (AATS) (2008), In Support of Contemporary Commercial Music (Nonclassical) Voice Pedagogy. Available online: www. americanacademyofteachersofsinging.org/assets/articles/CCMVoicePedagogy.pdf (accessed March 20, 2017). Baldwin, Jessica, Kat Reinhert, and Matthew Edwards (2017), “A Survey of Voice Faculty in Commercial Music Degree Programs,” presentation at The Voice Foundation Annual Symposium, Philadelphia, PA, June 4, 2017. Baker, Felicity and Robert Krout (2012), “Turning Experience into Learning: Educational Contributions of Collaborative Peer Songwriting during Music 137

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Therapy Training,” International Journal of Music Education, 30 (2): 133–147. doi:10.1177/0255761411427103. Bartlett, Irene (2010), “One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Tailored Training for Contemporary Commercial Singers,” in Scott Harrison (ed.), Perspectives on Teaching Singing, 227–243, Bowen Hills, Australia: Australian Academic Press. Bennett, Dawn (2007), “Utopia for Music Performance Graduates. Is It Achievable, and How Should It be Defined?,” British Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 179–189. doi:10.1017/ S026505170700738. Bennett, Dawn (2009), “Academy and the Real World: Developing Realistic Notions of Career in the Performing Arts,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 8 (3): 309–327. Bennett, Dawn (2012), “Rethinking Success: Music in Higher Education,” International Journal of the Humanities, 9 (5): 181–187. Boud, David, Ruth Cohen, and Jane Sampson, eds. (2001), Peer Learning in Higher Education, first edition, London: Routledge. Bridgestock, Ruth (2012), “Not a Dirty Word: Arts Entrepreneurship and Higher Education,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 12 (2–3): 122–137. doi:10.1177/1474022212465725. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carey, John (2005), What Good Are the Arts?, main edition, London: Faber & Faber. DeNora, Tia (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, Matthew (2014), So You Want to Sing Rock ‘N’ Roll: A Guide for Professionals, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Elliott, David J., Marissa Silverman, and Wayne Bowman, eds. (2016), Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis, first edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Gaunt, Helena and Heidi Westerlund (2016), Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education, first edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Green, Lucy (2006), “Popular Music Education in and for Itself, and for ‘Other’ Music: Current Research in the Classroom,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 101–118. doi:10.1177/0255761406065471. Hallam, Susan and Helena Gaunt (2012), Preparing for Success: A Practical Guide for Young Musicians, London: UCL IOE Press. Harrison, Scott D. and Jessica O’Bryan, eds. (2014), Teaching Singing in the 21st Century, New York: Springer. Harrison, Scott, Jessica O’Bryan, and Don Lebler (2013), “‘Playing it like a Professional’: Approaches to Ensemble Direction in Tertiary Institutions,” International Journal of Music Education, 31 (2): 173–189. doi:10.1177/0255761413489791. Hollingsworth, Kathleen L. (2013), “Strategies to Facilitate Voice/Hand Coordination for Jazz Improvisation by the Jazz Singer/Pianist,” PhD diss., University of Miami, Open Access Dissertations, 1014. Available online: https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/oa dissertations/1014 (accessed November 27, 2018). Hooper, Emma (2017), “Do the Stars Know Why They Shine? An Argument for Including Cultural Theory in Popular Music Programmes,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, first edition, 153–165, London: Routledge.

138

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Singers in Higher Education: Teaching Popular Music Vocalists

Hughes, Diane (2010), “Developing Vocal Artistry in Popular Culture Musics,” in Scott Harrison (ed.), Perspectives on Teaching Singing, 244–258, Australia: Australian Academic Press. Hughes, Diane (2014), “Contemporary Vocal Artistry in Popular Culture Musics: Perceptions, Observations and Lived Experiences,” in Scott Harrison and Jessica O’Bryan (eds.), Teaching Singing in the 21st Century, 287–302, Dordrecht: Springer. Hughes, Diane (2015), “Technological Pitch Correction: Controversy, Contexts and Considerations,” Journal of Singing, 71 (5): 587–594. Hughes, Diane, Sarah Keith, Guy Morrow, Mark Evans, and Denis Crowdy (2016), The New Music Industries: Disruption and Discovery, Cham: Springer. Hunter, Desmond (2006), “Assessing Collaborative Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (1): 75–89. IFPI and Music Canada (2014), “The Mastering of a Music City.” Available online: https://ifpi. org/downloads/The-Mastering-of-a-Music-City.pdf (accessed November 16, 2018). Keskinen, Anni K. (2013), “Vocal Pedagogy and Contemporary Commercial Music,” BA thesis, Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki. Available online: http://ethesis.siba.fi/ files/nbnfife201306103898.pdf (accessed January 14, 2017) [in Finnish]. Lebler, Don (2007), “Student-as-Master? Reflections on a Learning Innovation in Popular Music Pedagogy,” International Journal of Music Education, 25 (3): 205–221. doi:10.1177/0255761407083575. Lebler, Don (2008), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Peer Learning in Practice,” Music Education Research, 10 (2): 193–213. doi:10.1080/14613800802079056. Lebler, Don and N. Hodges (2017), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Dual Perspectives on DIY Musicianship,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zach Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 273–284, Abingdon: Routledge. LeBorgne, Wendy D. and Marci Rosenberg (2014), The Vocal Athlete, first edition, San Diego, CA: Plural Publishing, Inc. LoVetri, Jeannette L. (2008), “Contemporary Commercial Music,” Journal of Voice, 22 (3): 260–262. LoVetri, Jeannette L. and Edrie M. Weekly (2003), “Contemporary Commercial Music (CCM) Survey: Who’s Teaching What in Non-classical Music,” Journal of Voice, 17 (2): 207–215. doi:10.1016/S0892-1997(03)00004-3. McLaughlin, S. (2017), “Mediations, Institutions and Post–compulsory Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zach Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 33–45, Abingdon: Routledge. Moir, Zach (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Bloomsbury Singer Songwriter Handbook, 35–39, New York: Bloomsbury. Potter, John and Neil Sorrell (2012), A History of Singing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reid, Anna and Michael Duke (2015), “Student for Student: Peer Learning in Music Higher Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (2): 222–232. doi:10.1177/0255761415569107. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), “Pedagogy for Employability in a Foundation Degree (Fd.A.) in Creative Musicianship: Introducing Peer Collaboration,” in Helena Gaunt and Heidi

139

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Westerlund (eds.), Collaborative Learning in Higher Music Education, 193–198, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Ioulia Papageorgi and Graham Welch (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan and Alex G. Gillet (2015), “Creativities, Innovation, and Networks in Garage Punk Rock: A Case Study of the Eruptörs,” Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, 4 (1): 9–24. Smith, Gareth Dylan, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (2017), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, first edition, Abingdon: Routledge. Westerlund, Heidi (2006), “Garage Rock Bands: A Future Model for Developing Musical Expertise?,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 119–125. doi:10.1177/0255761406065472. Ziegler, Aaron and Michael M. Johns (2012), “Health Promotion and Injury Prevention Education for Student Singers,” Journal of Singing—The Official Journal of the National Association of Teachers of Singing, 68 (5): 531–541.

140

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

10

The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach: Performance Techniques for Musicians with Learning Disabilities

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Blair Kelly

One of the greatest challenges surrounding performing arts education for adults with learning disabilities, is in overcoming negative attitudes and perceptions of nondisabled people toward the performers. Scior and Werner (2015: 1) observe that there is a combination of discomfort and unfamiliarity when interacting with people with learning disabilities. This is often enacted as “aversive disablism,” excluding disabled members of the community from performing arts opportunities on the belief that they are incapable or will have a primarily negative input and limited outcomes in performance. This widespread perception that adults with learning disabilities are unable to achieve, limits the possibility for success in a performance, leading to audiences expecting a bare minimum of ability and applauding the act of participation rather than the individual achievement of the performers. This issue is highlighted further in the Care Quality Commission’s (2017) recent publication reviewing adult social care services in England and Wales, it states that quality of services is extremely varied, in large part due to the impact of funding; 19 percent of services are judged to require improvement and 2 percent are rated inadequate. Still more have closed due to poor results and inadequate funding, leading to a deficit in opportunities for performing arts education for adults with learning disabilities. In my practice as a lecturer and workshop facilitator, I have observed that for adults with learning disabilities, the performance is often the moment the singer, actor, or dancer steps on stage; this singular act is the “achievement” or the performance, and whatever may follow is inconsequential to the success of this “performance.” This assumption of limitation on the performer from their experience in adult social care is reflected in a “learned helplessness,” often restricting the potential creative practice (McCord 2004: 23–32). There is often a greater focus on developing life skills than on vocational learning, particularly in the context of performing arts education. Whilst the performing arts are often valued by educators as forums for developing practical social skills, there is limited perceived value in services for adults with learning disabilities. This can lead to funding cuts, which in turn creates a deficit 141

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

in both opportunities and access to services that provide vocational learning (Care Quality Commission 2017). In leading a group of adults with moderate and severe learning disabilities over a five-year period, their achievement is seen by myself and the learners themselves not merely in the singer being present on the stage. Learners with disabilities have been demonstrably absent from discourse in and around music education (Jellison and Taylor 2007: 9–23), and whilst the body of research has grown substantially over the past ten years, there remains a “persistence in working from a medical model framework with some studies including developmental goals such as social skills acquisition, with its implied aim of normalizing behaviour” (Murphy and McFerran 2016: 15). In response to this I have developed a three-tiered system, the Adapted Expressive Performance Approach (AEPA), which supports the development of technical ability and performance skills in learners, in a way that focuses on achievement in the performance of popular music rather than solely on the participation. This chapter discusses my practical application AEPA in the context of sung popular music. The AEPA is influenced by Estill’s voice training (Steinhauer, Klimek, and Estill 2017) and the emotive aspects of Hagen (Hagen and Frankel 1973) and Stanislavsky’s (Merlin 2007) acting systems, working toward a goal of emotive performance through the voice. Adapting parts of Laban’s movement analysis (1950) allows for a kinaesthetic approach to creating a performance that is particularly beneficial for some learners who may have difficulties with speech. These practitioners feature heavily in conservatoire-style education, and their work forms a significant part of my teaching practice with my mainstream undergraduate students. I discuss the adaptations I have made to inspire learners into achieving emotional connection, engagement with context, and physical embodiment in performing contemporary music, whilst also applying complex techniques. The purpose of using these particular practitioners is to implement evidence-based learning strategies used in mainstream performing arts education, whilst giving accessibility and inclusivity to differentiated learners. I present my practice-based research in the form of a case study, discussing the process I used when working through the AEPA with a specific learner, Anna (pseudonym) a 27-yearold performer on the autistic spectrum with moderate learning disabilities. The case study discusses Anna’s learning in the context of a mixed gender group of fourteen learners with moderate1 and severe2 learning disabilities, and the resulting outcomes for her sung performance.

AEPA in practice The AEPA is designed primarily to work with groups of learners, but many of the elements are also suited to one-to-one coaching. I will focus on Anna’s learning within the group and how I utilized the group within the exercises, stretching and

142

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach

challenging those who are able to undertake the higher tiers. The tiers of the AEPA are as follows: The Foundation Tier streamlines the original technique to a foundational exercise to allow accessibility for learners with both moderate and severe learning disabilities. The Intermediate Tier expands on the Foundation Tier, stretching and challenging those with moderate learning disabilities, and can be an extension for some learners with severe learning disabilities. The Advanced Tier gives learners with greater autonomy the complete original technique with minor adaptions to support inclusive learning.

●

●

●

The Foundation Tier is accessible to all learners within the group, and in facilitating the group I consider any sections they may need to change to reflect the current task. This refocuses and personalizes the activity to give context to what is being undertaken, rather than significantly changing the process. The Foundation Tier accommodates the pace of the learners and allows for responses and input from them, which I discuss below. Progression to the Intermediate and Advanced tiers is optional, but gives the learners greater levels of challenge and brings them closer to the original context of the technique or exercise. Within this mixed ability group, I had to consider whether tiers were appropriate for all members of the group and if not, how the tiers would need to be split to allow those with a greater level of ability to progress through the tiers whilst the rest of the group continued refining the Foundation Tier, which may take place over several sessions.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Case study This example is taken from the sixth week of a ten-week rehearsal process for a showcase performance of popular music in week eleven. Anna chose “Stay,” originally performed by Rihanna (2013) as her solo performance; the lyrical content of the song reflects on the desire to stay in an unhealthy relationship despite being aware that it is damaging to do so. To contextualize the process of working with Anna, I will briefly comment on the common traits that she presents as part of her disability: Repetitive behaviors, such as twirling material or rubbing her thumb and forefinger together, always keeping her hands busy. Strong communication skills and confidence in expressing herself, but difficulty in making and sustaining eye contact or looking at a fixed point in the room. Repetitive delivery of sung and spoken material, with intonation and phrasing being learned both in performance and in conversation.

●

●

●

143

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Single-minded focus, for instance, Anna may abruptly exit a conversation or rehearsal to use the bathroom but will rarely do this mid-song.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

Whilst this is not an exhaustive list, it is important to note that these are the traits that appear amplified on stage. In Anna’s case, the AEPA is used to provide an intervention that allows her to make choices that will either interrupt these traits on stage, or to make use of them to benefit the performance. Repetitive behaviors can prove to be particularly challenging for both learner and director, but can also be reframed to help the learner repeat the desired technique or outcome. Having prepared the song independently, Anna came to a rehearsal demonstrating a strong grasp of pitch and commented on the connection she feels with emotional ballads. When she first performed the song for the group, Anna would switch to the lower octave on the higher pitches because she had some difficulty singing them without discomfort. Her interpretation of the song was also limited to repetitive hand movements and her eye line was directed at the floor, interspersed with a small number of gestures at points in the song where the emotional content shifted. It should be noted that these small gestures were fitting with the story of the song, and from a director’s perspective, these can be used as a foothold into exploring further gesture and physical storytelling. In discussion with Anna about the meaning of the song, she vocalized her understanding of the lyrics as the singer having lost or been hurt by her romantic partner. She also expressed that she found the higher sections of the song to be challenging, and she wasn’t comfortable singing using that part of her voice. I decided first to approach the interpretation of the song as the starting point for directing Anna due to her established understanding of the lyrics, and to give some context to the higher pitches. I chose to use Stanislavsky’s given circumstances for this—the given circumstances refer to creating the situation in which the character3 currently finds themselves and what has led to this point, or what Merlin (2007: 66) describes as “the conditions of life for the character.” Once the learner has created the character’s circumstances, they then create an objective, defining what the character wants (phrased as “I want …”) and a series of actions that will allow them to achieve the objective (phrased as “I verb”). I used the following exercise, adapted from O’Brien (2011), to support the singer in developing her interpretation of the song to connect emotionally with the lyrics. The original exercise asks the learner to create their given circumstances by examining the text and drawing conclusions from it, which will then lead them to define their objective and actions. It then asks broader questions more suited to mainstream learners. As such, I have structured the exercise to allow greater accessibility, and whilst encouraging creativity, the questions in the Foundation Tier offer much smaller choices for the learner to make about the imaginary physical environment. The premise in performance is for the singer to use the lyrics of the song to achieve their objective, as something that can be performed through and reacted to, rather than trying to emote on demand. The entire group undertook this activity at the Foundation Tier, and then to differentiate

144

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach

became a part of the Intermediate and Advanced tiers either participating in these more challenging questions or continuing with questions more fitted to the Foundation Tier.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Creating given circumstances Foundation: the singer sits on a chair with their eyes closed. This stage is visualization— creating an image of the physical environment of the circumstance through a range of questions, recapping on their choices as necessary. I focus on establishing the visual; what is physically around the singer as the events of the song transpire. The line of questions may go as follows: Where are you? Are you indoors or outdoors? Have you been here before? Are you alone? Is the floor wooden or carpeted? What color is the carpet? Are the walls painted or covered with wallpaper? What color are they? Are there pictures on the walls? Intermediate: focus now on what has led to this circumstance. I now ask the singer specific questions about the situation or the character they have created, encouraging them to answer freely and creatively; they may need some support during this, but the emphasis is on this being their choice. Questions for this circumstance could include: How long were you with your boyfriend? Did you live together? Where did you meet? How do you feel right now? Why do you feel like that? Advanced: Now that the given circumstances have been created by the singer, what is the objective of the song? What does this person hope to achieve by singing it? This part of the exercise is very personal and specific to each singer and, again, the aim is to facilitate independent decision-making. Using the given circumstances exercise to highlight the objectives of the character, Anna was able to discuss the need for a musical climax during the final third of the song. Anna chose the objective of “I want to make you stay” with the actions of “I beg” and later “I demand.” The use of given circumstances, objectives, and actions is particularly beneficial in popular music where a singer is expressing an emotion in response to an event, but the song may lack the storytelling lyrical form of traditional folk, musical theatre, or classical arias (Lornell 2012). To achieve the heightened intensity at higher pitches I used the following exercise to help Anna achieve twang quality, which Estill (2010: 41) describes as “striking … this quality is common to those who speak in noisy environments or who must be heard at great distances.” Twang quality is characterized by a raised larynx, thin true vocal fold (TVF) body cover and a narrowed aryepiglottic sphincter, resulting in high partials between 2 and 4 kHz in the acoustic frequency, which the human ear interprets as being very loud and at times piercing.4 For Anna, the benefit of using twang quality was not only in the acoustic aspect of the sound but due to the thin TVF body cover, as it is less effort to maintain higher pitches. This exercise was adapted from Estill (2010: 41–52) and, as with O’Brien, I used reframing of the work to differentiate between learners. 145

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Accessing twang quality Foundation: pairs stand opposite one another, two meters apart, and use a whiney cry to call “Hey!” to the partner, to which the partner will reply with a whiney “Hello!” Both will then take a step backwards, repeating the call and response phrase. Each time the phrase is repeated, each learner must take a step back, gradually creating a light yell or call. At this point I had Anna call the challenging phrase from the song unpitched, focusing only on applying the whiney call sound to the words. This is accompanied by imagery to maintain retracted false vocal folds to avoid constriction and strain. Analogies that can be used for this are silent laughter, happily calling to an old friend, or finding a basket of puppies (Steinhauer, Klimek, and Estill 2017: 35–40). Intermediate: taking this whiney yell or call sound, I asked Anna to apply it to the challenging section of the song removing the lyrics and instead singing “Yeah!” To encourage the calling, Anna threw an imaginary ball across the room. Advanced: returning to the lyrics of the song, Anna sang the phrase facing the back of the room, looking into the horizon (Anna used a visual representation of the clock hanging on the wall). I then reflected with Anna on the feeling the twang quality produces; what did she feel in their throat? Was it comfortable? This is essential to give the learner autonomy in their own practice to reflect on in their independent rehearsals. Applying the action of “I demand” to the high intensity section of the song along with the work on finding the twang quality, allowed Anna to prepare her body for this section, giving some freedom and ease to the sound. This allowed Anna to express the climax of the lyric to fit the story she had created through the given circumstances exercise. For Anna, the use of terminology was a key aspect of her understanding and engagement with the techniques. Frequently referring to the objective and actions she had created for the song gave her some creative ownership of the work and a way to communicate her ideas directly. Throughout the rehearsal Anna developed a further two actions: “I remember” and “I long for.” This led to Anna adapting her physicality on stage, and reflecting on her chosen actions allowed her to identify moments in the song to use a gesture, a change of eye line, or to move across the stage. Having this connection with the lyric and reasons for the emotive physicality allowed Anna to free her performance from some of the repetitive gesturing that comes naturally to her, and in turn she developed the emotional expression with which she performed. Having the objective and actions as the focus points rather than “playing an emotion” allowed Anna to experience the story she had created for the song, establishing a connection with the emotional content of the lyric.

Reflecting on AEPA In AEPA, the learner is the creative practitioner in focus, supported to develop the tools to engage their creativity. The role of the instructor in AEPA is to act as director and 146

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach

facilitator. Cremata (2017) states that the facilitator in popular music education “affirms the students’ freedoms and meets students at their points of interest” (64). This idea is supported by Challis (2009: 425) who questions the requirement for “reasonable adjustments” for disabled learners without support from the institution in achieving this; whilst the focus of Challis’s study is in further and higher education, the theme of reasonable adjustment for disabled learners (and lack of clarity in how to achieve this) resonates throughout all levels of music education. It is through this facilitation that the support staff and I provide learners with “scaffolds to participation” (Rathgeber 2017: 375), allowing performers to retain ownership of their performances and the choices they make. This idea of being emotionally present and engaged on stage is key to effective vocal performances in popular music (Eerola and Vuoskoski 2013). This facilitation can also be successfully applied across a range of performance styles such as musical and devised theatre, as adaptations are made to support both the learning of performance skills and in the emotive performance. As the AEPA continues to develop and expand, the focus will continue to be on accessibility to emotive performance. My experience of teaching with this approach, has been positive and is reflected in the learner’s practice in rehearsal and on stage. The learner may engage both in functional development of voice use and physicality, but can then also align this with their creative choices for storytelling rather than isolating technique from performance. If the facilitator gives the creative onus to the learner and provides them with a toolkit for accessing and developing their creativity, then the perceived limitations of disability become redundant and the learner becomes a performer rather than a service user. Further performance-based research in a wider range of groups will be key to ensuring that the approach is flexible enough to respond to the individual needs of learners, whilst challenging them to achieve creatively and emotionally in performance.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 “People with a moderate learning disability are likely to have some language skills that mean they can communicate about their day to day needs and wishes. People may need some support with caring for themselves, but many will be able to carry out day to day tasks with support” (BILD 2017). 2 “People with a severe learning disability often use basic words and gestures to communicate their needs. Many need a high level of support with everyday activities, but many can look after some if not all of their own personal care needs. Some people have additional medical needs and some need support with mobility issues” (BILD 2017). 3 Here and several times through this chapter I will refer to the singer and their interpretation as “the character.” This is to better explain the development of the emotional connection between the singer and their interpretation, which may not be an expression of personal experience but a created story with personal connection to the lyrical content. 147

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

4 Twang is a voice quality which creates the distinctive ring heard in certain genres of music such as country and musical theatre, and is also heard in children playing—a bratty “nyeh nyeh nyeh,” for example.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References BILD (2017), I have Heard the Terms Profound, Severe, Moderate and Mild Learning Disability. What Do these Mean? Available online: www.bild.org.uk/resources/faqs/#I-haveheard-the-terms-profound-severe-moderate-and-mild-learning-disability-What-do-thesemean (accessed October 25, 2017). Care Quality Commission (2017), The State of Adult Social Care Services 2014 to 2017: 1–52. Available online: www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/20170703_ASC_end_of_programme_ FINAL2.pdf (accessed October 25, 2017). Challis, Ben (2009), “Technology, Accessibility and Creativity in Popular Music Education,” Popular Music, 28 (3): 425–431. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/40541516 (accessed July 15, 2017). Cremata, Radio (2017), “Facilitation in Popular Music Education,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 63–80. doi:10.1386/jpme.1.1.63_1. Eerola, Tuomas and Jonna K. Vuoskoski (2013), “A Review of Music and Emotion Studies: Approaches, Emotion Models, and Stimuli,” Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 30 (3): 307–340. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mp.2012.30.3.307 (accessed July 15, 2017). Estill, Jo (2010), Estill Voice Training Level Two: Figure Combinations for Six Voice Qualities. Pittsburgh, PA: Estill Voice International. Hagen, Uta and Haskel Frankel (1973), Respect for Acting. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Jellison, Judith A. and Donald M. Taylor (2007), “Attitudes toward Inclusion and Students with Disabilities: A Review of Three Decades of Music Research,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 172 (Spring): 9–23. Available online: www.jstor.org/ stable/40319362. Laban, Rudolf (1950), The Mastery of Movement on the Stage. London: Macdonald and Evans Ltd. Lornell, Kip (2012), Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. McCord, Kimberley A. (2004), “Moving beyond “That’s All I Can Do”: Encouraging Musical Creativity in Children with Learning Disabilities,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 159 (winter): 23–32. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/40319205 (accessed November 27, 2018). Merlin, Bella (2007), The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, London: Nick Hern Books. Murphy, Melissa A. and Katrina McFerran (2016), “Exploring the Literature on Music Participation and Social Connectedness for Young People with Intellectual Disability: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis,” Journal of Intellectual Disabilities: 1–18. doi:10.1177/1744629516650128#articleShareContainer. O’Brien, Nick (2011), Stanislavski in Practice, New York: Routledge.

148

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Adapted Expressive Performance Approach

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Rathgeber, Jesse (2017), “A Place in the Band: Negotiating Barriers to Inclusion in a Rock Band Setting,” in Gareth D. Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 2690–2381, Abingdon: Routledge. Rihanna (vocalist) (2013), “Stay,” track 9 on, Unapologetic, Def Jam. Scior, Katrina and Shirli Werner (2015), “Changing Attitudes to Learning Disability: A Review of the Evidence,” in Mencap: The Voice of Learning Disability, 1–25, London: University College London. Available online: https://mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/2016-08/ Attitudes_Changing_Report.pdf (accessed July 15, 2017). Steinhauer, Kimberly, Mary McDonald Klimek, and Jo Estill (2017), The Estill Voice Model: Theory and Translation, Pittsburgh, PA: Estill Voice International.

149

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

150

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part III

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Originating Popular Music

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

152

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

11

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education: Distance Collaboration and Reflective Teaching Practices Andrew Krikun and Stephen Ralph Matthews

Talking to colleagues about what we do unravels the shroud of silence in which our practice is wrapped. Stephen Brookfield, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction After independently developing tertiary higher popular music education (HPME) pedagogical practices, we decided to embark on a yearlong distance collaborative educational project with forty-five tertiary-level beginner songwriting students based in the United States and New Zealand. We found significant advantages to collaborating with a colleague based at disparate geographical and educational settings with students from different social and cultural backgrounds. Our regular video conference conversations and the reflective analysis on our individual pedagogical techniques and practices illuminated the philosophical thinking that had been informing our respective work for over fifteen years. The critical reflective teaching research of Stephen Brookfield provided us with a framework to situate this investigation. Our considerations, reflections, and discussions became some of the most liberating aspects of our project as they provided alternative ways to evaluate and define our educational perspectives and priorities. As modern music production technologies and changing socioeconomic dynamics have altered the skills, aptitudes, and motivations of student populations, educators have responded by devising new curricula and new courses for their institutions. Working on this project has helped inform the development of new curricula, assisted the authors to reflect upon the fundamental principles underlying our pedagogical work, and reinforced the

153

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

importance of guiding student songwriters to refine the processes that strengthen and personalize their self-reflective skills and individual creative practices.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Our project In December 2015, a mutual colleague suggested that we begin an online conversation due to our common interest in teaching songwriting and our corresponding academic positions in tertiary institutions. Soon we greeted each other for the first time (virtually) via a Skype video conference call. During this online meeting, we discovered an affinity between our pedagogical philosophies and teaching practices, and realized the potential benefits of exchanging experiences, ideas, and methods. Without any other agenda than to work closely with a like-minded colleague and to improve our teaching practices, we decided to plan a yearlong collaborative project between our respective songwriting classes. Starting in early 2016, we utilized Skype and, to a lesser degree, email exchanges to maintain a pattern of regular online communication, planning and writing the project’s four songwriting assignments and discussing the progress of our students’ work. Although we taught at different types of institutions in two different countries, we shared the experience of teaching popular music in tertiary educational institutions, sites where the pedagogy and curricular role of popular music have been contested and problematized (Hooper 2017; Moir 2017; Parkinson and Smith 2015; Smith 2013, 2014). Our regular video conference calls provided invaluable opportunities to discuss the learning and teaching environments we experienced and curated in our respective institutions. This information provided a context for us to understand the conditions that had significantly influenced the other’s development as a music educator, both due to the support we had —or had not—received and the struggles we had faced in establishing our respective courses and degree programs. We found participating in a year of collaborative reflective practice compelled us to examine the underlying habits and methods that underpinned our work as songwriting educators. During our online exchanges, we found a commonality of experience. Our work as educators had been in direct response to the environments in which we worked, the needs and expectations of the students we taught, the aims and goals of the institutions we served, and the educational and cultural perspectives that permeated the societies within which we lived. Consciously and unconsciously, these environmental contexts influenced our core philosophies and shaped our pedagogical practices (Barrett 2011; Cremata et al. 2017). As we worked together, our previous educational perspectives and practices were corroborated, as well as challenged by the work and viewpoints that we shared on a regular basis. This chapter discusses our project, from start to finish, and examines our journey of collaborative critical reflection, the teaching practices we employed, the effectiveness of our assignments, and the professional development we experienced along the way.

154

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Our institutions and programs In order to give our project context, the following is a brief description of the two institutions for which we work, the courses we teach, and an overview of the musical skills and inclinations of our songwriting students. Bergen Community College is a publicly funded two-year postsecondary institution located in suburban New Jersey in the United States; it offers a variety of vocational and transfer programs to any secondary school graduate.1 Students are enrolled in a variety of vocational degrees—such as criminal justice or nursing—and transfer degrees in liberal arts and professional studies. Associate’s degrees are offered with a focus on music performance, music business, and music technology. In 2002, popular music courses were added to the traditional music curriculum, including Songwriting Workshop, a music elective with no entry prerequisites. This course has run consistently over the past decade and in 2010 became a requirement for recording engineering students in the vocational track.2 Both music majors and nonmusic majors are eligible to enroll in this course since there are no prerequisites. The majority of Bergen music students have not participated in traditional secondary school music programs (i.e., band/choir/ orchestra) and do not possess the minimum traditional musicianship skills required by four-year college music programs. Songwriting Workshop includes a wide diversity of students, ranging from those with no previous musical or lyric-writing experience to music majors with a range of music theory knowledge and considerable instrumental skill. Those students lacking previous songwriting or instrumental experience have often had some music technology experience. The University of Auckland offers research-led programs across all the major disciplines, has a student enrollment of over 40,000 students, and is situated in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland. In 2001, the university’s Faculty of the Arts offered a general popular music degree that included a number of songwriting and performance courses. A few years later, the School of Music introduced a new three-year BMus popular music degree with the aim of supporting students to develop a creative songwriting practice including performance, music production, and music industry studies. Since then, each year a cohort of approximately twenty students gain entry into this BMus specialization after passing New Zealand’s national university entrance qualification and a formal audition process.3 All BMus popular music students take six consecutive creative practice songwriting courses. At the start of their degree, the BMus popular music students are beginner to intermediate4 songwriters with beginner to intermediate skills as instrumentalists and vocalists. A significant proportion have a limited knowledge of traditional music theory and music notation. At postgraduate level, students can study songwriting and popular music creative practice as well as popular music pedagogy as part of an MMus. The typical age of the Auckland and Bergen undergraduate students is similar (between 18 and 21 years old) but, at times, each course has one or two older adult students (the Bergen songwriting course also includes nontraditional students).5 In New Zealand, the 155

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

students reflect the diverse ethnic composition of Auckland city: Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent), Māori (indigenous New Zealanders), Pacific Island and Asian, and to a lesser extent recent immigrants from Asia, the Americas, and Europe. This student group represents a wide spectrum of musical interests including folk, pop, blues, roots, rock, R & B, soul, reggae, hip-hop, jazz, worship, alternative, and country. In Bergen, the student population also routinely mirrors the demographic of the metropolitan area including white (European-American), Hispanic, Asian, and black (African-American) students as well as visiting international students. Bergen students tends to be predominantly interested in rap/hip-hop and rock (classic rock, heavy metal, hardcore, etc.).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Our backgrounds Matthews was a beginner songwriter when he enrolled at the University of Auckland in the 1980s. As songwriting courses were not offered then, he completed his degree in Western contemporary composition along with conducting. After working as a freelance vocal coach, arranger, and music director for a decade, he began to focus on songwriting and composition as his primary creative outlet, and this reconnected him to his upbringing and connections with te ao Māori, the indigenous culture in Aotearoa New Zealand. In 2002 he returned to teach songwriting at his graduating university. He was motivated by a desire to offer students an opportunity to study songwriting as their primary specialization and to support the establishment of this area of study at university-level institutions. Krikun’s musical and academic career has been as varied as Matthews’. As a young man, he pursued a career as a singer-songwriter performing in clubs and recording his original material. After his rock band disbanded in the early 1980s, he returned to formal education as an undergraduate student majoring in Western classical composition. Continuing to explore creative pursuits in the music and theatre communities of Los Angeles, he was introduced to the community of Nepalese immigrants with whom he shared music and other cultural traditions. After visiting Nepal and documenting native music traditions, he enrolled as a graduate student in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, earning his master’s degree in 1991. In 2002, he began teaching at Bergen Community College, expanding the existing curriculum to include popular music performance and composition classes. Beginning doctoral research in music education at New York University in 2004 and completing his PhD in 2014, Krikun took a keen interest in popular music pedagogy both as a research scholar and as an active practitioner.

Distance collaboration During the past decade, music educators have increasingly utilized technological advances to assist them in realizing their educational goals.6 Pignato and Begany 156

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

(2015), when describing current music education projects that utilize distance collaboration, proposed that “Music students, teachers and schools can vastly expand resources available in their classrooms by connecting with expert practitioners, building partnerships, seeking feedback, and distributing student work beyond the boundaries of their home institutions” (112). In their article, the authors describe the theoretical concepts of deterritorialization and multilocality, which facilitate collaborations “less bound by geography, culture, or localized identity than in past times” (121). This was certainly true of our distance collaboration. Although both of us had been participants in several creative distance collaborations, neither of us had participated in an education exchange project of this depth and over such an extended period of time. Technological advances such as online video conferencing helped us to facilitate instantaneous communication bridging time zones and locales. As we had never met before, utilizing video conferencing enabled us expeditiously to get past the formal stage we had previously experienced when introductions were limited to phone conversations and/or written email correspondence. Our awareness of the significant time and seasonal differences between the two countries meant that the act of organizing our conference calls enhanced our understanding of each other’s work activities and home routines. Communicating via Skype enabled us to quickly develop a personal sense of rapport and trust that enabled us to engage in meaningful and honest exchanges. We began to risk asking deeper questions of each other as well as sharing openly our concerns, doubts, and personal vulnerabilities as educators. In July 2016, when we met in person for the first time at the International Society for Music Education world conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the experience was akin to two long-lost friends greeting each other after a long absence. For both of us this was proof of the close collegial relationship we had developed since late 2015. Throughout the project, our reflective dialogue was enhanced by the fact that we were removed from the immediate cultural and political environments of the other’s institution. Although both of us were from primarily English-speaking, colonized, and immigrant countries, we soon recognized and acknowledged the differences in our respective national education systems, notably the differing priorities and qualities of access to higher education and the level of acceptance of songwriting degrees. In the United States, there is still a resistance to programs that include popular music performance and composition (Powell, Krikun, and Pignato 2015) while New Zealand has offered university degrees with this focus since 2000. Although all the universities in New Zealand are publicly funded, in the United States there is a bifurcation between the public higher education system controlled by the governments of the fifty individual states and private institutions either governed by a nonprofit board of trustees or established as a for-profit business. One of the goals of public institutions in the United States is to serve students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds, offering them free or affordable tuition costs. National differences also extend to the scale of emphasis on a broad or “liberal” curriculum focus. Students in colleges and universities in the United States are required to take a significant number of “electives” outside of their 157

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

core subject area while in New Zealand undergraduate music students are currently required to take a minimum of just two nonmusic focused courses within a degree encompassing twenty-four courses. Differences between the programs was anticipated and found, and therefore the common points of agreement were appreciated more as they were often unexpected. Although students from both institutions would be considered digital natives,7 we discovered that a clear majority of our students had never engaged in a long-term distance creative exchange. Technically speaking, in contrast to the authors’ one-on-one experience, the limitations of using Skype for large group conferencing became apparent during our first student group session. The key issues we faced were the inability to obtain a reasonably high quality of audio and video capture when we needed to switch quickly between the whole group and individual students as impromptu open discussion and the performance of original songs took place. In hindsight, we would have been able to reduce these issues with better equipment (for example, multiple microphones and a video camera with an adjustable lens) and if one or two technical assistants had been present to manage and monitor the sound and video capture for each group. Fortunately, the students seemed undeterred by these difficulties. Finding a mutual time that students in both countries were available and able to conference call as a group was challenging. This was primarily due to the significant time zone difference (New Zealand is usually sixteen hours ahead of the East Coast of the United States) and student availability outside of normal class hours. For the first semester, Bergen students voluntarily called during a time that the New Zealand students were in class, and for the second semester, Auckland students voluntarily met at a time that the US students had a class. In each case, the numbers participating were understandably far greater for those attending a scheduled class. Our students were excited by the prospect of participating in the project, and at the end of each semester, they thought very positively of the opportunity to exchange songs and discuss songwriting processes with peers in a distant country.

The four songwriting assignments For our project, we designed and presented to the students four new creative songwriting assignments. We decided to include various self-reflective and collaborative creative practices, and to ask the students to compose songs employing such things as the AAA narrative song form and the AABA thirty-two-bar song form. In his study of the instructional techniques of British songwriting teachers, Bennett (2015) describes two types of songwriting constraints—process-based and content-based. Process-based constraints put restrictions on the songwriting process—such as composing a melody to a preexisting rhythm track—and content-based constraints restrict the student to particular musical and lyrical parameters. Bennett stipulated that the use of constraints

158

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

“are intended to help students to develop new creativities that may not be common in their personal habitus” (51). Before commencing the project, we had independently trialed and employed a wide variety of constraints in our assignments. For this project, we decided to employ an array of process-based and content-based constraints drawn from those we had successfully used with beginner songwriters in the past ten years or so. Process-based constraints included the referencing of news events and literary works and the use of collaborative creative processes. Content-based constraints included the introduction of unfamiliar song structures and lyric-writing techniques. Students worked on two assignments per semester, completing each within a timeframe of three to four weeks. Each assignment brief provided detailed instructions of how to complete the given tasks and asked students to adhere to a list of specific songwriting constraints or criteria. Before composing their songs, students were asked to investigate the criteria by way of completing a series of preparatory exercises. They then presented a draft version of the song and received written and verbal feedback from their peers and their teacher. Once a song was finished, each student made a basic demo recording of it; this was then submitted along with a chord chart and lyric sheet of the song. At the end of the assignment, we asked the students to reflect on their experiences by way of answering a series of written questions. A total cohort of around forty-five students participated in our project—the same group of fifteen first-year BMus students from the University of Auckland for the whole year, and a new group of fifteen Songwriting Workshop students from Bergen each semester. The Bergen students were formed into collaborative groups of two or three to help them complete each assignment as many had just one songwriting or musical skill, for example, they could play an instrument, were a singer, or had experience with music production. The Auckland students worked on the assignments individually, except for assignment four, as this focused on collaborative practice. For this assignment, the Auckland students were formed into groups of two. To help us compare the way our respective student cohorts responded to each assignment, we gave both student groups exactly the same set of written instructions. We made no adjustments for variables such as different musical skill sets, level of proficiency, or social and cultural backgrounds. This approach enabled us to evaluate things such as whether this diverse set of students consistently understood the content and wording of the assignment sheet, how they engaged with the songwriting constraints or criteria, and if they found the assignments useful in their development as songwriters. To initiate student self-reflective practices, we asked the students to regularly journal their experiences, to complete self-reflective written exercises, and to engage in verbal peer feedback after the performance of each original song (by the songwriters). During the feedback session students openly discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each song, and examined what qualities they found to be effective and engaging. Observing these discussions gave us insights into the effectiveness of the assignments and provided us with some understanding of how the students responded to specific criteria and the way we taught them. 159

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Assignment one: AAA narrative song form We decided to begin our project by focusing on the AAA narrative song form.8 Traditionally the AAA form is comprised of a series of verses, usually three or more, with no chorus or bridge. Without the interruption of a chorus or bridge, the verses follow one after the other allowing the narrative to progress without delay. It often has a one- or two-line refrain at the end of each verse and the refrain frequently provides the title of the song. These features enable AAA songs to efficiently convey long or complex plots and the song lyric tends to be more prominent than the song’s musical attributes. From our past experience, we had found that students responded positively to exploring this song form even though it rarely appears in contemporary mainstream popular music. For this assignment, we asked the students to begin searching for and identifying a widely publicized current event or news story that they thought was personally significant. After investigating and considering the wider social issues that this event highlighted, we then asked them to base their song narrative on the event including the social issues it raised. We also asked them to keep the musical writing and accompaniment simple, using no more than four chords for the whole song. This was our way of ensuring the lyrics became the prominent feature of the song.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Assignment two: AABA thirty-two-bar song form For the second assignment, we asked students to compose a song using the structure synonymous with Tin Pan Alley, the AABA form. A traditional AABA song is typically comprised of four sections of music each with exactly the same number of bars.9 The first section, or A, establishes the musical character and introduces the lyrical focus of the song. It is repeated once, the second A, before the third section, the B, provides a new set of musical ideas and dramatic relief in the lyrics. The song finishes with a musical reprise of the A section. This song form almost always features the use of a phrase as a refrain as the first or last line of each A verse. The refrain also serves as the song title. Besides the AABA song form, we decided to stipulate additional contentbased constraints or criteria: (1) each section needed to be eight bars in length, making the total length of the song thirty-two bars; (2) the A section’s lyrical refrain needed to include an oxymoron, a contradictory figure of speech; and (3) the refrain had to be identical to the title of the song.

Assignment three: A place of importance For the third assignment, we asked our students to reflect on their past and identify places of significance to which they still felt emotionally connected, for example, an 160

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

old family home they remembered well, or a building or outdoor space that they used to frequent as a child. We also asked them to consider if their memories and feelings for this place still continued to have an impact on their lives. Students then explored what songwriting techniques might assist them to authentically communicate these highly personal qualities of association. The assignment criteria stipulated that the lyrics had to describe specific physical characteristics of their place of importance and to do this in such a way that these lyrics helped convey how they felt.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Assignment four: Collaborative process and referencing a short story For the fourth assignment, we combined two techniques: (1) creative collaboration, and (2) referencing a work of literature. To guide the collaborative process, we first divided the student cohort into groups of two or three students. The rationale for deciding how to organize the students differed between institutions. In Auckland, the songwriters were selected so that they collaborated with someone with a different musical background and whom they had not collaborated with before. In Bergen, Krikun formed students into small groups with complementary skill sets, for example, a confident singer or lyricist with an experienced instrumentalist or someone with good music production skills. At the start of the assignment the students were asked to document their creative process by keeping a personal creative diary, noting such things as the dates and times of their group meetings, who did what, and the form their collaborative sessions took. After completing the assignment, the students were then asked to reflect on their experiences, and to consider what the challenges and benefits were of working together. In order to assist students referencing a work of literature, we independently chose two sets of short stories written by a diverse range of authors, all native to our two respective countries. The stories were selected to represent a mix of time periods, cultural settings, and literary styles representative of each country’s literary tradition. The students began the assignment by reading part or all of their selected short stories, and then as a group they collaboratively chose one story to base their song on. To help ensure an identifiable relationship between the songs and the stories, the students were asked to refer in their lyrics to a specific scene, character, or dramatic theme from their chosen story.

Critical reflective practice for songwriting educators In his book, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, Brookfield (2017) introduces four lenses through which teachers can view their teaching and learning episodes and reflect on the outcomes and implications. These lenses are: (1) student’s eyes, (2) colleague’s 161

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

perceptions, (3) personal experience, and (4) theory. We used these lenses to frame our discussion and yearlong reflection of our project. We were interested in Brookfield’s theories as these provided a simple and yet thorough framework with which to consider, reflect, and discuss our work. What follows is a summary of our deliberations.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Lens one: Student’s eyes Brookfield argues that “the most important pedagogical knowledge we teachers need to do good work is an awareness, week in, week out, of how our students are experiencing learning” (2017: 62). In discussions about our respective student cohorts, we discovered that the groups differed on what commonly inspired and motivated them to study songwriting. Through class discussions, assignments, and informal surveys, students revealed to us why they enrolled in our respective songwriting classes. At Auckland, the typical BMus popular music student is invested in a long-term goal—to develop their craft as songwriters and, after they graduate, to establish a career in the music industry, working either part-time or full-time as songwriters, performers, and/or recording artists. Some also have an interest in pursuing careers in the music industry or in music education. The Bergen students, however, enroll in the songwriting class for a wider variety of reasons: as an elective for personal enrichment and creative expression, as a study requirement for students pursuing a career as recording engineers, and musicians who would like to develop their rudimentary songwriting skills. To bolster the students’ learning opportunities and to assist our understanding of their responses to the shared songwriting assignments, we created opportunities that ensured they engaged in regular self-reflective practice on key elements in the assignments, in keeping with Brookfield’s observation above. Each assignment included written coursework that asked them to complete an in-depth self-reflective exercise by answering a set of questions. At the end of each assignment, we summarized and compiled their answers and used this information to help us to discuss and reflect on the effectiveness of the assignments, including the way in which the brief was written, the assessment criteria, and learning processes. Their self-reflective written work and the subsequent group discussions in class provided us with valuable insight into the responses and thinking of our students, and enabled us then to compare the students’ responses within each class and between institutions. While reviewing students’ self-reflective work, we discovered many useful insights. For example, the vast majority of students from both courses were surprisingly very positive about their experiences working on constraint-based tasks such as specific song structures, lyrical techniques, and thematic content. To our surprise, this included the restrictive constraint of just eight bars per section while composing in the AABA song form. We also found that there was a common response to the types of constraints and learning techniques we employed despite the two student cohorts’ different set of motivations for studying songwriting. 162

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Lens two: Colleagues’ perceptions According to Brookfield (1995), “we can ask colleagues to be mirrors, mentors, or critical friends, with whom we engage in critical conversations about our practice” (xiii). Although each of us had previously discussed—formally and informally—our teaching methodologies with colleagues from within our respective institutions, due to the demands and exigencies of institutional workloads, exchanges with colleagues from our own institutions had focused primarily on improving ways to support students’ day-to-day learning needs, and specific curriculum development and assessment moderation. Opportunities to discuss deeper philosophical and educational questions and fully investigate alternative practices were rare. The experience of collaborating and exchanging ideas with an instructor from an institution in a different country and with a different student profile proved to be an invaluable aid to review our respective teaching practices. As we continued our dialogue, we explored our own musical and educational backgrounds—this provided us with opportunities to look at our own practices from the other’s unique perspective. The fact that we were based in different countries also provided an advantageous sense of independence from our day-to-day work routines. Each of us soon began to learn more about our collaborator’s educational system and cultural milieu. We examined the specific challenges and opportunities of the music students in each geographical setting. In addition, we discussed student profiles, unresolved curriculum issues, and the economics of postsecondary music study in each country. These deliberations provided us with a different lens to reflect on the cultural dynamics, and educational philosophies and practices of our native countries. During the project, we collaborated on the creation of assignment criteria, reflected on the potential learning experiences for our students, and constructed a framework for student reflection. After the students completed each of the four assignments, we prioritized examination of the learning outcomes and self-reflective responses of the students, and interestingly, rarely discussed the comparative quality of the student’s creative work. When we described our students’ experiences, we instinctively employed informal narrative techniques. The value of this being that the other was able to listen and then spontaneously respond with a comparable, or an opposing story drawn from their students’ experiences. At Auckland, many of the first-year students were grappling with musical aspirations to be successful songwriters and lingering self-doubt. In their song lyrics, they depicted internal and family conflict, personal relationships, and emotional connections to people and place. At Bergen, the students responded to stories closest to their own personal experiences: drug addiction, family dynamics, and criminology. Over time, narrating student experiences in this way provided perspective and depth to our understanding. We also discussed and commented on the way we were each drawing conclusions and choosing to frame the learning experiences of our students. At the end of the second assignment, as the instructors who had introduced the assignments, we questioned whether our individual in-class delivery of each assignment 163

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

influenced our students’ interpretation of the written assignments criteria and objectives. We discovered that we had each used different exemplars to introduce the AAA and AABA song forms. Although the students were free to compose in a musical style of their choosing, we discovered that the students’ interpretation of the assignment’s wording had been influenced by the songs we had used as exemplars.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Lens three: Personal experience Brookfield (2017) surmises that the lens of personal experience “gets the least respect” because of the prevalence of the scientific method in Western academic culture (69). We found exchanging one’s autobiographical story with a colleague to be an invaluable way to understand the personal experiences and perspectives that influenced the way they had developed their teaching practice. During our regular Skype sessions, we informally shared each other’s real-life story as songwriters, composers, and educators, relating episodes, events, and personal reflections. We soon realized that before becoming tertiary educators, both of us had participated in a wide variety of professional work (as mentioned above). While sharing our personal experiences with each other, we discovered that our philosophical foundations and methodological approaches had a number of similarities. These included our belief that music-making is deeply woven into the fabric of society and can be an important process for the examination of the self and to promote positive social change. A common outlook we share is that teaching songwriting not only offers us the opportunity to assist career focused musicians to develop skills to assist them to succeed professionally, but it also helps all students to deepen their understanding and perspectives of themselves and their relationships to those around them (Baker and MacDonald 2017). In our previous experience as musicians and “cultural explorers,” we both witnessed firsthand the role of music in a range of societies (e.g., Matthews’ close associations with rural Māori indigenous communities and Krikun’s experience in the Nepalese native and immigrant communities). These experiences had transformed our viewpoints on the place of the creative artist in society, and continue to inform and enrich our production of creative work focusing on contemporary social, political, and environmental issues in our home countries.

Lens four: Theory Regarding the fourth and final lens, Brookfield (2017) warns that “teachers say they don’t have the time to read or that educational theory and research really doesn’t have anything to do with the particularities of their classrooms” (72–73). During the course of our project, we found that we were so preoccupied with designing, presenting,

164

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

and reflecting on the project’s four assignments that we were unable to find time to investigate and review any educational research. However, since completing the project, and while writing this chapter, we have taken time out to familiarize ourselves with recent pertinent research, in particular, research on songwriting pedagogy in higher education institutions. After a year of personal dialogue, it was valuable for us to begin to explore the ideas of other songwriting educators. Several themes began to emerge in the literature: creativity, self-reflection, collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Investigating this theoretical research confirmed that others were considering and advocating a number of similar techniques and processes. This in itself was affirming. What was particularly valuable was reading others’ approaches to articulating and contextualizing the theoretical themes upon which these techniques and processes were based. Two popular music education scholars, Joe Bennett and Zack Moir, provided an overview of many of the salient themes that we encountered. For Bennett (2015), the deployment of songwriting in an educational context requires “a defined curriculum, a set of learning outcomes and assessment strategies, and a number of pedagogical tools for guiding the learner’s journey” (38). He concludes that the aim of the songwriting curriculum in higher education “must engender four things: increased domain immersion, an ability to be self-critical and edit work, genre-agnostic creative freedom, and the building of an improved portfolio of work” (47). To this end, he suggests four approaches to the teaching and learning of songwriting: repertoire analysis, formative assessment, constraint-based tasks, and practice. All of our collaborative assignments utilized constraint-based criteria and formative feedback in conjunction with other tasks aimed to inspire students to reflect on topics of social and personal importance, while at the same time, familiarizing students with the historical art of popular songwriting. Arguing against the prominence of curricula devised for graduate employability, Moir (2017) states that “we must also ensure that our course design, pedagogy and approaches to assessment (an inevitability in formal education), are well suited to enable students to develop the skills and knowledge required to become practitioners (in the broadest sense), and empowering them to be reflective, self-critical, imaginative and confident graduates” (41). In our songwriting assignments, in keeping with our educational philosophy, we emphasized the development of self-reflective creative songwriters regardless of the commercial potential of the final product. We have found that beginner songwriters are empowered by being given opportunities to explore and experiment without the pressure of producing commercially viable work. In addition, Moir points to the importance of collaborative composition in the classroom to replicate authentic popular music practices, noting that “creativity in collaborative PMC10 is activated through working with other people” (44). We also found that the act of collaborating with others heightened our students’ awareness and understanding of their own creative processes and habits. As these tendencies were often unconsciously embedded practices, collaboration was an effective tool, encouraging meaningful selfreflection and an appreciation of difference and complementary skills. 165

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions Throughout the project, we emphasized teaching practices that encouraged a high level of discussion and creative exchange between students, and, where practical, dialogue across the student cohorts in the United States and New Zealand. We found that encouraging a culture of open and non-comparative11 communication increased the students’ opportunities to reflect on the value other songwriters attributed to their songs, and that this potentially provided insights into how a wider audience might respond to them. The awareness that the audience for their songs included songwriters based in a distant country enhanced their sense of engagement and commitment to their work. Sharing the project in this way helped the students get an idea of what it was like to be part of an international community of songwriters, and they enthusiastically participated in the shared assignments and video conferencing sessions. We found reading, analyzing, and discussing the students’ written descriptions of their assignment work to be insightful and highly beneficial. We discovered that by asking the students to reflect individually on their songwriting process, they had time to contemplate and consider what had happened, and were able to fully articulate their experiences. We also observed that most appeared to be more comfortable revealing personal details and creative challenges in these self-reflective exercises, as opposed to discussing these in an open classroom setting. Students consistently found the introduction of self-reflective practices, new creative techniques, and process and constraint-based criteria to have deepened their understanding of themselves as creative artists and contributed to their growth as songwriters. During this project, we observed that self-reflective practices appeared to foster opportunities to strengthen self-awareness, creative resilience, and support the development of an agile and confident creative mind. Although both student groups had positive experiences of the project, some students recalled difficulty during the collaborative assignment, commenting on the challenge of finding mutually agreeable times to meet and work together, and, in some instances, settling artistic disagreements. The latter was not reported by the Auckland group, possibly because at the time of the collaborative assignment (this was their first group assignment) they had been studying as a close-knit cohort in multiple popular music classes for over six months. In assignment one, we aspired to enhance our students’ awareness of the world around them by asking them to identify and write about an important social issue. When we intentionally chose to introduce students to historical song forms that are infrequently used in contemporary popular song, we found that introducing these song forms was in fact welcomed by our students and not resisted, as might have been expected. In assignment two, we asked them to compose a song limited by a set of tightly defined musical constraints. The students’ reflective responses revealed that they had positive experience after they had overcome the initial challenges posed by the criteria. In assignment three, the students chose a surprisingly wide diversity of places of importance and memories to write about. Their written self-reflections revealed 166

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

that they enjoyed composing this song, and in the process they reevaluated their past and discovered just how relevant and influential their memories were to their creative practice. It is interesting to note that feedback showed most students were not interested in performing this song outside of the course as they considered it too personal. In assignment four, many students related how they found collaboration to be an enjoyable and invigorating experience once they had mutually agreed on individual roles, and that collaborating often resulted in a faster than normal completion of the song. When choosing a short story, the students gravitated toward stories that portrayed characters and themes that they personally related to. Identifying with the fortunes of the story’s protagonists allowed them to empathize with this character and encouraged the students to consider life from another’s perspective. Many students revealed in their self-reflective work that they chose characters whose lives bore no resemblance to their own. In addition to more personal reflections, the assignment’s constraints led to important exchanges between students as to how to best cope with the challenges presented. This dialogue would not have taken place except for the uniformity of the specific challenge they all faced and the opportunity for dialogue during and afterwards. According to Brookfield (1995):

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Talking to colleagues about what we do unravels the shroud of silence in which our practice is wrapped. Participating in critical conversation with peers opens us up to their versions of events we have experienced. Our colleagues serve as critical mirrors reflecting back to us images of our actions that often take us by surprise. As they describe their own experiences dealing with the same crises and dilemmas we face we are able to check, reframe, and broaden our own theories of practice. (35) Brookfield’s statement perfectly describes the peer exchange we experienced during the course of this yearlong project. Viewing our pedagogical approaches through the multifaceted lens of our fellow educator and a large cohort of higher education student populations diversified by race, ethnicity, country of citizenship, and musical background, galvanized us to reflect on our practices from a fresh perspective. This yearlong collaborative project led to a great deal of informative discussion (via video conferencing and email) and ensured we regularly engaged in critical selfreflection on our work. It helped us undertake an in-depth review of a wide set of teaching practices that we had independently developed in the previous ten or more years, and assisted us to identify pedagogical issues for future investigation. Without video conferencing, we would not have been able to so regularly and effectively discuss, examine, and reflect upon our work—we were not in the same room but we were able to build a deep sense of confidence and trust in our relationship and at a far greater speed. As a result of this project, we forged a long-term partnership leading to collaboration on several conference presentations and participation in similar projects with other 167

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

colleagues. It is our hope that this chapter might provide a useful starting point for others to consider how to embark upon collaborations separated by geography, culture, and institutional practice, and who, assisted by the use of modern technology, are able to build a relationship of trust and explore, share, and reflect upon their pedagogical philosophies and practices.

Notes   1 In the United States, many students begin their undergraduate studies at public community colleges receiving an Associate’s Degree, which gives them the credential to transfer their credits to a four-year Bachelor’s Degree program. Community colleges are open enrollment institutions available to all secondary school graduates.   2 In American community colleges, the vocational track concludes with an Associate’s Degree that prepares the graduates for immediate employment in their chosen field.   3 University Entrance (UE) is the minimum undergraduate entry requirement to enroll at a New Zealand University. This qualification is made of a number of numeracy, literacy, and approved subject courses.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

  4 For the purposes of this discussion we have defined a “beginner” songwriter as someone who has written three to nine complete songs and has limited experience performing their originals. An “intermediate” songwriter has written approximately ten to twenty-nine complete songs, has a number of years’ experience as a performer, and exhibits a good understanding of song form, harmonic and melodic structure, and the relationship of these factors to the lyric’s meaning and intent. An “advanced” songwriter has written thirty or more complete songs, has many years of experience recording and performing their originals, and has an authoritative control in all aspects of songwriting and performance.   5 A “non-traditional student” is a term used in the United States to define a certain category of students such as older students, part-time students, students working full-time, financially independent students, single parents, and students without a traditional high school diploma (Choy 2002).   6 The Oxford Handbook of Technology and Music Education (2017) and The Routledge Companion to Music, Technology and Education (2017) offer comprehensive overviews of the current issues and implementations of technology in music education.   7 A “digital native” refers to a person brought up during the age of digital technology and possessing a familiarity with internet applications. See Smith (2012) for a discussion of the notion of digital natives.   8 AAA Narrative Song Form is reminiscent of the English folk song tradition using strophic form and narrative techniques. These songs are often referred to as “ballads.” Examples include traditional songs such as “Barbara Allen” and modern songs such as “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.”   9 AABA 32-bar song form was the common songwriting structure in popular songwriting during the first half of the twentieth century, most often associated with the songs of Tin 168

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Songwriting Pedagogy in Higher Education

Pan Alley in New York City. In the 1960s, this song form continued to be used by pop/rock songwriters such as Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney. 10 Popular Music Composition. 11 Avoiding comparisons between the beginner songwriters’ work and that of established songwriters. Instead, analysis and detailed descriptions of the musical and lyrical characteristics of the student’s songs are employed.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Baker, Felicity A. and Raymond MacDonald (2017), “Re-Authoring the Self: Therapeutic Songwriting in Identity Work,” in Raymond MacDonald, David. J. Hargreaves, and Dorothy Miell (eds.), Handbook of Musical Identities, 436–452, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Margaret S., ed. (2011), A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, New York: Oxford University Press. Bennett, Joe (2015), “Creativities in Popular Songwriting Curricula,” in Pamela Burnard and Elizabeth Haddon (eds.), Activating Diverse Musical Creativities: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 37–55, London: Bloomsbury. Brookfield, Stephen D. (1995), Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, San Francisco: JosseyBass. Brookfield, Stephen D. (2017), Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, second edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Choy, Susan (2002), Nontraditional Undergraduates, Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Cremata, Radio, Joseph Pignato, Bryan Powell, and Gareth D. Smith (2017), The Music Learning Profiles Project: Let’s Take This Outside, New York: Routledge. Hooper, Emma (2017), “Do the Stars Know Why They Shine? An Argument for Including Cultural Theory in Popular Music Programmes,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 153–165, New York: Routledge. Moir, Zack (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin A. Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Singer-Songwriter Handbook, 35–49, New York: Bloomsbury. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth Dylan Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Pignato, Joseph Michael and Grace M. Begany (2015), “Deterritorialized, Multilocated and Distributed: Musical Space, Poietic Domains and Cognition in Distance Collaboration,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 8 (2): 111–128. Powell, Bryan J., Andrew Krikun, and Joseph Michael Pignato (2015), “‘Something’s Happening Here!’: Popular Music Education in the United States,” IASPM@Journal, 5 (1): 1–19.

169

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Smith, Erika E. (2012), “The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature,” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 38 (3): 1–18. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), “‘Seeking Success’ in Popular Music,” Music Education Research International, 6: 26–37. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Graham Welch and Ioulia Papageorgi (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 38–48, Farnham: Ashgate.

170

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

12

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning Adam Patrick Bell

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The plurality of the producer I received my first credit as a producer in the early 2000s for my work on an independent album for a friend, and at the time I thought this designation to be a misnomer. For my part, I had played drums, bass, and lead guitar parts on most of the songs, recorded and engineered each song track-by-track, and then mixed the whole album. I thought of myself as a temporary band member with the added benefit of having the gear and know-how to make a record. “Producer” seemed to me a title better suited for someone else. In retrospect, categorizing me as a producer in this case was apt. As the history of music production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries demonstrates, the role of the music producer is amorphous and constantly changing. What I failed to grasp initially was the plurality of the term “producer.” Zagorski-Thomas (2014) details that the music producer position originated as more of a managerial role and had little to do with making music using recording technology. What started as a position primarily concerned with marketing, distribution, and overseeing the recording process (160), evolved to encompass more varied and specialized roles. Zagorski-Thomas outlines four additional distinct producer categorizations: (1) the producer as a creative hub, (2) the self-producer, (3) the producer as a creative partner, and (4) the producer as a creative enabler. Starting with the producer as a creative hub, exemplified by the likes of Mitch Miller, Joe Meek, Phil Spector, Trevor Horn, and Dr. Dre, Zagorski-Thomas (2014) explains that in this model of production, the producer picks the people to help them realize their artistic goals in the studio. Part of the mystery of what the producer does can be attributed to this approach to production because what they do in the studio cannot be boiled down to a single role. For example, Warner (2003) summarized Trevor Horn’s hallmarks as a producer to include his timbral choices, “feel”—meaning “the subtle rhythmic/dynamic/timbral nuances and pitch deviations of performance”—and song structures (140). The other producers grouped in this category are known for a signature sound that they emboss on a recording. Whether it’s Phil Spector cramming

171

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

musicians into a Los Angeles studio to double or triple parts to build his famed “Wall of Sound” (Levine 2005), or Joe Meek toiling away in an unassuming London flat, dialing in compression and reverb settings to achieve new sounds and timbres never before heard on record (Repsch 2000), the one constant of this category is the producer maintaining a distinct sonic brand despite a revolving cast of contributors. Related to this categorization are those who self-produce, such as Prince and Stevie Wonder (Zagorski-Thomas 2014: 161), which is also commonplace in electronic-based musics such as electronic dance music (EDM) (Butler 2014) and hip-hop (Schloss 2014). While a completely independent production seems more feasible now than at any previous point in history given the relative cheaper access to professional recording hardware and software, a deep dive into the production process of any given recording typically reveals some level of collaboration with another party. Warner (2003) observes:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The transposition of the Romantic notion of the artist as inspired individual into popular culture is undermined by the reality of pop music production, which is almost invariably the result of teamwork. And it is in the recording studio, the very crucible of creativity in pop music, that the team works. (35) For example, Geoff Harkness details the production process of Chicago-based hip-hop artist O-mega, who makes his own beats in his home studio, but then collaborates with an engineer “who spices up the tracks and adds sonic flourishes that give character to the basic song” (Harkness 2014: 83). Zagorski-Thomas (2014) refers to this role as a creative partner and singles out the likes of George Martin, Brian Eno, Tony Visconti, and Rick Rubin as examples of producers who fit this categorization. Lastly, ZagorskiThomas describes the creative enabler as a producer that concentrates on creating a music-making environment for an artist in which they can thrive, citing Phil Ramone, Steve Albini, and Nigel Godrich as examples of this category. Producers perform many tasks with a great deal of individual variation, and as a result it is difficult to define the role succinctly. Furthermore, the role of the producer continues to change over time, requiring a dynamic definition. The categorizations outlined by Zagorski-Thomas (2014) are helpful, but they are incomplete because they are predominantly grounded in twentieth-century popular music. This is understandable given that most of the literature on production is based on twentiethcentury rock practices. For educators that teach production, how they conceptualize the role significantly impacts how and what they teach, and therefore it is critical to have an understanding of the evolving history of production in popular music up until the present. Furthermore, educators that teach production need to facilitate learning experiences in which students can engage with production practices, past and present. This chapter begins by providing a brief review of literature pertaining to producers, most of which centers on twentieth-century practices, and then proceeds to discuss more recent resources and different mediums. I single out John Seabrook’s The Song 172

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

Machine (2015) as a particularly pertinent resource for educators because it provides some illuminating insights into how music production is practiced at the present time. Informed and inspired by Seabrook’s research, I have designed the Song Machine Project to teach music production skills to students in an undergraduate music program. I outline how I facilitate the Song Machine Project in my teaching context with the hope that this might be helpful to others interested in facilitating similar projects in their respective teaching and learning contexts.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Music production literature Many of the established conceptions of what a producer does in the studio come from the approximate period of 1950 to 2000. For example, key figures who worked with The Beatles at Abbey Road have authored books on their experiences in the studio including George Martin (Martin and Hornsby 1979), Geoff Emerick (Emerick and Massey 2006), Ken Scott (Scott and Owsinski 2012), and Glyn Johns (Johns 2014). Similarly, firsthand accounts by prominent producers have been written by standouts such as Phil Ramone (Ramone and Granata 2007), Rick Hall (Hall 2015), Tony Visconti (Visconti 2007), Eddie Kramer (McDermott, Cox, and Kramer 1995), Daniel Lanois (Lanois 2010), and Brian Eno (Eno 2004). Further, there are written works that focus on multiple producers and their distinct approaches to making music in the studio, notably by Howard (2004), and the interview-based books by Buskin (1999) and Massey (2000, 2009). Finally, the writings about the heyday of analog recording in the United States by Moorefield (2010), Schmidt Horning (2013), and Zak (2001, 2010), serve to complement the research that has been published on the production processes of specific artists/producers from this era including Sam Phillips (Guralnick 2015), Joe Meek (Cleveland 2001; Repsch 2000), Phil Spector (Abbott 2011), Brian Wilson (Granata 2003), Todd Rundgren (Myers 2010), and Rick Rubin (Brown 2009). This body of work is a rich learning resource for budding producers, replete with creative ways to produce music, but it is important to acknowledge that there is an inherent bias in this literature toward rock music due to the largely rock-centric careers and practices of the authors and contributors. It is, however, important to acknowledge differences in approaches to production in other types of music, including dub (Veal 2007; Williams 2012), hip-hop, including the seminal sample-based work of the Bomb Squad (Rose 1994; Weingarten 2010) and the Dust Brothers (LeRoy 2006) amongst others (e.g., Coleman 2007, 2014; Schloss 2014), and DJing writ large (Brewster and Broughton 2006; Butler 2014; Katz 2012; Lawrence 2008). Arguably, the most impactful change ushered in by this music as it concerns production is that they presume the studio as something more than a place to make music in; it is something to make music with: “the ways in which this technology is used are often inseparable from the creative impulse, rather than a product of it” (Warner 2003: 33).

173

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Outside of academic literature there are some informative resources such as the documentaries The Art of Organized Noize (Jones 2016), the PBS series Soundbreaking (Dupre and Chermayeff 2016), and the HBO series The Defiant Ones (Hughes 2017) that may be helpful to those wanting to learn about production. Additionally, Hrishikesh Hirway’s ongoing podcast Song Exploder, which debuted in 2014, is perhaps the most current source of firsthand discussion about production practices, providing musicians with a platform to “take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made” (Hirway n.d.).1 Lastly, New Yorker writer John Seabrook has provided an eye-opening overview of popular music production practices in his book The Song Machine (2015). From hip-hop to K-Pop, Seabrook highlights the collaborative and oftentimes mechanistic nature of contemporary music production. Drawing on the aforementioned contemporary production resources, especially the work of Seabrook, I have designed a project to engage undergraduate students in contemporary production practices that I outline in the proceeding section.

The Song Machine Project

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Song Machine Project is based primarily on the songwriting and production practices of Max Martin2 as detailed by Seabrook (2015) in The Song Machine. I have facilitated this project with my undergraduate students for the past three years at two different universities, one in the United States (2015–2016), and the other in Canada (2016–). Most of the students I have taught are in their early 20s, and are music majors studying classical music performance. In both teaching contexts the project is/was part of a course called Introduction to Music Technology, which is described by my present institution as: An exploration of current technology for music making and appreciation including recording hardware and software, MIDI-based devices for integration with sound systems and interactive/media performance, audio file formats, score preparations and basic audition theory. (Bell 2016) Typically, I facilitate the Song Machine Project over the course of six weeks (three hours per week) with fifteen students in a computer lab. We use Logic Pro primarily because it is the only digital audio workstation (DAW) available on all the computers in our lab, but some students choose to use other DAWs on their own devices such as Ableton Live, Soundtrap, and FL Studio. Consistent with authentic practices as reported in the literature (e.g., Schloss 2014; Veal 2007; Warner 2003; Zak 2001), I make no explicit distinction between what constitutes technological and musical skills in this project. I refer to this skill set generically as DAW skills.3 Most of my students have not

174

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

and will not experience the studio as a dedicated physical location with standardized equipment such as a large format mixing console; most people’s “studios” will have little to do with the physical space in which they work and much more to do with the software they use. How we use our tools to make music is the answer to the question, “what is music production?”4 The Song Machine Project provides an opportunity for learners to use these production tools in personalized ways to make music. In doing so, students simultaneously learn producing and produce learning. Adhering to the tenets of constructionism (Papert 1993), the Song Machine Project promotes learning by doing; this is accomplished by emulating professional life (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2005) in a “complex learning environment” (Knight 2007), which entails:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 Valued and feasible goals. 2 Role variety and stretch—opportunities to engage with others on routine and challenging work. 3 Social interaction and challenge through working with diverse people on a variety of tasks, always with the provision that collaboration has benefits. 4 Time for metacognitive activity, including working with others to get feedback, feedforward, and legitimation. 5 An extensive view of workplace effectiveness, including an appreciation of the emotional and interpersonal faces of professional being and doing. (Knight 2007: 80) The primary benefit of this pedagogical approach is that “music technology” is learned within a music-making context reflective of real-world practices. Students experience firsthand the challenges and complexities of collaborative music production practices in which nuanced formative assessment is intertwined in the process. Ideally, music production education would be facilitated in an authentic apprenticeship in which skills are modelled and over time transferred tacitly (Collins, Brown, and Holum 1991), but experts, let alone experts willing to mentor,5 are in short supply. Modeling the complex learning environment of The Song Machine (2015) is the second best option. Each stage of the Song Machine Project promotes “constructive alignment” (Biggs and Tang 2011), which means that stage by stage what is intended to be learned is assessed along the way (97). In this approach, summative assessment of the final product is a natural outgrowth of the accumulation of formative assessments in each successive stage of the project (see Barnett 2007). The overarching aim with regard to assessment is to have it embedded in the activities that comprise the project and thereby reflect real-world practice.6 In my experience teaching at the postsecondary level, the common listening ground amongst a group of learners with diverse musical tastes is what Seabrook (2015) refers to as contemporary hits radio (CHR). CHR is seemingly inescapable, and as a result most students are familiar with Top 40 musical fare. Seabrook’s depiction of “the song machine”—his label for the CHR production process—details a formula frequently used by the industry’s top producers called track-and-hook: 175

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

By the mid-2000s the track-and-hook approach to songwriting—in which a track maker/producer, who is responsible for the beats, the chord progression, and the instrumentation, collaborates with a hook writer/topliner, who writes the melodies—had become the standard method by which popular songs are written. (200) While this cookie-cutter approach may seem uninspiring on the surface, in my experience the track-and-hook formula has proven to be an effective and engaging way for my students to learn contemporary music production practices and skills.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Phase 1: Form production teams To begin the project, I facilitate a brief introductory discussion with my students in which we discuss: (1) their participatory music experiences, (2) their experiences writing lyrics or poetry, (3) their experiences using music technology, and (4) their preferences for specific types/styles of music. The purpose of this discussion is to provide students with an opportunity to identify potential collaborators within their class. I encourage students to team up based primarily on shared musical interests, but it might also be helpful to form groups based on complementary skills such as a lyricist and a beatmaker forming a duo. I limit production group sizes to two or three because based on my experiences, these sizes tend to work best for promoting collaboration. I also ask that groups come up with a name; while this may seem trivial, it is important for students to develop producer identities.7 This is especially important for students who post their work online to the public but wish to separate it from their personal identity. Finally, before the next phase commences, I ask students to identify reference songs for the purpose of identifying assessment criteria. The songs they choose serve as invaluable guides that will be continually referenced throughout the project. Reference songs provide a foundation from which to model many artistic and technical considerations of the production process. Furthermore, when students identify standards from the reference songs by which to assess their own work, they engage in the real-world practice of assessment as learning (Boud and Falchikov 2007). In the realm of music production there are no “sharp criteria”—clearly bounded distinctions to differentiate qualities; instead, producers must discern myriad “fuzzy criteria” (Sadler 1989), which necessitates nuanced understandings of the production conventions and techniques associated with a particular musical style. Acquiring such a high level of discernment requires experience, and the project is designed to foster assessment abilities by requiring students to identify a standard or goal within a reference song, compare their work with the standard, and take action to improve upon their work when it does not meet the standard (Sadler 1989: 121). Once this foundation for formative assessment is in place, we are ready to proceed to the next phase of the project. 176

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

Phase 2: Tracking

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The second phase of the Song Machine Project requires production teams to take on the role of CHR “trackers.” Tracking in CHR differs from the more conventional practice of tracking in recording studios, which is commonly understood to be the process of recording the instrumental parts of a song prior to mixing them (Zak 2001). In the context of CHR, Seabrook (2015) explains that “tracking” encompasses the acts of making backing tracks that will later be developed into songs. The purpose of the backing track is to provide a foundation for the third phase in which another group will add top-lines. Oftentimes trackers start by making a beat and then add other elements (e.g., ambient drone, bass line, chord progression, and so on), which vary considerably based on the conventions of a particular musical style. The reference songs that students select in the first phase serve as signposts to guide decisions on what elements would be suitable to add to their beats. For the purpose of the project, I require production teams to make as many backing tracks as there are people in their group, and I define a backing track as simply a beat plus at least one more element. How CHR tracking is done in the professional domain varies from producer to producer, and the literature on this process is scant; however, there are examples such as the approach of hip-hop producer Mike Will as detailed by Seabrook (2016). In contrast to most of his profiles of producers in The Song Machine (2015), such as Max Martin and Stargate who subscribe to a more formulaic approach to tracking, Seabrook’s (2016) piece on Mike Will depicts a more laissez-faire approach: Will’s sessions tend to be loose, free-flowing affairs. At any given time, there are a dozen or more “creators” coming in and out—co-producers (Will has eight on his staff), artists, managers, and hangers-around … Will uses chance, spontaneity, and group dynamics. In his sessions, jamming and messing around … lead to happenstance and creativity. Replicating these real-world examples in a classroom setting requires the facilitator of the learning experience to foster an environment in which trial-and-error approaches are encouraged and a conceptual space is made for happy accidents to occur. Creating and maintaining a playful environment must be taken seriously. To help with this, I recommend specific tools to start the second phase. As a first step I introduce the beatmaking app Groove Pizza (NYU Music Experience Design Lab n.d.) because it is free and browser-based, so students can easily access it on their phones or computers. With only three sounds (bass drum, snare drum, and hi-hat), its simple design guides users to concentrate on the basics of beat-making. Groove Pizza offers preset beats that can be modified, which is especially helpful to newcomers, yet those wishing to start from scratch can just as easily do so. If students find Groove Pizza too simple, but like the 177

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

circular interface, I suggest the app Patterning (Olympia Noise Co. n.d.) as it offers more complexity and nuance. It is also important to expose students to professional-grade hardware and software so that they can experience what it’s like to use the same tools as their musical role models. Some students prefer grid-based software interfaces to make beats such as FL Studio and Logic’s Ultrabeat, and the tactile experience offered by MIDI controllers such as Ableton Push and Novation Launchpad provide an alternative avenue to beat-making solely with software. Regardless of the tools used, the goal is simply to get the production teams making beats, and assessing whether or not their beats should be developed further into backing tracks for the next phase in the project. During the tracking phase, the beat constitutes the first layer of a simple two-layer backing track. Regardless of the tools used for this phase, the directive for the second step in the tracking process is simple: add something. It is at this point that students learn to record MIDI and dive into the vast libraries of sounds that most DAWs offer, or aurally peruse loop libraries for an ear-catching bass line, chord progression, or ambient pad. The auditioning of sounds is a key component of this exercise as the qualities of the sounds are just as important as the pitches and rhythms. My students frequently ask: “How long should the track be?” and my answer is always, “What do you think?” There is no formula for determining the optimal length of a backing track, but the precedent of pop music evidences that many hit songs feature a repetitive backing track. I dissuade students from overproducing their backing tracks by adding too many elements because if the track is too busy, it is very difficult to add a top-line to it. I remind them that “Tracks are the beds upon which toplines lie—make space for them!” For newcomers to production, this phase entails a steeper learning curve because they are required to navigate several new technologies simultaneously. It is during this phase that learners develop basic DAW proficiency, which prepares them for the proceeding phases. Depending on the time available to work on the project, I recommend extending the second phase such that students are required to make multiple backing tracks as this allows those working collaboratively to take turns within their groups navigating the different tasks entailed in tracking.

Phase 3: Top-lining The third phase of the Song Machine Project is designed to emulate the CHR process described by Seabrook (2015) in which a producer/tracker will outsource the writing of hooks/top-lines: It is common practice for a producer to send the same track to multiple topliners … and choose the best melody 178

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

from among the submissions … In track-and-hook, the production comes first, and then melody and words are added. Often producers are not looking for a single melody to carry the song, but rather just enough melody to flesh out the production. (200–201) Seabrook (2015) makes no distinction between what constitutes a hook and a top-line, conflating the two, and describes how this process works in CHR using the example of how Rihanna’s “Umbrella” (2007) was produced by Atlanta-based RedZone Entertainment. In this particular case, the top-liner (The-Dream) improvised along to the backing track using his voice, including the famed “ella” refrain—a prime example of how an earworm is made.8 In the Song Machine Project we begin the top-lining phase by having each production group present their backing tracks to the other groups. Essentially, groups audition each others’ tracks, and choose one for which they will write top-lines. From a technical standpoint, the skills that this phase of the project develops most is recording and editing audio; students learn the basic principles of how microphones and audio interfaces work by using them to record themselves. After a group has selected a backing track, they are tasked with recording at least five different and distinct top-lines. I encourage students to use their voices to come up with top-lines because this approach tends to produce the most spontaneous results.9 In addition to this recommendation, I provide the following suggestions:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 Record everything. Don’t miss a happy accident! 2 Think of top-lining as doodling in sound. Just sing/play whatever comes to you, and don’t worry about whether or not you think it sounds “right.” 3 If you’re singing your top-lines, pay no mind to lyrics at this point, they’re just placeholders (e.g., da doo run run). 4 The more top-line ideas, the better. 5 Long top-lines aren’t a thing! Keep them short. If students are struggling to engage in this aspect of Phase 3 because they are new to creating music in this improvisational way, or feel uncomfortable trying it, the following strategies may help:10 Specify and/or limit pitches and rhythms for a top-line. Make improvising top-lines into a game of back-and-forth, one or two notes at at time. Make a sound-alike top-line: something that sounds similar to an existing melody of a popular song and then alter it to make it different. Try using an app like Google’s Song Maker (Google Creative Lab, Use All Five, and Yotam Mann n.d.) to help generate top-line ideas.

● ●

●

●

179

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

After the hooks have been recorded, they may be edited and manipulated to achieve a distinct sound, and experimentation with effects is encouraged.11 The function of the top-line in CHR is to hook the listener into the song, and the first listen by another group is oftentimes the best test of whether or not this has been accomplished. As students come to the end of this third phase, they often echo the sentiment of producer Mike Will: “It’s really a process to make one of these great songs. It’s layers. Layers and layers and layers” (Seabrook 2016). With the top-lining complete, the backing tracks from Phase 2 with the newly recorded top-line ideas from Phase 3 are given back to the original producer groups of the backing tracks and Phase 4, finalizing, concludes the project.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Phase 4: Finalizing In the fourth and final phase students are tasked with taking what was given to them by their top-liners and developing these fragments into a complete song. Regardless of the route chosen, the final destination is the same: a song with all of the elements (e.g., beats, vocals, etc.) deemed necessary by the production group. The first task is to audition the top-lines and select the one(s) that will be used going forward. After the group has settled on their top-lines, they have many hurdles to clear until their song is complete. At this juncture in the project I encourage students to determine their own workflow, but for those looking for guidance I suggest they first settle on a song structure.12 If the group plans to include vocals, I recommend that at least a temporary guide track is recorded at this point so that when other elements are added they can be heard in context with the vocals. Baked into this process of making creative decisions about the song’s structure and elements is the continued use of studio technology. So interdependent are the artistic and technical actions in producing that parsing them out from each other is a futile task. Throughout this phase I find myself giving many on-the-spot crash courses in microphone choice, placement, and technique, and how to use panning, compression, equalization, warping (pitch and time), automation, delay, and reverb. Understanding studio tools from a technical standpoint has its merits, but ultimately it is how the tools are used that evidence and express students’ evolving musicality as producers. While some students find explanations of the science of sound processing helpful, most prefer to discover how effects work in the context of their songs as they produce.13 In terms of time-scale, the final phase could be extended almost indefinitely as there is seemingly always more that can be done to perfect a song, but the Song Machine Project must grind to a halt sometime because there are other projects to attend to in the curriculum.14 Once the songs are complete, we celebrate with a listening party. In the real world of CHR, “assessment” comes down to answering the question: “is this song a hit?” Such a crude system is problematic at best for an educational environment in which the goal of the project is not to top Billboard or win a Grammy but, rather, to learn a broad set of skills that fall under the umbrella of “music technology.” The listening 180

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

party serves as a platform to self- and peer-assess the songs produced by the class. Having gone through the processes of the project themselves, when students listen to each other’s productions they can appreciate the work done at a nuanced level.15

Conclusions The purpose of the Song Machine Project is to provide a structure in which students can experience firsthand the interdependent relationship between the tools of the studio and making music. Rather than teach the skills associated with production in a piecemeal tool-by-tool fashion, as is common in lecture-based university programs, the Song Machine Project is holistic and scaffolded; students learn producing by doing it. Through the process, students embrace the adventurous spirit of the innovative producers that preceded them from rock, dub, and hip-hop, to name a few. They can mine past practices to forge future gold records but also engage in trial-and-error practices, which may lead them to happy accidents and new frontiers in production. On the surface, the Song Machine Project is a simple step-by-step project, but those who engage in the process soon discover that music production is a sophisticated art; it is the delicate melding of musical and technological actions that keeps the song machine humming, and the smooth operator of this machine is the producer.

Notes

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

  1 Any given episode provides insight into the artistic practice of production in/with the studio, such as Björk explaining that 90 percent of her time in the music-making process is spent editing (Hirway 2015).   2 Martin is known for producing Taylor Swift, Adele, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande, the Weeknd, Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Backstreet Boys, and NSYNC amongst others.   3 Moir and Medbøe (2015) refer to this all encompassing skill set as “Popular Music Composition.”   4 It seems clear that, for the foreseeable future, music production will hinge on people’s facility with software that (1) emulates analog production tools of the past, (2) offers the digital production tools of the present, and (3) supports the development of new production tools yet to be imagined.   5 Seabrook (2015) notes that just a small handful of producers create the bulk of CHR offerings. Notably, some of these producers such as Max Martin mentor a protégé.   6 Although I aim to model real-world practices of assessment, I am required to award a grade to students at the conclusion of the course; this project accounts for 30 percent of a student’s final grade in the course. Students are required to complete self- and peerassessments for each stage of the project, and to participate in a conference with me in 181

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

which they explain their work. If we mutually agree that their work is the best they can produce in consideration of their abilities and experience, they are awarded the highest standard. If we disagree on the standard(s), we discuss strategies to improve, which vary considerably on a case-by-case basis, but often require spending more time on a task (with or without the instructor as appropriate).   7

By fostering the development of a producer identity, the educator can help students to forge a meaningful and lifelong relationship in/with music that might otherwise have not been established.

  8 It helps to have a real-world example of top-lining, and The New York Times’ short video “Bieber, Diplo, and Skrillex Make a Hit” (Jensen et al. 2015), which is a succinct distillation of how the song “Where Are Ü Now” (2015) was made, provides a rare glimpse into the making of an earworm. Producers Diplo and Skrillex discuss their contributions to the song with a particular focus on the flute/dolphin-sounding hook, which was crafted by pitchshifting a Bieber vocal line and distorting it.   9 Some students are hesitant to improvise vocals because they feel self-conscious, but often these feelings dissipate when they realize that the function of the exercise is to brainstorm in sound as opposed to record a performance that will be preserved in the final iteration of the song. 10 Some students have little to no experience making music by improvising, and as a result find the task intimidating. I have found that they appreciate some guidance and strategies to wade into these waters. 11

For this very purpose I created a game called FX Roulette, see Bell 2015.

12 Once again, the student-selected exemplars play a critical role in helping to guide the process. By listening to and learning from the professional tracks that they have selected as influential, this often provides some inspiration and direction.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

13 This is evidence of students preferring a constructionist approach to learning (Papert 1993). 14 Students often express disappointment when the Song Machine Project comes to an end, and I am quick to tell them that there is no need to stop producing just because the project is completed; they can keep producing, and in tandem develop their skills and sonic styles. Regardless of the motivation to produce, it is a craft that can be cultivated over a lifetime. 15 The process leading up to the listening party is rich with formative assessment and this is very much in keeping with authentic real-world practice. All of those informal conversations about the qualities of production from stage to stage are representative of what professional producers do. Given this, there is typically little left unsaid once the final mixes are presented other than to offer appreciation to each other.

References Abbott, Kingsley, ed. (2011), Little Symphonies: A Phil Spector Reader, London: Helter Skelter.

182

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

Barnett, Ronald (2007), “Assessment in Higher Education: An Impossible Mission?,” in David Boud and Nancy Falchikov (eds.), Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education, 29–40, London: Routledge. Bell, Adam Patrick (2015), “FX Roulette: A Brief Guide,” Adam Patrick Bell (blog), August 2, 2015. Available online: www.adampatrickbell.com/blog/fx-roulette-a-brief-guide (accessed November 24, 2018). Bell, Adam Patrick (2016), University of Calgary Faculty of Arts School of Creative and Performing Arts Course Number and Title: MUSI 255 Introduction to Music Technology. Calgary: University of Calgary. https://scpa.ucalgary.ca/manageprofile/sites/scpa.ucalgary. ca.manageprofile/files/unitis/courses/MUSI255/W2018/LEC1/MUSI255-W2018-LEC1outline.pdf (accessed November 29, 2018). Biggs, John and Catherine Tang (2011), Teaching for Quality Learning in University: What the Student Does, fourth edition, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Boud, David and Nancy Falchikov (2007), “Developing Assessment for Informing Judgment,” in David Boud and Nancy Falchikov (eds.), Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education, 181–197, London: Routledge. Brewster, Bill and Frank Broughton (2006), Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, New York: Grove Press. Brown, Jake (2009), Rick Rubin: In the Studio, Toronto: ECW Press. Buskin, Richard (1999), Inside Tracks: A First-Hand History of Popular Music from the World’s Greatest Record Producers and Engineers, New York: Spike. Butler, Mark J. (2014), Playing with Something That Runs: Technology, Improvisation, and Composition in DJ and Laptop Performance, New York: Oxford University Press. Cleveland, Barry (2001), Creative Music Production: Joe Meek’s Bold Techniques, Vallejo, CA: Mix Books. Coleman, Brian (2007), Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, New York: Villard Books. Coleman, Brian (2014), Check the Technique, Volume 2: More Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies, Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press. Collins, Allan, John Seely Brown, and Ann Holum (1991), “Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Thinking Visible,” American Educator, 15 (3): 6–11. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus (2005), “Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts,” Organization Studies, 26 (5): 779–792. Dupre, Jeff and Maro Chermayeff, dir. (2016) Soundbreaking: Stories from the Cutting Edge of Recorded Music, Arlington, VA: PBS. Emerick, Geoff and Howard Massey (2006), Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of The Beatles, New York: Gotham Books. Eno, Brian (2004), “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, 127–130, London: Continuum. Google Creative Lab, Use All Five, and Yotam Mann (n.d.), Song Maker. https://musiclab. chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker/ (accessed November 24, 2018). Granata, Charles L. (2003), Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Chicago: A Cappella Books. Guralnick, Peter (2015), Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘N’ Roll, New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

183

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Hall, Rick (2015), The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame, Clovis, CA: Heritage Builders. Harkness, Geoff (2014), “Get on the Mic: Recording Studios as Symbolic Spaces in Rap Music,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 26 (1): 82–100. Hirway, Hrishikesh (n.d.), “About,” Song Exploder. Available online: http://songexploder.net/ about (accessed March 2, 2018). Hirway, Hrishikesh (2015), “Episode 60: Björk,” Song Exploder (podcast), December 17, 2015. Available online: http://songexploder.net/bjork (accessed November 27, 2018). Howard, David N. (2004), Sonic Alchemy: Visionary Music Producers and Their Maverick Recordings, Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard. Hughes, Allen, dir. (2017), The Defiant Ones, New York: HBO. Jensen, Taige, Graham Roberts, Alicia DeSantis, and Yulia Parshina-Kottas (2015), “Bieber, Diplo, and Skrillex Make a Hit,” Times Video, August 25, 2015. Available online: www. nytimes.com/video/arts/music/100000003872410/bieber-diplo-and-skrillex-make-a-hit.html (accessed August 25, 2015). Johns, Glyn (2014), Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Faces …, New York: Blue Rider Press. Jones, Quincy, III, dir. (2016), The Art of Organized Noize, Fresno, CA: Windsong Productions. Katz, Mark (2012), Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ, New York: Oxford University Press. Knight, Peter (2007), “Grading, Classifying, and Future Learning,” in David Boud and Nancy Falchikov (eds.), Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education, 72–86, London: Routledge. Lanois, Daniel (2010), Soul Mining: A Musical Life, New York: Faber & Faber. Lawrence, Tim (2008), “Disco Madness: Walter Gibbons and the Legacy of Turntablism and Remixology,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 20 (3): 276–329. LeRoy, Dan (2006), Paul’s Boutique, New York: Continuum. Levine, Larry (2005), “Phil Spector,” in Anthony Savona (ed.), Console Confessions: The Great Music Producers in Their Own Words, 8–16, San Francisco: Backbeat. McDermott, John, Billy Cox, and Eddie Kramer (1995), Jimi Hendrix Sessions: The Complete Recording Sessions, 1963–1970, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company. Martin, George and Jeremy Hornsby (1979), All You Needs is Ears: The Inside Personal Story of the Genius Who Created the Beatles, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Massey, Howard (2000), Behind the Glass: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits, San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books. Massey, Howard (2009), Behind the Glass, Volume 2: Top Record Producers Tell How They Craft the Hits, San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books. Moir, Zack and Haftor Medbøe (2015), “Reframing Popular Music Composition as Performance-Centred Practice,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 8 (2): 147–161. Moorefield, Virgil (2010), The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Myers, Paul (2010), A Wizard, A True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio, London: Jawbone Press. NYU Music Experience Design Lab (n.d.) Groove Pizza, v. 2.0. Olympia Noise Co. (n.d.) Patterning: Drum Machine, v. 2.0.

184

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Of Trackers and Top-Liners: Learning Producing and Producing Learning

Papert, Seymour (1993), The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York: BasicBooks. Ramone, Phil with Charles L. Granata (2007), Making Records: The Scenes behind the Music, New York: Hyperion. Repsch, John (2000), The Legendary Joe Meek: The Telstar Man, London: Cherry Books. Rose, Tricia (1994), Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Sadler, D. Royce (1989), “Formative Assessment and the Design of Instructional Systems,” Instructional Science, 18 (2): 119–144. Schloss, Joseph G. (2014), Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop, revised edition, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Schmidt Horning, Susan (2013), Chasing Sound: Technology, Culture and the Art of Studio Recording from Edison to the LP, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scott, Ken, and Bobby Owsinski (2012), Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust: Off the Record with the Beatles, Bowie, Elton, and So Much More, Los Angeles: Alfred. Seabrook, John (2015), The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, New York: Norton. Seabrook, John (2016), “How Mike Will Made It,” The New Yorker, July 11 and 18, 2016. Available online: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/how-mike-will-made-it (accessed July 18, 2016). Veal, Michael E. (2007), Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Visconti, Tony (2007), Tony Visconti: The Autobiography: Bowie, Bolan, and the Brooklyn Boy, London: HarperCollins. Warner, Timothy (2003), Pop Music – Technology and Creativity: Trevor Horn and the Digital Revolution, Aldershot: Ashgate. Weingarten, Christopher R. (2010), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, New York: Continuum. Williams, Sean (2012), “Tubby’s Dub Style,” in Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas (eds.), The Art of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field, 235–246, Farnham: Ashgate. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (2014), The Musicology of Record Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zak, Albin J. (2001), The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, Berkeley: University of California Press. Zak, Albin J. (2010), I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

185

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

186

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

13

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer? Developing Coordination, Musicianship, and Creativity through Electronic Drum Performance Bryden Stillie

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction If asked to describe the instrument a drummer plays, most people would probably describe an acoustic drum kit, consisting of a bass drum, snare drum, tom toms, and cymbals. It is unlikely that the words “hybrid” or “electronic” would be part of the language used. The technologies related to drumming have seen significant advancement since the first electronic drum kits in the early 1980s, and these technologies have played a significant role in shaping the way music sounds today. Throughout this chapter I refer to three different types of drum kit setup; these are as follows: (1) “acoustic,” the traditional drum kit setup; (2) “electronic,” pads/triggers used to activate electronic sounds from a sound module or computer; and (3) “hybrid,” a setup containing a mixture of acoustic drums, electronic pads/triggers, and/or sample pads1 or percussion controllers (Figure 13.1).2 At the age of 14 I received two Christmas gifts that would go on to define my career in musical performance and drum kit teaching. The first was the drum kit instructional VHS tape, Bruford and the Beat (Bruford 1982). The second was a Yamaha DD-11 digital drum kit. The opening scene of the instructional video shows drummer Bill Bruford playing his hybrid drum kit, which combined a Tama acoustic drum kit and Simmons3 electronic drum kit. The sound produced from the first three pads he played (a total of fourteen notes) became the inspiration for my approach to teaching creative use of drum kit related music technology, in my current role as Senior Lecturer in Music on the BA Popular Music program at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. This chapter presents and examines an innovative approach to teaching drum kit related technologies through the creation of a solo electronic drum performance undertaken by my Year 3 (undergraduate) drum kit students. The project requires students to recreate a song of their choosing, using music creation software,4 and then perform 187

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 13.1  A hybrid drum kit setup containing: (1) Roland SPD-20 percussion controller, (2) Roland CY-5 cymbal trigger pad, (3) Roland SPD-SX sample pad, (4) Roland PD-85 mesh head trigger pad, and (5) Roland KD-7 kick drum trigger.

the song using a Roland SPD-205 percussion controller, music software, and external trigger pads.6 My motivations for designing the project outlined in this chapter were that I wanted to: equip my students with skills and knowledge that enabled them confidently to integrate and implement drum kit technologies in live performance settings; increase students’ versatility (Smith 2014: 38) and subsequent employability; and encourage them to become more creative as musicians. I developed a course that equips my drum kit students with highly relevant skills and knowledge required by the modern drummer.

The study of drum kit in higher popular music education Drum kit is taught as a principal study within most undergraduate programs that identify as teaching popular music performance. Drum kit is also taught on programs that focus specifically on jazz and, in some cases, the instrument is also taught to percussion students studying on traditional Western art music programs. The learning experiences of drummers on these different program types may be markedly different due to the different approaches used to teach the instrument,7 and the expectations placed on 188

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

drummers at different stages of degree programs. These differences have a significant influence on the design of drum kit curricula, causing disparity in both depth and breadth of learning achieved by drummers graduating from different institutions. Drum kit instructors tend to assemble curricula from a series of highly established compartmentalized teaching approaches and methods (Dean 2012; Smith 2013) that are firmly rooted in developing technical skills through rudiments, coordination exercises, and application of rhythmic concepts, applied to the acoustic drum kit. Instructors decide on what to include in their curricula, based on factors including areas of student interest, course/program outcomes, personal values, student goals and skill sets, emerging trends, and the levels and abilities of learners. It is difficult to define a single curriculum that all undergraduate drummers should follow. There are very few resources or established learning and teaching approaches that specifically focus on how to learn and creatively use drum kit related technologies. Given that there has been significant development in these technologies and that such technologies are becoming commonplace in the hybrid kit setups used by many modern drummers,8 there is a need to develop new pedagogical models (Smith 2014: 44) and curricula that support the teaching of drum kit technology-based performance.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Educating students in drum kit technologies During my own experience of studying drum kit, I had only one lesson that explored using drum kit technologies. In that lesson, I did not get to set anything up—all I had to do was play a simple rock beat and strike a pad on beat one of each new bar to activate a percussion loop. Whilst I learned an approach to triggering samples (a skill that many drummers require), the experience omitted covering the knowledge needed to replicate, rebuild, or creatively use this technology. Anecdotally from colleagues, and from my experience as an External Examiner9 and guest lecturer, I have witnessed similar teaching approaches that only explore the “plug and play” features of drum kit technologies. Although these allow some technologies to be implemented quickly in performance, it means that their full functionality and affordances are rarely explored. As noted above, there is a dearth of educational resources related to learning how to use drum kit technologies creatively. Learners often have to rely on the information provided in owner’s manuals and technical demonstrations available through product manufacturers’ websites, to learn the basic functionality of their equipment. During my search for relevant teaching resources, only two instructional books appeared to explore electronic drumming in any depth. The Beginner’s Guide to Electronic Drums (Terry 2011) clearly defines and explains key terminology and approaches to integrating technologies related to electronic drums into hybrid kit setups. However, the book stops short of exploring creative and extended uses of the technologies to play anything other than percussion sounds. Fujiyama: Combining Acoustic and Electronic Drums (Jimbo 2003) also explores electronic drumming from a hybrid perspective. One advantage of Jimbo’s approach to hybrid performance is that the drummer has some control over the 189

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

tempo of their own performance. This differs from the electronic drum performance projects undertaken by my students, as they are required to play along to a metronomic click track; my reasons for this are explored later in this chapter. Jimbo provides a comprehensive method of notating musical performance for a hybrid kit setup. However, the notation is excessive and probably quite intimidating for drummers who do not read treble or bass clef, especially when all the pitched content of the music is activated by playing the single pattern indicated in the drum kit notation staff. Both of the aforementioned books explore electronic drums from a hybrid kit perspective but are still firmly rooted in learning to activate electronic sounds by playing patterns that are recognizable as drum grooves.10 For most acoustic drum kit players, there are certain “go-to” positions to play grooves, for example, one stick playing on the hi-hat, one stick on the snare, and bass drum with one foot. Acoustic kit players therefore will likely find the transition to the type of hybrid performances advocated by Terry (2011) and Jimbo (2003) relatively easy, as they would be familiar with the coordination required to play the patterns. Electronic trigger setups11 remove the need to adhere to conventional coordination patterns, as any sound can be triggered from any pad. My approach introduces new coordination possibilities that are constrained only by the technical limitations of the selected percussion controller, software functionality, and the physical and technical limitations of the performer.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The drum kit learning and teaching experience at Edinburgh Napier A key priority in Edinburgh Napier University’s Strategy 2020 (Edinburgh Napier University n.d.) is to move toward a program-focused approach to learning, teaching, and assessment (Hartley and Whitefield 2011; McDowell 2012). This cohesive approach to program design requires modules (courses) to complement one another so that students can utilize skills and knowledge developed in one module to help meet the requirements of another. This approach ensures that students have opportunities to develop necessary skills and knowledge to engage with new learning as they progress through the program. The BA Popular Music program at Edinburgh Napier is a four-year honors degree. The typical learning experience of a student on the program encompasses three areas of study, as follows: performance (solo and ensemble-based), musicology, and music technology. In performance modules, students develop: a strong working knowledge of music theory (approximate to London College of Music Popular Music Theory Grade VII12); music analysis skills; and high-level instrumental performance abilities. Students also learn four music production software packages. At the end of Year 1 students have developed competence using Logic Pro X, and have all earned the AVID13 Certification in Pro Tools (101 level) and Sibelius (101 and 110 level).14 Ableton Live is taught in Year 3 which compliments the timing of their electronic drum kit project.

190

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

My Year 1 and 2 drum kit curriculum focuses on developing technical skills and coordination related to the acoustic drum kit. Set works in the areas of Latin, jazz fusion, and progressive rock are used to improve musicality, coordination, and independence. These are supplemented with snare drum pieces that enable drummers to learn and contextualize all forty Percussive Arts Society rudiments (Percussive Arts Society 1984). This provides a solid foundation on which to begin exploring more complex concepts covered in Year 3, such as displacement, metric modulation, and electronic drumming. In Year 4, the curriculum is student-led and therefore highly personalized, enabling students to study individual topic areas related to their own drumming interests and future career ambitions.

My electronic drumming curriculum and the student learning experience The curriculum that supports development of my students electronic drumming performance projects is delivered in a blended format (Garrison and Kanuka 2004), utilizing a flipped classroom approach (Bergmann and Sams 2012). This pedagogical framework contains three areas of learning and teaching activity: preparation, faceto-face activities, and post-class consolidation. The face-to-face and online learning are deeply interlinked through a series of learning experiences that provide the “scaffolding” (Meskill 2013: 13) to enable students to interact and learn collaboratively online. The online content is hosted on the university’s virtual learning environment (VLE), Moodle. In semester one, a six-week block of learning and teaching experiences supports the curriculum (see Table 13.1).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Table 13.1  The Semester One Curriculum Week

Curriculum Areas

1

Introduction and Icebreaker: Lecture to explain the course aims and outcomes, and how the online content and resources are to be used. This then feeds the first online discussion.

2

Accessing and editing internal sounds on the Roland SPD-20 and constructing patches.15

3

Connect external triggers, pads, and controllers to the SPD-20.

4

MIDI Out: exploring how MIDI information from the SPD-20 can be used to control music software.

5

Exploring advanced music software functionality and signal routing, and the MIDI In capabilities of the SPD-20.

6

Using the electronic drum notation I have developed, students learn and perform a sample-based16 version of “Spitfire” (The Prodigy 2004) on a hybrid kit setup.

191

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Preparatory activities Students prepare for face-to-face classes by watching my video demonstrations of hardware and software functionality provided in the VLE. Digital delivery of this procedural and technical information17 which remains fairly consistent year to year has multiple benefits: Students learn at their own individual pace. Learning occurs asynchronously and content can be revisited to ensure students’ full understanding before attending class (rather than passively absorbing information in class). The resources provide ongoing support. Face-to-face time can be more productively spent on active learning and experimentation.

● ●

● ●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Face-to-face classes Face-to-face interactions occur in two formats—group learning experiences and tutorfacilitated workshops. In these settings, learning is “a highly social activity that takes place in realistic contexts and activities” (Selwyn 2011: 88). These practical, situatedlearning activities allow students to collaborate and support each other to develop greater practical understanding of hard- and software functionality.18 This is achieved through engaging with a series of problem-based learning activities I designed based on my own observations and on student feedback that identified curricular areas that they found challenging. These activities require students to troubleshoot and solve soft- and hardware issues by applying, linking, and demonstrating specific learning gained from the online content. These activities exemplify learning in Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development,” where through social interaction, learners are able to develop deeper understanding of the topics than if working individually (Vygotsky 1978: 86).

Online consolidation activities and support In semester one, online collaborative learning occurs in Wikis, general discussion forums related to FAQs and to solving technical challenges, and through forums that are focused on case study analysis, where students develop a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991: 42). Students collaborate to create Wikis that explain the functionality of a variety of drum trigger types, which provides a knowledge base for the rest of the class. This activity is particularly useful as it allows class time to be focused on the more challenging aspects of the course, and as drum pads and triggers are generally non192

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

proprietary, the knowledge created is transferable to drum kit technologies produced by almost any manufacturer. This ensures students can make informed choices regarding the triggers and pads they might use beyond the classroom environment. Additionally, it helps to foster “rich communities of inquiry” (Garrison and Anderson 2003: 5) where students become cocreators of knowledge. I use case studies that explore how students in previous cohorts created their projects, as stimuli for discussion forums. These case studies include videos of previous student performances that provide an indication of the expected standard of projects and the different ways in which technologies have been used. In semester two, students develop their electronic performance over a fifteen-week period. Learning is self-directed, and students make use of substantial online resources to support the development of their project. Ongoing face-to-face and online support is provided by student mentors from Year 4 of the program who have firsthand experience of creating and performing projects of this nature. These mentors help the current students to overcome challenges faced in the development of their individual projects, making for a highly personalized learning experience. Students are expected to perform their projects in a group workshop late in the semester, serving as an opportunity to receive formative feedback. The electronic performance of the song created during this project is assessed during the student’s summative performance exam at the end of semester two.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Selecting software and hardware The use of digital audio workstation Logic Pro X is encouraged for several reasons: the prior experience students have using this software in the earlier years of their studies; its flexibility when routing and manipulating MIDI signals; and its wide range of preset synthesized sounds, effects, and audio loops that allow students to work creatively and achieve results quickly. However, due to the functionality of modern music software, a detailed knowledge of how signals are transferred, received, and processed between hardware and software is no longer required to create music. This means that in order to make full use of the available hardware and software students must learn and develop a working knowledge of how MIDI is used to connect and control devices, in order to realize their projects. I selected the Roland SPD-2019 (Figure 13.2) as the percussion controller and trigger interface used for these projects. Although other manufacturers such as Yamaha and Alesis produce similar percussion controllers, some of which have more advanced MIDI features, the MIDI functionality of the SPD-20 is simple to understand and the parameters are easy to access and edit. Additionally, the SPD-20’s MIDI parameters are common to the controllers produced by other manufacturers which ensures that my students are learning transferrable knowledge and skills that can be applied to

193

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Figure 13.2  The SPD-20 with pad and trigger pedal numbering. Photograph by Alexandra Duncan.

different electronic drum kit equipment setups, and that they learn how these common MIDI parameters can be used to control music software in less orthodox ways20 as they develop their performance.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

How students develop their electronic performances Students are given freedom of choice to select a piece to perform; however, I approve their choice to ensure that it will pose an appropriate level of challenge both in the use of technology and to their coordination. Once their choices are agreed, there is a series of key stages to complete before students are able to perform their song using just the percussion controller and associated technologies. Initially, each student has to create their own version of their chosen song in Logic Pro X (or their preferred music software package). They draw on aural skills to analyze the original recording to work out constituent parts of the arrangement, which they must then program using software instruments and/or record as audio. If original audio stems are available, students may be permitted to use a limited number of these to help construct the track, for example, original isolated vocal tracks. Students are encouraged to approach their projects creatively through remixing or rearranging the original

194

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

material. During this process, students have to research, learn, and deploy genre-specific production techniques related to the musical style of their chosen arrangement. Completed arrangements must next be deconstructed into playable parts.21 The physical layout of the trigger setup must now be considered together with how it will be used to activate the sonic elements required to successfully realize the performance. In designing the layout of the trigger setup, students must consider (1) how to activate the constituent parts of the arrangement using four limbs, (2) the technical and physical performance limitations imposed by software and hardware, and (3) the trigger equipment available. Sonic elements of a performance can be recreated using samples, live software instruments, or both. The sample-based approach could be used with almost any MIDI percussion controller, as only a single software sampler instrument needs to be activated. Percussion controllers, such as the SPD-20, that are capable of sending multiple MIDI notes on different MIDI channels from a single pad expand the performance possibilities to playing live instruments, activating automation, and rearranging the performance using more advanced software functionality. When considering the approach to take, standard acoustic drum kit coordination no longer needs to dictate how the piece will be performed, as noted above. This does not mean that non-drummers could easily perform these pieces, however; the coordination required to play these arrangements is an extension of the coordination drummers already possess. The software and hardware afford any sound to be played with any limb, which opens up new possibilities and approaches to playing sounds that would normally be associated to a particular limb on a standard drum kit (e.g., the bass drum is ordinarily played with the right foot). A common approach is to play the drum pattern and bass line of the song with the feet, leaving the hands free to play the rest of the harmonic and melodic content using sticks. The next stage is probably the most laborious—building multiple patches on the controller that contain the specific MIDI information required to activate desired sounds. Often, several patches are required to perform a single section of the song, sometimes two per bar, due to limits on the number of MIDI notes that can be sent from any patch and the need to access different sounds within bars. Additionally, the need (for playability) to achieve a somewhat consistent layout of sounds on the pads increases the number of patches required. For example, if there is a repeated musical phrase present in the song, it makes sense that the MIDI notes required to play the phrase appear in the same pad positions on different patches, making the performance easier to remember. A key factor in realizing these projects is that the performance must be played to a metronomic click track, normally provided by the selected music software. This allows the music software to control patch changes at predetermined points using MIDI Program Changes.22 A MIDI track in the music software is populated with the Program Changes that reflect the way patches must be loaded to play the arrangement. This allows the performer to concentrate on playing through the song without having to physically change patches by pressing buttons. The Roland SPD-20 is able to react to Program Changes and set up new patches in a very short space of time, which makes 195

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

it an excellent choice for this project. I have tested some other sample trigger pads and have found that they are unable to load samples quickly enough after receiving a Program Change message to allow sounds to be triggered on beat one of the next bar. Alternative approaches to changing patch23 exist, but they do not provide the timing accuracy required to realize these projects. Following each of these stages, students prepare to perform the song. At this point an interesting phenomenon occurs; although the students are essentially learning a new piece of music, they have spent so long thinking about the way in which it will be performed that they have already learned most of the physical coordination patterns and, therefore, learn to perform the piece very quickly. The main challenge lies in fusing the sections of the song together so they can play the performance from start to finish. The final stage of the process is the performance of the song in the summative performance assessment. Having completed these projects students are proficient in the use of drum kit related technologies and many go on to feature the use of drum kit technology in their Year 4 exams the following year.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Developing a notation standard and sharing projects In addition to the curriculum I designed, I have developed a musical notation method that allows my students to learn electronic performances I have created, and provides a way for students to share their own projects with others in the class. Figure 13.3 shows the clef and notation legend I have created that indicates where notation for each limb appears on the staff and Figure 13.4 provides an example of how my notation is used to define the pad number to be struck, the necessary rhythmic phrasing that must be followed to ensure that sounds are activated at the correct time, and the coordination required to perform the piece. This approach provides a flexible solution to notating performances that would work for controllers made by alternative manufacturers with different numbers of pads or kit configurations. The multi-stave method used by Jimbo (2003) (mentioned earlier in this chapter), only works effectively when using MIDI note numbers to trigger the specific corresponding melodic pitch, i.e., a note number of 60 will play C3. This approach does not translate well to sample-based projects where any pitch or sound can be activated using any MIDI note number. With the addition of a standard drum kit staff, the notation method also works effectively for hybrid setups (Figure 13.5). This notation method is highly effective in addressing how to perform a piece. However, until there is an easy way to automatically replicate the technical setup of the equipment originally used to develop the project, on technologies or software from a different manufacturer, the sharing of these projects remains problematic; these challenges are discussed further, below.

196

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

Figure 13.3  Notation legend.

Figure 13.4  Example of percussion controller notation to suit the electronic setup in Figure 13.2.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 13.5  Notation for a Hybrid kit setup.

Summary With greater numbers of drummers integrating technology into their setups it is essential that these technologies become a common feature in drum kit curricula, and that drum kit students leave university with a strong knowledge of drum kit related technologies and their potential for creative application. Whilst the curriculum and associated learning and teaching I have designed focus on the use of Roland products and Apple’s Logic Pro X, the content and learning are entirely portable and relevant to the drum kit, hardware and software technologies produced by other manufacturers. The curriculum explores the language of MIDI, as for most music technologies this is the only way to activate devices produced by different manufacturers. By learning the relevant MIDI functionality, connectivity, parameters, and commands, students can apply this knowledge in any drum kit technology setting. 197

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

The decision to move much of the “static” curricular content into the online learning environment ensures that students can revisit content to prepare better for class and be ready to deploy the learning in a practical setting. Utilizing problembased learning in face-to-face sessions encourages students to activate their learning in a supportive classroom environment, to devise solutions to issues that may impinge on the practicality of performances, and ensures students have the confidence to use drum kit technologies in their own performance work. Through development of their solo electronic performance projects, learners develop a deeper understanding of how technologies function and how they can be used to enhance and extend the creative possibilities in performance. The development of a notation method should allow for wider sharing of these types of project. However, in order to make the sharing process more efficient, a method of converting the configuration data saved from a specific controller and remapping it for that of a different manufacturer would need to be developed. Additionally, a method for sharing projects that use sample controllers should also be explored, as the sample controller-based approach removes the reliance on having identical music software. Furthermore, deciphering the way in which a piece has been performed on pads (i.e., was pad 1 struck with the right or the left stick?) that enables it to be easily notated, is particularly challenging. This will require future research and product development with drum kit technology manufacturers in order to find a workable solution.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Notes   1 Sample pads are self-contained units with a playing surface consisting of multiple rubber pads. Each of the pads on the playing surface can activate either internal or user-created audio samples. Examples of these units are the Roland SPD-SX, Yamaha DTX Multi 12, and the Alesis Sample Pad Pro. These can be connected via MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to third-party software or hardware to activate other sounds.   2 Percussion controllers are self-contained units that have a playing surface consisting of multiple rubber pads that when struck can activate internal factory preset sounds only. Examples of these units are the Roland SPD-20, Alesis Performance Pad, and the Nord Drum 3P. These units can be connected via MIDI to third-party software or hardware to activate other sounds.   3 Simmons drums were produced between 1980 and 1994 (and have since been reimagined for the contemporary era, with a new line appearing for the US market in 2017). These were fully electronic drum kits that resembled the typical acoustic drum kit setup. The 1980–1994 kits were recognizable by their hexagonal pads.   4 Music software packages such as Logic Pro X and Ableton Live.   5 The Roland SPD-20, first released in 1998, is a single unit containing eight playable rubber pads that can each be used to either activate internal sounds or to send MIDI information to 198

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

an external device (such as a synth) to activate external sounds. The SPD-20 also has four trigger inputs allowing up to eight additional pads to be added to the peripheral setup.   6 Trigger pads have a playing surface generally made of rubber or mesh that when struck, output or affect an electrical signal. If connected to a drum trigger module this electrical signal can be used to activate a sound. These are not to be confused with acoustic drum triggers, which use the vibrations of an acoustic drum to activate sounds in a trigger module.   7 The instrument is sometimes taught as an ensemble instrument focusing on integration and support for a band. The outcome for students studying one-to-one with a tutor that focuses primarily on teaching advanced instrument specific skill sets will likely be very different.   8

The hybrid setups used by these drummers allow them to emulate, or reproduce, the sounds created in the studio by producers in a live environment.

  9 External examiners are employed within the UK’s higher education sector to ensure that assessments are fair, relevant, and meet the subject benchmark expectations at the appropriate level as set out by the national Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). 10 This is achieved by simply substituting a pad strike for a strike that would naturally occur in a standard acoustic drum groove or by using the bass drum pattern to simultaneously activate a bass guitar note. 11

Setups that use only trigger pads and percussion controllers with music software. These no longer conform to the standard drum kit layout and can be used to activate any recorded sound with any limb.

12 The London College of Music is a music examination board. They provide a framework of exams that are used to benchmark and assess the level of both practical musicianship and/ or music theory from beginner level to the advanced musician.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

13 AVID is the parent company that designs, supplies, and supports the music software packages Pro Tools and Sibelius. AVID offers professional accreditation and certification pertaining to use of each of their software packages. 14 Students have often had prior experience of the Sibelius music scoring software at secondary school, hence why they can achieve the more advanced 110 qualification by the end of Year 1. 15 The SPD-20 contains ninety-nine patches. Each patch can contain a different configuration of MIDI settings, internal sounds and effects. 16 The constituent instruments of the arrangement have been exported as audio files and loaded into a software sampler. They have then been mapped using MIDI to pads on the SPD-20 to allow the piece to be performed by a single player using a hybrid drum kit setup that incorporates the SPD-20 percussion controller. 17 These elements of the curriculum include: software functionality, hardware functionality; MIDI and how it relates to software and hardware; and learning how to perform “Spitfire” by The Prodigy. 18 This includes how to connect the SPD-20 via MIDI to the computer, accessing internal sounds on the SPD-20, accessing and adjusting the MIDI parameters on the SPD-20 and how these signals are processed in Logic Pro X music software.

199

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

19 The Roland SPD-20 percussion controller has been chosen due to its: MIDI functionality; four stereo connections for external trigger pads; two MIDI notes numbers on different MIDI channels can be sent from a single pad; and the speed of setup after a patch change. The MIDI output functionality allows the SPD-20 to be connected to an external device such as a computer to access and activate a wider variety of sounds. This also allows for multiple instruments to be activated when a single pad is struck. Four trigger inputs allow the units eight pad playing surface to be extended by adding as many as eight external trigger pads, thus increasing the number of sounds that can be activated on a single patch. The speed of patch changes and setup ensures that the performer can make use of every note in the bar rather than having to wait for the unit to load information before the player can continue with the performance. 20 This refers to using MIDI parameters, such as single MIDI notes, to activate functions in Logic X such as software instrument automation, Touch Tracks, and the Chord Memorizer. 21 This refers to the way instruments might be grouped together when they are exported from music software as a single consolidated sample or how a melody might be activated from a series of individual pads using MIDI. 22

MIDI Program Changes can be used to change patch on the SPD-20. A sequence of Program Changes placed on a MIDI track can be used automate the patch changes on behalf of the performer.

23 Foot switches could be used as tools to shift through patches; however, foot switches are less flexible than MIDI Program Changes and, in this setting, do not provide the timing accuracy required to realize these projects. Most controllers have a patch chain function that allows the user to arrange patches in a specific order, but there is a limit to the number of patches that can be contained in the chain (sixteen per chain on the SPD-20). In some cases, students require sixteen patch changes just to perform the verse of their chosen song, so this limit precludes the use of this function.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Bergmann, Jonathan and Aaron Sams (2012), Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day, Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. Bruford, Bill (1982), Bruford and the Beat, Baltimore: Axis Video, videocassette (VHS). Dean, Matt (2012), The Drum: A History, Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. Edinburgh Napier University (n.d.), Edinburgh Napier University Strategy 2020. https://view. joomag.com/strategy-2020-building-success/0536670001429606029?short (accessed November 20, 2018). Garrison, D. Randy and Terry Anderson (2003), E-Learning In the 21st Century: A Framework for Research and Practice, London: Routledge. Garrison, D. Randy and Heather Kanuka (2004), “Blended Learning: Uncovering Its Transformative Potential in Higher Education,” The Internet and Higher Education, 7 (2): 95–105.

200

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

When Is a Drummer not a Drummer?

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Hartley, Peter and Ruth Whitefield (2011), “The Case for Programme Focused Assessment,” Educational Developments, 12 (4): 8–12. Jimbo, Akira (2003), Fujiyama: Combining Acoustic and Electronic Drums, New York: Carl Fischer. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDowell, Liz (2012), Programme Focused Assessment: A Short Guide. Available online: www.brad.ac.uk/pass/resources/short-guide.pdf (accessed November 15, 2018). Meskill, Carla (2013), Online Teaching and Learning: Sociocultural Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury. Selwyn, Neil (2011), Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates, London: Continuum. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), I Drum, therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Graham Welch and Ioulia Papageorgori (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Terry, Bob (2011), The Beginners Guide to Electronic Drums, Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard Corporation. The Percussive Arts Society (1984), Percussive Arts Society International Drum Rudiments. Available online: www.pas.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/ pasdrumrudiments2015.pdf (accessed February 19, 2018). The Prodigy (2004), “Spitfire,” track 1 on Always Outnumbered Never Outgunned, XL Recordings, compact disc. Vygotsky, Lev S. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

201

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

202

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

14

Sleepwalkers, Beware: Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education Zack Moir and John Hails

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction This chapter deals with higher popular music education (HPME) and has a particular focus on the teaching and learning of composition. Our interest in this area derives from our practice as musicians and educators, and our deeply held mutual belief that creative engagement with music should be central to music education for all (Allsup 2013; Kaschub and Smith 2009; Kratus 2016; Moir 2017; Moir and Medbøe 2015).1 In writing this chapter we have borrowed from the language and ideas of poststructuralism, focusing particularly on the work-concept (discussed below).2 Although this movement could be said to relate principally to literary theory, most famously the writings of Roland Barthes (1977) and Jacques Derrida (1998), specific applications to the field of music (particularly those of Lydia Goehr [1992]) have served as a touchstone for our thinking. We both lecture in composition at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU), Scotland, but on opposite sides of a “divide” between the two undergraduate music programs offered by this institution.3 Specifically, in terms of composition lecturing duties at least, Moir lectures on the BA popular music program, and Hails on the BMus music program. It could be stated, crudely, that we work on either side of a “classical” versus “popular” music split in the department. However, this “divide” (if it exists at all) is far from binary, such that it may not even be sensible to talk about any difference in our respective perspectives and practices in relation to the “types” of music in which our students specialize.4 In order to understand our philosophical position, readers may find it instructive to understand more about the authors’ musical, educational, and professional backgrounds. Hails received piano lessons from the age of 6, clarinet lessons from the age of 8, before discovering his musical “home” in listening to classical repertoire. Composition lessons followed from the age of 17 before he matriculated onto a traditional music degree program that focused on common-practice classical 203

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

music repertoire. Moir accidentally fell into saxophone lessons at school at the age of 14 and he grew up avidly listening to a great deal of popular music. His undergraduate degree was in popular music performance (as a saxophonist), but he graduated with a hunger for the further study in a more traditional university setting. For Hails, a master’s program in composition felt entirely comfortable. For Moir, studying for a master’s in musicology at an ancient university—which was a hugely positive and inspiring experience—had the unfortunate side-effect of creating something of a perceived distinction between those who compose serious music, and those who merely write music, as part of a wider range of musical activity. At the time, this led to some minor insecurity with regard to the use of the term “composer” as a description of his identity.5 Moir’s PhD (2011) was not in the field of composition but it involved writing a great deal of music. Without formal training in composition, he regards himself as being enculturated in compositional practice through osmosis and autodidacticism. By contrast, Hails’ PhD (2008) was in notated composition, and much of his commentary focused on the specifics of this notation. His teaching at ENU on the classical program focuses on supporting students interested in writing “unconventional” music, particularly involving live electronics. Moir began teaching on the popular music program at ENU with a philosophy to build on the tradition of songwriting (i.e., only focusing on the writing of hit tunes, hooks, etc.) which had been the approach of some colleagues, to develop a more holistic approach to teaching composition in the context of popular music education (PME). Despite the apparent differences in our backgrounds in terms of educational and professional/compositional experience, we share a lot of ideas and values when it comes to composition education and its place within music education in the widest sense. These ideas form the basis of the argument set forth in this chapter.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Problematic definitions One of the main issues faced when discussing problems in the area of PME is that definitions of our terms are continually problematic. For example, the very nature of this discussion means that it is necessary for us to use terms such as “popular music,” and (often subconsciously as an antonym) the term “classical music.” As mentioned above, we recognize that in practical terms, such a clear-cut distinction between these two areas of music is impractical and does not hold up to scrutiny. This is because the very terms “popular” and “classical” are so broad, and encompass so many different styles, approaches, and practices. However, the fact remains that people do use these terms consistently, not only in everyday parlance but in scholarly and educational contexts too—particularly the label “popular music.” For example, this chapter finds itself in a volume on popular music education; many higher education (HE)

204

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

programs in the UK specifically focus on popular music; and there is a commonly held understanding among colleagues in this area that, although this may not actually refer to anything specific, what it does mean, particularly in an educational context, is “not classical.”6 Thus, the term “popular music” is used to connote difference or otherness from that which is commonly described in educational contexts simply by the term “music” (Bennett 2017). Consider, for example, the way in which undergraduate programs are advertised—it is almost unheard of to encounter degrees in “Classical Music.” This, of course, is because classical music, whatever that may mean, is generally the norm within the academy and the term “popular” is required to delineate an area that differs in some way from that which is commonly referred to as “classical.” The same is true of programs in, for instance, folk music, musical theatre, or jazz. We recognize that this chapter is somewhat polemical in nature. However, it is not our intention to directly criticize colleagues working in the area of composition education (“classical” or “popular”) but to deliberately stoke the fires of a critical discussion that is taking place in the literature (McLaughlin 2017; Moir 2017; Moir and Medbøe 2015; Parkinson 2017, 2014, amongst many others; Parkinson and Smith 2015; Smith 2014; Warner 2017) about the nature and value of HPME.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Same thing, different tunes? A common way for people to make distinctions between PME and classical music education is in terms of debates surrounding formal and informal learning. Green (2008: 10) outlines five fundamental principles of informal popular music learning and explains how they differ from normative practice in most formal educational situations. She suggests that, in informal popular music learning: (1) learners often start with music they already know and enjoy or identify with, as opposed to being introduced to music chosen by the teacher; (2) students learn about music and develop skills through listening and copying recorded music, as opposed to learning mainly through reading notation; (3) learning can take place individually and in peer groups, and does not require teacher supervision/guidance; (4) learning takes place in haphazard, idiosyncratic ways, rather than through preplanned, structured lessons; and (5) there is an emphasis on personal creativity, which is developed through performance, improvisation, listening, and composition, for example, rather than reproduction of existing musical works. While Green’s defining characteristics are very useful in helping us to understand the nature of informal popular music learning, it would be a mistake to assume that HPME is necessarily based on these, or similar, principles. In practice, it would be naïve to assume that teaching and learning activities in HPME will develop competencies through informal musical learning, while classical music (because of its strong links to notation), will forever be associated with formal

205

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

learning. However, such distinctions are made (by colleagues and students alike) and one can sympathize with the tendency, or even desire, to conceive of these complex issues in this simplistic dichotomous way. However, we are mindful of Folkestad’s (2006) warning (a similar point is made by Green 2002: 4) that this way of thinking betrays a “misconception and prejudice” and that “the most important issue might not be the content as such, but the approach to music that the content mediates” (142).7 The notion of popular music being taught and learned in an informal way, mostly by ear and through largely autodidactic means, is entirely representative of some contexts/situations (see D’Amore and Smith, 2016; Green 2002, 2008; Moir 2016, for example) and many young people can and do develop musically in this way. However, given the way in which popular music has developed within institutions in recent decades, for many students, the purely aural and autodidactic transmission of popular music is essentially an overly romanticized caricature that serves to muddy the waters in this area and to perpetuate stereotypes and false dichotomies. From our experience of working with school pupils and undergraduate students with an interest in popular music, the vast majority have learned to play (popular music instruments such as guitar, bass, keys, and vocals, for example) in school in a formal manner (certainly when considered according to Green’s principles, above) using instrumental method books that deal specifically in popular music and sitting performance exams, for example, in a very similar way to their peers who have studied “classical music.”8 Are we fooling ourselves to consider PME, as it exists in the academy, as a distinct area of practice with different rules and customs (see Henson and Zagorski-Thomas, Chapter 1 in this volume)? Or has it reached a stage (in the UK, at least) through its own formalization and academicization (or “schoolification,” see Cremata, Chapter 28 in this volume) that it behaves in the same way as “classical” music education but with different tunes? Since entering the academy, popular music has often been treated as material or content that can be subjected to the same pedagogies and assessment practices as that which we refer to as classical music (Green 2002; Kratus 2015; Smith 2014). This has, for a number of practical, social, and pedagogical reasons, led to a scenario in which popular music in the academy could be viewed as a metaphorical “square peg in a round hole” (Moir and Medbøe 2015: 148). The problem, we contend, is not the fact that popular music exists within the academy but, rather, that it is being inserted as mere content into a system that does not allow it to function as a meaningful, autonomous area of study.9 Indeed, as Kratus (2015) notes, the vast majority of tertiary music education culture in the twenty-first century largely replicates nineteenth-century pedagogies and practices associated with preparing students for orchestral employment. Given the reality that very similar models are employed in many popular music programs around the world, one might question the relevance of such an approach, and a cynical reading of the situation may lead us to question whether HPME is simply training students to be the next generation of wedding band performers.10 206

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

Work, canon, and the composer There exists a cultural tendency to think of a composer as the singular “genius” (see Nettl [2015: 57–59] for a discussion of the role of “culture heroes”) who produces an object that is played by performers and consumed by a (usually) discerning and knowledgeable audience (see Burnard [2012] for a detailed discussion).11 Indeed, Nettl singles out Western art music as being unusual in that the student is expected to engage directly with “the work” in its notational linked form before hearing their teacher play it (Nettl 2015: 391). The work, and the associated authority or genius of the composer, are generally unquestioned by educators and students alike, and are therefore rigid. For sake of clarity, when using the terms “work” or “work-concept” in this chapter we do so in reference to Goehr’s (1992) definition/conception. She explains that we have a tendency to:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

see works as objectified expressions of composers that prior to compositional activity did not exist. We do not treat works as objects just made or put together, like tables and chairs, but as original, unique products of a special, creative activity. We assume, further, that the tonal, rhythmic, and instrumental properties of works are constitutive of structurally integrated wholes that are symbolically represented by composers in scores. (2) The work-concept has had an enormous influence on modern understandings of, and attitudes toward, music “since its emergence around 1800” (Beard and Gloag 2005: 190). As Strohm (2000) notes, “the work-concept has, of course, deeply influenced our musical culture; it is as ‘real’ as any aesthetic idea can be, and many generations of musicians have believed in it” (128). We find it particularly interesting to note the use of the term “believed” in this context, as it serves as a reminder that what is being discussed here is, indeed, a concept, i.e., an abstract idea. The problem is, however, as Goehr (1992) states: a concept can become so entrenched within a practice that it gradually takes on all the airs and graces of necessity. Thus it has become extraordinarily difficult for us nowadays to think about music—especially so-called classical music—in terms other than those associated with the work-concept. (13) The cultural hierarchization that is imposed by the work-concept is, at least in part, responsible for the development of a canon of musical works—that is to say, works (and in turn, their composers)—that have been deemed worthy of celebration, and importantly, preservation and conservation (as is the root of the terms “conservatoire”

207

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

and “conservatory,” for example). Such preservation/conservation allows for future performance, musicological analysis, and also provides material for teaching students about music and, in turn methods for teaching music.12 Unequivocally, the notion of canon is clearly linked to ideas of value (aesthetic, cultural, political, etc.) and, thus, those works that could be considered as belonging to the canon are assumed to be more valuable cultural artifacts, often because of structural qualities and adherence to preconceived ideas of compositional value. The consequence of the development of a canon (which functions as a powerful cultural force) is that types of music that do not conform to such ideals become marginalized, and perhaps even fade into obscurity because they are not preserved for scholarship, analysis, and performance. While it is clear that the formation of canons allows for works to be preserved, studied, and performed, the relationship is cyclical in that the performance and study of certain works, cements their place in the canon through ascribing value to them. In this way, canon formation serves to crystallize or petrify living culture and establish “a central repertory that distill[s] the society’s central values” (Nettl 2015: 356). In popular music practice, however, the notion of the work-concept is far from central, and we cannot point to any sensible equivalent. That said, it could be argued that popular music is not entirely free of work-focused thinking (Tagg 2000) and that recordings (usually albums) are regarded by some to have a similar status to “works.”13 Similarly, we can see some parallels to ideas surrounding canon formation in such lists that purport to detail the “100 greatest albums of all time,” for example. However, as Horn (2000) argues, popular music practice:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

is generated not by a work-concept but by a different set of precepts arising from the interactive nexus of performer-performance-performed. This nexus is capable of generating debate about the concept of the work—not the other way round. (34) The work-concept has been challenged in recent decades and in the words of Strohm (2000) has “been ‘on the run’ for a considerable time now” (130). For example, Barthes (1977) makes the distinction between “text” and “work,” a formulation that includes a performative distinction. “Text” for Barthes is open to multiple interpretations rather than a single interpretation and the independence of the text from the writer posits that text is a “social space” (164). This distinction is also explored by Derrida (1998), heralding the end of “the idea of the book [which] is the idea of a totality” (18) and welcoming the age of the text that is at once destructive and creative, active and “disruptive” (18). Transposed into the field of music, Goehr’s (1992) exposure of the problematic nature of the work-concept demonstrates how music from earlier eras have been granted definitive form and “work status” enforcing “constancy and standardisation” (247), goes some way toward establishing a post-structural framework for us to consider canon. 208

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

Having noted the decline in the dominance of the work-concept, at least through the lens of post-structuralist philosophy, readers may question how relevant it is for us to continue with this discussion in the context of the current chapter. We believe that there is much value in continuing with this line of thought because of the enormous impact on historical developments, and contemporary approaches to music education of work-focused music education. In the case of classical music education particularly, the tradition of studying “great” composers and their “masterpieces,” and learning repertoire associated with one’s instrument, for example, is practically integral to the endeavor. It would be fair to suggest, as Parkinson (2014) does, that “a symbiotic, mutually perpetuating relationship” (15) exists between the classical music canon and (classical) music education. Our worry is that something similar is happening in many areas of HPME and could be in danger of seriously undermining the value of popular music in the academy.

Composition education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

To engage in a cultural practice like learning a specific style of music involves learning how it works on a structural level but also submitting to, and thereby perpetuating, those values, beliefs, and ideologies that pertain to associated educational practices. Within the academy, this has typically involved engaging with canonical works and, as discussed above, has something of an ossifying effect on the works in question and the practices and pedagogies by which they are taught, learned, and transmitted—usually from “master” to “student” (Lebler 2007). As Allsup (2013) notes, this ossification can be said to have some advantages: Innovative knowledge gets quickly codified, procedural know-how apprenticed and passed on, technologies are protected from large-scale change, practicespecific meanings become inherited through repetition and obedience, and mastery is easily recognized and celebrated. (60) However, such codification, master-apprentice transmission/inheritance of knowledge and practice, and repetition, etc., leads to a situation in which many people designing education programs believe that it is their duty to do so in a way that upholds such practices. Thus, programs were—and arguably still are—developed in universities and conservatories that enshrined particular practices, pedagogies, ways of learning, and materials studied, in accordance with canonic norms (Bennett 2017 discusses similar issues). This is also enforced by the publication and continued use of certain texts, for example, the near-ubiquitous textbooks on harmony (e.g., Piston 1987) or orchestration (e.g., Adler 2002), for example, that are staple volumes

209

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

for undergraduates—particularly composers on classical programs. When educators prescribe certain texts and encourage or even require their students to use them they are, often unquestioningly and perhaps inadvertently, reifying the composers and the techniques employed in their work, discussed therein. This is a clear example of the way in which the work-concept has permeated the academy and influenced pedagogic practice. However, while there may be advantages (if only in terms of pedagogical expedience) for educational programs that place the study of canonic repertoire at the heart of most areas of practice, we believe that curricular design that is unquestioningly influenced by the work concept might well have the effect of stifling creativity, individuality, and the sense of exploration and experimentation that we would like to instill in our students. There is an unfortunate tendency, in many areas of HE music study, to see canonical Western classical music as something that is more “worthy” and “prestigious” than other more recent types of music (including popular music), perhaps because of its association with the academy and consequent formalized pedagogies. Many of the expectations, “engrooved practices” (Trowler, Saunders, and Knight 2003), behaviors, and procedures that are inherent in HE (i.e., pedagogies, assessment practices, the need for grading and ranking of students, the focus on product, etc.) perpetuate a proclivity toward teachers and students dealing with music in a way that easily fits within existing institutional structures (for more discussion on institutionalization see Hebert, Abramo, and Smith 2017: 467–468). As such, we would like to respectfully suggest that many people dealing with composition education within HE, on both sides of the classical/popular music divide, are at risk of sleepwalking into a situation in which their practice, the educational experiences of their students, and the general cultural perception of “composition” as a musical practice/phenomenon—particularly in the domain of popular music—are being undermined. As Smith and Parkinson (2015) note, “higher popular music education has necessarily accommodated to the expectation and norms of the HE context in which it has set up home” (97), and this, we argue, is the very root of many of the problems in HPME. By doing things “the way that they have always been done,” or uncritically adopting pedagogic practices and ways of working that were developed for other forms of music, HPME runs the risk of rendering itself invalid and subjecting itself to the type of ossifying canonization that has been more associated with classical music and that is, in our opinion, antithetical to popular music practice. While there may be historical/ political/social reasons for this enduring tendency toward crystallization in classical music (and further discussion is beyond the scope of this chapter), we argue that the tendency for HPME to follow suit due to institutional norms and convention is missing an opportunity to capitalize on myriad cultural, processual, and contextual differences in the world of popular music. It is important to remain ever mindful that, “in the everyday language of popular music practice … the term ‘work’ is rarely, if ever, found” (Horn 2000: 14). Why, then, should our educational practice be so influenced by such a concept? 210

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Although we have, over the last three decades or so, seen a considerable increase in the number of HE and further education (FE) institutions offering programs in popular music in the UK “there is considerable continuing debate regarding what is meant when we refer to ‘popular music education’” (Moir 2017: 37) and it is clear that, on a global level, the field is characterized by a great deal of variety. This fact has been discussed elsewhere (Cloonan and Hulstedt 2012; Mantie 2013; Smith 2014) and it is not within the scope of this chapter to discuss it in greater depth. Suffice to say, the variegation that characterizes this area of music education reflects the fact that the very notion “popular music” is in itself nebulous and indefinable, and “represents an impossibly wide umbrella that encompasses a huge variety of styles, making it difficult to quantify musically” (Shuker 2012: 261). As such, we do not attempt to define popular music in stylistic, demographic, or commercial terms—indeed, the authors admit to frequently considering whether or not the word “popular” is particularly useful, and whether it has become more of a problematic identifier than a meaningful indicator of a particular type of music. Popular music composition (PMC) (Moir and Medbøe 2015) does not have a long history in the academy and some may even find the use of the word “composition” alongside the term “popular music” an uneasy juxtaposition.14 The term “songwriting” is more commonly encountered (Kratus 2016) when referring to activity surrounding the origination of new music within HPME, but we are reluctant to rely on that term because the implication of the centrality of “songs” does not reflect the creative experience of a great many people working in this area. Composing music is so closely aligned with, and indeed embedded in, the practice of popular music that it is problematic to separate writing/creating and playing, in many ways. As Moir (2017) states: In popular music, the composer/performer dichotomy is usually less pronounced as artists regularly perform their own music. Popular music practice is more associated with creativity and production, and less with learning, interpreting, and performing the works of great composers. (40) This said, it is of increasing concern that many popular music programs are designed and structured in ways that do not adequately reflect the nature/values of popular music, but that prioritize those approaches to pedagogy and assessment, for example, that already sit comfortably within the structure of HE institutions. By way of example, it is not uncommon in the case of solo and ensemble performance classes in popular music programs, for lecturers to provide set repertoire for students to learn and perform for exams/recitals.15 This, in the context of the history of institutionalized music education, may not seem unusual or even problematic. However, if we (as a field) are truly interested in creating meaningful and relevant popular music programs then it is important to question the value of pedagogies that prioritize the learning and performing 211

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

of preexisting music over the origination of music due to the tacit dominance of the work-concept in music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions: Sleepwalkers, beware We suggest that two key factors influence this discussion. Firstly, institutionalized music education has been structured in more or less the same way for centuries (as discussed above) and popular music programs have merely adopted the course design, pedagogy, approaches to assessment, and values of (classical) music courses. In doing so, many of the values of this way of learning music have tacitly and subconsciously been adopted, for example, the notion of the “work” (Barthes 1977; Goehr 1992) and the “genius” of the composer which leads to the implicit, but keenly felt, hierarchical relationship that exists between the composer, the performer, and the audience. By extension, this very construction renders the idea of composition as something specialist and not related to the everyday practice of performing musicians. Musicians learn the work of the great composers and musical training involves students becoming enculturated or inducted into the ways, customs, and values of the musical traditions that they (may wish to) learn. After all, we would argue that there is clearly no such thing as one (sensible) universal understanding of what constitutes musicianship, or music theory, or performance, or any of the areas that music students tend to study. Any such study pertains directly to the tradition in which they are being trained. Our deliberately provocative use of the word “sleepwalkers” has been with the intention of evoking the idea of educators in this area unquestioningly, even subconsciously, deferring to routine procedures and ways of working. While this is problematic in any area of education it is particularly problematic in HPME as, although this is a relatively new area, we believe it is in danger of becoming standardized, crystallized, work-focused, and author-centric through adherence to educational systems that are arguably unrelated to the everyday practices of popular music. We argue that this is true of many areas of HPME but particularly so when considering composition, which many people view as a rarefied activity that is integral to music (i.e., someone has to write the music we play) but essentially divorced from the everyday activity of music-making. We suggest that by sleepwalking into the situation described above, we are missing the opportunity for composition to be a way of learning for all music students, rather than an awkward specialism that fosters isolated, work-focused, authorcentric values and practices. This is an important consideration for educators on both sides of the conceptual pop/classical divide but, given the less pronounced composer/ performer dichotomy in many areas of popular music and the fact that popular music (in the broadest cultural sense) is less concerned with the proliferation of canonic material, and associated approaches to its study, then this is especially important for HPME in terms of the design of programs and learning experiences.

212

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

In an educational landscape in which we move away from a reliance on the study of works, we would also see a “despecialization” of the notion of composition and composers—toward something more aligned with popular music practice and culture. Creation and performance would not be seen as separate activities, but rather teaching and learning would be built upon the notion of originating music in all areas of the curriculum. Indeed, its centrality would guide students in their study and the very notion of the term curriculum would be challenged. We are in no way suggesting that a move away from the work-concept should invalidate the practice of creating music, nor would moving toward a text-focused approach to PME discourage educators from teaching students about traditions and their rules and structures. It would, however, allow for the creativity, the personal experiences and ambitions of the learner, and their prior knowledge to be celebrated as assets to their learning that should not be quashed by (or seen as subservient to) tradition and canonic “rules,” upheld by teachers, institutional norms, and cultural traditions. Although he was not directly referring to HPME, Allsup’s (2013) words when advocating for a “compositional turn in music education” are particularly resonant in the context of the current discussion:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

the social contract upon which the praxial philosophy of music education was built has now been turned on its head, with the curiosity-seeker in charge, not the teacher, not the author-composer. (65) It is our firm belief that we, as a community of popular music educators, should be mindful of our practice and continually engage in honest and thorough critique.16 In doing so, we should consider those aspects of our approach to education that exist because of, and are perpetuated by, the preoccupation of our field with (and cultural conditioning to unquestioningly believe in) the work-concept. We believe that meaningful HPME should enable all students to view the origination of music as a normative practice; be free from the strictures of codified musical practices defined by rules and norms of particular types of music; and to empower students to learn through creative exploration in a manner that holds their ideas as central, not to view them as deficit learners who must faithfully study the work of masters in order to have an appropriate music education. The needs of the creative learner should shape the educational experience—not the structures, histories, and traditions of certain musical forms. This will require some bold action, and for many educators this could be an uncomfortable suggestion. However, to continue the sleepwalker metaphor, we need to wake up to the social reality in which popular music practice exists and to stop forcing the music that our students are passionate about into inappropriate pedagogical pigeon holes, which serve nothing other than the perpetuation of established models.

213

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Notes   1

We have emphasized the word creative in this sentence as we feel that a great deal of music education is far from creative in nature, despite commonly held beliefs that music is a fundamentally creative subject.

  2 A definition of post-structuralism is certainly beyond the scope of the current chapter. However, for the purposes of this discussion, we conceive of this as a philosophical movement which essentially rejects the possibility for the objective study of meaning. Simply put, post-structuralism embraces subjectivity and argues for the validity of the readers’ interpretation in constructing meaning. Structuralists aim to derive or decipher meaning from the relationship of the constituent parts to the whole, whereas poststructuralists locate meaning in the mind of the reader (or listener, in this case).   3 See Edinburgh Napier University Music (2018) for more information about our programs.   4 We have used the word “types” here, in a deliberate attempt to avoid the use of the word “genres” which, we believe, becomes messy and problematic when dealing with such metaclassifiers as “popular” and “classical,” each of which encompasses a great many styles that could be considered as distinct genres.   5 We are both very much aware there is a tacitly implied qualitative difference between the verbs “compose” and “write” with regard to the origination of music. “Compose,” is much more aligned with the Western classical tradition, whereas “write” tends to refer to many of the same practices but in other areas.   6 See Frith (1996) and Smith (2014) for discussion pertaining to difficulties surrounding definitions of popular music.   7 This issue is also discussed by Lucy Green (2002: 4).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

  8 Consider the books and materials in the “Rockschool” (RSL 2018) or Trinity Rock and Pop (Trinity College London 2017) series, for example, which effectively provide printed (and, importantly graded) material for students to study, learn, and perform under exam conditions.   9 We, as a field, are guilty of developing and perpetuating educational structures, materials, ways of learning, transmitting, and engaging with popular music that, as Green (2002) suggests, bear little resemblance to the culture and social contexts in which it exists. 10

This is, in no way, intended to be pejorative and it is not our intention to belittle the practice of function band performance. However, we do (unapologetically) question whether or not the kind of approach to HPME that favors such practices is particularly relevant or meaningful, and whether we are missing other important opportunities if proceeding in this way.

11

It would be remiss to fail to acknowledge that this “genius” composer is also almost always white and male. While we can point to a number of examples where this is not the case, it is not unreasonable to suggest that this is the prevailing conception.

12 For a more detailed discussion of canon formation see Weber (1992, 1999).

214

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

13 If one views the roots of popular music as a moment of expression of resistance under the yoke of the dominant class of its time, it is tempting to diagnose the history of its industrialization in the twentieth century as a control mechanism leading to the establishment of a new canon with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the curriculum in high schools (Weale 2015). 14 When using the term PMC in discussions with some colleagues in other institutions that offer popular music programs, Moir has sometimes faced questions about what it actually means and how it is taught. Perhaps more concerningly, it has on occasion been treated with a degree of condescension with the tacit (but clear) implication that the very notion of “composition” as it pertains to popular music may be considered as “quaint” or an inherently nonserious “novelty.” 15 It could be argued that even the nature of performance exams as an assessment form in this area is somewhat unsuitable, and such approaches enforce certain ways of teaching, learning, and working, that focus mainly on perfecting a performance of preexisting material. Additionally, one might even draw attention to the terminology surrounding such practices, for example, “repertoire,” “ensemble,” “recital”—none of which are at home in the everyday lexicon of popular music, other than as a result of imposed institutional norms. 16 Given that the focus of this volume is on PME, our conclusions are mostly focused on this area but many of the ideas, suggestions, and warnings would be equally applicable to classical music education. Given the relatively recent advent of PME, however, we see our suggestions as more of an intervention than a call to fundamentally alter the nature of traditional music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Adler, Samuel (2002), The Study of Orchestration, third edition, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Allsup, Randall Everett. (2013), “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to Open Texts,” in Michelle Kaschub and Janice P. Smith (eds.), Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, 57–74, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland (1977), Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath, New York: Hill and Wang. Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag (2005), Musicology: The Key Concepts, London: Routledge. Bennett, Joe (2017), “Towards a Framework for Creativity in Popular Music Degrees,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 285–297, London: Routledge. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cloonan, Martin and Lauren Hulstedt (2012), Taking Notes: Mapping and Teaching Popular Music in Higher Education, York: Higher Education Academy.

215

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

D’Amore, Abigail and Gareth Dylan Smith (2016), “Aspiring to Music Making as Leisure through the Musical Futures Classroom,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 61–80, New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edinburgh Napier University Music (2018), “Come Study with Us.” Available online: www. edinburghnapiermusic.co.uk (accessed November 16, 2018). Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Frith, Simon (1996), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goehr, Lydia (1992), The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Farnham: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Farnham: Ashgate. Hebert, David G., Joseph Abramo, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), “Epistemological and Sociological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–478, London: Routledge. Horn, David (2000), “Some Thoughts on the Work in Popular Music,” in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, 14–34, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Kaschub, Michelle and Janice Smith (2009), Minds on Music: Composition for Creative and Critical Thinking, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education. Kratus, John (2015), “The Role of Subversion in Changing Music Education,” in Clint Randles (ed.), Music Education: Navigating the Future, 340–346, Abingdon: Routledge. Kratus, John (2016), “Songwriting: ‘A New Direction for Secondary Music Education’,” Music Educators Journal, 102 (3): 60–65. Lebler, Don (2007), “Student-as-Master? Reflections on a Learning Innovation in Popular Music Pedagogy,” International Journal of Music Education, 25 (3): 205–221. McLaughlin, Sean (2017), “Mediations, Institutions and Post-Compulsory Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 114–126, London: Routledge. Mantie, Roger (2013), “A Comparison of “Popular Music Pedagogy” Discourses,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 61 (3): 334–352. Moir, Zack (2016), “Popular Music Making and Young People: Leisure, Education, and Industry,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 223–240, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moir, Zack (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Bloomsbury Singer Songwriter Handbook, 35–50, London: Bloomsbury.

216

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Toward a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

Moir, Zack and Haftor Medbøe (2015), “Reframing Popular Music Composition as Performance Centred Practice,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 8 (2): 147–161. Nettl, Bruno (2015), The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions, third edition, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Parkinson, Tom (2014), “Values of Higher Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the UK,” PhD thesis, University of Reading. Parkinson, Tom (2017), “Dilemmas of Purpose in Higher Popular Music Education: A Critical Portrait of an Academic Field,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (2): 133–150. Parkinson, Tom, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Piston, Walter (1987), Harmony, fifth edition, London: W. W. Norton & Company. RSL (2018), “Rockschool.” Available online: www.rslawards.com/rockschool (accessed November 16, 2018). Shuker, Roy (2012), Popular Music: The Key Concepts, London: Routledge. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Ioulia Papageorgi and Graham Welch (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Strohm, Reinhard (2000), “Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical WorkConcept,” in Michael Talbot (ed.), The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, 128–152, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Tagg, Philip (2000), “Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Practice,” in Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, 71–103, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trinity College London (2017), “Rock & Pop.” Available online: http://trinityrock.trinitycollege. co.uk/ (accessed November 16, 2018). Trowler, Paul, Murray Saunders, and Peter Knight (2003), Changing Thinking, Changing Practice, York: Learning and Teaching Support Network. Warner, Simon (2017), “Where to now? The Current Condition and Future Trajectory of Popular Music Studies in British Universities,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 127–138, London: Routledge. Weale, Sally (2015), “Sgt. Pepper and Santana Added to Music GCSE Curriculum,” The Guardian, May 13, 2015. Available online: www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/13/ sgt-pepper-beatles-santana-music-gcse (accessed February 5, 2018). Weber, William (1992), The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weber, William (1999), “The History of Musical Canon,” in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music, 336–355, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

217

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

218

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

15

Facilitating Music Video Projects in the Classroom: From YouTube to Musical Playground

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Christopher Cayari

As a fresh school music teacher in the early 2000s, I heard about a video repository website named YouTube that had an incomprehensible number of music videos and performances that I could access for free. Listening examples in my classroom abounded; commercially produced popular music videos, top-notch symphonic documentaries, and live-performance recordings of genres ranging from garage bands to folk music were only the tip of the iceberg. I pointed my students to the website to learn, mimic, and be inspired. YouTube was an invaluable resource for me and my students as we explored the informal music learning common amongst popular musicians: memorizing, copying, jamming, embellishing, improvising, arranging, and composing (Green 2002). When I left the school classroom in 2008 to pursue a master’s degree in music education, I began to think about YouTube not simply as a space where videos are uploaded and stored, but one where people interact with others, learn about music, and inspire new ways of creating and sharing music.1 For my master’s thesis, I conducted a case study chronicling the journey of a musician who became a pioneer in the YouTube musical community (Cayari 2011). His YouTube channel archived his growth as a performer and composer/arranger; immersing myself in his covers and original music led me to this assertion: YouTube can be seen as a large canvas that allows millions of artists to place their own mark on a digital mosaic. The performers on it have their own opuses and experiments. Because of its interactive qualities, YouTube is an art medium; a technology which allows listeners to become singers, watchers to become actors, and consumers to become producers creating new original works and supplementing existing ones. It allows everyone to have a voice that can be heard and a face that can be seen. (Cayari 2011: 24)

219

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

I returned to teaching after finishing my degree and considered how I could incorporate my new understanding into work with my students. I adapted the approach Green (2008) suggests for using informal music pedagogies in the classroom. I asked my students to create music videos. They could form their own groups, choose their own songs, and use various software or hardware (either their own or belonging to the school). They were given a couple of weeks to prepare their music, record it, and create a video to share with their peers. I facilitated these projects in appreciation courses, ensembles, and group fretted string classes. I was blown away by my students’ creativity and discussed these projects at length and how they fit within a music program (Cayari 2014).2 My students were an inspiration to me and served as a catalyst for the research I have conducted since I undertook doctoral studies in 2012; research on YouTube artists (Cayari 2016b, 2018) and on the effect of music video creation projects on a classroom (Cayari 2015). My fascination with YouTube constantly provokes me to design projects for facilitating music video creation with my students. This chapter is a critical look at projects I have undertaken with students to help them learn musical and technological skills that help them make music and that will hopefully inspire them to continue creating after they leave the classroom. YouTube has become the second most visited website in the world (Alexa 2018), with more adolescents using YouTube to listen to music than any other source (Nielsen 2012). It is imperative that educators understand how the medium influences music creation, listening, and learning. By examining the creative processes of YouTube musicians and applying these practices to my classroom, I have developed instructional projects for students based on my research participants’ experiences and have found that some students find the practices to be intuitive. Music video projects allow those students the opportunity to fine-tune their technological tendencies and provide opportunities for those who may not instinctively gravitate toward music video creation to learn important skills; skills that relate to recording, editing, producing, and publishing digital music, not to mention considering what the visual representation adds to the audience’s experience of music video performance.

Creative freedom vs. conducted following: Thinking outside of the box I afforded my students a lot of freedom in music video projects (Cayari 2014, 2015), explaining that I was “throwing them into the deep end,” manifested through a simple directive: make a music video. I gave them the opportunity to have flexible schedules, work with whom they wanted, and arrange or compose the songs they desired to perform in a style that was meaningful. I was shocked that students did not initially appreciate this freedom; many, in K–12 schools and universities, stared blankly at me

220

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Facilitating Music Video Projects in the Classroom

and asked, “Well, what do you want us to do?” They wanted step-by-step directions on how to achieve an A grade. This should not have surprised me. Choices were not often given to them within their performing ensembles; the conductor chose the music and told them how to play it. The freedom of the music video creation projects challenged students to think “outside the box” as I encouraged them to create something of which they were proud. Encouraging students to work in this unfamiliar way consistently resulted in projects that showcased well-produced cinematic music videos, multitrack recordings exhibiting high-level musical skills, and entertaining, quirky performances that brought out showmanship and charisma. While most non-video-based informal music pedagogies encourage this type of freedom, it is important to note that technology both affords and limits creativity; I look at some considerations in this regard in the following sections.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Developing ensembles of one: Multitracking and soloistic virtual ensembles A popular recording practice is multitracking—layering audio tracks on top of one another to create a cohesive sound. Multiracking has manifested throughout YouTube communities in the form of productions I call soloistic virtual ensembles, i.e., music videos that feature one person playing or singing all the parts of a musical arrangement or composition. Soloistic virtual ensembles on YouTube elicit a video representation of the performer, providing the illusion that an ensemble of clones is performing as a cohesive unit. Soloistic virtual ensemble performers make music in a variety of styles: barbershop quartets, in which clones jest and joke with each other, modern popular bands that produce cinematic stories, and singing heads performing choral octavos through static split-screens that visually resemble the opening credits of the classic hit US television program The Brady Bunch. Soloistic virtual ensembles allow creators to pursue music on their own terms and to branch out from the music and music learning most common in schools. YouTube creator Melody Myers was afraid that her Sweet Adelines (barbershop for treble voices) quartets of popular songs would have to be taken down once she pursued a professional opera singing career (Cayari, 2016b).3 If Myers had sung only music given to her by her teachers, she would have only sung opera, classical, and folk music. However, she performed music on her YouTube channel from musical theatre, rock and roll, jazz, opera, barbershop, and Top-40 genres. In the classroom, I witnessed a student put together a soloistic virtual ensemble (Cayari 2015).4 This student’s favorite parts of his undergraduate music teacher education were the instrumental methods courses, and for his music video project he used a beginning band arrangement to create a multitrack, one-person recording in which he played all the instruments he had learned in his courses. The student thus

221

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

demonstrated proficiency on various instruments and exhibited mastery of other musical skills including score interpretation, recording and editing, and musical expression. Traditional methods courses required students to learn how to play and teach the instruments of a wind band, but making this video allowed this student to practice, perform on each instrument, and record them. He chose how to use dynamics, tempi, and articulations to express his musicality, and editing his ensemble in a digital audio workstation (DAW) allowed him to play with his ensemble by exploring how parts depended upon and enhanced each other. While sometimes YouTube creators’ ambitions are at odds with institutional practices, the skills taught within schools and by private instructors can synergize with video creators’ aspirations, as was the case with David François, the creator of the David Wesley YouTube channel (Cayari 2018).5 François did not learn music video creation from a singular source, instead applying knowledge he learned in his piano lessons, tinkering with composition software, and through learning to play euphonium in school and then joining the Royal Canadian Sea Cadets’ marching band. These experiences compelled him to compose brass ensembles for his worship band that later appeared as soloistic virtual ensembles on his YouTube channel. The recording and singing skills he honed at his church served as a springboard for the creation of his first multitrack YouTube recordings, and set him up to become a successful YouTube creator with nearly 50,000 subscribers at the time this chapter was written. François’s success on YouTube inspired him to continue creating seven-voice, a cappella arrangements for his channel. In an interview, he acknowledged that his YouTube channel helped him maintain his arranging abilities.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Collective virtual ensembles: The synergy of many voices David François told me excitedly about fans who commented on his YouTube channel to say they performed his arrangements at their churches. The arrangements that were initially meant for only François to perform and share with his followers had been copied by other church musicians who learned his arrangement by ear (and by sight), providing an example of the informal music learning practices outlined by Green (2002). François’s copiers and the countless fans asking for sheet music of his arrangements inspired him to create his own virtual choir populated by his viewers; François provided sheet music for one of his most popular songs and asked his fans to record themselves singing it. After receiving all his participants submissions, he edited the voices together to create what I call a collective virtual ensemble.6, 7 I use collective virtual ensemble techniques in my praxis as a teacher educator, in an attempt to save my students time and reduce their anxiety. I allow my elementary

222

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Facilitating Music Video Projects in the Classroom

education generalist students to submit video playing tests on ukulele and recorder. Students are given the option to play their test live and in person, but they overwhelmingly choose to record so they can submit the best take for a grade. Once their playing tests are turned in, I compile the projects into a collective virtual ensemble8 and love seeing my students’ faces in class when we all watch the finished product of them virtually performing together! It is a pleasure to listen to students at their best and grade them. However, occasionally the quality of the recording makes my editor-heart sink. Ceiling fans produce background noise and distracting visual busyness. Volume levels can be inaudible or so loud that they distort, sometimes even both in the same recording. Videos recorded from phones can have a quality that rivals professional cameras or be so pixilated that a student looks like a fleshy blob. Each challenge requires me to make a choice on how to represent the student. To provide an example of the agony of a collective virtual ensemble editor, here are some typical reflections on what happens when I have a student’s audio track that has notes that are out of tune. I have to ask myself the following questions: Should I exclude the out-of-tune track? If I do this, a student does not exist in my final mastered audio. Then a new consideration arises: do I include that student’s name in the credits or visually represent the student in the video? Should I include the audio track but keep the volume low? If I do this, I have an existential crisis that challenges my belief that every voice or instrument in an ensemble is necessary and every musician’s contribution leads to the ensemble’s success. I worry that this student may know they had notes out of place and when they hear a mastered audio, they may question why I minimized their contribution. Should I include the poor audio track but edit it so the student sounds in tune? If I do this, I have to go through the tedious process of “fixing” the student’s “mistakes.” Furthermore, the student may wrongly conclude that they sound much better than they do. Should I include the substandard audio track as it is, giving it as much presence as in-tune submissions? If I do this, the final product will be riddled with mistakes. I do not expect my students’ live performances to be perfect, but a history of highly edited recordings compels me to make sure our virtual ensemble sounds the best it can. Should the mistakes of one student ruin the recording of all the others?

●

●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

●

Considering these questions and then discussing them with students can allow an educator/editor to have dialogue with students about musical growth and the skills necessary to produce audio recordings and music videos. These philosophical conundrums are imperative to consider as students practice alternative means of sharing music beyond staged live performances.

223

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Technological affordances and limitations Creating music videos requires access to and facility with technology. As such, video creators often have a plethora of hardware, software, and learning tools at their disposal. Hardware available ranges from cheap, accessible options like cameras on cellular phones and laptops, to professional-grade cameras one might find in television studios. Many YouTube musicians purchase middle-range cameras that feature single lens reflex (SLR), which allow for detachable lenses to be used for various distances, shutter speeds, and exposures. Some creators use their cameras to record audio, while others purchase separate microphones, preamps, and digital mixing consoles for clearer, more professional quality. Audiovisual recording and editing software also comes in a wide price range. Computer software programs like Audacity for audio and iMovie or Windows Movie Maker for video are free entry-level options for music video creation. Mid-level programs like PowerDirector (Windows) and Filmora (Mac) provide powerful features that are easy to use. Advanced creators often use industry standards like Adobe Premier and Pro Tools. Apps on smart devices (phones and tablets) offer user-friendly options for multitracking. Karaoke-style apps like Smule (2018), StarMaker (StarMaker Interactive Inc. 2018), and Musical.ly (2018) have helped my students produce easy click-and-record music videos with professionally made background tracks. Each of these apps has free and pay-to-play songs available. My more adventurous students use Acapella from PicPlayPost on Apple (Mixcord Inc. 2018) and Acapella Maker—Video Collage on Android (Hecorat 2018) for easy crafting of multitrack videos with up to nine audiovisual tracks. Of course, while these suggestions are popular in the latter half of 2018, tools will inevitably change owing to market forces and technological advance. Creators often educate themselves on how to use equipment to make sophisticated projects.9 Learning resources are abundant online and available for free in tutorials on YouTube. Many institutions subscribe to tutorial repositories such as Lynda.com and “pay” sites offering tutorials like Chegg.com. Workshops, for instance, YouTube Boot Camp, and conferences such as VidCon and South by Southwest (SXSW) offer communities in which people can learn face-to-face from others in panel and lecture settings.

Conclusions Music learning institutions have long traditions of providing spaces for learning through (and leading to) live performance, and the growing prevalence of modern popular music learning in schools allows a new generation of students to perform. Simultaneously, the emergence of social media has inspired informal learning practices through which musicians develop musical autonomy, experiment with technology, foster musical skills, 224

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Facilitating Music Video Projects in the Classroom

collaborate with others, and produce art. It would behoove music learning institutions and music educators to help students learn the skills they need to create and publish music videos online. As one who has provided a space for students to explore the potential and myriad possibilities of music video creation, I have seen students take control of their music-making. Through working on and with audio and video recordings, they are required to self-assess musical skills as they develop. Students take the opportunity to collaborate and learn valuable lessons about working with others to develop creativity and interpersonal skills. They create artifacts and learning that are not possible without the use of technology, and they learn how to work with the limitations and affordances of machines and programs. Students should consider how they can share their music with people beyond the concert hall, open mic, or dive bar. YouTube and the creators who use the platform can teach us a lot about popular music-making and learning in the twenty-first century. Using practices developed by YouTube creators, music educators can help institutions of learning to equip students with the skills necessary to create popular music well after they have left our tutelage.

Notes 1 Space and place theory is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, I have discussed elsewhere (Cayari 2016a) how social connections and finding meaning through media has allowed for people to consider YouTube as simply a space that exists or a place that is meaningful and interactive, a concept developed by space/place scholar Gee (2005). 2 Additional topics covered in the mentioned article (Cayari 2014) include addressing educational standards, setting up music video creation projects, technological resources, assessment, copyright, and barriers.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3 Myers’s name is used with permission in accordance with Institutional Review Board (IRB) requirements, see Myers n.d. 4 An excerpt chosen by my student, Jacob Bross, is used with permission in accordance with IRB, see Cayari 2017a. 5 François’s name is used with permission in accordance with IRB, see Wesley n.d. 6 An example of one of François’s collective virtual ensembles is used with permission in accordance with IRB, see Wesley 2017 in the references. 7 One of the most prominent collective virtual ensembles is the Eric Whitacre Virtual Choir, which I discuss at length elsewhere (Cayari 2016a). In summary, Whitacre published videos to recruit singers from across the world to record themselves singing his octavos. Singers then sent Whitacre their videos and a team of editors compiled them to create virtual choirs. 8 See Cayari (2017b) for a virtual ukulele ensemble featuring my students at Purdue University and the students of Cara Bernard at the University of Connecticut. All videos in this collective virtual ensemble were used with permission by performers. 9 For more in do-it-yourself recording, see Chapter 30 in this volume.

225

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Alexa (2018), “Alexa’s Top 500 Global Sites.” Available online: www.alexa.com/topsites (accessed December 13, 2018). Cayari, Christopher (2011), “The YouTube effect: How YouTube Has Provided New Ways to Consume, Create, and Share Music,” International Journal of Education & the Arts, 12 (6): 1–28. Cayari, Christopher (2014), “Using Informal Education through Music Video Creation,” General Music Today, 27 (3): 17–22. doi:10.1177/1048371313492537. Cayari, Christopher (2015), “Participatory Culture and Informal Music Learning through Video Creation in the Curriculum,” International Journal of Community Music, 8 (1): 41–57. Cayari, Christopher (2016a), “Music Making on YouTube,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 467–488, New York: Oxford University Press. Cayari, Christopher (2016b), “Virtual Vocal Ensembles and the Mediation of Performance on YouTube,” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://hdl.handle. net/2142/90478. Cayari, Christopher (2017a), “Cayari 2015 - Jacob 30,” YouTube, March 2, 2017. https://youtu. be/8VeUMf-H4Fk (accessed November 16, 2018). Cayari, Christopher (2017b), “Viva La Vida—Virtual Ensemble Performed by PurdUKEConn— Spring 2017,” YouTube, April 13, 2017. https://youtu.be/3iK2I26DdlI (accessed November 16, 2018). Cayari, Christopher (2018), “Connecting Music Education and Virtual Performance Practices from YouTube,” Music Education Research, 20 (3): 360–376. Gee, James Paul (2005), “Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces,” in David Barton and Karin Tusting (eds.), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power, and Social Context, 214–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Bodman: MPG Books. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Farnham: Ashgate. Hecorat (2018), Acapella Maker—Video Collage, v. 0.5, Android 4.2.2. Mixcord Inc. (2018), Acapella from PicPlayPost, v. 3.2, iOS 10.0 or later. musical.ly (2018), TikTok - Real Short Videos, v. 9.1.0, iOS 9.3 or later. Myers, Melody (n.d.), “Home,” YouTube. www.youtube.com/user/SugarbabyLA (accessed November 16, 2018). Nielsen (2012), “Music Discovery Still Dominated by Radio, Says Nielson Music 360 Report,” August 14, 2012. Available online: www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/music-discoverystill-dominated-by-radio--says-nielsen-music-360.html (accessed November 27, 2018). Smule (2018), Smule—The #1 Singing App, v. 7.2.9, iOS 9.0 or later. StarMaker Interactive Inc. (2018), StarMaker—Sing Karaoke Songs, v. 7.2.6, iOS 9.0 or later. Wesley, David (n.d.), “Home,” YouTube. www.youtube.com/channel/UC5L4_zhPrXyuXU9yIipMaA (accessed November 16, 2018). Wesley, David (2017), “O Canada 150—Virtual Choir & Concert Band,” YouTube, September 2, 2017. https://youtu.be/FTfREKLrcxE (accessed November 16, 2018). 226

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part IV

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music Education in Schools

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

228

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

16

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose John Finney

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction The past fifty years have seen classroom music education striving to be more inclusive, accessible, and responsive to cultural and social change, and decolonized from longstanding hierarchical values that have consigned popular music to marginal status and what is Other. But music in the school is sponsored by the state and national policies frequently play a significant part in mediating the way classroom music is formulated and practised. In consequence, this chapter places popular music education in the context of historical and contemporary policy-practice debate that has shaped the music education for all children and young people as part of a general education. Part 1 provides examples of the practice of music education today in three English schools before sketching a historical perspective on this view of the present, with particular attention paid to the making of a National Curriculum for Music in England. In this way, something of the nature of music education as a contested concept and an area of ideological struggle is presented. In Part 2 the question of “why music education for all children?” is addressed through the lens of Gert Biesta’s three-part model (Biesta 2010), enabling thought to be given to the ways in which purpose can be formulated, and by extension the ways in which a popular music education might articulate a rationale as part of a general music education for all children and young people. In this way a window is opened into the nature and character of music in the school providing a context for conceiving of an “in school” popular music education and how it might be delineated and justified. Thus, a contribution is made to “bridging the gap” between popular music and music education as propagated through the institution of the school (Rodriguez 2004).

Part 1 Rarely, if at all, does a school music teacher in England self-identify as a popular music educator. Nevertheless, the uses of popular music in the classroom is near ubiquitous and sometimes extensive as witnessed in two of the examples of school music presented 229

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

below. Rather than any attempt to expose models of popular music education, the three vignettes are intended to show some recent developments in classroom practice. The vignettes arise from my observation of practice, both participant and nonparticipant, as well as ongoing correspondence with the music teachers involved. As a former teacher of music graduates learning to be school music teachers I have been privileged in gaining access to their developing practice.

1. Silent disco

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Silent Disco—Year 9 have been writing club dance pieces using industry standard software.1, 2 They have incorporated a variety of minimalist techniques including phasing, repetition, gradual layering and metamorphosis into their compositions and have developed their skills as composers and producers. Tonight we invite you to dance along to our Silent Disco event where all forty compositions will be played. The wearing of rave paint and glow bracelets is actively encouraged. Enjoy! This was the invitation awaiting visitors to a London school on an evening celebrating the pupil’s “beautiful work.”3 I had been invited by the music teacher whom I had kept in contact with since her year of teacher training when I had been her supervisor. I had never been to a silent disco. Neither had I worn rave paint or a glow bracelet. With wireless headphones on and surrounded by the makers of the music dancing and waving glow sticks in celebration, it made good sense. I was struck by the spaciously rich quality of the sound and especially the thickness and depth of the bass. Some pupils had worked individually and some in pairs, and together had made a near seamless compilation of the forty pieces. The work had been uploaded to the school’s Google Drive from where pupils can download their music. Meanwhile many have asked for the mp3s directly by email to be shared at home. Some have made ringtones of their music.

2. Making the school’s Song Book In another secondary school just a few miles from where I had encountered the silent disco all pupils are taught to play a big band instrument. It is through the teacher’s selection of popular music in a hip-hop style familiar to the pupils that instrumental technique and ensemble skills are mastered. Tonight, after school, is the first rehearsal of the Gala Band which is to represent the school in a coming together of pupils from London schools in celebratory performance at the prestigious London music venue, the Barbican. 230

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

All pupils aged 11–14 receive two one-hour classroom music lessons each week.4 One is dedicated to big band instruction while the other provides general musical experience and is designated as core music. The music teacher has come to see how the accumulated learning from both big band instruction and core music lessons creates a school Song Book, and in turn the formation of a Community of Practice (See Wenger 1998).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3. First Access to music I have entered one of England’s grandest medieval cathedrals to the distant sound of a string orchestra rehearsing. I have come to see the culmination of a local primary school’s participation in the Cambridgeshire Music Service’s First Access instrumental learning program.5 I sit next to a proud parent making frequent affirming eye contact with her daughter and there are other pupils scanning the audience in order to make their own familial connections as they do. The children aged 7–8 present an hour-long program showing how their varied repertoire has provided the basis for mastering fundamental string playing techniques. There is a stillness and composure in this string orchestra as each musician listened to a backing track, a soft pop ambience, that provides the ground for their playing, while watching attentively the hand gestures of their conductor. While this is an example of “traditional” music education it is popular music that is playing a crucial role in the learning experiences of the young musicians. These three snapshots, a small opportunistic sample of music education in the schools of England in 2016, provide a flavor of the diversity of practice, including the use of popular music, and something of the common endeavor to educate musically at the present time as part of a general music education that is compulsory for all children aged 4–14. The children and young people are in the process of making, performing, and presenting music. In this it is popular music that is central to achieving both relevance and impact. The teachers have created musical experiences considered appropriate to the needs of each particular group including choice of content (musical material used), along with the methods of teaching employed. The teachers in their different ways are holding the torch long ago ignited from the Promethean fire that kindled the idea of music education as a component of a general education. While that may be a romantic view, and while change, transformation, and innovation in practice may be of more compelling interest at the current stage of late modernity, an appreciation of how we came to our current situation is instructive.

Compulsory music education for all children Historical studies have shown the ways in which ideas about music education have been embedded in social systems and political arrangements, revealing the power of ideas 231

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

about the nature of music, education, childhood, and imagined future societies. Music has found a place within the idea of a general education since pre-Christian times, whether viewed as a form of religious instruction, a means of moral improvement, a cultivator of taste, or a civilizing influence (Mark 2013; Rainbow and Cox 2006). However, music education as an element of a compulsory music education for all children has a relatively short history enabled by the rise of the nation state in the early nineteenth century and the establishment of national systems of education (Cox 2011; Williams 1997). In England, the Elementary Act of 1870 established free and compulsory education for all and by 1880 compulsory for all up to the age of 13. Music was a component of this general education offered, if at first restricted to singing and occupying a tentative place in the order of things, and unsurprisingly giving rise to dispute about content and methods of instruction. Initial dispute centering on the right method of teaching sight-singing gave way at the beginning of the twentieth century to debate about appropriate song repertoire. The choice was stark: was it to be folk song, thought to be music of the people communally created and practiced, or national song representing nobler cultural aspirations and bound to images of nation? The latter won the day with the publication of a National Song Book (Cox 1993). A school music education had become an accepted component of a general education and a matter of political and social interest. In providing historical perspectives on contemporary practice Stephanie Pitts (2000) shows how the twentieth century witnessed changes in ideas about the place of music in the school while at the same time broadening the scope of music as a curriculum subject. The invention of the gramophone brought forth a music appreciation movement, and there was increased interest in providing the opportunity to play instruments alongside time given to singing (Rainbow and Cox 2006). And then a wave of innovation in the 1960s and 1970s, and a creative imperative seeing composing and improvising music finding a place alongside performing and listening (Finney 2011; Paynter 1982; Swanwick 1979), and with the first serious attention given to the place of popular music in the curriculum in recognition of culturally diverse musical practices (Pitts 1998; Swanwick 1968; Vulliamy and Lee 1976, 1982). In this ongoing attempt to enrich and widen opportunities, ideas about what a “right” music education should consist of continued to be a source of debate. Whether a matter of curricular content or methods of teaching, music education remained a contested field (Cox 2001; Cox and Stevens 2010).6 The question of curriculum content, as seen in earlier struggles for the right song repertoire, has proved to be a question of “whose” music is to be taught raising questions of group, individual, national, and global identity. Herein lies what would appear to be an enduring struggle for culture, raising further questions relating to cultural hierarchies, cultural democracy, and the construction of musical canons and their attendant practices as the arbiters of what is considered worthwhile (see Wright and Davies 2010, for example). The question of “a right music education” like much else in educational debate can be considered in the context of a pull between culturally conservative and culturally 232

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

progressive forces. As Moore points out: “The traditional verses progressive debate has been conducted as a conflict about society itself, as reflecting a tension between social order and change, respect for tradition verses ‘permissiveness’” (Moore 2004: 147– 148). This tension came sharply into focus with the creation of a National Curriculum as part of the Education Reform Act of 1988 and well described by Shepherd and Vulliamy as “the struggle for culture” (1994).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A National Curriculum The Education Reform Act represented a calling of education to order by the Conservative government of the time.7 There had been long-standing concern among the political right that standards were in decline and that the nation itself was in decline. This called for a return to traditional values, to the restoration of culture, and drew upon a neoconservative narrative that held together nation-culture-identity (individual and collective)-social cohesion-educational curricula (Beck 1996). The making of a national curriculum provided the opportunity to restore (see also Finney 2011). In the process of determining the place of music in the curriculum a National Curriculum Working Group for Music was set up by the secretary of state for education, Kenneth Clarke comprising a broad range of stake holders, including representatives from the music industries and strongly advised by Her Majesty’s Inspectors.8 The group came to conceive of a music education in broad and generous terms taking account of the developments of the recent past as well as noting ongoing deficiencies. Chief amongst these was the decline of singing in schools. In the group’s interim report there was emphasis on cultural diversity with examples selected from pop, jazz, samba, salsa, and reggae, although it should be noted there was greater emphasis on “ethnic” materials than popular traditions (Department of Education and Sciences [DES] 1991). In the public debate that followed a long-standing struggle for culture came to the surface and erupted. The cultural conservationist perspective was quick to speak. Anthony O’Hear (1991), for example, attacked the working group for their cultural relativism: Should not the fact that a lot of rock music is violent, nihilistic, drug-orientated and sexually explicit have been in the front of the committee’s mind from the start? Should they not have been aware that not all music is equally civilizing, equally humane? Shouldn’t they have shown some inkling of the power of music, for decadence or for culture, for light or for dark, for Dionysius or Apollo? (11) Music education historian Gordon Cox was equally quick to recognize that here lay old stereotypes, cultural labeling, calls for the cultivation of taste, and an ideological will to reaffirm a Eurocentric view of music and music education (Cox 1993). Responses were 233

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

also swift from notable musicians such as Pierre Boulez and Simon Rattle defending the nonprescriptive and progressive vision of the working group. In the event the Secretary of State for Education came down on the side of tradition ensuring the maintenance of “the hegemony of the European ‘classical’ tradition, rather than holding to the brave vision of the Interim Report of a unified view of music encompassing a range of traditions” (170). For the first time in England a statutory music curriculum had been established with defined content, some of which was indeed highly stipulative only to be softened by the curriculum’s revision in 1995 (see Dearing 1994). Here requirements in the case of music were simpler and more generalized. Official attention was now being paid to assessment structures and to the nation’s literacy and numeracy. At the same time, there was ongoing concern about the nation’s perceived moral decline and the raising of overall standards of attainment leading to an intensification of school inspection9 and accountability10 (see Beck 1998). In fact, it is what came to be known as the “standards” agenda that has provided one of the most significant and enduring impacts of the creation of a national curriculum. Standards were and remain closely linked to a core preoccupation of government—to demonstrate that attainment in subjects relevant to economic performance is high and rising, that is, those subjects designated as core: English, maths, and science. As Gordon Brown notes, “there is a skills race … the challenge is now to unlock the talents of all people [to take part in a] global skills race” (2008: 27).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Millennial music education As the millennium approached, questions were being asked about the efficacy of music as a once-a-week classroom event. Was it capable of having the life and vigor experienced by young people in their bands, orchestras, choirs, rock groups,11 and private listening? For pupils of secondary school age in particular, music was a source of cultural energy, self-expression, and identity expression. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first century serious challenge was being made to the norms of secondary music schooling with the call for the way music was learnt beyond the school in its range of informal and less formal practices to impinge upon classroom practice (Lamont et al. 2003; Sloboda 2001). The interests, tastes, and identities of the pupils could lead the way. One significant response came from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation in the form of the Musical Futures initiative setting out to find “new and imaginative ways of engaging young people, aged 11–19, in music activities” (Price 2005: 1). This came in considerable part to be informed by the distinguished scholarly work of Lucy Green whose Music on Deaf Ears (1988) had proposed the ideological groundings of musical meaning making. Drawing upon the ways in which popular musicians learn (Green 2001), and through a program of field work in schools, a novel classroom pedagogy emerged showing how classroom music could emulate the world of popular musician’s informal learning practices (Green 2008). 234

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

The Musical Futures initiative was welcomed by the Labour government’s innovation unit, indicative of a government promoting creativity and entrepreneurship rather than any attempt to impose an evaluative form of culture (Hewson 2014).12 The initiative has sustained a mode of operation that provides music teachers with classroom curricular resources and training while creating a global community of like-minded teachers. While serving to challenge and refresh their practice there is the potential to reorientate the teacher’s overall perspective involving the recognition of the musical identities of their pupils and the ways in which their school music-making can be celebratory rather than alienating. With the coming of a new government in 2010, a Conservative-led coalition, sponsorship was given to music through the creation of a national plan seeking to provide all pupils with the opportunity to learn a musical instrument (see Department for Education (DfE) and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 2011). At the same time came the revision of the National Curriculum and by 2013 a new Programme of Study for Music had been created (DfE 2013). In this there was a renewed emphasis on cultural restoration with references to the greatness of the musical canon and allusion to “the best.” Pupils were expected to listen to “the best” music with a sense of discrimination.13 In a speech delivered at the University of Cambridge, Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove made a case for a traditional education in pursuit of achieving a shared common culture, and in the case of music this meant high European art music.14 It was important that there was: a shared appreciation of cultural reference points, a common stock of knowledge on which all can draw, and trade, in a society in which we all understand each other better.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

And that: there is such a thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding—intellectually, sensually and emotionally— than, say, the Arctic Monkeys. (Gove 2011) We recall the words of O’Hear (above) responding to the Working Group’s Interim Report in the making of a national curriculum for music. Some twenty years later Education Secretary Gove similarly relies upon a stratified view of culture, eschews diversity and plurality, insisting on rigid categorical distinctions between “high culture” and what is “other.” It was the reemergence of the neoconservative view of nation-culture-social cohesion giving fresh fuel to the traditional-progressive educational debate. There is of course a gap between official policy, political ambitions, and classroom practice. While each teacher is working within the constraints and freedoms afforded by the values of their particular school, determined to some extent by National Curriculum 235

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

requirements and examination syllabuses as well as the system of school inspection, there remains space for the interpretation of policy. In the case of music this is considerably wider than the core subjects of English, math, and science, and this we see in the three snapshots of practice set out earlier. Returning to the vignettes above there is strong synergy between the practice observed and the character and values of the school, as well as the convictions of the teacher. The silent disco is exemplifying the school’s commitment to project-based learning, the making of beautiful work and real-world learning. In this case the making of the school Song Book has been made possible by the commitment of the school’s sponsor to big band music, and viewed as satisfying the school’s claim to a curriculum that has depth and breadth, and where music is designated as a specialism of the school and a key contributor to pupils’ breadth of experience. The Year 3 string orchestra has been enabled by a portion of the school’s budget being allocated to this opportunity for all pupils to learn to play a string instrument. The school places great value in creating a vibrant musical component to the curriculum. In each case we see music as part of and integral to the wider endeavor of the school, as part of a general education thought to be of value for all children. In this, popular music is embraced as a powerful resource in achieving musical learning that has both relevance and impact. In Part 2 I turn to a theme running through what has so far been presented—the chapter now moves from theme to question. This is a fundamental question and one easily avoided or answered without due thought and consideration, a question easily placated by warm words, ideological assertions, or enthusiastic advocacy. What is a music education for and, by extension, what would a popular music education set within the framework of the school and a general education be for? Here is an opportunity to stand above the political fray evoked above, even if only for a short time, in order to speculate about what a good music education might be, what a good popular music education might be?

Part 2 In the book Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy (2010) the philosopher of education Gert Biesta points out that asking the question “what is the purpose of education?” has become increasingly difficult, because recent educational discourse within the major educational jurisdictions of the world have almost entirely focused on the measurement of educational outcomes. At the same time he points to the ever expanding rhetoric of “learning”—learning gains, lifelong learning, flipped-learning, learning partners, learning walks, slow learning, deep learning, e-learning, online learning, learning futures, assessment for learning, “we are a learning school.” Instead of asking what is education for, or what is good education, attention is paid to “the effectiveness of learning,” for example, “is this approach effective?” What is the most effective way to teach for the best outcomes? 236

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

In Biesta’s view questions concerning purpose, instead of being continually at the forefront of thought as a part of ongoing debate, are quickly settled. Despite a seductive rhetoric to the contrary, the very concept of education is in danger of being reduced to issues of efficiency and effectiveness. In addition to the problem of the focus on effectiveness there is the discourse of music education under siege giving rise to an incessant advocacy.15 There is the promotion of music as a source of, and servant to, all good things with claims that music has a proven impact upon something else, wider academic achievement, critical thinking, empathy, resilience, and so on (see Freer 2013). Music is presented as possessing a supposed inherent goodness and power to transform and redeem and, as both Beethoven and Michael Jackson mistakenly thought, the power to heal the world.16 This music educational advocacy yields a thousand blooms and ten thousand witnesses and is likely to make promises that cannot be kept (see Bowman 2005). In this way, the question of “what is music education actually for?” raises constantly a plethora of muddled responses and above all, the persistent narrative, wherein music’s value is given in terms of how music education might facilitate the learning of other (more important) subjects, as well as the development of individual personal qualities and virtue. While there is an important role for advocacy, and particularly when it is based upon evidence, it too easily becomes a surrogate for, and distraction from, considering purpose. But how are we to go about the question of purpose, keeping in mind that our task is to consider the purpose of music education within a general education for all pupils? In creating a framework for addressing the question of purpose, Biesta offers a framework for addressing this “what for” question. In finding purpose, a common starting point is to consider the nature of music supplemented by questions such as: What is education? What is music education? What is the nature of childhood? What kind of citizens do we want? What kind of society, etc.? The approach adopted, following Biesta, starts elsewhere while reaching into these questions. Biesta proposes that there exist three different yet interrelated functions that education performs. And by considering these as a composite framework it becomes possible to discuss and dispute what the purposes of education are, and for our purposes here to consider what the purposes of music education might be, and now I include popular music education.

1. Qualification In using the term “qualification,” Biesta (2013) is delineating the process that provides for the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that allow us to do something.17 Understandably, the qualification function is given great significance in any system of education. And some would argue that it is not only a necessary but a sufficient purpose. In the case of music we might ask in the most general of terms, and remember we are thinking about a general music education for all children: in what ways does a music education qualify 237

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

the child to do musical things-equipping them with knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make music well? In what ways might a popular music education embrace such a purpose? What kind of knowledge would be in mind? Would this be as much knowledge embodied and intuited as propositional knowledge understood as statements of truth, a knowing that this is the case?18 To what extent would this be dispositional knowledge? How might answers to these kinds of questions assist in shaping a set of educational aims giving direction to a curriculum? For Biesta the qualification function needs to be made sense of alongside two other functions, specifically, socialization and subjectification.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

2. Socialization Biesta’s second function is referred to as socialization, which is viewed as the process of inserting newcomers into a social order involving the transmission of the social norms required to maintain common ways of living, shared beliefs and values that are thought to bind us together (Biesta 2010). While socialization functions as a continual process beyond the confines of the school, in school we quickly learn that we do or don’t hug our primary school teacher, that there are times to move to music and times to be still, that it is good to be kind to other people both near and far away through the songs sung, that singing is a normal thing to do, that music is something that can be learnt about, and so on. Legislators from Plato to Gove have paid great attention to the socialization function of education. In England, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, singing was seen as the vehicle by which children would be inducted into a social order that is of course also a moral order. In 1836, civil servant and social reformer Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth proposed that singing is “an important means of forming an industrious, brave, loyal and religious people” (cited in Rainbow 1967: 120), the kind of sentiment that led to an ongoing commitment to forge and preserve a common song repertoire. And now in our own time, and with the cause of preserving a common heritage of song abandoned, there is the political ambition to create a common conversation around an agreed canon of musical works.19 At the same time Ofsted are monitoring the inculcation of British values, and music teachers are required to be a part of this. But all this brings into play a counter position that wishes to contest the existing social order by offering visions of a society transformed.20 Paulo Freire brings the matter into sharp focus: Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality 238

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (Freire 2000: 30) And Christopher Small writing in 1977 argues for creative activity to be placed at the center of music education so that it becomes: possible to control our own musical destiny, provide our own music rather than leave it to someone else to provide, then perhaps some of the other outside expertise that controls our lives can be brought under control also. (Small 1977: 214) The strained relationship between the maintenance (and restoration) of ways of life (culture) and their transformation is considerable. We recall from Part 1 above the persistent tension between conservation and progression. Thus, if pupils are to become qualified in making music well, they will need to be inducted into existing cultures of making music with the potential for the regeneration and creative transformation of practice. Our first and second purposes interact. Making music well requires knowledge, skills, and understandings of musical cultures. How might a popular music education respond to the tensions between a conserving and a transformational function? To what extent will critical pedagogies be central to practice? In making the socialization function problematic the ground has been laid to consider Biesta’s third category.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3. Subjectification Subjectification (an ugly word as Biesta acknowledges) is the process by which each child and young person becomes a subject; becoming independent from the social order, individuated and quite separate from any general notion of a person, an autonomous subjective self with the possibility of living creatively and critically. Neither the qualification nor the socialization functions of education of themselves recognize the uniqueness of each recipient of an education. Above, Small is writing about “controlling our own musical destiny” as a necessary resistance to the socializing process, and this hints at the sense of freedom that evolves from growth in self-awareness, in consciousness of the process of induction into the social order, of constraints and potentials, and of the possibility for personal agency and autonomy, meaning the capacity for self-government. Our actions are truly our own and we act authentically. In this way a music education can acknowledge an existential strand to its purpose. We can ask, to what extent would a popular music education address the growth and enrichment of the subjective life of the pupil? In summary, Biesta’s three dimensions overlapping and interacting, and productively living in tension, generate thought about what is good education? What is good music education? What is good popular music education? Consideration can be given to just

239

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

what emphasis is to be placed at different stages, in different places, and at different times and as circumstances call for. In this way we go beyond the narrowing discourse of educational efficiency and effectiveness and the promises made through advocacy. Through my extrapolations from the Biesta model I can offer for debate three purposes of a good music education: 1 To equip all children with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make music well. 2 To induct all children into existing cultures of making music with the potential for the regeneration and creative transformation of practice. 3 To enable all children to become unique individuals, subjectively enriched, and able to know a sense of personal freedom, even emancipation through music-making.

A wider consideration

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Is there a broader framework within which to place the question of purpose? One strong contender is the notion of education for human flourishing—music education for human flourishing, an idea made plain by Aristotle as eudaimonia (see Pangello 2012). In the broadest terms an education should enable the child to live well and fully flourish as a human being now and throughout their lives. Caterine Pangello writes: In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that eudaimonia means “doing and living well and being content.” For Aristotle this implies that eudaimonia involves activity and a striving for excellence. It is human nature to strive for self-development. Therefore the best form of eudemonia is gained by the proper development of one’s best powers and the most humane attitude. This identifies us as “rational animals.” It follows that eudaimonia for a human being is the attainment of excellence (arête) through the use and application of reason. (2012) Eudaimonia represents a lifelong goal. There is no point of arrival and “happiness,” merely being a state of mind is not what Aristotle is thinking of. The term “well-being” misses the mark too. The concept of human flourishing enables examining and attending to the structures that prevent this from being the case, to inequity and social injustice. In Gareth Dylan Smith’s I Drum, Therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer (2013) the author draws on the work of Waterman (1992) who interprets “Eudaimonism” as an ideal, “a Utopian realization of a person’s principal meta-identity” (Smith 2013: 57; see also Smith 2016), a place to find a true sense of self. A eudaimonic lifestyle in Aristotelean terms and hinted at by Waterman is an ethical pursuit and for contemporary 240

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

philosophers of music education music-making is an ethical encounter giving music education ethical underpinnings (see Bowman 2001; Regelski 2005). In discussion of music education’s means and ends, Bowman (2013), with eudaimonia in mind, proposes the self-evident truth that some ends are more momentous than others and that some of the ends served by music are clearly more humanely desirable than others. He writes: the best musical or educational practices are those that contribute to human thriving. And yet there are many ways in which humans may thrive, none of which follow inexorably or universally from a given musical action or practice. (4) Thus, music educational practice is above all else concerned with situational particulars and their contingencies, and any framework attempting to delineate purpose is ultimately accountable to an ethical evaluation of the ends served. This we imagine to be in the minds of the music teachers in my three snapshots cited earlier and their search for what a good music education is thought to be, and ultimately to the elusive question of what kind of person is it good to be.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Summary and conclusion In this chapter I have presented a view from inside the school, that place where a general music education is part of a general education, compulsory for all, and sponsored by the state. I have drawn attention to some of the ways in which this is circumscribed by government intentions and interventions, along with dominant voices seeking to guide the social order. Yet, through the three scenes from the classroom set out in Part 1 something of the varied and dynamic character of classroom music-making is observed and its potential to be many things working with and against official frames and expectations. In asking what a music education is for I have sought some detachment from the imminence of the classroom, from public policy, and much contemporary commentary focused as it is upon effectiveness and efficiency. With the aid of Biesta’s three-part model I have also moved beyond the myriad claims emerging from the enthusiastic rhetoric and vague advocacy of the present time that seeks to promote what are frequently sectarian or commercial interests in the advancement of particular forms of music education. Keith Swanwick, in a mood of moderation in the face of competing claims, noted that: Music maintains its foothold in formal education not because it gives some kind of direct sensory pleasure, or enhances the public image of a school, or because some few students may eventually earn a living in music-related 241

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

occupations. It persists in our educational systems because it is a form of human discourse as old as the human race, a medium in which ideas about ourselves and others are embodied in sonorous forms, ideas that may be simple or complex, obvious or enigmatic. And insight into these ideas—as into any significant idea—can be intrinsically rewarding. (Swanwick 1987: 4) Swanwick reminds us that while music in the school is a popular idea, its place is hard won, rarely unquestioned, or its character uncontested, and its status frequently marginal. However, it does maintain a presence as a constituent part of a general education in England and elsewhere and, therefore, as an entitlement for all children and young people and contribute to the furtherance of human flourishing. In Bringing it All Back Home: The Case for Popular Music in Schools, Rodriguez (2004) addresses the challenge faced by popular music education in “bridging the gap” between the traditions of formal schooling and the practices of popular musicians and popular music education. I suggest that one way forward, and in the spirit of Biesta, is to engage in fuller debate about educational purpose. In addressing the purposes of popular music education there is undoubted value in recognizing varied and diffuse goals, acknowledging multiple standpoints and epistemological possibilities (Herbert, Abramo, and Smith 2016). However, in offering Biesta’s dynamic tripartite model of educational functions, my own music educational extrapolation, and final embrace of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, there may be a common source of understanding what a compulsory music education is for. This can be one where popular music education is not merely a welcome guest but a fully assimilated force for the making of a good music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Notes   1 In England school years are numbered 1 to 13. Year 1 is age 5–6, Year 7 is age 11–12 and the first year of secondary school.   2 The teacher writes; “The club dance genre being emulated was closely linked to trance music specifically (think Insomnia by Faithless) and featured gradual layering, ostinato loops and repetition in general, as well as things like the ‘4 to the floor’ beat. Pupils also used techniques from minimalist music, for example by adding phase shifting drum parts or using note addition.” The software used for the composition project was LogicPro X.   3 The school is committed to project-based learning aiming to produce high-quality products through a process involving critique protocols, public audiences, models of excellence, and much time for multiple drafts and rehearsals. See An Ethic of Excellence (Berger 2003). Hence, “beautiful work.”   4 In England at ages 11–14 music is normally allocated a one-hour lesson weekly.

242

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

  5 First Access is a program providing pupils with the experience of learning a musical instrument at no cost. Nationally, 25 percent of pupils opt to continue with tuition for which a charge is usually made. In this case Cambridgeshire Music Service is the provider.   6

This work provides a ground-breaking cross-cultural historical study of music in compulsory schooling with contributors from Great Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Spain, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Cuba, Australia, China, Japan, and South Africa.

  7

The Conservative government had come to power in 1979 with Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. The passing of the Education Reform Act of 1988 represented the most significant education legislation since the Act of 1944. John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Conservative prime minister in 1990 and was reelected in 1992 to lead a new government to be replaced in 1997 by a Labour government led by Tony Blair. In 2010 a Conservativeled coalition government was formed with David Cameron as prime minister and Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Education.

  8 The inspection of British schools dates back to 1839 with the establishment of an independent inspectorate Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMI). The role was to report on the standards of education in state schools. In 1992 John Major reconstituted HMI as the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) seeking to hold schools more accountabile for their performance.   9 In 1992 the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) was brought into being by the 1992 Education Act and the Schools Inspection Regulations of 1993. It replaced the school inspection functions previously performed by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate for Schools (HMI).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

10 Between 1969 and 1977 a series of five pamphlets known as Black Papers opposed the excesses of progressive education. The writers were concerned with the threat to standards, order, and discipline. The papers served to fuel ongoing critiques of school standards and what was perceived as a creeping moral relativism. Black Paper 3 included the case of music. See Simpson (1970). 11

These refer to musical activity beyond the school.

12

The Labour government elected in 1997 championed the cause of education with the slogan “Education, education, education” and by the third Labour government elected in 2005 efforts were directed toward raising standards through a strategy unit and the deployment of national strategies for literacy and numeracy. Complementing this was the establishment of an innovations unit.

13 Reference to “the best” intentionally called forth the work of the nineteenth-century culture critic Matthew Arnold who in his essay Culture and Anarchy proposed that culture be the means “of getting to know, on all the matters that most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold 1869: viii) and viewed by the cultural conservationists as the touchstone of traditional values embodied in the great works of the Western canon. For a concise representation of this perspective see Scruton (2007). 14 The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s White Paper (2016) underlines the government’s reading of culture as “high culture” emphasizing that: “Knowledge of great works of art, great music, great literature and great plays, and of their creators, is an important part of every child’s education” (21).

243

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

15 For example, at the present time there is concern that music is disappearing from the school curriculum as a result of intensified accountability measures favoring core subjects. Advocacy is frequently used as a strategic tool in the art of political persuasion and central to securing funding and above all recognition. 16

For a comprehensive overview of such positions see Winner, Goldstein, and Vincent-Lacrin (2013).

17 What has our education allowed us to do? What has it enabled us to know and understand, think about, make judgments about? How has it enabled us to find a place in the world, the world of work, the world of leisure, community life, family life? How has it enabled us to enter into discourse about the world, to be politically literate, for example? 18 Music educationalists in England have argued for a plural approach to understanding the nature of musical knowledge in the face of the singularity of knowledge represented as statements of truth, as propositional knowledge, knowledge about music, knowing what is the case or in its most reductive form knowing “facts.” See, for example, Reid (1986); Swanwick (1994). 19 In 2016 the British government commissioned the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music to promote a hundred pieces of classical music for primary schools. 20 Paulo Freire is viewed as an important source of what is termed “critical pedagogy” and which sets out to develop a critical consciousness in pupils. Such pedagogy seeks to resist official curricula and what is thought to be the reproduction of the knowledge of the powerful. See Apple (1982) and Giroux (2011).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Apple, Michael W. (1982), Education and Power, first edition, Boston, MA: Routledge and Keegan Paul. Arnold, Matthew (1869) Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, London: John Murray. Beck, John (1996), “Nation, Curriculum and Identity in Conservative Cultural Analysis: A Critical Commentary,” Cambridge Journal of Education, 2 (26): 171–198. Beck, John (1998), Morality and Citizenship in Education, London: Cassell. Berger, Ron (2003), An Ethic of Excellence, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Biesta, Gert J. J. (2010), Good Education in the Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy, London: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, Gert J. J. (2013), The Beautiful Risk of Education, London: Paradigm Publishers. Bowman, Wayne (2001), “Music as Ethical Encounter,” Bulletin for the Council for Research in Music Education, (151): 11–20. Bowman, Wayne (2005), “Music Education in Nihilistic Times,” in David K. Lines (ed.), Music Education for the New Millennium: Theory and Practice for Music Teaching and Learning, 29–45, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Bowman, Wayne (2013), “The Ethical Significance of Music-Making,” Music Mark Magazine, Winter (3), 3–6.

244

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

Brown, Gordon (2008), “We’ll Use Our Schools to Break Down Class Barriers.” The Guardian, February 10, 2008. Available online: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/10/ gordonbrown.education (accessed November 16, 2018). Cox, Gordon (1993), A History of Music Education in England 1872–1928, Aldershot: Scholar Press. Cox, Gordon (2001), “Teaching Music in Schools: Some Historical Reflections,” in Chris Philpott and Charles Plummeridge (eds.), Issues in Music Teaching, 9–20, London: Routledge Falmer. Cox, Gordon (2011), “Britain: Towards a Long Overdue Renaissance?,” in Gordon Cox and Robin Stevens (eds.), The Origins and Foundations of Music Education: Cross-Cultural Historical Studies in Compulsory Schooling, 15–28, London: Continuum. Cox, Gordon and Robin Stevens, eds. (2010), The Origins and Foundations of Music Education: International Perspectives, London: Bloomsbury. Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (2016), The Culture White Paper, London: DCMS. Department for Education and Science (DES) (1991), Music Working Group: Interim Report, London: DES. Department for Education (DfE) (2013), The National Curriculum for England, London: DfE. Available online: www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-englandmusic-programmes-of-study (accessed January 5, 2018). Department for Education (DfE) and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (2011), The Importance of Music: A National Plan for Music Education, London: DfE and DCMS. Available online: www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-importance-of-music-a-nationalplan-for-music-education (accessed January 5, 2018). Dearing, Ron (1994), The National Curriculum and its Assessment: Final Report, London: School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. Education Reform Act (1988), London: Department for Education and Science (DES), Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Finney, John (2011), Music Education in England: The Child-Centred Progressive Tradition, Aldershot: Ashgate. Freer, Patrick K. (2013), “Advocacy for What? Advocacy for Whom?,” in Michael Mark (ed.), Music Education: Source Readings from Ancient Greece to Today, 286, London: Routledge. Freire, Paulo (2000), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin. Giroux, Henry (2011), On Critical Pedagogy, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gove, Michael (2011), “The Need to Reform the Education System,” speech made at the University of Cambridge, November 24, 2011. Available online: www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/michael-gove-to-cambridge-university (accessed). Green, Lucy (1988), Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology and Education, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Green, Lucy (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Aldershot: Ashgate. Herbert, David G., Joseph Abramo, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2016), “Epistemological and Sociological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt

245

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–478, London: Routledge. Hewison, Robert (2014), Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, London: Verso. Lamont, Alexandra, David J. Hargreaves, Nigel A. Marshall, and Mark Tarrant (2003), “Young People’s Music in and Out of School,” British Journal of Music Education, 20 (3): 229–242. Mark, Michael, ed. (2013), Music Education: Source readings from Ancient Greece to Today, forth edition, London: Routledge. Moore, Rob (2004), Education and Society: Issues and Explanations in the Sociology of Education, Cambridge: Polity Press. O’Hear, Anthony (1991), “Out of Sync with Bach,” Times Education Supplement, February 22, 1991, 28. Pangello, Caterina (2012), “Aristotle’s Concept of Eudaimonia,” Ask a Philosopher (blog), May 23, 2012. Available online: https://askaphilosopher.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/aristotlesconception-of-eudaimonia/ (accessed January 5, 2018). Paynter, John (1982), Music in the Secondary School Curriculum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pitts, Stephanie (1998), “Popular and World Music in the Secondary Classroom: A Historical Perspective,” Ensemble: The Magazine of the Music Masters’ and Mistresses’ Association, 48: 14–17. Pitts, Stephanie (2000), A Century of Change: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice in British Secondary School Music, Aldershot: Ashgate. Pitts, Stephanie (2002), A Century of Change in Music Education: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Practice in British Secondary School Music, Aldershot: Ashgate. Price, David (2005), Musical Futures, an Emerging Vision, London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Rainbow, Bernarr (1967), The Land Without Music: Music Education in England 1800-1860 and its Continental Antecedents, London: Novello and Company Ltd. Rainbow, Bernarr and Gordon Cox (2006), Music in Education Thought and Practice, second edition, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Regelski, Thomas (2005), “Curriculum: Implications of Aesthetic versus Praxial Philosophies,” in David J. Elliot (ed.), Praxial Music Education: Reflections and Dialogues, 219–248, New York: Oxford University Press. Reid, Louis Arnaud (1986), Ways of Understanding and Education. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), “Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), The National Association for Music Education, 13–28, Reston, VA: National Association of Music Education (US) (MENC). Scruton, Roger (2007), Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, New York: Encounter Books. Shepherd, John and Graham Vulliamy (1994), “The Struggle for Culture: A Sociological Case Study of the Development of a National Music Curriculum,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15 (1): 27–40. Simpson, K. (1970), “Music in Schools: The Problems of Teaching,” in Charles Brian Cox and Anthony Edward Dyson (eds.), Black Paper 3, London: Novello.

246

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Music in the School: Significance and Purpose

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Sloboda, John (2001), “Emotion, Functionality and the Everyday Experience of Music: Where Does Music Education Fit?,” Music Education Research, 3 (2): 243–254. Small, Christopher (1977), Music, Society, Education, London: Calder. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), I Drum, therefore I Am, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2016), “(Un) Popular Music Making and Eudaimonism,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 151–168, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Swanwick, Keith (1968), Popular Music and the Teacher, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Swanwick, Keith (1987), “Editorial,” British Journal of Music Education, 14 (1): 3–4. Swanwick, Keith (1979), A Basis for Music Education, Slough: NFER-Nelson. Swanwick, Keith (1994), Musical Knowledge: Intuition, Analysis and Music Education, London: Routledge. Vulliamy, Graham and Ed Lee (1976), Pop Music in School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vulliamy, Graham and Ed Lee (1982), Pop, Rock and Ethnic Music in School, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Waterman, A. S. (1992), “Identity as an Aspect of Optimal Psychological Functioning,” in Gerald R. Adams, Thomas P. Gullotta, and Raymond Montemayor (eds.), Adolescent Identity Formation, London: Sage Publications. Wenger, Etienne (1998), Community of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, James Howard (1997), “The Difusion of the Modern School,” in William K. Cummings and Noel F. McGinn (eds.), International Handbook of Education and Development: Preparing Schools, Students and Nations for the Twenty-First century, 119–136, Oxford: Pergamon. Winner, Ellen, Thalia R. Goldstein, and Stéphan Vincent-Lacrin (2013), Art for Art’s Sake? The Impacts of Arts Education, Paris: OECD. Wright, Ruth and Brian Davies (2010), “Class, Power, Culture and the Music Curriculum,” in Ruth Wright (ed.), Sociology and Music Education, 35–50, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

247

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

248

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

17

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning: Popular Music Education and Orff Schulwerk

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Martina Vasil

Adolescents1 engage with many different types of music, but most prefer to listen to popular music and compose in popular music styles (Hargreaves and Marshall 2003; North, Hargreaves, and O’Neill 2000). When adolescents create and perform popular music, they primarily engage in informal learning, where aural musicianship is central to learning and creating music, the learning process is holistic, and musicians choose the music themselves, direct their own learning, and create and perform music in friendship groups (Green 2008). Engagement with popular music occurs in many contexts outside of schools, and it can be challenging for most K–12 music teachers2 to bring popular music and informal learning into formal school settings in the United States (Williams 2007). There have been several studies about music teachers including popular music and informal learning in the classroom through nonformal teaching that centers on active music-making, student autonomy, and the teacher acting as facilitator (Abramo 2011; Cohen and Roudabush 2008; Green 2008; Musical Futures 2015; Newsom 1998; Randles 2012; Trapp 2012). A few studies describe how this occurs specifically within the context of general music3 classes using instruments commonly found in popular music, such as guitar, piano, and drum kit (Abramo 2011; Randles 2012; Trapp 2012). A growing number of general music classrooms in the United States include such instrumentation (Little Kids Rock 2013), but there is a need to understand how music teachers can include popular music and informal learning with instruments more typically found in elementary general music classrooms: unpitched percussion instruments, recorders, and xylophones (Bowles 1996). Most undergraduates studying to become music teachers in the United States graduate with little exposure to and experience with informal learning and popular music (Hebert 2011). Only 0.54 percent of instructional time in these music teacher preparation programs is devoted to popular music (Wang and Humphreys 2009), amounting to fewer than twenty hours over four years. However, most undergraduate music education majors must take a general music methods course in their program, 249

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

which commonly includes material on the Orff-Schulwerk approach (Frego and Abril 2003). Understanding how this approach can be used to bring popular music and informal learning into music classrooms may help music teacher educators better prepare preservice music teachers to meet the musical interests of students. This chapter describes how one music teacher, Kaitlyn, successfully included popular music and informal learning opportunities through the Orff approach in her general music classes.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Orff Schulwerk Orff Schulwerk is an approach to music education developed by composer Carl Orff and educator Gunild Keetman that began as active, group-participatory activities for adults to explore the elements of music (Landis and Carder 1990). Music and movement compositions largely developed from students’ “spontaneous improvisations,” although folk music (native and foreign) could inspire new ideas (Orff 1963: 70). Much time was spent on musical exploration and invention; traditional staff notation was rarely read and music was only written down to preserve the composition. Orff and Keetman later developed the Schulwerk for a series of educational broadcasts for children, adding verbal expression and connecting music with movement, dance, and speech. From this collaboration emerged the conception of elemental music; that is, music composed of simple, repetitive, sequential structures that take shape in simple forms. This music was easy for anyone to grasp and made more meaningful through active participation. Orff drew from source material that was natural to children— playground chants and songs, nursery rhymes, counting games, folk songs, singing games—all inextricably linked with movement. This was music for everyone, as Orff believed that all children are musical (Orff 1963). From this work emerged a pedagogical process (imitate, explore, create) (Beegle and Bond 2016), although by no means did Orff consider the Schulwerk a “method.” Orff and Keetman captured their compositions and repertoire in five volumes, Music for Children (Orff 1963), which helped the Schulwerk become widespread in the United States, particularly within elementary schools.

Orff Schulwerk and popular music education In Orff Schulwerk, music learning occurs through creative play, with an emphasis on creativity, musical spontaneity, and innovation (Beegle and Bond 2016)—these are qualities that are shared with nonformal and informal approaches to music learning found in popular music education. “Popular music education” is defined as a range of approaches to teaching and learning popular music that occur in various settings 250

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

(Green 2006; Smith and Powell 2017). Popular music is often learned informally (Rodriguez 2004); the definition of informal learning that will be used in this chapter is Green’s (2008) where (1) learners choose the music themselves; (2) music is learned aurally, through listening and imitating recordings; (3) learning takes place in friendship groups; (4) skills and knowledge are acquired through self-study or peer teaching; and (5) learning is integrated; learners are performers, composers, improvisers, and listeners, with an emphasis on originating music. When teachers bring popular music into school settings, they often use nonformal teaching techniques (Rodriguez 2004). Nonformal teaching is an inclusive approach to music-making that includes:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

group-based activities in performing, listening, composing and improvising; a sense of immediacy and exploration; tacit learning; music being caught not taught; music teachers/leaders often play a lot, and explain very little, utilizing skills within the group through peer learning, students and teachers co-constructing content; [and] opportunities to develop non-cognitive skills, such as responsibility, empathy, support for others, creativity and improvisation to find solutions. (Musical Futures 2015) In contrast, when music is learned formally, instruction is typically teacher-led and curricula are more structured with clearly defined learning objectives that afford less flexibility and spontaneity (Jaffurs 2006). Both informal and formal learning can be found within music classrooms (Green 2006), so it is helpful not to think of them as a dichotomy but, rather, along a continuum (Espeland 2010; Folkestad 2006; Green 2002). Discussion of Orff Schulwerk and popular music education is relatively new. For example, articles about popular music and Orff Schulwerk appeared only in the 2011 summer issue of The Orff Echo, the national journal of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (Cave 2011; Clements 2011; Gault 2011; Tobias 2011; Woody 2011). A K–12 music educator has written two blog posts addressing popular music and Orff in music education (Caithaml 2014a, 2014b). Sessions addressing both popular music and Orff are not common at conferences and workshops. For example, among the six annual Association for Popular Music Education conferences (2012–2017), only two sessions focused on popular music and Orff (Klossner 2015; Vasil 2017). The American Orff-Schulwerk Association occasionally features sessions on popular music and Orff at the annual national conference; at the 2016 conference there were three (Klossner 2016; Pierre 2016; Siegel 2016). There are few people who focus on popular music in workshops for Orff chapters nationwide: Heather Klossner, Richard Lawton, Eric Young, and myself. Popular music is usually discussed as classroom repertoire in relation to Orff; this is, to my knowledge, the first publication discussing learning and teaching processes common to each. 251

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Teaching popular music through Orff Schulwerk: Kaitlyn’s story In 2015, I completed a study on four K–12 music teachers who integrated popular music and informal learning in their classrooms (Vasil 2015). One of these—Kaitlyn—was educated in the Orff-Schulwerk approach. I interviewed and observed Kaitlyn several times over the course of four months. Kaitlyn worked at a private, all-girls pre-K–12 school in a highly affluent suburban neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. The school strongly supported music, as there were five music teachers and three classrooms dedicated to music alone. The general music teachers at the school all used Orff Schulwerk. Seventh- and eighth-grade students (ages 13–15) were required to take general music unless they participated in recorder ensemble, chorus, or guitar class. These were Kaitlyn’s students.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Teaching popular music Kaitlyn’s general music students perceived themselves to be less musical than their peers because they were not confident in singing, playing guitar, or reading notation. Kaitlyn reported that these musical insecurities were compounded by social and emotional insecurities; students were frequently hesitant to try new things and were unsure of anything that pushed them outside of their comfort zones, such as performing music in front of others. Even students who had been at the school several years and who had gained musical experiences through the Orff approach showed insecurity: “Most of these girls had an excellent music education, but hormones, worries about social standing, and friends’ perceptions sometimes get in their way” (Kaitlyn, pers. comm., July 13, 2017). Kaitlyn sought to build her students’ confidence musically, socially, and emotionally. Kaitlyn’s classroom included guitars, iPads, and the Orff instrumentarium (i.e., xylophones, metallophones, recorders, unpitched percussion, and timpani). Just as Carl Orff (1963) intended, Kaitlyn knew that the instrumentarium included instruments that were accessible and easy to play. Kaitlyn’s older students did not seem as excited by the folk songs and playground chants they had enjoyed when they were younger, so she sought something new to excite her students and encourage more participation. She decided that including popular music in her seventh- and eighth-grade general music classes could be a way to engage her students better. She also created a new class—Pop Rocks—which was completely devoted to covering popular songs with classroom instruments. She included popular music in her curricula as repertoire to be performed in the form of cover songs and arrangements; as models for students working on composing melodies, accompaniments, and lyrics; and pieces of music used for analysis when students engaged in songwriting. Her approach to teaching embodied 252

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

the Orff process: imitate, explore, and create (Beegle and Bond 2016). When including popular music in her classes, her teaching process seemed to move along a continuum from more formal to nonformal, and the learning contexts from formal to more informal.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Seventh-grade general music Seventh-grade general music was a yearlong, fifty-minute class that met twice during a six-day rotation. Out of the three classes in which Kaitlyn included popular music, this class included more formal learning opportunities because she was working on the imitation and exploration stages of the Orff process (imitate, explore, create). Kaitlyn believed that these students needed to hear and perform popular music first in order to build their vocabulary for creating their own music in eighth grade. The seventh-grade general music curriculum was organized into thematic units. One unit focused on covering popular songs using classroom instruments. In choosing the repertoire, Kaitlyn wanted to use songs that her students knew, so her students provided her with a list of their favorite songs. She then used the arranging skills she had learned during her Orff Level I and Level 2 education to arrange the popular songs for classroom instruments. Kaitlyn analyzed her students’ songs and chose pieces that could easily be transferred to a classroom instruments and still provide a full sound. This meant including at least a melody/vocal line, a melodic ostinato, and a rhythmic pattern in the arrangement. Thinking about her students’ abilities and prior experiences on the classroom instruments, she then taught these arrangements to her students by rote (the imitation part of the Orff process). A typical lesson would began with a vocal warm-up, then Kaitlyn would teach the various parts of the song by rote—a xylophone part, an unpitched percussion part, and vocal parts. Students were then given time to work on their individual parts. Kaitlyn often had students “rotate” so that everyone had the experience of playing all of the parts; later, students chose the part they liked best for performance. At various points in the lesson, Kaitlyn brought the students together to perform the piece as an ensemble. At the end of class, there was usually a culminating performance where students performed the song, with or without the recording. Sometimes class ended with a brief discussion of what had been learned or accomplished that day, and the class made plans for the next lesson.

Pop Rocks Pop Rocks was a ten-week elective class that met every other day for two hours. The course was open to both seventh- and eighth-grade students. Students who signed up for Pop Rocks included those who were in general music and students who were pulled

253

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

out of general music to take recorder ensemble. The class was structured similarly to the popular music unit in seventh-grade general music (above); students covered popular songs using instruments in Kaitlyn’s classroom—guitars, iPads, and the Orff instrumentarium (i.e., xylophones, metallophones, recorders, unpitched percussion, and timpani). However, Kaitlyn moved more quickly with this class. Class time was more unstructured, songs were learned at a much faster pace, and the class generally involved fewer discussions. Kaitlyn either tailored arrangements of popular songs to her students’ abilities or provided time for students to engage in informal learning, such as learning a piece of music entirely by ear with little teacher help. For example, Kaitlyn once had a student who played recorder well, so she chose Rusted Root’s “Send Me On My Way” (which has a prominent penny whistle solo) in order to showcase that student’s strengths. She arranged the piece and taught it to the class by rote. Whether she used traditional staff notation or not depended on her students. Sometimes she wrote note names on the SMART Board for students. At other times, her teaching became much more nonformal. For example, when students expressed an interest in Disney songs, Kaitlyn presented them with the challenge of learning “Be Prepared” from The Lion King. Instead of arranging this song, Kaitlyn gave students time to listen to the recording over and over to determine how to recreate it using instruments in the classroom. As students listened to the piece and played along, Kaitlyn acted as a facilitator. She did not tell the students what to do but watched as they taught themselves the parts and only stepped in when she saw they needed or asked for help.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Eighth-grade general music Eighth-grade general music was a yearlong, fifty-minute class that met twice during a six-day rotation. When planning the curriculum, Kaitlyn remained mindful of the Orff-Schulwerk process of imitate, explore, and create. While seventh-grade general music focused on “imitate” and “explore,” eighth-grade general music focused on “create,” which to Kaitlyn meant songwriting. Since all eighth-grade students at the school were provided with Apple iPads, Kaitlyn used the app GarageBand to facilitate the songwriting process. Kaitlyn focused on four main topics throughout the year to facilitate the songwriting process: lyrical analysis including an exploration of poetic devices such as rhyme schemes and imagery, discussions of music theory such as common chord progressions, using GarageBand loops to compose music, and using GarageBand to record singing and guitar. Lessons were typically in four main sections. A lecture and then group discussion involved listening to a popular song and examining the lyrics or musical properties. Students sometimes worked with Kaitlyn to create a song during the group discussion, sitting in a circle and sharing ideas. After discussion, students worked on

254

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

their own using GarageBand to compose and record their songs. To conclude the lesson, they regrouped for another short discussion. Kaitlyn shared: We talk about it [individual songs] and how we can change it and tweak it to make it sound more like a song. I think that piece at the end of the class to come back together and talk about what they did out when they were creating has been really helpful because then I can kind of check in and other people can check in and help out. That’s my favorite part, when another student says, “What if you said this? Oh! What if you did this?” That would have never happened if they were in their own world writing. (Interview 1 with Kaitlyn, February 2, 2015) At the end of the course, students emailed their songs to Kaitlyn or uploaded them as unlisted videos on YouTube and sent her the links. Throughout the course, Kaitlyn assessed students on their knowledge of chords, triads, chord progressions, lyric writing, and (eventually) the final song.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Nonformal teaching and informal learning in Orff Schulwerk Kaitlyn used many aspects of nonformal teaching in her classroom. To review, nonformal teaching (1) is an inclusive approach to music-making; (2) includes groupbased activities in performing, listening, composing, and improvising; (3) encourages musical exploration and tacit learning through doing; (4) has the teacher modeling rather than only explaining; (5) takes advantage of students’ skills through group peer learning; (6) is when teachers and students co-construct content; and (7) is when the teacher provides “opportunities to develop non-cognitive skills, such as responsibility, empathy, support for others, creativity and improvisation to find solutions” (Musical Futures 2015). As a result of Kaitlyn’s nonformal teaching, students engaged in informal learning, where: music was learned aurally through listening and imitation, learning took place collaboratively in friendship groups, skills and knowledge were acquired through self-study or peer teaching, and learning was a holistic process (Green 2008). Several aspects of nonformal teaching and informal learning overlap; the following are discussed: (1) inclusivity; (2) musical exploration and coconstructing content; (3) music is learned aurally through listening and imitation; (4) group peer learning; (5) skills and knowledge are acquired through self-study or peer teaching; (6) learners choose the music themselves; and (7) opportunities for social/ emotional growth. Inclusivity. Carl Orff believed every child is musical (Orff 1963). The use of simple percussion instruments “that could be played with little musical training” to invite new and innovative sound and movement creations allows everyone to succeed musically 255

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

within their capacity (Beegle and Bond 2016: 30). As an artist and improviser, Orff teachers tailor learning pathways for each child or class (Carley 1977; Keetman 1974). This approach was apparent in Kaitlyn’s inclusion in her general music lessons of all students not in recorder ensemble, chorus, or guitar class. In creating the new Pop Rocks elective, Kaitlyn allowed any seventh- or eighth-grade student to join, regardless of experience. In crafting her instruction, Kaitlyn’s took note of each student’s background, interests, and abilities and worked hard to ensure that everyone made a musical contribution to the group sound. Musical exploration and co-constructing content. Rather than conducting students or directing learning each step of the way, Orff teachers tend to act more as facilitators of the music-making process, inviting students to contribute ideas and make musical decisions (Beegle and Bond 2016). Music teachers who facilitate informal learning also exhibit such flexibility and responsiveness (Vasil 2015); they step in when students need help and know when to hold back to let students solve their own musical problems (Boespflug 2004). While Kaitlyn tended to teach in a more structured way in seventhgrade general music, she acted more as a facilitator for Pop Rocks and even more so for eighth-grade general music. Music is learned aurally through listening and imitation. Learning music aurally is a cornerstone of the Schulwerk approach. Kaitlyn’s education in Orff Schulwerk Level 1 and Level 2 provided important experiences in learning and teaching music in this way. Thus, in her classroom, students learned all or most music aurally. They learned how to perform covers of songs, performed teacher-prepared arrangements of popular tunes by ear, and created their own songs mostly by ear (sometimes they looked up a chord progression or guitar tablature). Group peer learning. Orff-Schulwerk teachers value collaborative learning, so small and large group activities are commonplace in their classrooms (Huffman 2012). Students may collaborate to compose rhythmic or melodic sequences, create dance compositions, or choose instrumentation to accompany spoken text. Whether students can work in friendship groups is up to the individual teacher, but in my experience many Orff teachers allow students to choose their group members. Almost all students had time to socialize in small groups or as a whole group in Kaitlyn’s classes. Large group activities tended to be more teacher-directed; smallgroup activities tended to be more student-directed and occurred largely within the eighth-grade general music class when students were working on their songwriting. Friendships groups were particularly apparent in the eighth-grade general music class. Students could work on their compositions alone, but they were also encouraged to work with friends to gain support and ideas and to collaborate. Friendship groups occurred less in seventh-grade general music but were sometimes present in Pop Rocks when students worked together to learn certain instrumental parts. Skills and knowledge are acquired through self-study or peer teaching. According to Frazee (2012), it is essential for teachers who use the Orff approach to include time for student reflection and music analysis during class; students are asked to study their 256

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

work and make critical decisions about what musical steps to take next. Often this reflection happens after music has been taught through imitation; students have had time to explore and play with the musical elements found in the piece and have asked to create something new with the elements they have manipulated and learned about. Reflection on composition is an important time for students’ self-study, talking with peers, and making choices in the classroom (Frazee 2012). Self-study and peer teaching were included in all three of Kaitlyn’s classes to varying degrees. Students sometimes chose the music they performed and the instruments they played (e.g., iPad, guitar, Orff instruments, or voice). All students had time to work independently on projects and most students could structure their own time as they worked toward the completion of a project or goal. Although seventh-grade general music was the most teacher-directed class, Kaitlyn provided opportunities for students to work on parts and to help one another. In the songwriting curriculum, peer teaching was strongly encouraged as part of group discussions. In Pop Rocks, students gravitated toward certain parts, figuring them out by listening and imitating the recordings and helping each other. Learners choose the music themselves. This characteristic of informal learning is one not usually found in Orff-Schulwerk classrooms; this is perhaps puzzling, because Orff himself advocated the use of music with which children are familiar (1963). This was echoed by Warner (1991), who thought that first using music familiar to children was the best way to connect them later with unfamiliar music. Kaitlyn allowed some student choice in the music that would be learned, but she made the final decision on what songs to include. For example, at the start of the school year, students in all of her classes made a list of their preferred songs from which Kaitlyn chose songs that could be taught easily, would be good songwriting models for students, and that were appropriate for school. Opportunities for social/emotional growth. Musical exploration is central to the Orff approach and is used to help children develop both musically and emotionally (Frazee 2012). Kaitlyn was aware of her students’ emotional fragility and social insecurities from the time she was hired and took steps to create a classroom climate to help her students grow. While her seventh-grade general music class and Pop Rocks allowed students to interact and grow socially, she viewed the eighth-grade general music class as a place for their emotional growth. The songwriting allowed students to discuss their emotions and work through them in song. We went around in the circle and we all shared our lyrics. We sat right there and every girl just said it and it was great, totally good humor. There was one girl who said, “I prefer not to share it,” because I give that as an option. If you don’t want to share it’s totally fine, because songs can be very personal and that’s great. So the one girl was like, “Can I talk to you outside?” While the other kids were 257

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

doing a test, we went out and she shared her lyrics and she gave me the backstory. “Well, there’s this guy. While we were hanging out my friends talked to him and now we don’t hang out anymore. I’m kind of mad at my friends about that, and I miss him and I’m mad at them.” She’s got all these conflicting feelings and these are people in the class right now. I think that’s a great example of how she was really using this songwriting to kind of work through her emotional issues. (Interview 4 with Kaitlyn, March 30, 2015)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions For preservice and in-service teachers with traditional backgrounds in music education who are interested in bringing popular music into their classrooms, the Orff approach may be one way to introduce nonformal teaching and informal learning. The OrffSchulwerk approach includes nonformal teaching techniques that allow informal learning to happen in the classroom. Music teachers who are accustomed to teacherdirected, formal teaching and learning may feel that the classroom is out of control when they use nonformal teaching and provide experiences with informal learning (Abramo and Austin 2014; Green 2008). Balancing this “chaos” with some structure has helped music teachers largely overcome these feelings and effectively include popular music into their curricula (Vasil 2015). The Orff-Schulwerk process of imitate, explore, create may be one way to bring some structure to the classroom, particularly for general music classes. For adolescents, the addition of popular music in the formal setting of a school provides them with a sense of familiarity that may boost their confidence and motivate them to participate more in middle school general music classes. For teachers, the OrffSchulwerk approach appears to be one way to overcome the challenge of bringing popular music and informal learning into formal school settings.

Notes 1 Adolescents are young people aged 12–18 (in the United States, students in grades 6–12) (Campbell, Connell, and Beegle 2007; Spruce and Odena 2012). 2 In the United States, K–12 stands for kindergarten to twelfth grade. Students in Kindergarten are typically 5–6 years of age, and students in twelfth grade are typically 17–18 years of age. 3 In the United States, general music is a compulsory subject for most children in grades K–5 (children 5–11 years of age) and is sometimes offered in secondary schools as a compulsory 258

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

or elective subject. It is typically taught by music specialists and the curriculum is designed to serve all students and provide them with broad experiences in performing and learning about music (Abril and Gault 2016).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abramo, Joseph (2011), “Gender Differences of Popular Music Production in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 59 (1): 21–43. doi:10.1177/0022429410396095. Abramo, Joseph and James Austin (2014), “The Trumpet Metaphor: A Narrative of a Teacher’s Mid-Career Pedagogical Change from Formal to Informal Learning Practices,” Research Studies in Music Education, 36 (1): 57–73. doi:10.1177/1321103X14528454. Abril, Carlos R. and Brent M. Gault, eds. (2016), Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues,and Viewpoints, New York: Oxford University Press. Beegle, Ann and Judith Bond (2016), “Orff Schulwerk: Releasing and Developing the Musical Imagination,” in Carlos R. Abril and Brent M. Gault (eds.), Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints, 25–48, New York: Oxford University Press. Boespflug, George (2004), “The Pop Music Ensemble in Music Education,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 190–203, Reston, VA: MENC. Bowles, Chelcy (1996), “Structuring Successful Creative Experiences for Adults,” General Music Today, 9 (2): 22–24. doi:10.1177/104837139600900208. Caithaml, Justin (2014a), “Orff in Pop Culture: Layered Ostinati,” Teaching with Orff (blog), March 27, 2014. Available online: http://teachingwithorff.com/orff-pop-culture-layeredostinati/ (accessed November 25, 2018). Caithaml, Justin (2014b), “Orff in Pop Culture: Popular Music, Traditional Approach,” Teaching with Orff (blog), May 3, 2014. Available online: http://teachingwithorff.com/orff-popculture-popular-music-traditional-approach/ (accessed November 25, 2018). Campbell, Patricia Shehan, Claire Connell, and Amy Beegle (2007), “Adolescents’ Expressed Meanings of Music in and out of School,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 55 (3): 220–236. doi:10.1177/002242940705500304. Carley, Isabel (1977), Orff Re-echoes, Chagrin Falls: American Orff-Schulwerk Association. Cave, Victoria Redfearn (2011), “What Kids Really Love!,” The Orff Echo, 43 (4): 25–28. Clements, Ann C. (2011), “Finding Your Groove with Popular Music through Video Game Technology,” The Orff Echo, 43 (4): 29–33. Cohen, Mary L. and Cecilia Roudabush (2008), “Music Tech, Adaptive Music, and Rock Band 101: Engaging Middle School-Age Students in General Music Class,” in Ann Clements (ed.), Alternative Approaches in Music Education: Case Studies, 67–82, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Espeland, Magne (2010), “Dichotomies in Music Education—Real or Unreal?,” Music Education Research, 12 (2): 129–139. doi:10.1080/14613808.2010.481823. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. doi:10.1017/S0265051706006887. 259

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Frazee, Jane (2012), Artful-Mindful-Playful: A New Orff-Schulwerk Curriculum for Music Making and Music Thinking, New York: Schott Music Corporation. Frego, R. J. David and Carlos Abril (2003), “The Examination of Curriculum Content in Undergraduate Elementary Methods Courses,” Contributions to Music Education, 30 (1): 9–22. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/24127024 (accessed November 25, 2018). Gault, Brent M. (2011), “Listen to the Music! Popular Music and Active Listening,” The Orff Echo, 43 (4): 10–13. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Group. Green, Lucy (2006), “Popular Music Education in and for Itself, and for ‘Other’ Music: Current Research in the Classroom,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 101–118. doi:10.1177/0255761406065471. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Group. Hargreaves, David. J. and Nigel A. Marshall (2003), “Developing Identities in Music Education,” Music Education Research, 5 (3): 263–273. doi:10.1080/1461380032000126355. Hebert, David G. (2011), “Originality and Institutionalization: Factors Engendering Resistance to Popular Music Pedagogy in the U.S.A,” Music Education Research International, 5: 12–21. Available online: http://cmer.arts.usf.edu/content/articlefiles/3345-MERI05pp1221Hebert.pdf (accessed). Huffman, Carol (2012), Make Music Cooperatively: Using Cooperative Learning in Your Active Music-Making Classroom, Chicago: GIA Publications. Jaffurs, Sheri. E. (2006), “The Intersection of Informal and Formal Music Learning Practices,” International Journal of Community Music: 1–29. Available online: www.intellectbooks. co.uk/MediaManager/Archive/IJCM/Volume%20D/04%20Jaffurs.pdf (accessed November 25, 2018). Keetman, Gunild (1974), Elementaria: First Acquaintance with Orff-Schulwerk, London: Schott. Klossner, Heather (2015), “Make It Pop: Tune Your Students’ Ears with Pop Tunes!,” presented at the Association for Popular Music Education Conference, University of Miami, Miami, Florida, June 12, 2015. Klossner, Heather (2016), “Make It POP: Tune Your Ears with Pop Tunes,” presented at the American Orff-Schulwerk Association Professional Development Conference, Atlantic City Convention Center, Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 3, 2016. Landis, Beth and Polly Carder (1990), The Eclectic Curriculum in American Music Education: Contributions of Dalcroze, Kodaly, and Orff, Reston, VA: MENC. Little Kids Rock (2013), Little Kids Rock National Impact. Available online: www. littlekidsrock.org/pdf/board-resources/national/Little%20Kids%20Rock's%20National%20 Impact%20Sheet.pdf (accessed November 25, 2018). Musical Futures (2015), “Schools.” Available online: www.musicalfutures.org/community/ schools (accessed November 25, 2018). Newsom, Daniel (1998), “Rock’s Quarrel with Tradition: Popular Music’s Carnival Comes to the Classroom,” Popular Music and Society, 22 (3): 1–20. doi:10.1080/03007769808591711. North, Adrian, David J. Hargreaves, and Susan A. O’Neill (2000), “The Importance of Music to Adolescents,” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70 (2): 255–272. doi:10.1348/000709900158083. 260

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Nonformal Teaching and Informal Learning

Orff, Carl (1963), “The Schulwerk: Its Origins and Aims,” reprinted in Beth Landis and Polly Carder (eds.), The Eclectic Curriculum in American Music Education: Contributions of Dalcroze, Kodaly, and Orff, 137–144, Reston, VA: MENC. Pierre, Tom (2016), “Pop, Soul & Orff,” presented at the American Orff-Schulwerk Association Professional Development Conference, Atlantic City Convention Center, Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 3, 2016. Randles, Clint (2012), “Teaching the Guitar as a Tool for Creative Expression,” in Suzanne Burton (ed.), Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music, 79–94. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, Reston, VA: MENC. Siegel, Lawrence (2016), “Newfangled Folk: A Modern Twist on Traditional Dance!,” presented at the American Orff-Schulwerk Association Professional Development Conference, Atlantic City Convention Center, Atlantic City, New Jersey, November 4, 2016. Smith, Gareth Dylan and Bryan Powell (2017), “Editorial,” Journal of Popular Music Education 1 (1): 3–8. doi:10.1386/jpme.1.1.3_2 Spruce, Gary and Oscar Odena (2012), “Commentary: Music Learning and Teaching during Adolescence: Ages 12–18,” in Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 1, first edition, 437–440, New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199730810.013.0026. Tobias, Evan (2011), “From Old School to New Schulwerk: Addressing Sound Worlds of Contemporary Popular Music,” The Orff Echo, 43 (4): 19–24. Trapp, Kenneth R. (2012), “Middle School Keyboard Ensemble Class,” in Suzanne Burton (ed.), Engaging Musical Practices: A Sourcebook for Middle School General Music, 49–77, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Vasil, Martina (2015), “Integrating Popular Music and Informal Music Learning Practices: A Multiple Case Study of Secondary School Music Teachers Enacting Change in Music Education,” PhD diss., West Virginia University, Morgantown. Vasil, Martina (2017), “Exploring Popular Music Education through the Orff-Schulwerk Approach,” presented at the Association for Popular Music Education Conference, University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, June 15, 2017. Wang, Jui-Ching and Jere T. Humphreys (2009), “Multicultural and Popular Music Content in an American Music Teacher Education Program,” International Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 19–36. doi:10.1177/0255761408099062. Warner, Brigitte (1991), Applications for the Classroom, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Williams, David. A. (2007), “What Are Music Educators Doing and How Well Are We Doing It?,” Music Educators Journal, 94 (1): 18–23. doi:10.1177/002743210709400105. Woody, Robert H. (2011), “Willing and Able: Equipping Music Educators to Teach with Popular Music,” The Orff Echo, 43 (4): 14–18.

261

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

262

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

18

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar Steffen Incze

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction I grew up in a suburb outside of Portland, Maine, and attended a local high school that, like many others in the area, boasted a strong instrumental concert band program. I took up the upright bass and soon became completely hooked, practicing for hours each day. After several years as a professional musician, I took on a job as the head of an instrumental music program in a public, inner-city Montreal high school. I arrived brimming with enthusiasm, convinced that my love of the subject and my years of experience as a gigging musician would automatically translate into effective teaching. The reality turned out to be somewhat less simple. Inheriting a concert band program which was largely considered by the school’s administration to be failing due to low output, poor quality, and lack of community buyin, I immediately added a rhythm section and started writing out arrangements of classic large-ensemble soul charts from the likes of Ray Charles and Tower of Power. In doing so, I hoped to infuse the ensemble with new life merely by increasing the volume and energy level of our repertoire. Early concerts were decidedly out of tune and out of time, but they were also entertaining, energetic, and a lot of fun. I have long believed that fun and academic success are not diametrically opposed to each other but, rather, inherently complementary. In this vein, I even attempted a band arrangement of the ninth graders’ favorite song (“Party Rock Anthem,” by LMFAO). This turned out to be an epiphany; for although the students loved rehearsing this piece, they never put a sincere effort into learning their individual parts. In the end, they put on a decidedly subpar performance of the material. The lack of ownership that the students displayed in supposedly preparing this piece (which they had literally begged me to transcribe) left me with a vague sense of foreboding. Over the coming months, this developed into a nagging fear that my dream of realizing a popular, achievement-oriented band program was simply not going to happen in that context, at least not anytime soon. Students in our school faced so many debilitating obstacles to learning band instruments—realities that I had never encountered along my own privileged educational path. The most significant of these 263

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

many obstacles was the fact that precious few had any connection to nor appreciation for any of the traditional large-ensemble performing genres. Jazz big bands and large funk/soul/R & B groups were as far removed from their cultural frame of reference as wind ensembles and orchestras. The activities and materials I provided proved to be largely disconnected from the musical lives of my students. Most of them, to give just one small example, had no appreciation for nor association with any music performed in swing, shuffle, or blues beats. While on one hand I believe that part of my job is to broaden student horizons, I also found myself doubting the relevance of such large areas of knowledge as compound time signatures in their entirety. Given this dilemma, the idea of soldiering on with our mediocre band program was an uninspiring one, to say the least. My paradigm was broken—something fundamental had to change. This realization prompted me to ask my students what they thought we should do in class. I did this through a variety of feedback and survey instruments, and weighed their answers against my own priorities of establishing a progressive, skills-based curriculum.1 The overwhelming response was that students wanted “better” musical materials to study. Although they were unable to articulate or define what made for “better” activities, the rough consensus leaned toward (1) an increased emphasis on popular music, and (2) incorporation of guitars, drums, vocals, and computers. I cautiously began implementing the students’ suggestions; in each case, the incorporation of materials related to popular music was invariably designed to achieve modest yet specific learning objectives from the prescribed curriculum. In my earliest exercises, I transcribed hit songs and used them to drill standard content.2 These exercises represented an attempt to broaden our stylistic material without fundamentally altering the curriculum. One simple yet effective activity to emerge from these experiments involved the use of hip-hop to practice reading notated rhythms and rests. Students would be given a piece of sheet music on which only the backing vocals of a rap song were notated. To be successful, students had to focus and count through long periods of silence as well as read relatively syncopated and difficult rhythms. The music was fun and uplifting, students were not only allowed but encouraged to yell, and the surety of bold and overconfident individual mistakes made for both clearly delineated teachable moments and reliable waves of hilarity. While I certainly cannot claim that every lesson achieved the desired learning outcomes, I was greatly impressed with the overall levels of enthusiasm and participation from my students. Popular music, initially incorporated in a very peripheral role, became an increasingly centralized part of the curriculum. This change in direction was manifestly appreciated by the school community; one concrete result of this initiative was a marked and sudden increase in the numbers of students who chose my elective the following year. The positive feedback generated by this shift in material lead me to believe that it was indeed the type of music education we were offering that was limiting the possibilities of my program. Bolstered by research suggesting that many students who have an interest in music-making are opting out of school music programs (Constantine 2011), I became increasingly willing to experiment with alternative 264

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar

formats. For a variety of reasons, I eventually settled on an approach based on electric guitar instruction. While guitar classes are not inherently more culturally relevant than traditional large ensembles, the guitar offers a world of possibilities to connect with modern students—particularly those who had stated an interest in popular music—and instruction in this area has been shown to attract students who would otherwise opt out of music programs (Seifried 2006). The paradigm shift described above presented a new challenge, however. Specifically, that my non-negotiable mandate was to pursue learning outcomes in music theory, music literacy, and musicianship. I was hired to develop a successful Advanced Placement Music Theory course.3 Although I was granted permission to pursue this goal in the manner I saw fit, my explicit objective was to prepare senior students for success on said exam. Distinct from instrumental performance considerations, theoretical understanding and analytical application of common-practice tonality represents the primary scope of the program (College Board 2018). While traditional formats of American music education are very effective at conveying these concepts, guitar methods are much less oriented in this specific direction. Perhaps this is because of the versatility of the guitar, it has allowed for the development of vastly different approaches to learning and playing. There are so many different types of guitar music and so many different guitar techniques that there is no single overarching skill set universally held to be essential for guitar mastery. To name just one example of the issues I faced, I found that a great deal of established materials and instructional methods for the guitar tend to eschew traditional music staff notation in favor of physical representations of the guitar neck such as chord boxes or tablature. While guitar-based notation systems are equally valid forms of musical literacy, they are difficult to reconcile with an emphasis on staff-based notation. I was left, therefore, with a relatively problematic disconnect between the pedagogical trends of guitar classes and the assessment criteria of a remarkably different paradigm. Some scholars, noting that the most common use of guitar in popular culture is as a simple accompaniment instrument, have gone so far as to assert that the two are not so much incongruous as incompatible: “The role of the guitar in the context of Western music suggests a lingering incompatibility with traditional academic musicianship” (Harrison 2010: 2). For many, the types of guitar-specific forms of musical notation are not parallel systems but explicitly inferior ones, designed to circumvent the arduous task of becoming musically literate (Lorenz 1993). This bias is reflected in the fact that guitar instruction is one of the few music education models yet to be correlated with overall academic successes (Seifried 2006). Arguably, however, the liberation from the need to read traditional staff-based notation could perhaps be regarded as the greatest strength of established guitar pedagogies. Given that the USA’s National Association for Music Education (NAfME) defines music literacy as “knowledge and understanding required to participate authentically in the discipline of music by independently carrying out the artistic processes of creating, performing, and responding” (NAfME n.d.), it is important to remember 265

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

that music literacy is not synonymous with fluency in the European notation system. For the purposes of my teaching assignment, however, academic excellence in music did, indeed, need to be measured exclusively by the yardstick of reading traditional music staff notation. As a result, I sought out instructional methods for the guitar that featured maximum overlap with the College Board’s definition of musicianship and musical literacy. Different methods inevitably emphasize many different aspects of the instrument. The curriculum whose priorities dovetailed the most with the advanced placement exam came from the Registry of Guitar Tutors (RGT), a London-based guild of guitar tutors. Their mandate is to legitimize and improve the guitar teaching profession through the development of accredited standards, certified instructors, and formalized programs of study. The RGT exams and examiners are accredited through the London College of Music Examining Board, in partnership with the University of West London. The RGT provide a succession of externally certified graded music exams that encourage a high standard of ear-training, theoretical knowledge, and guitar performance. The level of musicianship required for success on these two exams are roughly equivalent. the largest discrepancy is in the implicit definitions of musical literacy: the RGT does not require familiarity with staff-based notation, and the College Board does not require familiarity with guitar-based systems. This chapter documents my attempt to develop a curriculum that ensured that my students passed the AP music theory exam, but doing so as much as possible through the guitar-centric pedagogies of the RGT electric guitar graded material. The intention was to prioritize the structure and content of the AP exam, but use electric guitar performance as a practical application to aid in the learning and comprehension of the topics covered, with a particular focus on using popular music to provide musical materials through which to internalize the prescribed common-practice music theory. Thus, my purpose in this project, condensed into a single exploratory question, is as follows: can a program of study be designed that teaches the AP music theory curriculum by way of electric guitar-oriented instrumental instruction?

Teaching music theory by way of the electric guitar Some scholars in the field of music education have identified the need to incorporate popular music more centrally into the teaching of theory and musicianship (Rosenberg 2010; Wang and Humphreys 2009). Frazier (2012) aptly distinguishes between merely having a popular music component within a program, and the loftier goal of education through and with popular music. There is now some precedent for using popular music in the classroom to achieve traditional instructional goals (Rodriguez 2012), and highly effective pedagogical resources for the incorporation of popular music are emerging (Biamonte 2011). One of the primary objectives of the AP music theory curriculum is to familiarize students with the musical materials of the common-practice period, which

266

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar

are bound together by a set of common harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic characteristics. Some of these characteristics are not restricted to music from the common-practice period but can also be found (albeit in slightly altered forms) in music from other eras. Many educators teaching music theory have long supplemented teaching materials with examples from popular music, employing them primarily as “drill material” for practicing aural skills (Rosenberg 2010), and controlled studies of student achievement have shown that a substitution of genres makes little difference in the application of concept-directed teaching (Schaus 2007). Educators have begun documenting specific areas of pedagogical overlap that exist between contemporary popular music and music of the common-practice period (Biamonte 2011), and others have provided a useful model for applicable popular music resource development and have published partial compilations of popular music examples designed to reinforce specific theoretical concepts (Rosenberg 2010). While it is not my intention to imply that popular music is a mere “gateway” or “stepping-stone” to the more “worthy” pursuit of studying common-practice music, the current chapter gives an overview of my investigation into some of the ways in which popular music can be employed to assist in the teaching and learning of specific concepts of traditional theory and musicianship. A large body of popular music shares sufficient overlap (in terms of formal and structural detail) with common-practice music to be useful in studying the latter. Throughout the project described above, I retained a focus on preparing students for the AP exam, as per my objective, and while there are certainly limitations to such a concept-driven, vocabulary-laden approach to music education, my challenge in this endeavor was to use uncommon practice musical materials to meet an explicit set of standards (i.e., the AP curriculum).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Comparison of the AP music theory standards and the RGT electric guitar standards The AP music theory curriculum and the RGT electric guitar curriculum are compatible frameworks in that they represent a similar level of academic rigor, feature clearly published standards, and are widely validated by reputable institutions (see above). Both programs’ foci include the development of listening skills, performance skills, analytical skills, and compositional skills through a large variety of musicianship tasks such as aural dictation, harmonic analysis, application of scales and modes, and so on. The more I investigated these two curricula, the more similar they appeared to be. I developed a hybrid curriculum from these published standards, refined to fit my classroom context, and implemented in my high school music classes. As part of my research method, I systematically inventoried each program for learning objectives, course content, and vocabulary. Taxonomies were compiled independently, modified for maximum alignment, and examined for conflicts and unaligned material. I have used

267

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

the published goals of the AP music theory curriculum as a framework for comparison. In many cases, this was as simple as rearranging items from the RGT program within the broad topical headings of the AP curriculum. In other instances, RGT items are described in terms of their contrast to those of the College Board. Perhaps the most striking similarity between the standards of the two curricula is that both require students to engage with theoretical concepts in a variety of skill-based activities. The demands of the AP and the RGT curricula are remarkably similar, and both envision a thorough, multifaceted, and holistic understanding of curricular items, expecting students to apply their understanding to a variety of tasks. Success on both exams requires an active, constructivist engagement with the material above and beyond mere memorization of facts. Students are not asked to recite course content but, rather, to apply it in a large variety of practical tests To use the example of the major scale: both curricula require students to identify the tonal pattern from its theoretical construction (i.e., a specific succession of whole and half steps) and conversely to provide a working definition of it. Students must recognize this pattern by ear, both as an isolated element and inside of a musical context, and to analyze its function inside of a given context. Furthermore, they must demonstrate their understanding of this element by using it appropriately in performance and composition tasks. The major difference in standards is in their respective learning objectives, or rather the way in which students are asked to demonstrate their grasp of these concepts. Learning objectives are specific statements of what students should be able to do after having experienced a curricular element, describing desired behaviors, abilities, attitudes, areas of agency, and so on (Eisner 1979). The AP curriculum requires students to read and write staff-based notation. The RGT curriculum requires students to visually comprehend and physically recreate music theory as applied to the fretboard of an electric guitar. AP students are required to apply concepts creatively through fourpart composition, whereas RGT students are asked to compose through instrumental improvisation. Both approaches, for example, ask the student to demonstrate applied knowledge of chord construction. Students are expected to analyze and understand chords in isolation, and then use them in composition or performance. The fundamental difference in objectives is the ways in which students demonstrate their knowledge. The AP curriculum requires students to demonstrate their understanding by putting pencil to paper, whereas the RGT curriculum requires students to demonstrate their knowledge by putting their fingers on the guitar. The AP curriculum requires students to both recognize and reproduce a given concept in notational, aural, and analytical form. RGT students are expected to demonstrate understanding on a guitar fretboard as opposed to a musical staff, recognizing and reproducing concepts physically, aurally, and analytically. For example, both exams feature rhythmic, melodic, intervallic, and harmonic dictation tasks that require the students to listen to, analyze, recognize, and reproduce a given rhythm, melody, etc. The tasks are identical until that moment in 268

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar

which the student demonstrates their understanding. This chapter encourages the reader to consider these skills as congruent as opposed to dichotomous. Instrumental application of theoretical knowledge and theoretical understanding of instrumental performance, reinforce and strengthen each other when explicitly linked in instruction and practice.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Comparison of course content Given my mandate of preparing students for the AP exam, I began my comparison of course content with the curricular materials published by the College Board (College Board 2018). The course description is extremely precise and thorough, and provides a detailed survey of the specific content included. The RGT content areas, having been inventoried separately, were grouped into the existing AP categories. Identical content was identified; in some cases, AP terminology was applied to an equivalent term on the RGT syllabus; RGT content was often broadened in scope to correspond to AP materials. Through this simple process, it became apparent that students would be able to approach a great deal of the AP content by way of the guitar. For example, the AP curriculum section on modes and keys requires students to be familiar with the seven diatonic modes, major and minor keys, diatonic relationships, and crosskey relationships. The first three of these items were all made apparent within the published RGT materials, although they were not consolidated under a single heading. The only cross-key relationship specifically demanded by the RGT curriculum was that of the relative major/relative minor relationship. However, many of the crosskey relationships of the common-practice period, such as secondary tonicization, can certainly be illustrated through a guitar-centric approach to teaching and learning. These harmonic tendencies, furthermore, can certainly be found within contemporary popular music. The comparison of the two programs reveals few direct conflicts. The AP curriculum is much broader in scope than that of the RGT, resulting in a significant amount of unaligned or nonoverlapping material. This is to be expected, however, as one is a general music theory and musicianship curriculum, and the other is a guitar-specific exam syllabus. As such, in many instances, the topical areas of the RGT curriculum are considerably less comprehensive than their AP counterparts and, at first glance, the RGT standards may seem to represent a lesser standard of overall musicianship. A more detailed and critical look, however, reveals that much of the content that is not common to both curricula, relates specifically to musical elements unique to common-practice idioms that one would not expect to find in a guitar curriculum that focuses primarily on popular music. Several other curricular concepts, while not perfectly aligned between the two curricula, perform analogous functions. For example, both curricula expect students

269

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

to understand the place and function of nonharmonic tones. The difference is found in contextual application; where the AP exam utilizes and expresses these elements of tonality in melodic ornaments, the RGT approach is more inclined to express them as chord extensions. This is not so much a discrepancy of pedagogical approaches as it is a reflection of the conventions of different genres. Let’s consider the example of a D natural pitch sounding over a C major chord. In a common-practice piece, this note would most likely exist as a passing tone or neighbor tone in a melodic ornamentation, or similarly as a suspended note. This same harmonic situation within a modern pop composition, on the other hand, would likely be classified as a Cadd9 chord, with the pitch in question serving as a simple component of a different harmonic vocabulary. While much of popular music does not fit within the context of common-practice harmony and vice versa, it is nevertheless possible to see points of commonality between the two areas. This phenomenon presents a wealth of potential approaches to teaching, as familiarity with popular music may provide a frame for students to help them understand some of the AP concepts in a way that builds on their current knowledge and experience. The AP exam requires students to correctly identify (aurally and from a score), define, and apply vocabulary words from a prescribed list of theoretical concepts (for example, the major scale, secondary dominants, compound time signatures). The RGT has no official published vocabulary list, so I first identified vocabulary words found directly within the RGT topic listings, and then moved on to inferring necessary vocabulary words from the task descriptions. Finally, I identified terms from the AP vocabulary lists, for example, “rhythm” and “rest,” that would be necessary to pass the guitar exam despite their omission from published RGT materials. The vocabulary was cross-checked for similarity, and the inferred RGT vocabulary was grouped into the AP categories. In some cases, AP terminology was applied to an equivalent term used in the RGT material, for example, the terms “Pick-up” and “Anacrusis,” could be considered as equivalents. I was then able to find popular musical examples of some of the vocabulary terms from the list that could serve to demonstrate a term. By the end of this exercise, I had a clear understanding of the terms and concepts that could easily (and suitably) be taught/demonstrated through popular music examples, or guitar-centric instruction, and those which were specific to common-practice music and, thus, were problematic to teach in this context, such as figured bass and chorale writing, for example. For any given concept, students are expected to: recognize it if read from a score, diagrammed on a guitar neck, or heard; to write it in traditional notation, as well as on a guitar diagram; to play it on a guitar; and to apply it appropriately in improvisational and compositional tasks. These content requirements encompass those of the AP curriculum in asking students to put pen to paper, and employ the RGT approach in asking students to demonstrate instrumental application of all material. Theoretical knowledge, rather than being studied as an abstraction is internalized through instrumental application. In other words, students must use their understanding of music theory to accomplish guitar-based performance tasks and vice versa. 270

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar

Learning outcomes of my hybrid program The primary learning objectives of my hybrid curriculum may be summarized as follows. By the end of the course of study, it is my hope that students should be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic organization of tonal music, and to apply their understanding to a variety of skills-based tasks including: 1 2 3 4

Interpretive skills such as sight-reading and sight-singing. Aural skills such as attentive listening, musical memory, and dictation. Compositional and improvisational skills. Electric guitar performance ability regarding technique, scales, chords, arpeggios, rhythm playing, and lead playing.

These learning objectives are prioritized for a number of reasons that go beyond the specific assessment-based goals of my personal mandate. Firstly, the growing momentum toward the inclusion of popular music in formal education settings (especially at the secondary level) is long overdue. Secondly, the widely understood merit of traditional paradigms of music education (Bowers 2012; Fermanich 2011) means that we should not completely abandon traditional instructional goals. From this perspective, I believe that is both possible and desirable to incorporate popular music more centrally into the teaching of theory and musicianship, and to teach universal concepts through and with popular music. Music theory, made real via a hands-on approach drawing upon cultural relevant materials of study, will hopefully enrich my students lives in the same way it has enriched mine.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Given the boundless complexity of teenagers, evaluating the relative success of this curricular experiment is an extremely tricky thing to do. Enrollment increased and my students, by and large, did well on the exams (I’ll spare the reader the statistics). The wider school community expressed approval of the innovations. I personally had an engaged and fulfilling experience as a teacher. At the same time, however, any number of students failed or dropped out. Certain performances flopped and others were of decidedly mediocre quality. The larger question of how to quantify the results of the specific approach detailed above is more or less unanswerable. One observation I can venture with confidence, however, is that my students tended to engage with the program in a decidedly self-directed way. They determined not only the amount of effort they were putting into their studies but also what kind of goals they were pursuing. The skill set found within my classes after a couple of 271

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

years was astoundingly varied and horizontally diverse, differing not only in levels of aptitude but also in areas of relative expertise. Some students were building upon their knowledge of idiomatic chord progressions to write their own songs. Others were shredding distorted pentatonic scales at the fastest speed possible. Some were focused on test preparation, while others did the bare minimum but continually brought in obscure gems of popular culture. From making space for individuals to construct their own relationships with musical analysis and performance, and from giving them the tools to do so, I can derive a greater satisfaction than would have resulted from a more traditional approach. This chapter presented an overview of my investigation into the depth of content contained in the RGT curriculum and the way in which it compares to that of the AP Music Theory course, a standard widely recognized by American universities. In finding the rigor of both standards equal, it emerges that the two have a great deal in common. Many aspects of the conventions of Western classical music may be clearly illustrated through uncommon practice exemplars, and as a result, it is possible to teach many (but certainly not all) of the elements contained in the AP music theory curriculum by way of popular music examples, and specifically (in this case) when approached through the lens of electric guitar pedagogy. Not all common-practice procedures and devices can be approached through guitar, and not all guitar concepts are informed by knowledge of European classical music. However, my approach, as detailed in this chapter demonstrates that the two distinct knowledge bases certainly do not need to be considered as being diametrically opposed. Although popular music may remain underrepresented in traditional pedagogical material, the two are not inherently incompatible and this chapter has provided an example of how popular music may be utilized in the teaching of traditional music theory. In some respects, indeed, popular music can be uniquely beneficial. Popular music can serve to build bridges of understanding between the musical knowledge of modern-day students and the theoretical concepts of less-familiar music. Furthermore, and centrally to my approach, the hands-on instrumental application of theoretical knowledge can cement understanding in a way that abstract study cannot. Nearly fifteen years ago, Rodriguez (2004) called for educators to “explore whether formal music teaching and learning might incorporate the essential aspects of popular music in mutually supportive and balanced ways” (3). My central purpose in this comparison is to show that, in certain contexts, such an endeavor might be even easier than we think. Specifically, I have concluded that a move away from the formats and musical materials traditionally found in high school music classes do not even necessarily require a change of curriculum. Through minor modifications, it was possible to maximize areas of congruence and to implement an entirely traditional curriculum through studying musical examples from the area of popular music, explored and investigated through the teaching and learning of the electric guitar. My pilot project met validated external standards based upon clear and specifically defined pedagogical goals, and was enjoyed by my students. As such, it is my firm belief that an 272

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Electrifying Tonality: Teaching Music Theory with the Electric Guitar

imaginative and instrument-focused approach to curriculum design, which takes into account the knowledge and experience of the learners, is one that offers great promise and potential.

Notes 1 The specifics of my method of gaining input from my students are not of direct consequence to the ideas discussed in this chapter. 2 In the United States, certain elements and fundamental building blocks of Western art music would be considered standard content. A lesson introducing or drilling quarter note rests, for example, or the bass clef, would be referred to as a lesson in standards or fundamentals. 3 In the United States, the Advanced Placement (AP) program represents a set of standardized curricula, across a large variety of subjects, encouraging high school students to complete university-level coursework. The curricular guides, and corresponding exams, are published, administered, and certified by an international nonprofit organization called the College Board with the mandate of encouraging college success through scholastic preparation of high school students. American institutes of higher learning (higher education institutions) often reward achievement on AP exams with course exemptions and advanced standing credits to new college students.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Biamonte, Nicole (2011), Pop-culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from “American Idol” to YouTube, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Bowers, Delbert (2012), “Recent High School Graduates’ Perceptions on Their School Experiences, Musical Lives and Curriculum Relevance,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles. College Board (2018), “AP Music Theory: Course Description.” Available online: https:// secure-media.collegeboard.org/ap-student/course/ap-music-theory-2012-course-examdescription.pdf (accessed June 20, 2018). Constantine, Megan (2011), “The High School Musical Experiences of College Students,” PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Eisner, Elliot (1979), The Educational Imagination: The Design and Evaluation of School Programs, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Fermanich, Mark (2011), “Money for Music Education: A District Analysis of the How, What, and Where of Spending in Music Education,” Journal of Education Finance, 37 (2): 130–149. Frazier, Kerry (2012), “Developing a Curriculum Plan for a Middle School All-Star Pop Ensemble,” PhD diss., Tennessee State University, Nashville. Harrison, Eli (2010), “Challenges Facing Guitar Education,” Music Educators Journal, 97 (1): 50–55. 273

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Lorenz, Kevin (1993), “A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Three Teaching Methods Based on Rote Learning, Improvisation, and Tonal Conceptual Development on Melodic Performance Skills Achievement of Music Teachers in a Beginning Guitar Class,” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. National Association for Music Education (NAfME). (n.d.) Core Music Standards Glossary. Accessed November 29, 2018. https://nafme.org/wp-content/files/2014/06/Core-MusicStandards-Glossary.pdf. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference (MENC). Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2012), “Popular Music in a 21st Century Education,” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 111 (1): 133–145. Rosenberg, Nancy (2010), “From Rock Music to Theory Pedagogy: Rethinking U.S. College Music Theory Education from a Popular Music Perspective,” PhD diss., Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. Schaus, Lam (2007), “Implementing Multicultural Music Education in the Elementary Schools’ Music Curriculum,” PhD diss., McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. Seifried, Scott (2006), “Exploring the Outcomes of Rock and Popular Music Instruction in High School Guitar Class: A Case Study,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 168–177. Wang, Jui-Ching and Jere Humphreys (2009), “Multicultural and Popular Music Content in an American Music Teacher Education Program,” International Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 19–36.

274

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

19

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators Fraser Burke Gottlieb

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Since before Tanglewood Symposium in 1967,1 there have been calls for greater inclusion of popular music in school music education in the United States (Isbell 2007; Krikun 2009). These echo similar calls for democratic learning models in music education (Allsup 2016; Cremata 2017; Reimer 2009)—where students are actively involved in making choices about, and the responsibility for, the learning taking place. Assuming these roles while developing collaborative skills provides students with the opportunity to have a voice and develop a sense of equality and unity in their work. Despite the numerous benefits present in the literature, research indicates that many preservice music educators feel unprepared, and many are hesitant to incorporate popular music use in their teaching (Springer and Gooding 2013). As a graduate student in the northwestern United States I undertook a master’s project investigating preservice music educators’ attitudes regarding popular music. Participants were preservice music educators at the undergraduate and graduate level that I asked to partake in the project. First I surveyed participants, then placed them in rock bands (to learn about and engage with popular music styles), interviewed them individually, and surveyed them again. This chapter will focus on the process these students underwent; learning about and playing popular music, and some insights and perspectives from their experiences. I planned the sequence of lessons knowing I was working with highly trained musicians. My hope is that it will provide a framework or ideas that can be adapted to fit a variety of educational contexts. Much of the information about the processes comes from my own observation notes, as I was present in all sessions.

275

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

The bands Twelve of my peers, having no prior experience playing and/or composing in a popular music style, agreed to participate and be placed into bands. I chose the bands based on instruments participants played (or expressed interest in playing), considering placing members with friends/students in their cohort when possible. Three bands were formed: Band A: Vocalist/keyboardist, bassist, trombonist/drummer, and saxophonist/drummer. Band B: Drummer/vocalist, keyboarding/vocalist, bassist, and guitarist. Band C: Drummer, trumpeter/pianist, pianist/guitarist, and bassist.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The sessions Each band partook in six 1.5–2 hour sessions with an end goal of composing a song. I decided upon three instructional methods—each group being assigned one at random— investigating whether one would be most effective at teaching the students. The first was a “teacher-led” model (Band A) where I planned and taught sequential lessons. The second was a “student-led” model (Band B), where I informed the students of the end goal but they made all decisions on what would be done in each session. I chose this model as research in the field has pointed to the success and need for democratic learning in music education (Allsup 2003; Cremata 2017; Reimer 2009), as well as for the sake of investigating and comparing the success of this type of learning to that of traditional teaching. I was present in all rehearsals to facilitate rehearsal space and equipment use, as well as to answer questions based on instrumental techniques. I chose to do this, as teacher involvement would be needed in any school situation—where even if left to make decisions about their learning, a teacher would be responsible for supervision and as a resource to students. The third group was a “mixed” model (Band C), spending their first and last sessions as “student-led” and the four sessions in between as “teacherled.” Participants had access to a drum kit, electric bass, guitars, and keyboard, amps, microphones and a PA system in all sessions. The sequence of the six sessions that I taught (sessions 2–5 for the “mixed” group) were as follows: 1 Students discussed what comes to mind when hearing the term popular music. Drum and bass techniques were taught, for example, coordination for playing different beats and correct left and right hand technique for bass playing. (Other instrumental techniques could be supplemented/added but were not necessary for this group.) Students were then tasked with learning a cover and playing it without a recording by the end of the lesson. The prior level of experience on the instruments varied in each group. Some participants were playing their primary instrument, while others were playing their chosen instrument for the first time. I broke the task 276

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

2

3

4

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

5

6

down by asking participants to choose a song, to figure out the bass notes and then the chords (by ear), to write out a chord chart, to begin adding parts to fit their instrumentation (arranging), and to rehearse with a recording. This session focused on considering structure and the differing roles of instruments. I provided a choice of songs to arrange. I then guided the group through learning the song, building upon the procedures previously learned. At this point we considered choices that needed to be made when arranging, for example: harmonic rhythm, structure, melody and harmony, and style. Building two-way bridges (Allsup 2011). This session was adapted and taught based on a lesson in which Allsup has students compare and contrast Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament” and Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.” He suggests that popular music can frequently be used as a bait-and-switch technique to get students to study art music and uses this lesson to show that the bridge can go both ways. I led participants in a discussion of each song, beginning with “Dido’s Lament” then moving on to “Dazed and Confused.” For each song they examined musical characteristics, lyrical content, what the song is trying to convey (emotionally or otherwise), and then compared and contrasted the two songs. The practical task for this session was to compose a song or part of a song over a ground bass. Analysis of lyrical content, chord progressions, and the relationships between them—adapted from Allsup (2011).2 The songs studied were Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” The students and I began jamming a section of each song. I then told them what they were playing; we listened to a recording and analyzed the lyrics. We discussed the historical and social context and then analyzed the music. I subsequently asked the students to draw links between the music and the overall message/sentiment of the songs. The practical task for this session was to write a section or contrasting sections of a song starting with a common/simple chord progression. The aim of this session was for the participants to progress from shorter composition tasks to applying what they’d learned to compose a full song. In this session they examined effective characteristics of a melody, writing effective riffs, and considered different ways to generate musical material. Some of these included, but were not limited to: structure, pacing, transitions, and melodic material. This session focused on transitions and development of material. Strategies were provided for effective transitions such as drum fills, stopping and starting, other instrumental or vocal fills and turnarounds. Each instrument’s role was also a topic of discussion, considering whether they were being used melodically, harmonically, or as countermelody. The tasks for this session were to write lyrics, compose set transitions between previously composed sections, compose definite parts for instruments that were still improvising (unless improvisation was the desired role of that instrument), and to rehearse the song until it could be performed without stopping.

All participants are referred to using pseudonyms. 277

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

The approaches

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The “student-led” approach Initially, I informed the band that I would be filling the role of teacher as facilitator and that they would be in control of the process. Reactions ranged from excitement, to shock, to uncertainty. A discussion took place about how to proceed: learn a cover or begin writing immediately, leading to concern amongst members that six sessions would not be sufficient to learn a cover and write a song. They decided to learn a cover, settling on “Chinatown” by Girlpool. Initially both Rachel (drummer/vocalist) and Jane (keyboardist/vocalist) were playing keys, trying to learn the song. After figuring out the progression, Jane began adding drums (not present in the original) and singing harmony. At this point Leah (guitarist) got up from her chair and began playing more enthusiastically and Sarah (bassist) followed. The session ended with a change in tone in the room. They outwardly expressed being proud of learning a song in one session and began to feel like they could accomplish plenty in the remaining weeks. The change in self-confidence occurring over this two-hour session is particularly notable. Having witnessed it, I believe the initial lack of confidence came in not knowing. Band members didn’t know what they were going to write, how to write it, what the process would be like, where to begin, or how long (or not long in this case) it would take them to learn a cover. After experiencing the success of learning a song they felt increasingly self-confident. This leads me to conclude that the first series of rehearsals are crucial and that choosing a simple, manageable song (setting a group up for quick success) can make a lasting difference to their long-term progression. In the next two sessions they learned “Papercut” by Raining Jane, repeating processes from the previous session, adding more nuanced transitions between sections this time. Furthermore, they began to discuss writing material. From then on the group continually worked through ideas before deciding to pursue the framework of an acoustic song brought in by Jane. Over the remainder of the sessions the band put their newly learned skills to use, developing that framework into an indie-pop style song.

The “teacher-led” approach In these sessions I designed lesson plans, facilitated discussions, and taught the group concepts, while still allowing students autonomy regarding repertoire selection, arranging, and rehearsing. Discussing impressions upon hearing the term popular music, participants spoke to an emotion driven genre that doesn’t need much concentration to listen to, is easily understood, simple but catchy, for entertainment and standard. One member did posit to the others whether it’s exclusively the opposite of art music? While these descriptions may appear reductive they were the preconceived ideas these 278

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

participants brought to this project. In the first session the band chose to cover “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. Mark (keyboardist/vocalist) quickly took the lead figuring out the chord progressions by ear. In the next session they began arranging, formulating ideas for an introduction, changing key, constantly reworking form, adding a solo section and more intricate drum parts. All members shared ideas but when it came to rehearsing, Mark again took the lead, calling out chords, ensuring everyone was together. At the conclusion of the session they identified the following sequence as an effective process for creating an arrangement:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 Learn the tune/listen to the original 2 Style 3 Key 4 Form 5 Instrumentation 6 Synching up chords 7 Refine. In the next session they analyzed the musical, lyrical, and emotional content of “Dido’s Lament” and “Dazed and Confused,” concluding that they were strikingly similar. I believe this was a moment when they answered their question of whether popular music is exclusively the opposite of art music. It appeared as though the lines began to blur for the members, challenging their original ideas. A sense of camaraderie began to emerge in this session as well when composing a ground bass song. Mark demonstrated this at the end of the lesson, discussing their composition, saying “I couldn’t have done it on my own. It helps to have everyone here. But as a group we crushed it!” In the remaining sessions the band completed composing tasks, developing ideas collaboratively. They discussed ways to generate material, including starting from chord progressions, text, melody, riffs, or depicting a message. They began writing a melody, harmony, and riffs. When asked about a sequence of steps to follow for composing, Mark’s answer was: first “have fun,” and the others agreed. It would appear that this group had really taken to playing together and the enjoyment of the process was paramount. As they were writing their full song—a 12/8 tune reminiscent of 1990s R & B, of which the band referred to in the end as sounding like “a super cool generic love song”—some of their discussions from previous sessions came into play. Considering the relationship the music had on the overall mood, it was decided that the use of sus4 chords didn’t produce the desired effect of being “sultry and seductive.” In the final session the band finished off their song, writing lyrics, melodies, and harmonies. In early sessions Mark tended to take the lead in much of the discussion, generation of ideas, and direction of the group. However, by the end of the six sessions this was much less noticeable, as all members appeared comfortable chiming in. It seems that 279

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

being in a band allowed a space for all ideas to be shared and fostered enough comfort for those who were less inclined initially, to come out of their shell.

The “mixed” approach The band decided immediately that they were going to learn a cover, put on “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey and began playing along. All members initially seemed to be in their own world but eventually began working collaboratively. They created an arrangement with the melody played on saxophone and recorded it. They then began playing “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen before changing to “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5. This band had developed an early tendency to play partway through a song then switch. My sense is this was due to them not determining a form for an arrangement or reaching consensus on what they wanted to do with a song. In the next session, the band discussed the difference(s) between covering and arranging:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Emma What is the difference between arranging and covering? I thought they were almost the same thing? John A cover is an exact copy/transcription. An arrangement is our own interpretation of how we want to play it. Pacing, peak sections, and style were some key concepts discussed, while the band identified transitions and solos as integral to personalizing their arrangement. The remaining sessions were quite similar to that of the “teacher-led” band. They reached similar conclusions about “Dido’s Lament” and “Dazed and Confused.” Perhaps this is because I was facilitating both discussions and was able to guide them in discussion, however, I feel their ideas were their own and the discussion organic. When composing using a ground bass they incorporated ideas from previous sessions building to a peak in their song. When deciding to change key after the peak one member asked, “is that too abrupt?” while another responded, “there are no rules.” I found this an important insight and development for this group. Considering music to have “no rules” is a notable shift from their traditional music education and was something that they were able to bring along for the remaining sessions, and I hope into their careers as music educators. I am not suggesting that they move forward with this notion in all aspects of music-making and/or teaching but rather that the sentiment remain. It’s the open-mindedness toward music and making their own decisions based on their insights and opinions that I would hope these, and all, students gain from a music education. The band ended up writing an instrumental song in their final two sessions, not being able to decide upon a singer and wanting to incorporate their skills as multi-instrumentalists.

280

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

The interviews The individual interviews that participants provided, between sessions four and six, were an invaluable tool in gaining insights from this process. Interview analysis identified the following themes.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Social dynamics Each group had members mention varying social dynamics in their interviews. Participants found experiencing leadership and opportunity for collaboration a benefit of this process. Participants further found defining leadership and directing their own learning difficult. When asked about difficulties of the process Rachel, keyboarded/vocalist of the “self-directed” band said, “coming up with our own material and defining leadership, or designating leadership.” Sally, trumpeter/pianist in the “mixed” group, addressed leadership as well saying “the first time we met … I feel like none of us were really being leaders but also still wanted to do something … that was difficult.” In contrast, I observed a member of each group exhibiting leadership characteristics, for instance when a participant would make a decision about what to rehearse, or another would vocally encourage a peer to take an active role in decision-making. Participants initially found it frustrating to consider and incorporate the ideas of others but ultimately found that to be rewarding. Rachel articulated this saying, “There have been some hard spots. Jane and I tend to butt heads on everything in any given situation, especially if there’s not leadership defined.” Leah, the band’s guitarist added context saying, “It’s definitely a balance of … checking in with everyone and making sure that we’re all working together and getting along, having conflicting ideas.” Additionally, participants found it beneficial to get to know new peers and to rely upon colleagues’ strengths, while feeling vulnerable when performing in front of their peers. John, bassist of the “mixed” band spoke to this last point saying “I think once we felt comfortable actually playing in front of each other then it was able to kinda open the door for um, for more playing once we kind of broke the barrier.” The difficulties experienced through self-directed learning and in small-group collaboration in general leads me to believe that some of the social skills needed to successfully collaborate may not have been a substantial part of these participants’ music education. Jane, a member of the “self-directed” group, illustrates some of these difficulties: Things that were difficult were … dealing with other peoples’ artistic ideas … I think it was easy for me to recognize that right away. Like after one time of really

281

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

not, of things really not being cohesive I realized, that yeah, I need to be more open to other peoples’ ideas, um especially if I expect other people to be open to my ideas. These difficulties support the claim that the goals of music education have been “remarkably unrelated to the musical needs and desires of the great majority of the population” (Reimer 2009: 20). The opportunity to navigate social relationships, to be in charge of the process, to have to consider others’ ideas and make compromises in order to create collectively are skills that should not be overlooked within a musical situation. I believe these skills will not only benefit students in all aspects of their lives but will also directly benefit their musicianship. Through the navigation of this process, students were able to learn from one another, not only to create music together but also adding skills to their individual toolkits for future musical endeavors.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Breadth and depth of learning Participants discussed individual learning, group learning, breadth of topics covered, and depth of discussion. Aspects included technical progress on an instrument, learning to play in relation to others, learning about how popular music functions, and improved self-reflective ability. Members of the “teacher-directed” band felt the progress they were making to be rewarding. Furthermore, participants felt it beneficial to have one-on-one time with the teacher, greater depth of discussion about the music being learned, time to explore different genres, and to compose in ways they hadn’t previously experienced. Matt, drummer/trombonist in the “teacher-directed” group, described learning by ear as difficult, saying “the difficulties for me would come in some of the things like you know actually being able to identify the chords … being able to work at a piano and identify like, oh okay, this is what the bassline’s doing, this is what the harmony’s doing.” Members of the “mixed” band were the only ones to speak of being challenged to think critically, referring to lessons focused on analysis and to their own playing. When asked about whether there were advantages to the small-group process, John addressed critical thinking saying, [The process gets] each of us to really think critically about, um, about what we’re playing … from the beginning, like putting a song together, it kind of gets each of us thinking about well what is this and what notes do we need to play, do we really need to match perfectly to what the song is and then applying that to our technical ability on each instrument and being able to do that whole process really for me for the couple hours that we do it at 282

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

the time gets me really thinking critically about what I’m listening to and how I can apply that to the bass. The ability for students to make transfers of skills and concepts learned to new situations is a goal of teaching. It is the kind of critical thinking and engagement with the material that John spoke of that I believe will allow students to transfer what they have learned beyond that specific setting to any future musical (or nonmusical) scenario.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Exploration of creative skills The exploration of creative skills came up across all groups with differing perspectives. Some found creating new music difficult, while others were comfortable. Emma, the “mixed” group’s drummer, addressed improvisation saying, “[the] advantages are that we get to work with a lot of improv related musicality stuff that you don’t normally get to work on in the traditional music setting.” She also spoke of the difficulties it poses, saying “I think it’s just getting over like the whole ‘I don’t have paper in front of me so there’s nothing to follow.’” Jane, drummer of the “student-led” group, wrestled with having structure attached to creativity (albeit a structure imposed by the group itself) but ultimately found it necessary for group composition. Mark, vocalist/keyboardist in the “teacher-led” band, found success in composing and arranging differently than taught in his formal training, while participants across both the “teacher-led” and “mixed” bands found the process advantageous, teaching them ways popular and classical music can interact. Additionally, those in the “teacher-led” band found the sequential presentation of tasks prepared them to write an original song. Mark addressed this saying, “the way that our group went about [learning] that by the time we actually got to like composing a song it felt very easy, where before I ‘took this class’ I’ve never composed and have found it very difficult to compose.” The fact that being creative was difficult for some to navigate, particularly at first, is interesting. It appears to support Reimer’s (2009) claim that creative skills are given notably less attention than performance and musical literacy skills in the traditional music education setting. If that’s the case here and participants hadn’t previously learned to be creative in this manner, it makes sense they would exhibit some difficulty. Matt, the “mixed” group’s trombonist/drummer, supports Reimer’s claim, while simultaneously shining a positive light on the potential outcome of acting upon it, saying “I think it’s been really successful as far as building creativity and ways to workshop music and arrange it and write it differently than we might have been trained before.” Developing creativity is something that needs to be facilitated for many students. As music teachers it is not just our responsibility to teach the performance, theoretical, and analytical skills of a musician; we must also assume responsibility for structuring lessons, tasks, and activities that will allow students the opportunity to explore and develop their own unique potential as creative musicians. 283

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Shifting perspectives toward popular music Throughout the interview process, it became apparent that participants’ perspectives had changed. For Jimmy, the “teacher-led” group’s bassist, lessons “opened [him] up to a whole different idea of pop music as kind of art-music.” Analyzing “Dido’s Lament” and “Dazed and Confused” (Allsup 2011) was thought-provoking, providing interconnectedness between classical and popular music. Sally, pianist and trumpeter from the “mixed” group, addressed the impact this had for her: I really liked the um time we had when we went from [classical music to rock music … ]. Having that perspective really um, maybe even changed my outlook on rock music. I don’t know, I guess I went in to it thinking that um … it was more surface-level but when we listened to “Ziggy Stardust” and [“Dazed and Confused” … ] that was super cool to just like kinda analyze it. I feel like we were successful at that. Ya. I guess just arriving at certain … I don’t know, I don’t really want to call it an epiphany but like your lesson goal or something along those lines. Furthermore, when asked about the viability of using popular music in the classroom, John, bassist of the “mixed” group, addressed his likelihood of implementing popular music ensembles, as well as the study of popular music in his future teaching saying:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I would say before this no … but now having gone through it, I think it is [viable] and … I think it offers a lot of musical lessons that can be taught and learned by the students … I do think it is viable and I would do something like this now, having done it. It appears to me that the depth of learning made possible through the processes participants undertook allowed them to change their opinions on the role of popular music in music education, as mentioned by John. Additionally, the lens in which these students viewed popular music appeared to change. Jimmy, bass guitarist in the “teacherdirected” group, discussed this: I think it’s been pretty successful as far as me like thinking about like “pop music” because you know coming into it I think our whole group was kind of like we, you know, we listed off all the different adjectives of pop music, entertainment music, and it was all sort of this music’s pretty basic and easy to understand. But doing the activities we’ve done, analyzing especially the specific songs we’ve done, it opens up, it’s opened me up to a whole different idea of pop music as kind of art-music. 284

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Viability vs. value vs. acceptability Opinions related to the viability, value, and acceptability of using popular music in the classroom varied. Rachel questioned the viability of small-ensemble work as a class saying, “as a class, I don’t think so, but as like … an extracurricular activity that the teacher actively participates in and helps the students through, I think it’s great.” Contrastingly, others felt it would be viable. Leah, guitarist in the “mixed” group, addressed viability saying, “I think each small group would have to have some kind of leadership role [laughing] or some student that’s going to take leadership and make sure it’s a productive rehearsal … unless it’s teacher ran—my group just wasn’t—but I think it definitely could work … My high school actually did something very similar so I’ve seen it work.” In opposition, Sarah, bassist in the “student-led” band, felt that regardless of the aforementioned musical and social benefits, facilitating a popular music program would be difficult to manage from educational and administrative perspectives. Further logistical concerns included having adequate space, students using their time effectively as mentioned by Emma, drummer in the “mixed” band, and a teacher’s ability to simultaneously oversee and support multiple groups. Frequently discussed alongside viability was value. A program where students create popular music in small groups was considered a critical learning tool that would get students making music immediately. Participants considered using popular music beneficial for sparking creativity and interpretation, facilitating interpersonal skills and musical interest. In contrast, Matt addressed a disadvantage of using popular music, considering the music “fairly limited.” Furthermore, value was found in the positive aspects of collaboration and the accessibility to teach transferable skills. Sarah, bassist for the “student-led” band, spoke to this saying, “it would help students increase their musical abilities both with, like, creating, interpreting, or whatever and then also interpersonal, working with other people and just becoming better human beings [laughs] in general.” Mark, pianist/vocalist of the “teacher-directed” group, worried this manner of teaching would not be accepted in traditional programs due to appearing like a “looser form of education.” After a pause he added however “I think it’s disappointing that that’s the case, or at least that is even my opinion that I think it’s disappointing because I think something like this would be really effective.”

Pride/ownership Each group exhibited a sense of pride and ownership of their group and accomplishments. Naming their band was an important issue for all. The “student-led” group’s previously mentioned shift from doubt to outwardly expressed pride in learning to play a cover in an hour is an example. According to my observation, members of the “teacherdirected” band who had been less eager to speak out, began contributing increasingly 285

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

as weeks progressed. Affirming prompts by a more vocal member, as demonstrated by the following conversation, aided in this effort while contributing to the aforementioned development of a genuine sense of camaraderie. Steve (Drummer) What kind of feel do you want from the drums? Mark (Keyboardist/Vocalist) Give us a beat and we’ll match you. All groups chose to record the material they were working on. Upon listening, group members were excited about having either learned, arranged, or composed parts of a song.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions After playing in bands—covering, arranging, and composing songs—participants generally exhibited considerable positive change in opinions regarding the use of popular music in music education. However, participants feel there is value in using popular music in music education but exhibit concerns logistically and regarding the acceptability of a program that would stray drastically from tradition. All methods were successful in teaching the skills associated with playing popular music and achieving the end result of enabling students to compose original songs in small ensembles, though in differing ways. The social dynamics needed to navigate this process were the most discussed theme among “self-directed” band members and creativity among “teacher-directed” members. However, the “mixed” band discussed both equally. Furthermore, a change in perspective toward popular music was most clearly demonstrated by members of the “teacher-led” and “mixed” bands. Comments suggest that lessons three and four—focusing on interpretation—had a notable effect on participants’ perspectives. Due to not receiving these lessons, in hindsight, it is not surprising that the same changes did not appear in members from the “studentled” band. These trends lead me to conclude that the “mixed” method is perhaps most effective when teaching preservice music educators as it allows enough structure to facilitate exploration of different musical skills and a deeper level of learning, while also providing the opportunity to navigate the social elements required to be successful at self-directed learning—a skill that appeared underdeveloped among the majority of participants. Changes exhibited in participants’ attitudes toward popular music supports the claim that teachers tend to teach that with which they are familiar (Ginocchio 2001). This brings up the issue of whether we “know what we like” or “like what we know?” Participants’ generally positive opinions of popular music, after playing and composing it, suggest that perhaps it is the latter. Prior to this process, participants had no experience playing in popular music ensembles, suggesting perhaps a lack of familiarity with the

286

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the Classroom: Perspectives of Preservice Music Educators

style and preconceived notions and/or biases toward it. It appears as though studying popular music in greater depth, learning new skills—from analysis to composition— and working collaboratively and creatively to make music they were proud of allowed them to view it in a more positive light. Though the process was not devoid of challenges for all, this process appears to have had a meaningful effect on participants. Examining ownership in a science program, O’Neill (2005) found expression of ownership consisted of students expressing positive self-views, pride in their work, and considering their subject matter personally meaningful and useful. My notes suggest the effect of ownership on participation and meaningful experiences may be transferable to learning opportunities in general. This process uncovered the manifestation of all of the above. From the camaraderie developed within groups to the supportive challenging of members to expand their role, positive self-views were evident. The continual recording of work to look back on, as well as to share with others can denote pride in one’s work and accomplishments, as was the case for these participants. Finally, the opportunity to actively participate in making choices about the learning (such as repertoire selection, instrumentation in an arrangement, etc.), the occasion to develop in a tight-knit group, and eventually to create an original work representing the interests and influences of the individuals as well as the ensemble allow the subject matter to be personally meaningful. While each band enjoyed unique successes and struggles, the process itself appears to be the constant. Each band was successful at covering, arranging, and composing popular music. Many of the participants learned new skills and insights they can take forward into their future careers as music educators and many exhibited a notable change in attitude toward popular music overall. And all of this happened after only six sessions together.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 The Tanglewood Symposium was a conference aiming to define the role and improve the efficacy of music education in American society. 2 This is adapted from the “Creating new contexts” section of Allsup’s article. The concepts for the lesson and some of the procedures are borrowed from Allsup’s lesson, while the musical selections and assigned task are my own.

References Allsup, Randall E. (2003), “Mutual Learning and Democratic Action in Instrumental Music Education,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 51 (1): 24–37.

287

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Allsup, Randall E. (2011), “Popular Music and Classical Musicians: Strategies and Perspectives,” Music Educators Journal, 97 (3): 30–34. Allsup, Randall E. (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington,: Indiana University Press. Cremata, Radio (2017), “Facilitation in Popular Music Education,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 63–82. Ginocchio, John (2001), “General Music: Popular Music Performance Class,” Teaching Music, 8 (4): 40–44. Isbell, Dan (2007), “Popular Music and the Public School Music Curriculum,” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 26 (1): 53–63. Krikun, Andrew (2009), “Mixing Memphis Soul into the Community College Curriculum Stew,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 21 (1): 76–89. O’Neill, Tara (2005), “Uncovering Student Ownership in Science Learning: The Making of a Student Created Mini-Documentary,” School Science and Mathematics, 105 (6): 292–301. Reimer, Bennett (2009), “The National Association for Music Education: Leadership for What?,” in Janet R. Barrett (ed.), Music Education at a Crossroads: Realizing the Goal of Music for All, 19–24, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Springer, D. Gregory and Lori F. Gooding (2013), “Preservice Music Teachers’ Attitudes Toward Popular Music in the Music Classroom,” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, 32 (1): 25–33.

288

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

20

Popular Music in the High School: Crafting and Implementing a Curriculum Julie Beauregard

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction While popular music education has become increasingly prominent in research and practice, discourse predominantly centers on issues of pedagogy and policy. Between these two lies the less-discussed issue of curriculum. This chapter charts, from the teacher’s perspective, the process of inception, curriculum writing, and fruition of a course devoted solely to the teaching and learning of and about popular music—a narrative that lies at the intersection of popular music education discourse and curriculum studies. I use the term “popular music” as a catch-all for any musics that fall outside of otherwise established genres in classical, folk, world, or jazz idioms from the inception of rock and roll in the 1950s to the present, regardless of commercial availability or mainstream acclaim. These include, but are not limited to, rock and roll, pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western, and subgenres of each such as death metal, electronic dance music, alternative hip-hop, and cowpunk. Below is a chronicle of the Popular Music course now offered at Penfield High School. I begin by providing contextualizing information on the school and district, and the steps I took to initiate a new course at my school. The bulk of the chapter is spent detailing course development and advertising, how I turned the course from a concept into a written curriculum document, and explaining the course’s structure over the duration of the school year. The chapter concludes with considerations for change after the course’s first implementation and thoughts on its overall impact.

Context within the school and district In fall of 2015 I began teaching at Penfield High School, following approximately fifteen years teaching elsewhere at elementary and collegiate levels. During the 2015/16 school year, Penfield High School comprised 1,463 students, with an equal number of males and females, 85 percent of whom were white, 9 percent qualified as disabled, 289

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

and 15 percent “economically disadvantaged” who “participate in, or whose family participates in, economic assistance programs” (New York State Education Department 2016). The district is situated in a middle-class suburban area of the mid-sized western New York city of Rochester. The district has long valued music education and justifiably touts us as a prime example of the strong departments that contribute to Penfield students’ well-rounded educational experience. This is evidenced through our programs, staffing, and facilities. In addition to general music classes in which all students participate from kindergarten through sixth grade (ages 5–11), Suzuki string lessons begin for interested students in first grade (ages 6–7), orchestral ensembles begin in third grade (ages 8–9), and chorus and band offerings start in fourth grade (ages 9–10). At Penfield High School (students aged 14–18), there are two levels of performance ensemble based on student skill and experience per area (band, chorus, and orchestra). Instrumental students participate in mandatory small-group lessons; four increasingly intensive levels of voice classes (covering the genres of classical, folk, and musical theatre) are available to singers; and a vast array of extracurricular (meeting outside of the regular school day), credit- and non-credit bearing choral and instrumental ensembles exist including two jazz bands, jazz choir, and a pop-oriented a cappella chorus. The school holds an annual jazz fundraiser concert that affords students opportunities to work with professional performing musicians while learning new commissioned works, and a full-scale musical theatre production is staged each spring. Balancing these performance-based offerings, classroom music courses have been available for decades. These include Music In Our Lives, a course with no prerequisite typically taken by ninth graders (ages 14–15) to fulfill the art or music credit mandated by New York State to graduate with a Regents Diploma1 (New York State Education Department 2015), and multiple levels of music theory including an AP (Advanced Placement) course culminating in students’ taking of the national College Board Music Theory AP examination. All curricular ensembles and courses meet for forty minutes each school day. This robust music program requires generous staffing. At the high school level alone Penfield has one full-time teacher and additional part-time instructional staff in each performance area. My primary (and, depending on course enrollment each year, sometimes exclusive) role at Penfield High School is that of classroom music teacher. Our building has a wing that houses a state-of-the-art auditorium, teacher offices, storage spaces, numerous practice rooms with pianos, and large, well-equipped classrooms for each musical area including classroom music. My classroom has three distinct spaces within it: (1) a standard open area for rows of chairs facing a whiteboard and interactive flat screen display panel; (2) a computer lab area with enough stations to accommodate up to twenty-four students and myself; and (3) an enclosed, moderately sized recording studio that permanently houses a drum kit, full-length keyboard, electric and bass guitars, numerous amplifiers, and a computer station, with enough remaining space to comfortably accommodate five other instruments or voices with microphones. The recording studio is an uncommon luxury for an American high school, and students show regular interest in using it for 290

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music in the High School

rehearsal and recording purposes. I gladly maintain an open-door policy so individuals or groups can use the studio before and after school, and during breaks that coincide with my noninstructional periods. Many of the students who express interest in “jamming,” rehearsing with an established rock band, or recording are not currently enrolled in a curricular performing ensemble or classroom music course. Some have previously taken Music In Our Lives or another music course, or heard through friends that this facility existed and simply wished to use it. The musical styles emanating from the studio are generally not represented elsewhere in the music wing. On any given day I hear grunge, djent, funk, blues rock, soul, punk, and other genres most often played by students who are either self-taught and/or who take private lessons outside of school. Drum kit, electric guitar or bass, keyboard, or voice are their primary instruments, and technical performance levels vary from beginner to near professional. In the classroom space itself students use computer software programs to create music individually, with or without the use of live recorded tracks. Styles here vary widely as well, but still fall outside of what otherwise typically occurs in school music to include trap, drum and bass, and folktronica. True to their genre of choice, volume levels vary; I request that students wear ear plugs in order to protect against hearing loss when in the recording studio, but they rarely heed this advice in order to more easily communicate with one another. Within a few weeks of starting to teach at Penfield High School it became clear to me that there was a disconnect between our curricular offerings and the musical abilities and interests of the broader student body. I gleaned how integral popular music is in the lives of Penfield High School’s students through informal conversations and observations of the ubiquity of headphone wearing throughout the school day—not to mention the abundance of research indicating the importance of popular music in the lives of adolescents (D’Amore and Smith 2016; Green, 2002; Powell, Smith, and D’Amore 2017). It became increasingly apparent to me that existing course offerings should be expanded to reflect music that students find significant, to make school music education as relevant as possible to as broad a student population as possible (Froehlich and Smith 2017). Though students seeking musical opportunities in our district may be more likely to find them than their peers elsewhere given the unusually abundant quantity of offerings provided, there is a substantial population still unserved by our music program. As a lifelong fan and practitioner of popular musics myself, I was also keen to honor my philosophical belief in the importance of expanding the traditional canon of repertoire and pedagogy to include previously marginalized content and instructional approaches.

Preparing to initiate a new course As reception of a potential course on popular music by fellow music teachers and school administrators in my district was a complete unknown, I conducted some research before making a formal proposal. Though popular music is gaining increased acceptance and 291

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

traction in the music education field, few academic courses focusing specifically on it exist at the high school level in the United States (Vasil 2015), and the study of popular music remains quite uncommon in the United States in any curricular high school context (Powell, Krikun and Pignato 2015). Fortunately, literature addressing authenticity of secondary school music content and pedagogy in relation to adolescents’ lived experiences and identities (Allsup et al. 2012; Christophersen and Gullberg 2017; Cutietta 1991), use of informal learning practices when engaging with popular music (Allsup 2008; Green 2008; Rodriguez 2004; Westerlund 2006) and opportunities for culturally responsive education in the secondary general music classroom (Abril 2013; Partti 2012; Thibeault 2013) were available and extremely helpful in situating my course proposal. My first step toward making a popular music course a reality was to discuss the possibility with the music colleagues in my building. They, along with our district’s music department chairperson, were enthusiastic about the idea and particularly the course’s potential to serve a new student population and expand the impact of our department schoolwide. I drafted a course description that was met with similar positivity and approved by all necessary parties at the building and district levels. The course was subsequently advertised for its first run during the 2016/17 school year. Students, in conjunction with their guidance counselor, choose the specific courses that will comprise their subsequent year of high school study within guidelines determined at the state and federal levels, given the school’s offerings from year to year. The new Popular Music course would fulfill an elective credit in music.

Crafting the course curriculum

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Course development and advertising Concurrent with these steps, I brainstormed intended learning outcomes for course participants and specific ideas for course construction, content, and teaching and learning methods. I reached out to the music education community at large, using Facebook, email, and discussions as means of crowd-sourcing information, ideas, and resources. This proved extremely fruitful, reminding me of the materials and approaches available through programs like Little Kids Rock (2015), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2016), and the Grammy Museum (2016), as well as leading me to others, such as Musical Futures (2018) and PBS’ American Masters series (Thirteen 2016). My awareness of theoretical and pedagogical ideas was further expanded through a review of scholarship including publications by Abramo (2011), Allsup (2008), Folkestad (2006), Green (2008), and Lill (2014). I committed to a student-centered approach including as much informal learning as possible to approximate out-of-school music learning experiences (e.g., musicking led by student aptitudes and curiosities, embedding a great deal of

292

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the High School

student choice and autonomy in execution of activities and assignments), and to starting with information and skills in, about, and related to music with which students were familiar in order to later expand their abilities and knowledge by making connections to the unfamiliar. The following description of the Popular Music course was included in our school’s 2016/17 Course Selection Guide:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Students will develop a comprehensive understanding of popular music through study of popular music history, reading about and discussing music in relation to culturally contextualizing factors and the music business, musical listening and analysis, songwriting, performance on instruments relevant to current popular music idioms, use of computer-based music technologies including MIDI sequencing, and audio recording and production. Projects include written and oral reports and presentations demonstrating critical thought and informed musical analysis, as well as small group performance of popular music arrangements and original student compositions. I conceived of this course as academically and musically rigorous, catering to students with an established foundation who wanted to develop both a deeper intellectual comprehension about music and increased creativity through musical invention and performance. Prerequisites were either completion of another high school level classroom music course, two years of a high school curricular ensemble (second year potentially concurrent), or by obtaining my permission. By making instructor permission a prerequisite option, students with musical interest and some basic musical understanding and skill were able to enroll following a brief interview/audition with me. Students in Grades 10–12 (ages 15–18) meeting any of these criteria were eligible. The hope was for students otherwise not involved in the school’s music program beyond their one-year requirement to continue with this course in expanding their musical knowledge and experience, and for those who had not yet been part of the school music program to participate in a course with content relevant to their lives outside of school. Typical enrollment in classroom music courses is approximately sixteen, and in its first year I hoped that the Popular Music course would reach the minimum fifteen required to run. Ultimately, twenty-two students enrolled.

Turning the idea into a written curriculum document I applied for and was approved to complete thirty hours of curriculum writing that occurred over the summer. As per district policy, I first completed a half-day curriculum writing training session. This entailed an explanation of district use of the nationally 293

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

prominent backward design framework2 put forth in the book Understanding By Design by Wiggins and McTighe (2005). Various templates are provided to district employees writing curricula, each of which follows and includes the primary facets of the backward design model while allowing for adaptability and modification; this is meant to promote flexibility between grade levels and disciplines while maintaining a unified approach to curriculum writing districtwide (Assistant Superintendent for Instruction James Peiffer, pers. discuss., December 1, 2016). The template in Figure 20.1 allowed for the clearest articulation of music course content, objectives, and outcomes for students, instructional approaches, materials, and assessments, so I and other teachers in the music department engaged in curriculum writing at that time deemed it most aptly suited for our work.

Figure 20.1  Curriculum template adapted from Penfield Central School District training documents (2015).

294

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music in the High School

Following the precepts of the backward design model I started with the end in mind, namely, what students should know and be able to do upon completion of this course. I concluded that it was imperative to include a spectrum of experiences related to popular music, from the academic and practical to the creative and exploratory. This resulted in the generation of six units of study: popular music history (1950s–present), the business of music, song craft, music theory, instrumental technique, and audio production. Course structure was meant to follow a modified spiral curriculum (Bruner 1960), with units overlapping and concepts returning with greater depth throughout the year, each ultimately completed at staggered intervals.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Course structure The overarching concept for the course is to move from the academic/practical to the creative/exploratory, shifting from a primary emphasis on popular music history in the first half of the year to song craft in the second half. Any popular music of interest to enrolled students can be included for study. The music history unit moves chronologically backwards at first, starting with artists familiar to and admired by students, then identifying and researching those musicians’ influences in order to find relevance in the more distant musicians to whom students may not otherwise relate. After this investigation, Covach and Flory’s (2015) textbook What’s That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History is used to tackle music history beginning in the 1950s, with groups of students responsible for giving presentations and writing quiz questions for their peers on chapter content. The business of music unit weaves into historical study throughout, helping identify and understand the roles and functions of various jobs and careers within the music industry and broader ecosystem. This unit also includes early examinations of changes in music consumption and advances in recording technology, connecting how those things shaped what and how music has been (and is) created and disseminated. Audio production, a unit in which students demonstrate comprehension of various music technologies (hardware and software), also begins during the first half of the year. Specified recording projects that stylistically align with historical elements are included to give hands-on experience creating the kinds of music under academic study. Similarly, the song craft unit begins in the fall, starting by developing analytical skills and comprehension of song form, and the impact of instrumentation, texture, performance technique, and production on a final recorded product. Immersive, detailed listening skills are established. Historical study is finalized in the second half of the year, alongside completion of various creative endeavors in the song craft unit (e.g., writing novel melodies over familiar chord progressions, arranging existing songs from the popular music canon). At this point the instrumental technique unit begins, establishing and increasing students’ proficiency on instruments most commonly used in popular music: electric guitar, electric bass, keyboard, drum kit, and voice3 so they gain experience and skills 295

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

immediately applicable to a popular music ensemble. Two instruments are studied by each student: one they consider their “primary” popular music instrument, which they have significant previous experience with, and a “secondary” instrument, which is far less familiar or may be entirely new to them. Students are grouped into bands based on proficiency of their primary instruments, as well as stylistic and social collaborative preferences. Simultaneously, with students rotating with their group through stations, students work on lyrical composition and some basics of music theory are covered in such a way as to facilitate the aural and functional skills of students with regard to tonality, melody, meter, rhythm, and harmony; students complete numerous readings and exercises from Scott’s (2003) text Chord Progressions for Songwriters during the music theory unit to link aural familiarity to theoretical comprehension. Essentially, the vast majority of work completed in the second half of the year is done in service of reaching the final goal of the song craft unit: the collaborative composition of an original song to be performed by a student ensemble or rendered electronically. Students can choose to collaborate with peers in studio and on postproduction editing, or work independently or in pairs to combine their knowledge of elements of the song craft and music theory units with elements of the audio production unit when creating their original song. The recording and mixing of these original songs constitutes the end point of the audio production unit, while discussion of copyright law concludes the unit on the business of music. With each class activity and assignment, students are asked to provide input or to select from options so that their learning is personally relevant. In cases where I make decisions about things such as groupings for various projects, I take into account each student’s interests and abilities (e.g., a student with expressed enthusiasm for alternative rock would be assigned to read about and report on college radio and the emergence of indie rock when studying the 1980s).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Considerations after initial implementation Having recently completed one full year of running the Popular Music course described above, I have considered some changes. First, experience has shown that the course description should indicate that it is a survey course providing an introductory understanding of concepts and skills rather than leading to “a comprehensive understanding of popular music,” which intimates greater depth than can reasonably take place in one year’s time. This was misleading to students and also set an impossible bar for me to reach as their teacher, frustrating all of us to varying extents at different points. Second, course content needs to undergo some modifications to accommodate myriad student capabilities, especially as these will change with each iteration of the course. Primary changes include greater emphasis on embedding musical technologies

296

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music in the High School

in creative projects, which were used this year but only in a limited capacity due to a switch from Mac to PC platform and a related change in software programs. Greater hands-on experience will undoubtedly foster deeper student understanding and allow them to develop more capably as musical composers, arrangers, engineers, and producers, particularly important as the music ecosystem sees an increasing overlap between these roles and that of performer (Moir and Medbøe 2015; Thompson and Stevenson 2017). I also intend to provide students more time to collaborate on song composition—their most substantial culminating project of the year. During this first year students needed more time and freedom to produce a product that truly reflected their musicality. I made the mistake of stipulating too many parameters for that project, and retrospectively I recognize that my stepping back will be much more beneficial to student creativity and revealing in terms of their accomplishment and synthesis of yearlong learning. To provide more time for these portions of the curriculum, the popular music history unit will need to be reduced. Logistical issues, including the arrival of textbooks a few weeks after the school year began, slowed down the pace of that unit, so I anticipate that streamlining will be an easy endeavor in the future. Overall, Popular Music is a successful course with a hearty first-year enrollment, a high level of participant engagement, and positive “buzz” around school (except for complaints that there is actual in-class work and homework involved). As evidenced by student performances of original songs at multiple in- and out-of-school events, and reports of increased musical collaboration, gig-seeking, and self-marketing outside of school, this situates me as a change agent and facilitator for students’ musical selfempowerment—something for which a need is being increasingly voiced within our profession (Randles 2013; Powell and Burstein 2017; Powell, Smith, and D’Amore 2017). The course continues to be offered, allowing me to carry on servicing a broader population and to integrate teaching and learning methods and musical genres otherwise not represented in our high school music program in both the course itself, and in a new extracurricular mixed-instrumentation group I direct focused on recording and performing original student arrangements and compositions meant to act as a supplement to the Popular Music course and the overall music program.

Notes 1 A Regents Diploma is the standard for high school graduates in New York State. The alternative diploma is the Local, which is primarily for “students with disabilities with an individualized education program or section 504 accommodation plan,” but can also be awarded to any student under special circumstances following an appeal process (Penfield High School n.d.). 2 The term backward curriculum design “has been widely circulated in professional discourse due mainly to its attractive premises and powerful promises. These promises fulfill imperative needs of stakeholders facing standards, assessment, and accountability measures resulting from the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)” and Race To The Top (RTTT) program 297

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

of 2009. Across the United States, backward design has become the predominant model for curriculum mapping in the United States (Cho and Allen 2005: 105–106). Wiggins and McTighe spearheaded a specific framework for implementing backward design in their initial publication of Understanding By Design in 1998. The stages of backward design they outline are: “1) Identify desired results. 2) Determine acceptable evidence. 3) Plan learning experiences and instruction” (Wiggins and McTighe 2005: 18). As opposed to “traditional” curriculum writing that may either be activity-oriented or teacher-centric, backward design focuses on student learning outcomes and how to achieve them through focused learning tasks and embedded assessments. 3 During this unit students work in groups and/or independently in myriad ways. Learning methods include, but are not limited to, direct instruction, peer instruction, use of online tutorials, and use of published or teacher-generated written guides.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abramo, Joseph Michael (2011), “Gender Differences of Popular Music Production in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 59 (1): 21–43. Abril, Carlos R. (2013), “Toward a More Culturally Responsive General Music Classroom,” General Music Today, 27 (1): 6–11. Allsup, Randall Everett (2008), “Creating an Educational Framework for Popular Music in Public Schools: Anticipating the Second-Wave,” special issue of Visions of Research in Music Education, 12(1): 1–12. Available online: www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/rea10/facultyprofile/files/inganEducationalFrameworkforPopularMusic(2008).pdf (accessed February 11, 2017). Allsup, Randall Everett, Heidi Westerlund, and Eric Shieh (2012), “Youth Culture and Secondary Education,” in Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, vol. 1, 460–475, New York: Oxford University Press. Bruner, Jerome S. (1960), The Process of Education, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cho, Jeasik and Allen Trent (2005), “‘Backward’ Curriculum Design and Assessment: What Goes Around Comes Around, or Haven’t We Seen This Before?,” Taboo, 9 (2): 105–123. Christophersen, Catharina and Anna-Karin Gullberg (2017), “Popular Music Education, Participation and Democracy: Some Nordic Perspectives,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 425–437, New York: Routledge. Covach, John and Andrew Flory (2015), What’s That Sound?: An Introduction to Rock and Its History, fourth edition, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Cutietta, Robert A. 1991. “Coaching a Pop/Rock Ensemble.” Music Educators Journal, 77 (8): 40–45. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Froehlich, Hildegard C. and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), Sociology for Music Teachers: Practical Applications, second edition, New York: Routledge.

298

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music in the High School

Grammy Museum (2016), “Teacher Curriculum and Resources.” Available online: www. grammymuseum.org/education/curriculum (accessed February 9, 2017). Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Group. Lill, Athena (2014), “An Analytical Lens for Studying Informal Learning in Music: Subversion, Embodied Learning and Participatory Performance,” Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 13 (1): 223–247. Musical Futures (2018), “Music Education Training,” Available online: www.musicalfutures. org/training (accessed November 24, 2018). Moir, Zack and Haftor Medbøe (2015), “Reframing Popular Music Composition as Performance-Centred Practice,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 8 (2): 147–161. New York State Education Department (NYSED) (2015), “2015. Summary of the Arts (Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts) Provisions in the Part 100 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education).” September 15, 2015. Available online: www.nysed.gov/ common/nysed/files/programs/curriculum-instruction/artsum.pdf (accessed February 10, 2017). New York State Education Department (NYSED) (2016), “Penfield Senior High School Enrollment (2015—16).” Available online: https://data.nysed.gov/enrollment.php?year=2016 &instid=800000034517 (accessed June 14, 2017). Partti, Heidi (2012), “Learning from Cosmopolitan Digital Musicians: Identity, Musicianship, and Changing Values in (In)Formal Music Communities,” PhD diss., Sibelius Academy, Kopijyvä, Espoo. Penfield High School (n.d.), “Diploma Types and Graduation Requirements.” Available online: www.penfield.edu/highschool.cfm?subpage=77766 (accessed June 14, 2018). Powell, Bryan and Scott Burstein (2017), “Popular Music and Modern Band Principles,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 203–216, New York: Routledge. Powell, Bryan, Andrew Krikun, and Joseph Michael Pignato (2015), “‘Something’s Happening Here!’: Popular Music Education in the United States,” IASPM@Journal, 5 (1): 4–22. Powell, Bryan, Gareth Dylan Smith, and Abigail D’Amore (2017), “Challenging Symbolic Violence and Hegemony in Music Education Through Contemporary Pedagogical Approaches,” International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 45 (6): 734–743. Randles, Clint (2013), “A Theory of Change in Music Education,” Music Education Research, 15 (4) : 471–485. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2016), “Education.” Available online: www.rockhall.com/learn/ education (accessed February 9, 2017). Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier (2004), “Popular Music in Music Education: Toward a New Conception of Musicality,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 13–27, Reston, VA: Music Educators National Conference (MENC). Scott, Richard J. (2003), Chord Progressions for Songwriters, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.

299

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Thibeault, Matthew D. (2013), “Quite a Lot on Some Problems With—and Just a Little on the Hopes for—Secondary General Music with Regards to Culturally Responsive and Respectful Music Education,” General Music Today, 26 (3): 35–38. Thirteen (2016), “PBS: American Masters,” PBS. Available online: www.pbs.org/wnet/ americanmasters/topic/music/ (accessed February 9, 2017). Thompson, Paul and Alex Stevenson (2017), “Missing A Beat: Exploring Experiences, Perceptions and Reflections of Popular Electronic Musicians in UK Higher Education Institutions,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 203–216, New York: Routledge. Vasil, Martina (2015), “Integrating Popular Music and Informal Music Learning Practices: A Multiple Case Study of Secondary School Music Teachers Enacting Change in Music Education,” PhD diss., West Virginia University, Morgantown. Westerlund, Heidi (2006), “Garage Rock Bands: A Future Model for Developing Musical Experience?,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 119–125. Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe (2005), Understanding by Design, second edition, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

300

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part V

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Identity, Meaning, and Value in Popular Music Education

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

302

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

21

Popular Music Education: Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia Gareth Dylan Smith

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction People’s musical tastes, preferences, and experiences of music are all deeply personal. They are also of course culturally located, rooted in the social milieus whence we come and in which we live, love, and learn (Bennett 2015; Campbell 2010; Froehlich and Smith 2017; Jorgensen 1997; Smith 2013a; Vulliamy and Shepherd 1984). In Margaret Barrett’s (2011a) edited volume on cultural psychology of music education, she and the other contributors illustrate through a series of rich, vivid case studies and other explorations, how music learning, identities, and cultures are constructed and coconstructed, construed, and coconstrued through music education encounters and experiences. These experiences structure us and we, individually and collectively, build and maintain these musical taste and educational-systemic structures, turning them into actions and behaviors as music makers, consumers, and educators. Anything personal is always already something political. Education is also always political, because it deals with people, power relations, and the meanings and values of people’s place(s) in the world (Bourdieu 2005; Giroux 2003, 2007, 2014; Green 2008; Powell, D’Amore, and Smith 2017). As Froehlich and Smith note, “the more rigorously certain values are emphasized over others, the easier it is to discount, disengage, and disenfranchise anyone whose values do not match up with those in the (frequently silent) majority” (2017: 32). Each music teacher has their unique approach to education, colored to greater or lesser degrees and more or less consciously, by the people who taught them to teach and by those to whom they have ascribed pedagogic authority (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977)—that is, those whose ideas they trust and whom they are willing to let influence their future decisions, music, and selves. Much of what follows in this chapter does not apply solely to popular music education, inasmuch as the discussion applies to music education more broadly. This is not because I have made insufficient effort to locate my thinking in a specifically popular music education realm—indeed, in my dual role as one of the editors of this volume, I aim herein to help frame the chapters that follow in the section. My approach stems from my desire not to silo popular music any further than might already have happened 303

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

(Smith and Powell 2017). Through the hegemonic power of what Bourdieu (1986) termed “cultural capital,” the word “music” in music education usually refers, or is at least normatively understood to refer, to Western art music (WAM) (Powell, Smith, and D’Amore 2017). For this reason, any music that is not WAM needs to be identified and qualified as such. A related issue compounding this otherness, is that because popular music does not have the cultural capital accorded to WAM, it can become increasingly difficult to incorporate popular music and other “Other” music into music education practice and discourse.1 However, the points under discussion in this chapter take on particular relevance for popular music, because popular music is, by definition, easily accessible and highly valued by very large numbers of people—however contested and broad one’s understanding of “popular music” may be (Smith 2013b, 2014; Niknafs, in press). I should at this point declare some authorial biases. I trained formally as a classical clarinetist but have spent all of my performing and teaching career (with a tiny handful of very rare, unflattering exceptional instances) employed as a drummer, school teacher, and college lecturer working with a range of popular music styles and students. Nearly all of my publications are on or closely related to popular music education. The contents of this chapter, therefore, are inevitably filtered through my trained assumptions and acquired blind-spots in regard to discourse in the field. Thus, this chapter is intended far less as a treatise, than I hope it may serve to provoke discussion and dialogue. David Elliott and Marissa Silverman (2014a: 58–59) remind us that “music does not have one value; music has numerous values, depending on the ways in which it is conceived, used, and taught by people who engage in specific musical styles” and communities. That message runs through this chapter, beginning with a look at identity from a cultural psychology perspective. A section on aesthetic experience follows, paying particular attention to subjectivity and individual, embodied knowledge of playing music. That leads into a discussion of eudaimonia and punk pedagogies, providing perspectives on enabling and empowering students at all levels. The chapter ends with a call for teachers relentlessly to fight the hegemony that threatens to undermine the transformative potential of popular music education.

Identity I have found it helpful to frame my thinking about and understanding of identity through the discipline of cultural psychology. Scholarship in this area can help scholars to see and remember the separateness as well as the interconnectedness of individual experiences, and the sociocultural contexts in which they occur. Michael Cole (1998) sets out seven key characteristics of cultural psychology, four of which are salient here. He explains that a cultural psychology perspective:

304

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

seeks to ground its analysis in everyday life events assumes that mind emerges in the joint mediated activity of people. Mind, then, is in an important sense, “coconstructed” and distributed assumes that individuals are agents in their own development but do not act in settings entirely of their own choosing rejects cause-effect, stimulus-response, explanatory science in favor of a science that emphasizes the emergent nature of mind in activity and that acknowledges a central role for interpretation in its explanatory framework. (104)

● ●

●

●

Margaret Barrett (2011b), carefully situating cultural psychology in a music education context, writes:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Through the processes of mutual constitution, individuals and groups may not only shape the contexts and settings in which they live and work, they are in turn shaped by them. In such a view, context and setting are integral to the constitution of human thought and activity, rather than variables to be taken into account when investigating a phenomenon. In short, we cannot separate mind and cognition from culture and context, values and beliefs, and a culturally mediated identity. (3) For music educators working in a range of contexts, this orientation is doubly empowering, for it reminds us that through the culture we create and curate in our schools, classrooms and institutions, we can (and inevitably do) affect and effect the identity realization of students in our care; also, it explains how culture is, or can (and, I firmly believe, should) reflect, embrace, and enact the cultural realities and identities of students. Cultural psychology, presented in this way, tells us nothing that we do not already know instinctively and through experience of classrooms and other contexts within and without music education. However, if we pause to reflect on the obvious features of how cultures, identities, and learning interact, hopefully we, as educators, allow ourselves time to consider how best to address the realities in our particular classrooms and communities. Inevitably, some days go better than others, as each day, each class and each taught session bring with them the effects and behaviors of the inhabitants of turbulent, dynamic lives interacting in an institutionalized setting as best they can. Lucy Green and others have commented on the intimate symbiotic connections between identity and learning, and have explained how one is often also an instance of the other. Green, for instance, states that “identity … [is] intrinsically and unavoidably connected to particular ways of learning” (2002: 12), and Etienne Wenger observes that “learning transforms our identities,” asserting, moreover, that it can be helpful to view “identity as learning trajectory” (1998: 227). I have previously conceptualized these connections in terms of learning realization and identity realization (Froehlich 305

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

and Smith 2017: 24–25; Smith 2013a), where two meanings of the verb “to realize” become important: (1) to make something real or make it happen; and (2) to understand something: Active identity realization refers to any instance of someone going about being or trying to become, for instance, a musician. This involves immersing oneself in musical traditions, communities, activities, and acquiring the necessary attitudes and skills. Active identity realization follows and leads to passive identity realization. Passive identity realization refers to understanding who you are, for example, feeling like a musician, or seeing yourself as a teacher; this may happen during and after key life moments such as a successful concert performance, creation of a satisfying production in a digital audio workstation (DAW), or teaching a successful lesson. Active learning realization refers to all the ways in which people seek to learn things, and the ways in which that learning takes place, for instance, taking lessons in voice or an instrument, watching online tutorials videos on music production, or jamming with friends in a band learning songs. Passive learning realization refers to understanding that you have learned something; for instance, realizing in a band rehearsal that as a drummer your creative contributions are welcome, or discovering through pursuing a range of performance opportunities that you’re really best suited to, for example, progressive math rock contexts.

●

●

●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

Passive identity realization is a moment of discovery, of learning. Active identity realization requires active learning realization (one cannot be a musician or teacher without developing appropriate skills and attributes). Passive learning realization is a byproduct of active identity realization and active learning realization. Active identity realization and active learning realization lead to passive identity realization and passive learning realization, which in turn can lead to active identity realization and active learning realization In the model of the “Snowball Self” (Froehlich and Smith 2017: 24), identities are described as existing at three “levels” —(1) the overall concept one has of one’s (snowball) self; (2) separate and overlapping, intersecting identities within this larger self (e.g., student, family member, musician, non-singer, valued member of the school community); and (3) contextual identities (such as those that emerge lesson to lesson in school, moment to moment, task to task, and experience to experience)—these might be “improving drummer,” “teacher’s favourite,” “solid improviser,” “content, happy songwriter/producer,” or “poor writer/mathematician/sportsperson.” At all levels, identities are realized through complex processes of learning, reflecting, and understanding. The identity-learning-realizations that take place at the second and third levels identified here are typically those most immediate in, pertinent to, and 306

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

accessible through music education experiences. However, as Lucy Green has amply demonstrated, students’ music education experiences lead them to feel celebration, alienation, or ambiguity (2008: 246). Experiences of these impact the core of who a person is, who they understand themselves to be, and thus how they comport themselves in education contexts, and in the presence of particular cultural and social structures and the institutions that embody and represent these. That is to say that music education directly and profoundly impacts identity realization and learning realization; a person’s sense of self, their future learning choices, and in turn the impact of these on identity, are always at stake. The foregoing exposition on a cultural psychological orientation to understanding identity, speaks to what Bourdieu (1984, 2005) has called “habitus,” which is, in essence, the acknowledgement that we are each the lived product and manifestation of whence we have come—including family, gendering, and any and all other aspects of that which has, visibly and invisibly, informed who we are as individuals in global and minutely localized (e.g., classroom) contexts:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Insofar as he or she is endowed with a habitus, the social agent is a collective individual or a collective individuated by the fact of embodying objective structures. The individual, the subjective, is social and collective. The habitus is socialized subjectivity, a historical transcendental, whose schemes of perceptions and appreciation (systems of appreciation, tastes, etc.) are the product of collective and individual history. Reason (or rationality) is “bounded” not only … because the human mind is generically bounded … but because it is socially structured and determined, and, as a consequence, limited. (Bourdieu 2005: 211) Bourdieu and Passeron (1977: 19) coined the term “pedagogic authority (PAu),” which describes a key component in any cultural psychological or sociological approach to understanding and working in music education contexts. Pedagogic authority is not wielded (by, e.g., a teacher) but ascribed (by anyone granting themselves permission to learn). If a teacher, institution, or culture is given, by a student, the pedagogic authority to teach, then the student is ready to engage in the process of learning. If pedagogic authority is not ascribed (because, for instance, students do not recognize the value of the knowledge or culture that a teacher aims to impart), then learning certainly takes place but negative, passive learning realization is foregrounded as students compound the learning: they and their culture are not valued in this space. This process happens in place of active learning realization in line with the pedagogical or curricular aims of the teacher (and perhaps of the student) who may be willing, but unable, to connect with the curriculum or its culture-bearers.

307

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

A perpetual challenge for teachers who desire to curate democratic learning spaces in their classrooms, is that there are learning outcomes to be reached, concerts to be performed, standards to address, and—often the most significant hurdle of all—a daily teaching schedule that leaves teachers no time for lunch, “bio breaks,” or to catch a breath, so it is often much more efficient and far less exhausting to fall back on a predefined curriculum, method, text book, and assessment rubrics. A democratic, more open orientation lets students see and connect with teachers as humans searching for meaning and value in life, and not as authoritarians (Allsup 2016). Hildegard Froehlich articulates the apparent conundrum with which educators are thus perpetually presented: Teaching music should always begin with “what makes my students tick.” Although that is hard enough, even harder is perhaps to enable them from there on to explore and discover what is unfamiliar and new to them— something they can sink their teeth into and become increasingly better at doing … I nearly always found myself torn between roles of gatekeeper and gate opener. (Froehlich and Smith 2017: 106–107) If educators curate and model a mutually supportive environment where all music and all experiences of that music are valued and respected, we come closer to realizing much of the potential of music in the classroom. Doing music, making music—music(k) ing2—is about enriching our lives, and tapping into our innately human need to do music.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Aesthetic experience Norman Denzin (2014: 41) argues that the effects of experiences on a person “are the epiphanies of a life,” somewhat equivalent to what I have, above, termed “passive identity realization.” A key feature of identity realization in and through music and music education, is what Richard Shusterman (2008) has termed “aesthetic experience,” about which he writes: Aesthetic experience is essentially valuable and enjoyable; It is something vividly felt and subjectively savoured, affectively absorbing us and focusing our attention on its immediate presence; It is meaningful experience, not mere sensation. (17) ● ●

●

Shusterman’s subjective location of aesthetic experience for all is core to this chapter’s central theme of identity. In Art as Experience, John Dewey writes, “experience, in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality … it signifies active and alert

308

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

commerce with the world; at its height, it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events” (Dewey [1934] 1980: 19). Dewey’s assertion thus also concurs with those made by Barrett and others, above, concerning the importance of recognizing and embracing the interconnectivity of one’s self with culture and society— the mutual coconstruction of an identity by society and of society by its (persons with all their) constituent identities. Any reference to the aesthetic implicates the personal or the subjective. For the purposes of this chapter, it is the intensified understanding of, from, and with oneself that I wish to emphasize, before turning my focus again outward in the closing sections. There are, of course, many ways in which people can have valid, meaningful experiences that are construed as “aesthetic.” For instance, Bennett Reimer’s (1989) treatise on Philosophy of Music Education emphasized music listening and appreciation as more-or-less passive, aesthetic experiences for learners; his work exemplified the music education as aesthetic education (MEAE) approach (Reimer 1996). Reimer’s former student, David Elliott, proposed an alternative, “new” philosophy for music education in his (1995) exposition, Music Matters—later revised with a colleague (Elliott and Silverman 2014b)—that focused on the aesthetic of praxial music education, of doing in and for music learning: “musicing” (1995: 58). Reimer erroneously characterized Elliott’s aesthetic as being about “music for performers only” (Reimer 1996: 59), when Elliott emphasized playing, which involves substantially and qualitatively different experiences from performing (which nonetheless usually involves playing, or singing). Shusterman’s aesthetic experience concerns a heightened sense of awareness in and of self that is particularly well suited to discussing the playing of music. This playing can find its most successful or ideal manifestation away from performance as often as (or more frequently than) in it (Elliott and Silverman 2014a; Smith 2017a); it includes rehearsals, jamming, and collective and personal avocational music-making. Shusterman’s framework also helps orientate discussion toward meaning for the individual. It is not that other writers on the aesthetic have elided meaningfulness for students but Reimer’s work, for instance, tends to privilege the teacher’s perspective, whereas as the focus in this chapter addresses more directly the subjective experience of the person having the aesthetic experience. It is helpful to orient ourselves further toward the personal, highly subjective experiences of playing music—on “the inextricability of music from practice” (Stone-Davis 2011: 159)—as something of a corrective to “normative disembodied understandings of music that have become embedded as reified epistemological and ontological truths” in music education (Smith 2017a). I pay particular attention, therefore, to somatic experience, embracing music-making “as an actual experience … music is a physical phenomenon … [and] in the context of music it is not at all contentious to claim that not only experience but knowledge is located in the body” (Winter 2013: 108). Shusterman argues compellingly that, the more twenty-firstcentury lives are spent online and “in” virtual spaces, the higher value that education systems place on the cerebral, cognitive skills and the more we spend our leisure time 309

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

as spectators and voyeurs, “the more our bodily experience seems to matter” (2008: 12). His point resonates deeply with me as a drummer (and as a keen cyclist and runner). I realize the irony of my acknowledging this need for corporeal knowledge in writing! As a caveat to this, I would add, however, that I need, crave, relish, and constantly seek to spend time playing the drums—moving with them, feeling the sound and the experience. I once (Smith 2017a) distilled in a haiku the centrality of drumming to my life:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I am a drummer Drumming is when I am me Then is who I am I am me at other times and in other contexts, of course, but drumming is when everything makes the most sense. Playing the instrument is core. Of course, drumming will not be so essential to most people as it is to me, nor would I seek to suggest that it should be. My point is that something musical—drumming—is deeply embedded in the core of my personhood and identity. Fundamental to my need to play drums, is the location of that need in somatic experience—experience that is always aesthetic experience. Without engaging in and acknowledging this, I cease to be who I am. I possess embodied, conscious, and tacit understanding that “the performance [and indeed all playing] of music is an embodied event” in which “the physical body becomes one with the instrument and with the sound produced” (Stone-Davis 2011: 162). I contend that it would not be much of a stretch to propose that many thousands of other musicians experience a similar essential somatic, aesthetic experience of and in playing music. Aesthetic, embodied experience can be a vital part of identity realization for students in a wide range of music education contexts. Chris Shilling asserts “the necessity of understanding humans as embodied beings” (2000: 6). As Shusterman urges, “the body is not only a crucial site where one’s ethos and values can be physically displayed and attractively developed, but it is also where one’s skills of perception and performance can be honed to improve one’s cognitions and capacities for virtue and happiness” (2008: xii). It is vital that music educators recognize this point. I turn to these considerations of virtue and happiness in the following section.

Eudaimonia I have discussed elsewhere how music-making can be intrinsically meaningful to people making popular music, and suggested that eudaimonia is a helpful term for understanding the centrality of music-making to people’s lives and identities (Smith 2016)—the musicians whom I interviewed for that study reiterated again and again just how important it was to them to include music-making as a core component of their lives. These musicians were “quietly and decisively living their lives according to their

310

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

own inner imperative[s]” (Norton 1976: xiii), “liv[ing] in accordance with the daimon or ‘true self ’” (Waterman 1992: 58; emphasis in original)—compelled to make music vital parts of their lives and selves. Victor Frankl speaks similarly of a person’s “will to meaning,” urging that, where possible, it is actually a person’s responsibility to live according to their true purpose ([1959] 1997: 121). The popular musicians profiled in the “flash study analyses” curated by the Music Learning Profiles Project all exhibit eudaimonic orientations (Cremata et al. 2017: 5–7). People are drawn and compelled to music-making, which means teachers (and systems of education) have an ethical obligation to meet students there (Elliott and Silverman 2014 a, 2014b; Wright 2010). Elliott and Silverman (2014a) convincingly contend that eudaimonia is an ethical way of being that takes account of not only one’s own (musical) compulsion and needs but also is anchored in respect for the needs of others in the community. Conversely, one could argue that a eudaimonic orientation is inherently oppressive and aggressively neoliberal in its orientation. I suggest, therefore, that “eudaimonism can be viewed … as a double-sided coin, promising simultaneously acceptance into an exclusive ideological system and freedom from that dehumanizing structure” (Smith 2016: 164). With recourse to the powerful and incisive work of Anne McClintock (1995), I contend that eudaimonia “embodies and promotes an overtly masculine stance, with its overtones of privilege, and thus imperial, colonial, and postcolonial violence and power in its assumption of the possibility of a fulfilling career, remunerated or unpaid.” It can be easy to conflate a (eudaimonic) desire for meaningful, personal fulfillment with the “subjectivity and violence inherent in a competitive marketplace [which] positions that environment at odds with goals of a democratic pedagogical paradigm” (Smith 2015: 71). Ruud Welten (2012) explains how, despite this pervasive twenty-first-century paradigm, there is palpable hope: Humanity has become an object. The criteria for having a “meaningful” life are not constituted by existential values, Aristotelian purposes, modelled after the virtues of our vocations, a striving after happiness, but they are valuated on the market place. In our times, we do not speak of labourers or even personnel, but of “Human Resources” that have to be managed, like tools. In a society like ours, we recognise this “in-humanisation,” and we try to escape it. We “use” work, not to produce, but to regain our humanity. (23) Musicians feel the power of their eudaimonic calling, either to help them escape from the in-humanization that Welten describes, or to avoid altogether being drawn into that vortex. It is as though the calling to a purpose is felt by each of us, and for some, music provides a path for that journey of fulfillment. Here, perhaps, is where reorientation away from an entirely subjective version of eudaimonism offers relief and even salvation in an oppressively neoliberal age. 311

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

A eudaimonic orientation can be liberating and empowering for both teachers and students, as embodied in punk pedagogical perspectives (Kallio 2017; Santos and Guerra 2017; Schwartz and Robertson 2017; Smith 2017b; Torrez 2012). Modern society is adept at teaching working classes and under classes—the proletariat, the precariat, and marginalized groups—that they have to conform to the norms of another, more powerful, thereby oppressive class of people, including schools and teachers, who necessarily represent and enact that power imbalance and symbolic violence (Bourdieu 2001). Teachers, though, have opportunities to empower those with whom they work, using their own power to help realize it in others. A punk pedagogical stance is characterized by an “attitude of constant challenge and determination to disrupt” norms and that with which a person disagrees (Sofianos et al 2015: 26). It is here that teachers working empathically, responsively, and democratically with their students have often hundreds of daily opportunities to help students along a road to “self-actualization” (Maslow 1968), “individuation” (Jung 1933: 26), or “identity realization” (Smith 2013a: 17). By working to engage people at the personal level through music, and to let them know that we allow them to engage and be themselves, educators can empower people to flourish and achieve eudaimonia. As mentioned above, education often falls short of the ideals to which educators may aspire. Diane Reay articulates how education, “has been about the making of one class at the cost of the unmaking of another’’ (2010: 403); this ongoing social stratification takes place in numerous deliberate and often invisible ways, including through the values inscribed into its structures. Colonialism, imperialism, and white European supremacy are inscribed and built into the fabric and assumptions of education systems, in the West and globally. Music education, too, “takes place in socio-political systems that institutionalise cultural hegemony and social stratification through perpetuating symbolically violent practices and unconscious assumptions regarding the purpose of music and music education in society” (Powell et al. 2017). Music educators, individually and collectively as a professional group, tend to elide these problems, or simply do not see them, perhaps owing to our predominantly privileged positions as professionals (Smith and Powell 2018). As such, Stephanie Horsley speaks to “music education’s historical avoidance of issues related to politics, citizenship, and social justice” (2015: 63). It is salient to recall the words of Ivan Illich, who in 1970 penned a stinging critique of compulsory education projects, shortly before economically dominant nations began hastening our descent into a soulless chasm of increasing de facto feudalism, “reciting the neo-liberal gospel” in unison (Giroux 2014: 11), whereby governments of nation states “are able to collaborate, in the name of monetary stability and budgetary rigor, to the sacking of the most admirable conquests of the social struggles of the past two centuries—universalism, egalitarianism … and internationalism—and to the destruction of the very essence of the socialist idea or ideal” (Bourdieu 2003: 54), dragging with them the poorer, servile nations of the world in insurmountable and ever-increasing debt. Illich urged that, “rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we 312

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system that promotes it.” He asserts, moreover, that “equal opportunity is, indeed, both a desirable and a feasible goal, but to equate this with obligatory schooling is to confuse salvation with the church. School has become the worldwide religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age” (Illich 1970: 10). Similar claims are made specifically about music education projects (Baker 2014; Williams 2011), although music education has tended to escape much of the most scathing criticism of mandatory public programs of schooling, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Kallio 2015; Kallio and Partti 2013). A eudaimonic orientation, then, may appear unrealistic, but paired with the energetic and unrelenting, confrontational aspects of a punk pedagogical stance, I see it as a worthy and necessary aspiration to help students pursue their true sense of purpose and self, and for music educators to (be seen to) do this as well. We need to show all of our students hope, while at the same time not replicating the systems and structures of power and symbolic violence that give us our privileged positionality. This is true for all of teachers, who must be critically aware of our positionality in relation to other individuals and groups. bell hooks speaks to the complexity in anyone’s position in social hierarchies, when she explains: White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed. Black men may be victimized by racism, but sexism allows them to act as exploiters and oppressors of women. White women may be victimized by sexism, but racism enables them to act as exploiters and oppressors of black people. Both groups have led liberation movements that favor their interests and support the continued oppression of other groups. Black male sexism has undermined struggles to eradicate racism just as white female racism undermines feminist struggle. As long as these two groups or any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others. (1984: 16) It is vital to remember that oppression is far harder to see when you are the oppressor, perpetuating oppression, especially if doing so unconsciously. For the oppressed, oppression is always visible, omnipresent (Du Bois 1945, 2014). Despite glimmers of hope to the contrary, it can be all too easy to see the current global social climate as one that, perpetuated by shimmering, bland, or melodramatic mainstream media representations, is at best one in which “political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the increasingly popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs” (Giroux 2003: 94). I am convinced, more than 313

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

ever, that an active and activist approach to music education is incumbent on those of us in positions to effect change.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions I began this chapter by locating the meaning of music, and music-making in particular, in the lives of individuals and in the societies and cultures that co-construct music’s meanings for people. As Elliott and Silverman note, “music making and listening involve personal and social-sonic (corporeal, visual, tactile, etc.) actions and events, interpersonal engagements, personal and collective emotions, and the relationships of all of these to the individual circumstances and needs of persons living with and for other persons” (2014a: 62). Elliott and Silverman emphasize the importance of physical, embodied understandings and knowledge that are core to feelings and expressions (realizations) of identities in and through music. Merleau-Ponty (1945: 12) calls embodied knowledge “another type of intelligibility” than that about which we educators are enculturated to think in the West. Similarly, Bourdieu urges people to “engage a corporeal knowledge that provides a practical comprehension of the world quite different from the intentional act of conscious decoding that is normally designated by the idea of comprehension” (2000: 135; my emphasis). Through the framework of identity realization and learning realization, I described how musical doing is always music learning, and how music education always involves constructing and construing identities. While this is true in regard to all music within and without explicitly education contexts, it is especially salient in regard to popular music, since many people connect especially deeply with popular music, giving it profound meaning and relevance for their lives (DeNora 2000; Frith 1996). Popular music is an essential component of music education (whether this fact is acknowledged or unacknowledged), therefore I urge teachers and professors to consider its integral role in identity realization for students. Eudaimonia is a valuable and worthwhile philosophical orientation to instill in the outlooks of students, especially for those whose realized snowball self may be predestined, by birth or through enculturation, not to succeed according to conceptions of success imposed by the institutions in which they find themselves. Students typically spend many years in school and thus have a very long time to build senses of self that are either oppositional to and at odds with, or very much aligned and in tune with, cultural capital as valued by the governing structures and hierarchy of hegemonic societal power. This is not to say that schools and teachers should expect nothing or very little of their students, or that they ought to redefine achievement entirely in terms of what students wish to learn or to do. The teacher-learner relationship requires mutual respect. It is, therefore, incumbent upon educators to embrace broad conceptualizations of success (Smith 2013c), by constantly challenging the violent and socially destructive hegemony

314

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

(of ideas, of value, and of meanings that students are permitted to construct) that govern or can be permitted to govern interactions and power relations in educational contexts. This requires educators constantly to question themselves and one another, in a reflexive mode that embraces, for instance, Elliott and Silverman’s “praxial philosophy of music and music education, [wherein] both musical artistry and eudaimonia are among the ultimate aims of music making and music teaching and learning” (Elliott and Silverman 2014a: 59). A broad range of critical and activist lenses and stances are available accessibly through emerging scholarship in punk pedagogies (Smith, Dines, and Parkinson 2017). Drawing on critical, radical, and anarchist pedagogies, “punk seeks to avoid the limiting qualities of, and subsequent laziness associated with, ideology. This attitude of constant challenge and determination to disrupt” (Sofianos, Ryde, and Waterhouse 2015: 26) can be emancipatory and transformative in the classroom. It can appear (and even be) threatening to hegemony and institutions, but this is precisely where the potency of punk pedagogies’ powerful potential lies—“drawing upon the autobiographical … punk is treated as the educator—the facilitator—that provide[s] a framework of enquiry, questioning and interrogation” (Dines 2015: 21). When educators provide, afford, and enhance modes of connection to and for students, through access to aesthetic experience, enabling realization of positive identities, mutually envisioning how students can be themselves in the world, pursuing their purpose, then educators empower students by allowing them to find and value themselves. Such an attitude may seem to be distinctly at odds with aims and structures of compulsory schooling (Giroux 2007, 2014; Kallio 2017; Santos and Guerra 2017), but if educators do not seek thus to reach the individuals in their classes, then they fail themselves and their students. As Ruth Wright asserts, in the contexts of high school: To allow for the multiplicity of musical identities inhabited by our pupils to flourish and to lead them to discovery of new musical worlds at times when they are ready to engage positively with them, we need to empower our pupils and afford them increased autonomy over curriculum and pedagogy. This will require a new type of teacher possessed of the empathy to “kick” their dominant habitus where necessary and enter the musical worlds of their pupils. (Wright 2008: 400) This punk pedagogical orientation allows (teachers and) students to challenge prevailing status quos and tells them that their convictions are valuable. It can help empower and enable people to understand their own purpose in the world and to believe in the possibility of their success (however construed) in pursuing their own purpose with others.

315

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Notes 1 It was precisely this situation that led two of this book’s editors to set up the Journal of Popular Music Education; we were forced to set up shop alongside “normal” or “mainstream” music education in order to provide a home for regular, peer-reviewed publication of scholarship on popular music education. 2 Froehlich (2007) and Froehlich and Smith (2017) use this composite spelling of “music(k)ing” in order to include both Small’s “musicking” (1998) and Elliott’s “musicing” (1995).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Allsup, Randall (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Baker, Geoffrey (2014), El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, New York: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Margaret S. (2011a), A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barrett, Margaret S. (2011b), “Towards a Cultural Psychology of Music Education,” in Margaret S. Barrett(ed.), A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, 1–16, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bennett, Andy (2015), “Identity, Music, Community, and Self,” in John Shepherd and Kyle Devine (eds.), The Routledge Reader on the Sociology of Music, 143–152, New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, Pierre (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986), “The Forms of Capital,” in John Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 241–258, New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2000), Pascalian Meditations, Recwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2003), Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2, London: Verso. Bourdieu, Pierre (2001), Masculine Domination, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2005), The Social Structures of the Economy, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage Publications. Campbell, Patricia S. (2010), Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children’s Lives, second edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Cole, Michael (1998), Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cremata, Radio, Joseph M. Pignato, Bryan Powell, and Gareth D. Smith (2017), The Music Learning Profiles Project: Let’s Take This Outside, New York: Routledge. DeNora, Tia (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denzin, Norman K. (2014), Interpretive Autoethnography, third edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Dewey, John ([1934] 1980), Art as Experience, New York: Perigree. 316

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

Dines, Mike (2015), “Learning Through Resistance: Contextualisation, Creation and Incorporation of a ‘Punk Pedagogy’,” Journal of Pedagogic Development, 5 (3): 20–31. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1945), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2014), The Souls of Black Folk, supplementary material written by Norman Harris, New York: Pocket Books. Elliott, David J. (1995), Music Matters: A New Philosophy of Music Education, New York: Oxford University Press. Elliott, David J. and Marissa Silverman (2014a), “Music, Personhood, and Eudaimonia: Implications for Educative and Ethical Music Education,” TD: The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa, 10 (2): 57–72. Elliott, David J. and Marissa Silverman (2014b), Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education, second edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Frankl, Viktor E. ([1959] 1997), Man’s Search for Meaning, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Frith, Simon (1996), “Music and Identity,” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds.), Questions of Cultural Identity, 108–127, London: Sage Publications. Froehlich, Hildegard C. (2007), “Gateopeners One Step at a Time: Thoughts about Mentoring Doctoral Students in Music Education,” in Eva Georgii-Hemming (ed.), Kunskapens konst: Vänbok till Börje Ståhlhammar. Skriftserie Forskning Musikvetenskap, 115–130, Örebro: Musikvetenskap Musikhögskolan, Őrebro Universitet. Froehlich, Hildegard C. and Gareth D. Smith (2017), Sociology for Music Teachers: Practical Applications, second edition, New York: Routledge. Giroux, Henry A. (2003), “Utopian Thinking under the Sign of Neoliberalism: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of Educated Hope,” Democracy and Nature, 9 (1): 91–104. Giroux, Henry A. (2007), “Utopian Thinking in Dangerous Times: Critical Pedagogy and the Project of Educated Hope,” in Mark Coté, Richard J.P. Day, and Greig de Peuter (eds.), Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization, 25–43, London, ONT: Toronto University Press. Giroux, Henry A. (2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond American’s Disimagination Machine, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Forward for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2008), Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology, Education, London: Abramis. hooks, bell (1984), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre, London: Pluto Press. Horsley, Stephanie (2015), “Facing the Music: Pursuing Social Justice through Music Education in a Neoliberal World,” in Cathy Benedict, Patrick Schmidt, Gary Spruce, and Paul Woodford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education, 62–77, New York: Oxford University Press. Illich, Ivan (1970), Deschooling Society, London: Marion Boyars. Jorgensen, Estelle Ruth (1997), In Search of Music Education, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Jung, Carl Gustav (1933), Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Oxford: Routledge. Kallio, Alexis Anja (2015), “Drawing a Line in Water: Constructing the School Censorship Frame in Popular Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (2): 195–209. 317

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Kallio, Alexis Anja (2017), “Give Violence a Chance: Emancipation and Escape in/From School Music Education,” in Gareth D. Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (eds.), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 156–170, New York: Routledge. Kallio, Alexis Anja and Heidi Partti (2013), “Music Education for a Nation: Teaching Patriotic Ideas and Ideals in Global Societies,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 12 (3): 5–30. McClintock, Anne (1995), Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge. Maslow, Abraham H. ([1968] 2014), Toward a Psychology of Being, Bensenville, IL: Lushena. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1945), Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge. Niknafs, Nasim (forthcoming), “Engaging with Popular Music through a Cultural Standpoint: A Concept-Oriented Framework,” Music Educators Journal. Norton, David L. (1976), Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Powell, Bryan, Gareth Dylan Smith, and Abigail D’Amore (2017), “Challenging Symbolic Violence and Hegemony in Music Education through Contemporary Pedagogical Approaches,” Education 3–13: International Journal of Primary, Elementary and Early Years Education, 45 (6): 734–743. Reay, Diane (2010), “Sociology, Social Class and Education,” in Michael W. Apple, Stephen J. Ball, and Luis Armando Gandin (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, 396–404, Oxford: Routledge. Reimer, Bennett (1989), A Philosophy of Music Education, second edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Reimer, Bennett (1996), “David Elliot’s ‘New’ Philosophy of Music Education: Music for Performers Only,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, (128) (Spring): 59–89. Santos, Tiago T. and Paula Guerra (2017), “From Punk Ethics to the Pedagogy of the Bad Kids: Core Values and Social Liberation,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (eds.), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 210–224, New York: Routledge. Schwartz, Jessica A. and Scott Robertson (2017), “Laughing All the Way to the Stage: Pedagogies of Comedic Dissidence in Punk and Hip-Hop,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson, Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 128–143, New York: Routledge. Shilling, Chris (2000), The Body: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shusterman, Richard (2008), Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, New York: Cambridge University Press. Small, Christopher (1998), Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013a), I Drum, Therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013b), “Pedagogy for Employability in a Foundation Degree (Fd.A.) in Creative Musicianship: Introducing Peer Collaboration,” in Helena Gaunt and Maria H. Westerlund (eds.), Collaboration in Higher Music Education, 193–198, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013c), “Seeking ‘Success’ in Popular Music,” Music Education Research International, 6: 26–37.

318

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Identity, Aesthetic Experience, and Eudaimonia

Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Graham F. Welch and Ioulia Papageorgi (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2015), “Neoliberalism and Symbolic Violence in Higher Music Education,” in Lisa DeLorenzo (ed.), Giving Voice to Democracy: Diversity and Social Justice in the Music Classroom, 65–84, New York: Routledge. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2016), “(Un)popular Music Making and Eudaimonia,” in Roger Mantie, and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 151–170, New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2017a), “Embodied Experience of Rock Drumming,” Music and Practice, vol. 3. Available online: www.musicandpractice.org/volume-3/embodied-experience-rockdrumming/ (accessed November 17, 2018). Smith, Gareth Dylan (2017b), “There’s Only One Way of Life and That’s Your Own,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (eds.), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 191–209, New York: Routledge. Smith, Gareth Dylan and Bryan Powell (2017), “Welcome to the Journal,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 3–8. Smith, Gareth Dylan and Bryan Powell (2018), “Introduction,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 2 (1&2): 3–6. Sofianos, Lisa, Robin Ryde, and Charlie Waterhouse (2015), The Truth of Revolution, Brother: An Exploration of Punk Philosophy, London: Situation Press. Stone-Davis, Férdia J. (2011), Musical Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Torrez, Estrella (2012), “Punk Pedagogy: Education for Liberation and Love,” in Zack Furness (ed.), Punkademics: The Basement Show in the Ivory Tower, 131–142, London: Minor Compositions. Vulliamy, Graham and John Shepherd (1984), “Sociology and Music Education: A Response to Swanwick,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 5 (1): 57–76. Waterman, Alan S. (1992), “Identity as an Aspect of Optimal Psychological Functioning,” in Gerald R. Adams, Thomas P. Gullotta, and Raymond Montemayor (eds.), Adolescent Identity Formation: Advances in Adolescent Development, 50–72, London: Sage. Wenger, Etienne (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, New York: Cambridge University Press. Welten, Ruud (2012), “Work and Leisure in a Consumer Society,” Studia Universitatis BabesBolyai-Philosophia, 57 (2): 21–33. Williams, David A. (2011), “The Elephant in the Room.” Music Educators Journal, 98 (1): 51–57. Winter, Richard (2013), “Language, Empathy, Archetype: Action-Metaphors of the Transcendental in Musical Experience,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 2 (2): 103–119. Wright, Ruth (2008), “Kicking the Habitus: Power, Culture and Pedagogy in the Secondary School Music Curriculum,” Music Education Research, 10 (3): 389–402. Wright, Ruth, ed. (2010), Sociology and Music Education, Farnham: Ashgate.

319

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

320

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

22

“I See You, Baby …”: Expressive Gesture and Nonverbal Communication in Popular Music Performance Education Liz Pipe

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Performing popular music requires the delivering musician to possess an understanding of an amalgam of matters that extends beyond the accomplishment of secure and proficient instrumental technique. The performer is at the center of an audiovisual aesthetic; their physical presence, image and demeanor communicate a plethora of information to the various parties (such as fellow performers and audience members, sound and lighting technicians) involved in the art of music performance. The multimodal nature of performance is not limited to popular music (an umbrella term that refers to a variety of styles, genres, cultural influences, and performance expectations). Chia-Jung Tsay (2013) highlights that the visual communication of a performance is also vital in classical music, a genre in which performance has been considered to be “designed to draw attention to the work,” unlike popular music, which was conceived to be more performer-centered (Frith 1996: 200).1 Nicholas Cook (2000) argues that musicians and audiences in all genres are concerned with the image of the performer. This is not to undermine the importance of technical skill but, rather, to emphasize that in order to execute a fully convincing performance, musicians need to be aware of many additional elements, such as the use of body movement, that assist in communicating the artistic message in and of the music (such as the lyrical narrative or rhythmical nuances). The presentation of a musical work therefore depends as much on nontechnical elements as it does on the execution of the technical parameters, and “expertise in music performance is commonly seen as the synthesis of technical and expressive skills” (Juslin and Persson 2002: 227). My interest in this topic stems from my own professional practice as a performer (I am principally a keyboard player/pianist with extensive experience as a soloist and ensemble member), a teacher, and an examiner, and I have observed a lack of consistency with regard to how expressivity is viewed and considered. Within the higher education environment in which I work as a lecturer, students have often spoken 321

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

to me about the type of vague assessment feedback they receive from educators, which might read, “needs to work on stage presence” or “performance skills need enhancing,” for example, and yet some undergraduates are uncertain how to effect the suggested changes. Students understand the importance of the inclusion of these skills, but without meaningful pedagogical help or support, they remain unable the gap in their knowledge or developing the requisite abilities. With firsthand understanding of how important these skills are in the live performance environment, I recognize the necessity of investigating this area with a view to seeking change in music performance education at my institution.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Preparing students for performance There may be, then, something of a paradox about the way in which aspiring popular musicians are prepared in higher popular music education (HPME) for performance. The importance of the physical and expressive presence of the performer is rarely questioned; tuition often focuses on functional (and more easily measurable) aspects of mastering an instrument or voice, while other more qualitative aspects, such as gesture, persona, interaction, and communication, are deprioritized or even neglected completely. Among the aspiring young musicians whom I meet, there is a common misconception that musical proficiency and attainment is best denoted by areas such as examination success, but this overgeneralization can lead to the production of students who have secure examination technique and sufficient technical competency, but who may never have had the opportunity to have experienced a plethora of skills that are vital for the successful popular musician of today. Graduates may well require a versatile skill-set allowing them to forge successful careers in an industry that is continuously changing (McLaughlin 2017; Moir 2017). Skills include those in the area of expressivity (Woody 2000), including an ability to create and deliver communicatively and emotionally enriching performances, capturing not only the essence of the song and stylistic nuances of the genre but also the persona of the performing musician(s). A pervasive belief is that abilities in expressivity and creativity are innate—what Anthony Gritten deems as a “black box” approach; “you can either do it or you cannot” (2017: 28). Such a conviction tends not to lead to good educational practice. Educators have a responsibility to create and use the necessary pedagogical tools to help students develop all areas of their musicianship, helping empower them to become more creative, empathetic, and versatile musicians and performers. Throughout this chapter, I present a discursive approach to my performance and teaching practice that is interwoven with relevant theoretical perspectives from the field of music education, and beyond. I begin the chapter by detailing the background to a self-designed research project that focuses on the areas of expressive gesture and nonverbal communication in popular music performance. By providing a clear definition

322

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“I See You, Baby …”

of these terms, I first describe how expressive movement can be directly related to the musical content of the delivered song. Key results of the project are then discussed, and I conclude the chapter by detailing how the findings of this research project have been implemented into the popular music performance curriculum that is run at the University of West London.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Background, aims and research questions This chapter centers on findings from an ethnographic study into the use of gesture and nonverbal communication in the ensemble rehearsal and performance practices of undergraduate popular music performance students. A series of group-directed rehearsals and a subsequent live gig were filmed, and followed by retrospective, semistructured interviews with participants. The ability to communicate in, and through, live performance is a key aspect of a professional musician’s skills, and one of the key objectives of this project was to construct a framework that would help students to identify and understand the different factors that are found to generate different gestural or physically communicate responses from a performer. Comprising seven members—three vocalists, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and an accordionist—the group represented people with diverse backgrounds and who had varied experience of performing in public.2 “Informal practices continue to form the essential core of most popular musicians’ learning” (Green 2008: 20) and the principal informal learning strategy employed by popular musicians is the act of copying (Green 2002, 2008). Therefore, with this project, rather than using musical scores (i.e., written notation), the participants were encouraged to source recordings and develop an understanding of their individual parts in advance of the first rehearsal. The rehearsals and live performance were all held at the University of West London, each event was recorded using a multicamera set-up, and I was present at each event in a discreet, nonparticipatory role, undertaking and manually recording observed findings. This methodological approach was chosen because observation is one of the key data collection methods of ethnographic research, and in education research “ethnography has proven itself to be an appropriate framework in which to observe practice” (Barton 2014: 97). Amanda Bayley (2011: 387) highlights the learning importance of observation studies, noting that “research findings resulting from observations of musicians’ interactions during rehearsal can directly inform the practice of other composers and performers.” In my observations and interviews, I aimed to: monitor performers’ expressive delivery and identify factors of influence in this area; examine the formation of any performance persona; monitor the formation of intra-ensemble communicative relationships;

●

● ●

323

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

discuss with participants other matters that may have arisen during the documenting process; and identify areas for pedagogical exploration and inclusion.

●

●

By allowing students to explore and understand the areas of expressive gesture and nonverbal communication without the potential pressures of a commercial project, alongside a structured reflection of the process, it was hoped that they would be provided with a much clearer insight into the communicative, technical, and artistic skills required in both live and recorded performance environments. Learning through social interaction (as is ensemble music-making) forms the basis of the concept of situated learning, which “takes as its focus the relationship between learning and the social situations in which it occurs” (Lave and Wenger 1991: 14). As such, situated learning is studying the phenomenon you want to learn in the specific context you are likely to undertake them, in this case through live performance in an ensemble setting. Knowledge is obtained “through one’s environment and lived experiences” (Kenny 2016: 11), and there is also an emphasis on implicit learning, where learning happens organically and the student is often unaware that learning is actually taking place.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Defining expressive gesture and nonverbal communication The area of nonverbal communication covers an array of visual, audio, and sometimes tactile components that are used to reinforce communicative intent, and gesture is one such. This can be confusing, since there is not one specific definition of the term (Cadoz and Wanderley 2000). In his research on the gestures of classical pianist Glenn Gould, François Delalande (1988) provides some valuable clarity by subdividing the term into three separate categories encompassing the mechanical through to the symbolic. These are the geste effecteur (effective gesture; the necessary physical movements required to produce the musical sound, such as the depressing of a piano key); the geste accompagnateur (accompanying gesture; subsidiary physical movements offered by the performer); and the geste figure (figurative gesture; musical motifs). Considering gesture as a physical, communicative entity, this chapter is most closely aligned with Delalande’s accompanying gesture.3 Although these movements are not directly involved in the production of the musical sound, it is important to remember that they may also have an effect on the music as experienced by performers and audience members. To illustrate this point, Pete Townshend (guitarist from rock band, The Who) in a discussion concerning his famous “windmill arms” gesture, acknowledged that “it was very much an act, but it did, in the end, become part of a guitar style which produced a sound that was unique” (Hyadd 2012). There is an intimate relationship between sound and physicality because of the nature of how an instrument is played and the corresponding corporeal energy used to produce the given auditory result

324

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“I See You, Baby …”

(Smith 2017). This is true of both acoustic and electronic instruments, with the physical gesture often impacting musical parameters such as amplitude, pitch, or timbre (Paine 2009). Because the gesture is always delivered alongside, or as integral to, the musical performance (performance being so much more than merely playing the music), rather than being performed in isolation, both music performance and music perception (from the viewpoint of the performer and/or audience) should be considered as forms of multimodal communication—using multiple semiotic systems to understand and interpret the information being provided. Multimodality is of vital importance to music performance, because gesture not only includes physical movements but “also includes expressive gesture present in the produced sound” (Camurri et al. 2004: 3; Smith 2017).

Identifying expressive movement related to the musical performance

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

In the framework shown in Figure 22.1, the area of accompanying gestures and nonverbal communication elements is initially subdivided into two different categories, derived from Viewpoints (Bogart and Landau 2014), which was originally a set of six improvisational dance models initiated by choreographer Mary Overlie. Behavioural gestures are functional gestures that belong to the external world and are considered

Figure 22.1  A framework that suggests the elements that affect the gestural and nonverbal delivery of a popular music performer. 325

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

to be prosaic in function and delivery. Examples include movements such as waving, bowing, saluting, and scratching, and, as an example, the presentation of this type of gesture communicates information such as personality, circumstances, environments, and clothing. In alignment with Delalande’s (1988) accompanying gesture, Bogart and Landau’s expressive gestures are metaphoric, symbolic and poetic in meaning, and “express feeling or meaning which is not otherwise directly manifest” (Bogart and Landau 2014: 49). These gestures can create strong, defined, visual imagery for the observer, not only for the overall narrative of the performed story or lyric but also for individual, specific words. Bogart and Landau’s (2014) category of expressive gestures is further divided to demonstrate how the performer’s gestural delivery correlates with the parametric and communicative elements of the piece, and how these are interpreted and understood by the performers. Through an ecological approach to perception (Clarke 2005; Gibson 1979), we can understand the importance of what is directly specified from the surrounding environment, and it is this interaction between the perceiver and the environment that shapes interpretations. Ecological theory established the structure for embodied cognition which stands in contrast to the Cartesian ideology of mind-body dualism. Mark Leman (2010) describes music as corporeally experienced, and notes that the human body acts as a mediator between the musical mind and the physical environment. Using this theoretical structure, “music is performed and perceived through gestures whose deployment can be directly felt and understood through the body, without the need for verbal descriptions” (Leman 2010: 127). The coupling of action and perception is an intrinsic part of embodied music cognition, and using previously learned environmental knowledge and experiences is why interaction should be considered embodied. Hearing a specific sound will result in a specific action from the perceiver: When an every-day sound is heard, the person will tend to act in relation to how that sound is produced. In contrast, when an abstract sound is heard, the person will tend to act in relation to particular parameters of the sound that can be reproduced by movements (such as general contours). (Leman 2012: 6) Here, Leman explains that there is an embodied connection between a performer’s physical delivery and the musical parameters of performed music. Pitch is particularly “rich in metaphorical associations” (Machin 2010: 100) and “downward pitch movement generally suggests a lowering of energy expenditure, while upward pitch movement suggests the opposite” (Zagorski-Thomas 2014: 11). For instance, the trademark expressive finger, hand, and arm movements of singers such as Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey regularly mirror the direction of the pitch given in their often virtuosic, accompanying melismatic vocal runs. In addition to the single pitch of the melodic line, the overall representation of the pitch of the song is determined 326

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“I See You, Baby …”

through its tonal center. “Love on Top” (Beyoncé 2011) is infamous for its numerous and technically challenging modulations of key toward the close of the song. In a live performance at the MTV VMA ceremony in 2011, the singer physically represents the changes of key with an accompanying gesture that sees her punching the air in an upward motion. The importance of rhythmical grooves, structures, nuances, and emphases can be shown through the use of illustrators (Davidson and Kurosawa 2005; Thompson, Graham, and Russo 2005), which are “used to clarify or emphasize the content of a message” (Thompson, Graham and Russo 2005: 207).4 Although “vocalists are able to move around on stage, using hand movements and/or facial expressions in a manner impossible for instrumentalists” (Schutz 2008: 99), instrumentalists are able to represent an emotive connection in many other ways. Findings from this study support evidence identifying intrinsic links between performed accompanying gestures and the musical parameters of articulation, dynamics, lyrical narrative, pitch, rhythm, and tone. Gareth Dylan Smith’s (2017) article on embodiment and rock drumming presents compelling evidence for including groove in this list of connections.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Findings: Determining leadership Karl Jensen and Emanuela Marchetti (2010) acknowledge that the ability to interact nonverbally and communicate with both fellow performers and audience members (beyond the sound produced by instruments, which is of course nonverbal) “is recognized nowadays as a musical skill, supporting social and artistic aspects in the act of becoming a musician and of playing music” (Jensen and Marchetti 2010: 1). They explain that “non-verbal interaction is mostly started by a sort of ‘leader’, who ‘knows’ how the music should be played and guides the others non-verbally” (5). Behavior supporting this claim was evident from the outset of the first rehearsal. It was immediately apparent that the level of preparation was distinctly unbalanced in regard to how well the individuals had prepared their parts, causing frustration among betterorganized members of the collective. Unofficial ensemble leadership, including musical direction and the pace of the rehearsal, fell to the drummer, who was unequivocally the best-prepared member of the band. He had very focused ideas about his “vision” for the songs and was a catalyst for ensuring progress throughout the rehearsal process, facts acknowledged by all members of the ensemble in the interview process. The integration of a variety of personality types in any group setting will inevitably affects the overall dynamic, as each individual member may have their own opinions and may, or may not, concur with other members of a group or voice their views. Jensen and Marchetti (2010) discuss how nonverbal communication between performers can be considerably affected by schismogenesis, a phenomenon in an anthropological theory that explains “a progressive social differentiation within a group, according to individual aspirations and different way of dealing with them.” Schismogenesis is either complementary or symmetrical. 327

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Complementary schismogenesis is characterized by a more harmonious group dynamic, where individuals in a group have different objectives and behavior practices. By contrast, in symmetrical schismogenesis individuals have “the same aspirations and the same behavioural patterns” (Bateson 1972: 68), and it may involve a scenario where people compete to lead the group, resulting in resistance and bringing conflict to the communicative process. Although the leadership role in rehearsals was taken by the drummer, and this responsibility went relatively uncontested, a noticeable shift occurred with the subsequent live performance, when one of the vocalists assumed the leadership position, regardless of whether or not she was the lead singer for a given item. This, too, was confirmed by all the ensemble members in interviews. During the interview process, the drummer acknowledging that he had consciously taken a more submissive role in the performance but remained aware of being the “leader” of the rhythm section:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I don’t take [the] leadership when there’s a performance. I’m not the leader [then]. I may lead the guys beside me but not lead—shadow—not even shadow, but “let’s go together, guys” When I’m playing, it feels like we have a leader, which is the artist,5 and then the leader back here [gestures to a metaphorical backline] is me, ‘cause I can control the dynamics of the band … therefore I’m the one that has to be always looking at the artist. So, my primary relationship is with the artist and then secondarily with my colleagues here [rhythm section]. For me, as a drummer, maybe it’s because of my personality, but I always feel like a leader, so I have to express myself in the way that I play by looking at the other guys to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

Findings: Trust, confidence, and expression in ensembles I was keen to discover why the performers felt that the hierarchical shift described above had happened. Although they each acknowledged that personality types played a defining role, a much more important, recurring factor was the issue of trust. Anthony Gritten writes that “trust is related to reliance, confidence, faith, and familiarity, and its etymology encompasses the notion of leaning on others” (2017: 7), and although all members of the ensemble allowed a complementary schismogenesis to occur in rehearsal, after watching footage of the rehearsals, the drummer proposed that perhaps he should not have been so authoritative in his approach and that the shape of the project could have come to fruition in a more organic manner; a suggestion that was quickly 328

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“I See You, Baby …”

opposed by the guitarist: “I don’t think we had the time to let it happen organically, and each person has a different way of approaching it. There’s not a unified way, aesthetically, of going about it.” Most rehearsals will be leading toward a performance goal or deadline, meaning that some form of leadership is a requirement. When considering why the leadership role fell to this particular vocalist, the musicians’ response was unequivocal—each member of the ensemble trusted her to deliver the requirements needed to execute a successful performance: As soon as I looked at Hayley6—she’s confident, she knows exactly what she’s doing. From my experience of performing with her, and being around her, I know that she knows what she’s doing … I think that the confidence that Hayley demonstrates is a huge something to stand on. Hayley, too, concurred that she had knowingly put herself into the leadership position of the ensemble with this change of environment. I asked her about the confidence she bestows when performing, which resulted in a high level of trust in her from her bandmates. She explained that although the basis of the performance persona she presents in the live performance environment is her real self, there was an awareness that:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I have to add a few character traits that I don’t have … I think you have to be confident when you’re the lead singer. You have to because the musicians won’t feel comfortable to play for you if they know that you aren’t sure of what you’re doing. That can affect the way they’re playing, they won’t be as excited, they won’t be creative enough. … Maybe I do have a persona when I’m performing because [in life] I am shy, so I have to transform myself on stage. In order to instill trust in herself from other ensemble members, the singer felt a need to perform confidence that she did not really feel. By contrast, the drummer did not mention that he was “faking” his leadership. In a different paper, there would be much to unpack here with regard to instrumentalists’ and gender roles in popular music ensembles (Abramo 2011; Green 1997; Smith 2013; Whiteley 2000; Powell, Chapter 23 in this volume)

The performance environment The performing environment can completely alter the physical dimensions of performances; Leman (2012) notes that our bodies act as the mediators between the environments, and our subjective experiences of and in them. Individuals’ different (and unspoken, tacitly assumed) approaches to rehearsal and live performance 329

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

environments were evident throughout this project. The rehearsal process was both fruitful and frustrating, with the greatest expression of exasperation appearing because by the second and final rehearsal, one member of the ensemble was still unsure of their musical contribution, with lyrics unlearnt and cues uncertain, which caused unnecessary (for others) repetition of specific sections, resulting in a sense of stagnated preparation. Each of the participants stated that rehearsal was a place for the preparation of technical delivery, and that expressivity and physical depiction of the music were not considered to be rehearsed elements; these were things that either happened intuitively or would not happen at all. There was also a consensus that a performance persona was an entity that was given consideration in the performance rather than in rehearsals. Pedagogical repercussions of this merit due consideration; for instance, when inhabiting or enacting a performance persona, the physical presentation of and by performers is likely to change. Hayley, the vocalist discussed earlier, spoke about her approach to rehearsals and performance: For me, it’s weird to explain because I think that in rehearsal, I’m more aware of myself than when I’m on stage. There’s no persona in rehearsal but I’m still doing some of the things I would do in a performance in terms of being emotional when I’m singing; I can’t sing without interpreting the lyrics or meaning of what I’m trying to say. So, I guess in a perfect world, the way I am in rehearsals would be the way I am on stage because I think that that is close to myself without the inhibitions.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Reflection: Teaching expressivity in popular music performance From September 2016, I have facilitated weekly workshops to popular music performance students at the London College of Music, at the University of West London, based on the findings of this research. The aim of these sessions is to encourage and advocate “exploration of one’s own craft and artistry” (Froehlich and Smith 2017: 129) through what Smith (2013: 34) terms as a “hybridized learning” approach, where elements of informal learning, which can be pivotal to popular musicians’ educational trajectories (Green 2002, 2008), are integrated into a formal learning environment (Cremata et al. 2017). I follow a social constructivist teaching approach, where the role of the teacher becomes that of a facilitator and where students are actively encouraged to contribute to discussions in the (group) classroom environment; contributing with their own experiences and viewpoints, particularly those which have been obtained through

330

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“I See You, Baby …”

extracurricular experiential learning. This sharing of experience, and the creation of a dialogue and a safe learning environment between student and teacher, is vital; a view shared by Shawn Condon (2015: 17) who asserts that “teaching expressivity requires the teacher to create and foster an environment conducive to risk taking and creative exploration.” Students should not be afraid to explore different styles and aspects of their performance; the more comfortable students are, the more effective the gestural and communicative elements of the performance will be. Although students enjoy and benefit from the sessions, with many providing positive feedback regarding the level of engagement they felt with the sessions, there have certainly been pedagogical challenges. Shifting the role of teacher from that of the sole transmitter of knowledge (using a behaviorist approach, e.g., O’Neill and Senyshyn [2011]) to that of a facilitator (where the emphasis of learning moves from being the sole responsibility of the educator to a collaborative relationship between students and teacher) requires a level of trust and support between these two parties. Teaching as a facilitator requires the educator to be open-minded as they are responsible for creating an environment where the student feels comfortable to make mistakes, to understand how their bodies move and respond to music, and to forge between bandmates working relationships dependent on trust and the appropriate balance of leaders and followers. Some students were reticent when introduced to the areas of expressive gesture and nonverbal communication, and in embracing the area of physicality in their performances. Their technical ability was well established, and the classes challenged some of their viewpoints centering on the belief that these nonverbal, communicative elements cannot be taught, and that physical communication is a purely inherent skill or attribute (recalling Gritten’s [2017] “black box” analogy). Students new to studying this area of performance can be wary of experimentation and, if they are used to a more behaviorist teaching approach, they often wait for the educator to take the lead in the learning process. One of the most significant realizations for students was that, just as technical rudiments of a piece would be practiced until reproducing them became second nature, expressivity needs to be equally practiced—a notion which had not been previously considered. In her retrospective interview, Jane, a vocalist, stated that: I always thought that the focus in a rehearsal was making sure that the music was right, that everyone’s parts were fitting together, and that there was groove between the whole band. For me, how I moved on the stage and communicated with the other musicians, and with the audience, was an afterthought that I just included spontaneously in the live performance. Now I realise that I need to know how I’m going to perform—and my bandmates do too—so that I can feel confident in all aspects of my musical performance, and that they [the bandmates] can feel confident in me.

331

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Rick Kemp discusses the connection between acting and musical performance, suggesting that: like a pianist practicing scales, it makes sense … to work at practicing the mechanics of physical expression, to understand and control how features such as posture, gesture, and facial expression communicate, and how to make voluntary actions in these areas appear involuntary and therefore spontaneous. (2012: 32; emphasis in the original) A means through which this apparent spontaneity can be achieved is the conscious competence model of assimilation (Howell 1982; Kemp 2012); a process whereby learners work through four stages (from unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence) to ultimately obtain a level of expertise whereby the skill (in this case, the expressive execution of the performed song) can be executed without mindful consideration (Kemp 2012).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Closing thoughts Undertaking this project and implementing its findings into a popular music performance curriculum, has demonstrated to this author the value of including expressivity into pedagogy in higher popular music performance education. Although technique and expression within music performance are separate elements, “they interact with, and depend upon, one another” (Sloboda 2000: 398) and, therefore, require equal pedagogic consideration. As such, just as a musician would spend focused time crafting their technical ability, time should also be spent honing their performance skills. This issue needs addressing, not only by student musicians but also by educators, who should not expect students to simply have a tacit understanding of performance skills and provide them with feedback, which offers no educational solution to the problem. Addressing this anomaly in performance education means providing a possible challenge to the educational preconceptions of both educators and students. Pushing the boundaries of learning is crucial if curricula are to be innovative and relevant to the twenty-first-century performance student. The career trajectories of performance musicians have changed, with the portfolio career becoming an ever-increasing option for music graduates (Munnelly 2017; Scott and Scott 2017), and the content of higher education curricula has to reflect this to ensure that graduates are prepared for becoming practitioners (Moir 2017). Adopting a hybridized learning context means that the subject of expressivity can be delivered using an amalgam of concepts from formal, nonformal, and informal learning frameworks, all of which are necessary in order to meet the foci of the curriculum, real-world, and institutional requirements. Group-based learning allows an emphasis to be placed on learning through collaboration, providing students with an 332

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“I See You, Baby …”

opportunity to engage in critical discourse and dialogue in their subject area. Students should be actively involved in the learning process, as their experiences form valuable contributions to the classroom, and the teacher as facilitator is responsible for creating a safe, comfortable learning environment where the students feel able to take risks and achieve success through creative and expressive individuality. Following this study, classes and workshops on expressivity are now a pivotal part of all levels of the popular music performance curriculum at the University of West London, allowing students to develop theoretical understanding and practical know-how in a situated learning environment. The inclusion of these sessions into the curriculum appears to have led to improvements in the way that the students are executing their musical performance, as they are able to gain a much clearer insight into, and holistic view of the communicative, technical, and artistic skills of their musicianship. The value of developing an awareness and understanding of their own performance styles and physical delivery has allowed them to consider, possibly for the first time, what they look like on stage and has offered a realization that their behavior and physical delivery influence the reaction of the audience, and the behavior and responses of their fellow performers.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 Tsay (2013) focuses on perceptions of novice and professional musicians who were asked to identify the winner of a prestigious international classical music competition from the observation of the event via three contrasting formats—sound only, vision only, and the sound and vision together. Although the preconceived thoughts of over 80 percent of the participants of the study was that the sound-only extract would be the medium which would allow them to correctly identify the winner, the experiment showed that the participants who observed the visual-only extracts were the participants who identified the winner at a rate significantly above chance. The participants who observed the sound-only extract identified the winner at a rate less than chance. 2 The scope of performing experience between the students was notable, from performing on small-scale, local-level events, through to significant internationally televised performances. 3 Similar concepts to the accompanying gesture (Delalande 1988) are ancillary gestures (Wanderley 1999; Wanderley and Depalle 2004), expressive gestures (Camurri et al. 2004), expressive movements (Davidson 1993), and body language (Dahl and Friberg 2007). 4 Thompson, Graham and Russo (2005: 207) additionally explain that, in addition to drawing attention to rhythmical nuances, illustrators can be used to emphasize specific sections of a lyrical narrative (by emphasizing certain words or phrases), or to emphasize areas of harmonic interest such as dissonance. 5 This participant refers to the lead singer as “the artist.” 6 All names have been anonymized.

333

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abramo, Joseph Michael (2011), “Gender Differences of Popular Music Production in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 59 (1): 21–43. doi:10.1177/0022429410396095. Barton, Georgina (2014), “Ethnography and Music Education,” in Kay Ann Hartwig (ed.), Research Methodologies in Music Education, 97–116, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Bateson, Gregory (1972), Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Northvale, NJ: Jason Aaronson Inc. Bayley, Amanda (2011), “Ethnographic Research into Contemporary String Quartet Rehearsal,” Ethnomusicology Forum, 20 (3): 385–411. doi:10.1080/17411912.2011. Beyoncé (2011), “Love on Top,” track 8 on 4, Columbia Records, compact disc. Bogart, Anne and Tina Landau (2014), The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition, London: Nick Hern Books. Cadoz, Claude and Marcelo Wanderley (2000), “Gesture—Music,” in Marcelo Wanderley and Marc Battier (eds.), Trends in Gestural Control of Music, 71–94, Paris: Ircam Centre Pompidou. Camurri, Antonio, Barbara Mazzarino, Matteo Ricchetti, Renee Timmers, and Gualtiero Volpe (2004), “Multimodal Analysis of Expressive Gesture in Music and Dance Performances,” in Antonio Camurri and Gualtiero Volpe (eds.), Gesture-Based Communication in HumanComputer Interaction, 20–39, Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Clarke, Eric (2005), Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning, New York: Oxford University Press. Condon, Shawn Michael (2015), “Creating a Musically Expressive Performance: A Study of Vocalists’ Use of Emotions in Performance Preparation,” MA diss., University of Jyvaskyla. Cook, Nicholas (2000), Music: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. Cremata, Radio, Joseph Michael Pignato, Brian Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), The Music Learning Profiles Project, Abingdon: Routledge. Dahl, Sofia and Anders Friberg (2007), “Visual Perception of Expressiveness in Musicians’ Body Movements,” Music Perception, 24 (5): 433–454. Davidson, Jane (1993), “Visual Perception of Performance Manner in the Movements of Solo Musicians,” Psychology of Music, 21 (2): 103–113. Davidson, Jane and Kaori Kurosawa (2005), “Nonverbal Behaviours in Popular Music Performance: A Case Study of The Corrs,” Musicae Scientiae, 19(1): 111–136. Delalande, François (1988), “Le Geste, Outil d’analyse: Quelques Enseignments d’une Recherche Cur La Gestique de Glenn Gould,” Analyse Musicale, 1st quarter (10): 43–46. Frith, Simon (1996), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Froehlich, Hildegard C. and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), The Sociologically Savvy Music Educator, London: Routledge. Gibson, James J. (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Hove: Psychology Press. Green, Lucy (1997), Music, Gender, Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. 334

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“I See You, Baby …”

Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Gritten, Anthony (2017), “Developing Trust in Others; or, How to Empathise Like a Performer,” in Elaine King, and Caroline Waddington (eds.), Music and Empathy, 248–266, Abingdon: Routledge. Howell, William C. (1982), “An Overview of Models, Methods and Problems,” in William C. Howell and Edwin A. Fleishman (eds.), Human Performance and Productivity: Information Processing and Decision Making, 1–30. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Hyadd, Moody (2012), “Pete Townshend on Trademark Windmill,” YouTube, October 8, 2012. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TLoG6VFPH8 (accessed November 17, 2018). Jensen, Karl Kristoffer and Emanuela Marchetti (2010), “A Meta-Study of Musicians’ NonVerbal Interaction,” The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, 6 (5): 1–12. Juslin, Patrik N. and Roland S. Persson (2002), “Emotional Communication,” in Richard Parncutt and Gary McPherson (eds.), The Science and Psychology of Music Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, 219–236, New York: Oxford University Press. Kemp, Rick (2012), Embodied Acting: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Performance, Abingdon: Routledge. Kenny, Ailbhe (2016), Communities of Musical Practice, Abingdon: Routledge. Lave, Jean and Etienne Wenger (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leman, Mark (2010), “Music, Gesture and the Formation of Embodied Meaning,” in Rolf Inge Godøy, and Marc Leman (eds.), Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning, 126–153, Abingdon: Routledge. Leman, Marc (2012), “Musical Gestures and Embodied Cognition,” Actes Des Journees d’Informatique Musicale, May9–11, 2012: 5–7. Machin, David (2010), Analysing Popular Music: Image, Sound, Text, London: SAGE Publications Ltd. McLaughlin, Sean (2017), “Mediations, Institutions and Post-Compulsory Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 114–126, London: Routledge. Moir, Zack (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The SingerSongwriter Handbook, 35–50, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Munnelly, Karen Patricia (2017), “Understanding Career & Degree Expectations of Undergraduate Music Majors,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, Columbus. O’Neill, Susan and Yaroslav Senyshyn (2011), “How Learning Theories Shape Our Understanding of Music Learners,” in Richard Colwell and Peter Webster (eds.), MENC Handbook of Research and Learning, vol. 1, Strategies, 3–34, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paine, Garth (2009), “Gesture and Morphology in Laptop Music Performance,” in Roger T. Dean (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Computer Music, 214–233, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

335

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Scott, Jo Collinson and David Scott (2017), “The Portfolio Career in Practice: Key Aspects of Building and Sustaining a Songwriting and Performance Career in the Digital Era,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Singer-Songwriter Handbook, 191–205, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Schutz, Michael (2008), “Seeing Music? What Musicians Need to Know about Vision,” Empirical Musicology Review, 3 (3): 83–108. Sloboda, John (2000), “Individual Differences in Music Performance,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(10): 287–309. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), I Drum, Therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer, Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2017), “Embodied Experience of Rock Drumming,” Music and Practice, vol. 3. Available online: www.musicandpractice.org/volume-3/embodied-experience-rockdrumming/ (accessed November 17, 2018). Thompson, William Forde, Phil Graham, and Frank A. Russo (2005), “Seeing Music Performance: Visual Influences on Perception and Experience,” Semiotica, 1 (4): 203–227. Tsay, Chia-Jung (2013), “Sight over Sound in the Judgement of Music Performance,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (36): 14580–14585. Wanderley, Marcelo (1999), “Non-Obvious Performer Gestures in Instrumental Music,” in Annelies Braffort, Rachid Gherbi, Sylvie Gibet, James Richardson, and Daniel Teil (eds.), Gesture-Based Communication in Human-Computer Interaction, 37–48, Berlin: SpringerVerlag. Wanderley, Marcelo and Philippe Depalle (2004), “Gestural Control of Sound Synthesis,” Proceedings of the IEEE, 92 (4): 632–644. Whiteley, Sheila (2000), Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity, London: Routledge. Woody, Robert H. (2000), “Learning Expressivity in Music Performance: An Exploratory Study,” Research Studies in Music Education, 14 (1): 14–23. Zagorski-Thomas, Simon (2014), The Musicology of Record Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

336

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

23

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation: Perspectives of Female Musicians in Popular Music Ensembles

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Bryan Powell

The majority of research on gender and popular music education suggests that poplar music ensembles are still gendered and favor males (Abramo 2011; Clawson 1999; Dibben 2002; Green 2002; Powell 2011). Bayton (1998) suggests that females in all social classes and ethnic groups are restricted in their music pursuits compared to boys, and that these constraints include parental restrictions as well as the exclusion by male musicians. Recent research suggests that factors such as the age of the female participants in school ensembles and the presence of a female music teacher of these popular music ensembles might mitigate gender-based inequalities in popular music education (Wright, Butler, and Bylica 2017). This chapter examines the perspectives and practices of two female musicians who play the gendered instrument of electric guitar (Hallam, Rogers, and Creech 2008). For this chapter, I conducted interviews with two female students, both age 19. Emergent themes from the data indicate that participation in school-based popular music ensembles can break down barriers to participation in popular music for females and help mitigate social and parental constraints. Additionally, data from the interviews show that despite an increased prevalence of female electric guitar players in popular bands and on YouTube, for example, there still exists notable double standards for female electric guitar players, and a need to “claim space” (Björck 2011) and prove themselves in popular music settings. It is worth noting the potentially problematic lens that I, as a white male, might use in presenting and discussing the experiences of young females of color. It is my hope that by utilizing their own words as often as possible to describe their experiences, this chapter will allow these young women to speak for themselves without my potentiallybiased interpretation of their experiences. It is also worth briefly discussing the concept of gender. As gender is an increasingly fluid concept, and recognizing that many individuals do not conform to the traditional gender-binary, it is worth noting that both participants in this study identified as cisgender females. Throughout this chapter, some of the research cited uses various terms such as female, girl, and/or woman. In the 337

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

context of my discussion, I will refer to the participants as female or young women, and use the term “girl” only in reference to their experiences in elementary school (ages 6–12). When citing research or other publications, I will use the descriptive language used in the original publication.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Instrument gendering in popular music Hallam, Rogers, and Creech (2008) examined the gendering of popular music instruments. The results showed that adolescents playing electric guitar and electric bass were 81 percent male. Clawson (1999) stated that instruments are imbued with gender connotations grounded in broader conceptions of gender difference. In the case of instruments, these relate especially to the assumed polarities of masculine and feminine bodies, such as large versus small, low-pitched versus high, strong versus weak. Clawson also found that, in contradiction to the masculine/large instrument and feminine/small instrument dichotomy, when female participants joined a rock band, they were most likely to play electric bass, in part because of the instrument’s greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men. Cramer, Million, and Perreault (2002) further suggest that musicians who choose to play instruments incongruent with social prescriptions (e.g., a female guitarist) may be perceived as deviant and ultimately face social reproach (164). Frith (1981) argued that choices in leisure activities, including playing music, are a result of the different degrees of opportunity, restriction, and constraint that are afforded to individuals and social groups. Using this argument, Bayton (1998) suggests that such constraints are crucial to the explanation of women’s relative absence from rock. Females are often under pressure to conform to constraints imposed on them by their parents including being restricted from activities such as joining a rock band and hanging out at the venues where rock music is often played. Rock musician David Lee Roth believes that the lack of women who play lead guitar is not because women lack the ability to play the instrument. He stated: When a little girl picked up a guitar and said, “I want to be a rock star,” nine times out of ten her parents would never allow her to do it. We don’t have so many lead guitar women, not because women don’t have the ability to play the instrument, but because they’re kept locked up, taught to be something else. (David Lee Roth quoted in Walser 1993: 172) Dibben and Leonard (2009) stated that rock activities are not considered genderappropriate for girls because the range of hobbies deemed suitable for girls is considerably narrower than the list of hobbies considered suitable for boys. Chapple and Garofalo (1977) argued that “music is so fundamentally social and public that women’s 338

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

efforts are blocked. With writing, for instance, women often turned to journals, letters, and other ‘private’ forums for recording their responses to the world and their place in it” (8). Where one might think that rock music would allow female participants to break free from patriarchal structures, rock music “often promotes traditional gender roles” (Bourdage 2010) and is “permeated by gender norms and expectations at all levels” (Connell and Gibson 2003: 8). Another force for the exclusion of female rock musicians is their male counterparts. Frith and McRobbie (1990) argue that the male domination of the music industry results in popular music that is male focused and concerned with masculinity. As a result of this focus on masculinity, Bayton (1998) argued that the inclusion of girls into a rock band would undermine the masculinity that the male members of the group are seeking. Electric guitar performance is also an area in which male players have often further gendered the instrument as decidedly male. Through body positioning and flamboyant physical displays, the male guitarist often “fortifies male dominance of the electric guitar with a large dose of phallic symbolism” (Bourdage 2010), a role that Waksman (2001) describes as “technophallus” (244). With women facing far more barriers to participation in rock ensembles than their male counterparts, it is not surprising that in-school popular music ensembles reflect this disparity. Green (2003) argued that the education system bears part of the blame for the lack of females in rock music ensembles—she explains:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Schooling helps to perpetuate differences in the musical practices and tastes of boys and girls. Teachers, curriculum planners, and pupils … overwhelmingly associate active engagement in popular music, such as playing electric guitar and drums, with boys and masculinity, whereas classical musical practices such as singing in the choir and playing the flute are linked with girls and femininity. (269) Björck (2011) also suggests that in-school popular music instruction acts to reinforce gender norms, in which “females are still found to be the minority within different contexts for learning popular music … while music teaching in institutional settings presents various sex-based imbalances, for example in terms of instrument and genre involvement” (8).

Perspectives of female electric guitarists To better understand the perspectives and experiences of female electric guitar players, I interviewed two females who play electric guitar. Both individuals were college students at the time of the interview and both participants agreed to use their real names in this study. In this section, I will present a flash study (MLPP 2017) of each participant. 339

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Kelley Janae Kelley Janae is a 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist who is currently a sophomore1 at Belmont University, Nashville, TN, currently studying entertainment law. Kelley describes herself as a “female multi-instrumentalist” whose main instrument is guitar. In addition to guitar, she also plays the bass, piano, and has recently started producing music as well. Her preferred performance genres are hip-hop, R & B, and blues. Kelley first picked up a guitar in third grade when she was 8 years old. Her elementary school received an instrument grant from the nonprofit organization Little Kids Rock, and the donated instruments included acoustic and electric guitars. “That was my first introduction to playing the guitar,” she recalls, “outside of playing the video game Guitar Hero.” She remembers her teacher Mr. Hale teaching the class how to play an A chord and from that first exposure to the guitar, being “inspired to want to learn more and get more involved in music.” As she entered middle school (traditionally ages 12–14 in the USA) Kelley formed a band with other students from her in-school Little Kids Rock program2 to play gigs outside of school. They quickly started gigging at various venues across Nashville including the Ryman Auditorium, B.B. King’s, and the annual Summer NAMM North American Music Merchants Show.3 “It was four of us. We had the singer, drummer, bass player, and me. We were all very serious about it, and we were all together.” Kelley’s band played a mixture of covers and original tunes. In addition to playing with her band, Kelley also performed as a soloist. She recalls entering a guitar contest in middle school that she won. “It was such an amazing thing,” she recalled. The grand prize was Jackson Flying V guitar. “I knew at that moment, I was like, this is what I want to do. I love this.” Kelley attended high school (ages 14–18) at the Nashville School of the Arts, an arts magnet school4 in Nashville. Her primary instrument was jazz guitar. During that period, she was also able to play with well-known artists such as Keith Urban, Gary Jenkins, and Young Money artist Jacquees. At the end of high school, Kelley applied to Belmont University, initially choosing to major in music as a jazz guitarist, but changing her major to music business so that she could merge her passion for music with her interest in entertainment law. As she currently works toward becoming an entertainment lawyer, Kelley is playing guitar regularly and using social media to build a following. Through her social media posts, she has been acknowledged by Complex Magazine, DJ Khaled, and R. Kelly. As she reflects on her experiences as a female guitar player, Kelley shares that she has, at times, felt out of place. I can definitely say, whenever I walk into a room, it’s always like … are they going to take me seriously? It’s always like I have to prove myself to other musicians, because it’s typically a male environment. I’ve always had to play first. I have to come in and appear confident, or look a sort of way in order for people to take me seriously.

340

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

Kelley said that the reception to her playing has generally been “really positive,” but she first has to “prove” that she can play. Even when she first started playing in her church, Kelley felt the need to prove herself partially because she was young and in part because she is female. Reflecting on her experience playing music in her church, Kelley recalled: the first couple months, I felt like I had to prove myself in that environment as being a female. There, everybody is expecting, you know, “You’re not going to be able to keep up with us,” or, “You’re not good enough,” or something along the lines of that. Upon reflecting on how she feels like she is occasionally treated differently in the music industry because of her gender, Kelley is reluctant to use that as an excuse: I don’t like to play that role, but I do feel like men do have it a little bit easier. They kind of have the ability to just kind of walk in and be like, “Yeah, sure. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is what I’m expected to do.” This perception of different expectations was also present in Kelley’s college music experience. As the only female jazz guitar major, Kelley felt like she was required to prove that she belonged, while her male counterparts had an easier time being accepted. She shared:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

It was definitely a male-focused environment. For the guys, everybody is already like, “Yeah, he can play. He can shred. He’s great.” I have to come in and everybody’s drilling me. I just went through a bunch of extra stuff that wouldn’t necessarily have to happen if I was male. You feel like you still have to prove yourself or something. Once Kelley plays for others, and proves that she has the skills, she feels like her “other” status as a female of color who plays electric guitar has actually benefited her. “I feel like people tend to have a curiosity about it. I definitely don’t want to play the race role, but I’m a black, female musician, so it’s something that people find an interest in because it’s unusual. So, they want to know more. They want to see more.”

Kayla Vasquez Kayla Vasquez is a 20-year-old guitar player. She currently plays guitar and bass in a community college rock ensemble at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey. Kayla has been playing the guitar for about seven years. She got her start playing

341

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

acoustic guitar at the age of 12 when she took a few guitar lessons at a local music store. She recalls taking lessons for “about three months but had to stop because it was too expensive.” In the short time that she took guitar lessons, she was able to learn basic guitar chords. “And then after that I kind of just … I don’t look at it as teaching myself because I was kind of just playing stuff. But after that I learned a lot.” Before learning the guitar, Kayla had minimal experience playing other instruments. She recalled moving to New Jersey and picking up the clarinet because it was “like some sort of requirement. Like every student had to pick an instrument. But I think my mom just kind of forced me to do something.” Kayla recalls being attracted to the clarinet because the majority of the other girls chose to play flute, and the clarinet offered her a chance to be different than the rest of the girls. Kayla stopped playing the clarinet after a year because, as she described it, she was “too lazy to stay after school for band.” Kayla started playing the guitar in part because she and her brother “got really into playing the video game Rock Band.” Her brother also played drums in a local area band for a few months and the exposure to rock music inspired Kayla to get more involved with playing the guitar. “I was just amazed. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ It’s kind of like a blur, I guess. I don’t really remember how I got into this stuff.” As Kayla started to dedicate more of her time to playing the guitar, she mostly practiced in her bedroom. As she entered high school, Kayla came to the realization that she wanted to start playing with other musicians. “I was like, ‘All right, I’ve got to start playing with people’.” Seeking to find other musicians to play with, Kayla approached the school’s jazz band director to join the jazz band. The band director, who Kayla described as “a really mean dude” informed her that in order to be in the jazz band, she would also have to join the concert band as well and play a concert band instrument. Additionally, Kayla was told that she would have to learn to read traditional music staff notation. She recalled “I didn’t know how to read music at all. Everything I knew how to do on my guitar I just learned by listening. I didn’t know how to read. I couldn’t even read the basic chords.” Kayla informed the band teacher that she was willing to learn to read traditional music staff notation and he put her in touch with a graduating student who could offer her lessons. “Those lessons were such a drag. I learned the basic notes and then I got this little guitar book, where I learned how to play Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star reading music notation.” Kayla used her newfound skills to audition for the jazz band by playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on the guitar. Kayla recalled that at the audition, “I was so scared. It was the worst five minutes of my life. I literally played Twinkle, Twinkly, Little Star just to show him that I could read music. And then he was like, ‘All right, play me a song that you really love.’ I was like, ‘I’m going to play this man some Jimi Hendrix.’ And I played it!” Although Kayla played guitar in the jazz band from her sophomore through her senior year (ages 15–18), Kayla didn’t play guitar with other students in a band outside of school contexts. She explained, “I didn’t really know a lot of people who played rock instruments to begin with, like who wanted to be in a band. I was kind of like afraid to kind of join a band because I was like, ‘who’s going to want a girl playing the guitar?’” 342

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

When asked why she had the perception that her peers wouldn’t want to have a girl guitar player, she explained, “I mean, people thought it was cool that I played guitar but I knew that they would never be like, ‘Oh my God, she’s like really good. Let’s have her in our band.’ They were just like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, she’s female and plays guitar.’” This perception that Kayla had of her peers’ lack of interest in her as a guitar player is, in her opinion, partially because of her gender. When asked if she thinks the response would have been different if she were a male guitar player, she responded, Of course. I mean I always feel like people automatically think that if a boy’s playing a guitar he’s already going to be good. Men have this passion and drive and whatever they do they’re going to do it good, whatever. That’s stupid. But if a girl’s playing a guitar, it’s like, “Are you really even good?” They have this image of like if a girl’s playing guitar, she’s going to be this, this, like, “Oh, are you another Joan Jett.” Whatever. Because even if like a boy sucks, it’s like excusable. It’s like, “Oh, it’s just a hobby,” whatever. I don’t know. But if a girl’s playing a guitar, it’s like, “Oh, if you’re going to be holding that instrument, you’d better be good.” Kayla has also found other musicians, including music teachers, both male and female, to be generally dismissive of her as a guitar player before they hear her play:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

When I do say I play guitar, a lot of people just dismiss it, too. They think, “Whatever, she’s probably not really good … it’s a phase, it’s a look, it’s whatever.” Fuck you music teachers, I’m going to play rock and roll. It’s just really, like, dismissed. Nobody really cares. But if it’s a dude who plays guitar, it’s like, “Oh, that’s cool. You’re in a band? Oh my God.” So I guess that’s kind of a bummer. As a college student, Kayla sees a little more open-mindedness from her peers about playing with a female guitar player. “I think it’s mostly because, like, whoever has heard me play, I guess they consider me good.” Even so, she still perceived some gender discrimination in the Pop/Rock Ensemble at her college. “Even like in the Pop/Rock Ensemble, we have a dude with a guitar and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, he’s so good.’ But he fucking sucks. I was like, ‘Oh, my god. Wow, I’m going to bang my head against the wall.’ We’re clearly not hearing the same thing.” Kayla shared that many people around her are skeptical that she will succeed as a music major. “I think guys can major in music, and people are just like, ‘That’s cool, Good luck!’ But then they see that I am a Hispanic young woman and they’re just like, ‘Wow, she better be extremely talented if she’s going to be in any music arena or whatever.’” When asked if she has ever felt discriminated for being a female electric 343

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

guitar player, Kayla shared that as a Hispanic electric guitar player she has felt “really out of place” in many musical situations. “I look and feel like I don’t belong.” Although Kayla currently plays in multiple ensembles as part of her college courses, she does not play in a band outside of school. She explained, “I don’t know. I mean it’s probably a combination of things … I have been trying to put myself more out there. I guess part of me is still, ‘Oh, am I even ready to be part of a band?’” Despite several challenges that Kayla has faced as a Hispanic, electric guitar playing female, she is optimistic about more young girls playing guitar in the future. “I do see it like definitely getting better. I’ve seen a lot more women now with recognition who play electric guitar. There’s a lot more recognition for these female musicians. It’s mostly because of social media.” Kayla shared that in the last few years, she has seen a growth in the presence of female electric guitar players on social media and on other digital platforms. She shared, I follow a lot of women on social media who are getting not exactly equal screen time, but they get significantly more than we’ve ever had, I guess. Like I see a lot more women now being either solo artists, they got that guitar with them and are getting a lot of recognition and are being seen as really talented musicians and being taken seriously now. So I definitely do see it getting better. Brittany Howard, from Alabama Shakes. That girl is cool.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Discussion Björck (2011) examined the use of spatial metaphors and concepts revolving around the idea that girls and women need to “claim space” to participate in popular music practices. This idea of claiming space was evident in the experiences of both Kelley and Kayla. Both participants felt that they needed to not only prove their skills to other musicians and teachers but also to claim space and establish themselves as musicians who belong. For both women, when they walk into a room of (male) musicians, they constantly wonder if they will be taken seriously. They attribute the need to “prove” themselves to the fact that playing the electric guitar is a domain traditionally reserved for males. According to Kelley, she continually feels the need to prove herself to other musicians, because it is typically a male environment. She felt that she needed to play first to prove herself, appear confident, and “look a sort of way” in order for people to take her seriously. The idea of credibility coming only after proving skills was echoed by Kayla who shared, “I think people are open-minded to what I do after they hear me play.” The male-dominance of electric guitar was also something that both Kayla and Kelley mentioned continually, especially as it pertained to other people presuming that men were naturally good at playing the guitar without requiring the same sort of 344

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

proof required of women. Kelley felt that men have it a little bit easier because, as she described, they have the ability to “just kind of walk in and be like, ‘Yeah, sure. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is what I’m expected to do’.” Kayla also sees the same tendency in others to assume that male guitar players are naturally better at guitar. Kayla feels like people “automatically think that if a boy’s playing a guitar he’s already going to be good.” Kayla discussed how male guitar players are granted permission to be a beginner at the guitar while female guitarists are not granted the same opportunity. She explained that if a male guitar player isn’t very good, he is given permission to be a beginner, or to play guitar as a hobby. However female guitar players are not afforded the same luxury. When it comes to other people’s perceptions of female guitar players, Kayla feels as though other people constantly think “Oh, if you’re going to be holding that instrument, you’d better be good.” Both Kelley and Kayla identified as “triple-minorities.” As persons of color, they are minorities. As females in rock music, they are minorities. And as female electric guitar players, they are minorities. Despite the initial challenges that this posed for Kelley, in her experience, once she proves to people that she can play, people tend to have a curiosity about it. As she shared, “I’m a black, female musician, so it’s something that people find an interest in because it’s unusual. So, they want to know more. They want to see more.” On the other hand, Kayla’s experience as a Hispanic, female, electric guitar player has led to her feeling out of place in many of the spaces where rock music is made. In her words, “I look and feel like I don’t belong.” As persons of color, it was statistically improbable that they would both participate in school music from the ages of 14 to 18. Research on the demographics of participation in high school (ages 14–18) music ensembles in the United States shows that participants are disproportionately white and from a higher socioeconomic status when compared to the general population of their school (Bradley 2007; Clauhs, Beard, and Chadwick 2017). When I asked them to describe what they do musically, both Kayla and Kelley included their gender and eventually their race, in their descriptions; Kelley described herself as a “female multi-instrumentalist” and a “black female musician,” while Kayla at one point in the interview described herself as a “Hispanic female guitar player.” This struck me as noteworthy, because as a white male, I realized I would never describe who I am as a musician as being a “white male electric guitar player.” Throughout my life, I have had the luxury of not thinking about my musicianship through the lens of race and/or gender. These young women have not been provided the same opportunity. It is clear that as female guitarists of color, their experiences claiming space and needing to prove themselves have kept their gender and race intertwined with their descriptions of their musicality. One area where the experiences of the participants were dissimilar was in participating in bands outside of school. For Kelley, her initial exposure to playing electric guitar inside of school led to her forming a band with other girls from her class who were also participating in the Little Kids Rock program. The presence of an in-school option to learn popular music instruments and build community with other musicians led to participation in bands outside of school for Kelley. On the other hand, Kayla received 345

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

no such in-school opportunities to play the electric guitar inside of school. Kayla was able to join the jazz band (only after agreeing to play a “traditional” instrument in the concert band), but that experience didn’t allow her to play the music that she loved, or meet other musicians who had similar interests. With no in-school opportunities to form bands during music class, Kayla’s only option was to try and meet other musicians outside of school. This was a prospect that was intimidating to Kayla, who in high school still struggled with her perception that other musicians might not want her in a band. In her words, “who’s going to want a girl playing the guitar?” This self-doubt has stayed with Kayla who, despite playing in the Pop/Rock Ensemble and participating in other school-sanctioned performance opportunities at Bergen Community College, still hasn’t found a group of musicians who she wants to play with outside of school. When reflecting on why she hasn’t joined a band outside of school, Kayla shared, “I don’t know. I mean it’s probably a combination of things because I have been trying to put myself more out there. I guess part of me is still, ‘Oh, am I even ready to be part of a band?’.” Another difference in experience between Kalya and Kelley was the role of K–12 school music in their lives. Kelley’s elementary school (ages 6–12) teacher embraced popular music in the classroom and gave Kelley the exposure and support she needed to develop a love for playing the guitar. This passion led Kelley to continue playing guitar throughout school as she chose a performing arts high school to attend. Since Kelley was playing guitar in her music class, she did not feel out of place as a guitar player involved with school music. On the other hand, Kayla had an opposite experience with school music. For Kayla, the electric guitar was not as welcome in school music settings. Her only experience playing guitar in school music was in the jazz band. Kayla’s high school music teacher, whom she referred to as “a really mean dude,” also required her to learn traditional music staff notation as a prerequisite to participate in the jazz band. Through this process, Kayla came to believe that school music wasn’t a place for the electric guitar, and in the one case where it is welcome (jazz band) it needs to be on certain terms. This experience is in line with Bradley’s (2007) description of music education as a system which “reproduces unequal power relations through practices that are often exclusionary” (1). In terms of progress with representation, both Kelley and Kayla shared that social media has provided more access, both to be seen and to see other female electric guitar players. Kelley has made an effort in the past three years to build up a following on social media, posting twenty-five videos of her performing that have garnered over 200,000 total views. Kayla, who does not post her own videos on YouTube, still looks to social media for inspiration and connection with other female electric guitar players. The growing presence of female guitar players on social media has led to, from Kayla’s perspective, an increased recognition that female electric guitar players are gaining more traction. Kayla explained, “I see a lot more women now being either solo artists, they got that guitar with them and are getting a lot of recognition and being seen as really talented musicians and being taken seriously now.” 346

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

Through the meaningful inclusion of the electric guitar into her K–12 in-school music ensembles, Kelley was exposed to the instrument at an early age and was given opportunities to develop a love for the instrument in a supportive environment. From those experiences, Kelley formed bands, gigged at several high-profile venues, and is continuing to build a following on social media playing the electric guitar. This experience at a young age is in line with Wright, Butler, and Bylica (2017) who suggested that the age of the female participants in school ensembles might mitigate gender-based inequalities in popular music education. Kayla, on the other hand, did not benefit from experiences playing in school-based rock bands as part of her K–12 music instruction. Despite being an accomplished guitarist, Kayla currently finds it challenging to form her own band outside of her college performance opportunities. It is a safe assumption that based on her hesitancy to find performance opportunities outside of school, were it not for the Bergen Community College Pop/Rock Ensemble, Kayla likely would not be playing in a band of any sort.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion This chapter sought to better understand the perspectives of two female electric guitar players. While the experiences of these women are not generalizable to other female musicians in other contexts, it is worthwhile to note the differences in school musical experiences for Kelley and Kayla, and how these different experiences had a profound impact on their musical journeys. As discussed above, Kelley’s in-school exposure to the electric guitar provided her with safe spaces to learn the instrument, peers to collaborate and perform with, and a feeling that she belonged in school music. On the other hand, the only in-school space where Kayla was able to play the electric guitar was in the jazz band, and only after she joined the concert band and learned to read traditional music staff notation. The community and hospitality (Higgins 2007) that Kelley experienced in her in-school music participation stands in stark contrast to the conditions put upon Kayla in order for her to play in the jazz band. In-school music programs can provide safe spaces for females to initially be exposed to gendered instruments such as the electric guitar, and can also provide opportunities for young women to play with other musicians in a supportive environment. As evidenced by the experiences of both Kelley and Kayla, these spaces are needed in both K–12 and postsecondary schools.

Notes 1 In the United States, a student’s sophomore year in college/university is the equivalent to their second year in higher education. 347

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

2 Little Kids Rock is a music education nonprofit organization that provides teacher training, resources, and instruments to public school programs in the United States. Their primary goal is to expand modern band education in the public school system. 3 The Summer NAMM Show is a musical instrument, leisure, and entertainment trade show sponsored by the North American Music Merchants (NAMM). 4 Arts magnet schools in the United States is a public school offering special instruction in the arts.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abramo, Joseph Michael (2011), “Gender Differences of Popular Music Production in Secondary Schools,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 59 (1): 21–43. Bayton, Mavis (1998), Frock Rock: Women Performing Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Björck, Cecilia (2011), “Claiming Space: Discourses on Gender, Popular Music, and Social Change,” PhD diss., Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Bourdage, Monique (2010), “‘A Young Girls Dream’: Examining the Barriers Facing Female Electric Guitarists,” IASPM@ Journal, 1 (1): 1–16. Bradley, Deborah (2007), “The Sounds of Silence: Talking Race in Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 6 (4): 132–162. Chapple, Steve, and Reebee Garofalo 1977), Rock ’n’ Roll is Her to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry, Chicago: Nelson Hall. Clauhs, Matthew, Julie Beard, and Andrew Chadwick (2017), “Increasing Access to School Music through Modern Band,” School Music NEWS: The Official Publication of the New York State School Music Association, 81 (4): 24–28. Clawson, Mary Ann (1999), “When Women Play the Bass: Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music,” Gender & Society, 13 (2): 193–210. Connell, John and Chris Gibson (2003), Sound Tracks: Popular Music Identity and Place, London: Routledge. Cramer, Kenneth M., Erin Million, and Lynn A. Perreault (2002), “Perceptions of Musicians: Gender Stereotypes and Social Role Theory,” Psychology of Music, 30 (2): 164–174. Cremata, Radio, Joseph Michael Pignato, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), The Music Learning Profiles Project: Let’s Take This Outside, New York: Routledge. Dibben, Nicola (2002), “V. Constructions of Femininity in 1990s Girl-Group Music,” Feminism & Psychology, 12 (2): 168–175. Dibben, Nicola and Marion Leonard (2009), “Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power,” British Journal of Music Education, 26 (3): 339. Frith, Simon (1981), Sound Effects; Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock’n’Roll, New York: Pantheon. Goodwin, Andrew and Simon Frith, eds. (1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, London: Routledge.

348

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Breaking Down Barriers to Participation

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Green, Lucy (2003), “Music Education, Cultural Capital, and Social Group Identity,” in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 263–273, New York: Routledge. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Hallam, Susan, Lynne Rogers, and Andrea Creech (2008), “Gender Differences in Musical Instrument Choice,” International Journal of Music Education, 26 (1): 7–19. Higgins, Lee (2007), “Acts of Hospitality: The Community in Community Music,” Music Education Research, 9 (2): 281–292. Powell, Bryan James (2011), “Popular Music Ensembles in Post-Secondary Contexts: A Case Study of Two College Music Ensembles,” PhD diss., Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. Waksman, Steve (2001), Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walser, Robert (1993), Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Wright, Ruth, Allison Butler, and Kelly Bylica (2017), “Where Them Girls At?’ Gender, Popular Music and Informal Learning,” presentation at the Research in Music Education (RIME) conference, Bath Spa University, April 27, 2017.

349

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

350

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

24

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education Lloyd McArton and Nasim Niknafs

What would a pedagogy of music look like that placed the interests of the curiosity-seeker before the expectations and expertise of the teacher? What would it mean to make tradition a guest in our classrooms, and not a bully? What happens to formal music education when it is unsealed from propositional knowledge, demonstrative know-how, and musical wholes? Randall E. Allsup, “The Compositional Turn in Music Education” (2013: 13–14)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Introduction Corroborated by the inauguration of the Journal of Popular Music Education (JPME) in 2017, scholarship regarding popular music in school music education has undergone significant proliferation since its earliest musings in the 1930s, documented by Krikun (2008), and later discussions of Keith Swanwick (1968) and the Tanglewood Symposium (Choat 1968). Not always reminiscent of Kratus’s “sticky” aspirations of funky all-ukulele classes (Kratus 2007), MIDI projects, and “ethnic ensembles,” Finland was the first country to fully embrace Western popular music in their school music programs (Väkevä 2006). The push for popular music in schools continues to encounter criticism, though, with the most prevalent issues stemming from aesthetic differences (Fonder 2014; Hebert 2011; Ho 2014). Hebert (2011) writes that “popular music pedagogy in certain respects may appear to inevitably stand in philosophical opposition to some of the more traditional approaches to music education that emphasize teaching Something for All of Us is an album by Brendan Canning and the Canadian indie band Broken Social Scene, released in 2008.

351

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

of the masterworks of European art music” (13). A study conducted by Ho (2014) in China showed that some teachers deliberately refrain from implementing popular music genres; one went so far as to state that she “never taught popular music, as it ‘polluted her students’ ears’” (278). Other aesthetic considerations in classroom applications related to popular music are also pertinent. Firstly, some schools may prove to be inappropriate settings for the development and learning of popular music. Väkevä (2006) notes that “the very reason for the existence of ‘students’ own’ music is to rebel against the established conventions that school music represents” (128). Even in settings that have been designed and thoughtfully prepared to support popular music, they may flounder, as there may be discrepancies between the types of popular music teachers value and the ones students cherish. Perhaps the new generation of young people would not even enjoy pop/ rock music as their chief mode of musical expression (128). As some teachers may not be prepared to deal with such issues, they may resort to exclusionary or intolerant practices (Senyshyn 2004) reminiscent of the dominant Eurocentric classrooms from which this reaction germinated. Kallio’s (2015) study of censorship in Finnish popular music classrooms brought attention to the issue that while popular music may provide a more engaging or relevant basis for music education, if classical repertoire is merely replaced with popular songs, it serves only to flip the exclusionary practice in favor of a different style of music. Though we may have students’ interests at heart, “popular music practices, like any other practices, are exclusionary and regulated by norms. Consequently, popular music-making may function as empowering but also as disempowering” (Björck 2011: 27). Björck suggests that popular music also acts to reinforce gender norms, in which females still reside at the periphery of popular music learning outside of schools, while institutional music teaching and learning contexts are not innocent from such gender disparities (8). The nature of popular music itself brings about its own aesthetic and ethical issues that ought to be considered when teaching young students. Both authors, one of whom having performed and grown up in garage and indie rock bands in Canada, and the other having an eclectic experience of underground rock music in Iran, hesitate in associating themselves with the world of popular music. In addition to carrying the stigma of a genre based on the “mainstream,” popular music represents an impossibly wide umbrella that encompasses a huge variety of styles, making it difficult to quantify musically (Shuker 2012: 261). In some circles, popular music corresponds to a commitment to economic and social strategies that outweigh musical and artistic decisions. It is often a signifier of “selling out” (Newman 2009), having given in to the whims and demands of corporate management and record labels for the purposes of financial gain, often in the place of artistic decisions. This issue becomes especially convoluted when considering notions of musical “success” (Smith 2013). While not entirely representative of the “many little worlds” (Kirschner 1998) of “(un)popular music” (Smith 2017) the stigmatism and fundamental values of popular music that connote artistic compromise may well be a toxic basis for music education if not navigated carefully. It is within this context 352

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education

that this chapter explores the ethics behind music-making practices from the indie, an “(un)popular,” music movement as a constructive force, and how they may provide a different (and perhaps healthier) perspective for educational practices that include popular music genres.

Cultural backlash: The origins of indie music

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Why is there confusion in defining indie? In part, it is because indie is not a thing at all and is therefore not describable in the same manner as a stable object. Although indie has no exact definition, the discourse and practices around the multiple descriptions and definitions of indie detail a set of principles that reveal the values and issues at stake for the community. Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt (2006: 25) Major record labels’ lingering dominance over global music production and distribution continues to cast a large commercial shadow over the music industry (Hearn 2009; Shuker 2012). Having established an environment prone to retaliation, reactions have taken place on different levels at different points in time, perhaps the most iconic and drawn out being the “failure of the post-punk challenge to the structure of the music industry” in the 1980s (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 53). Though initially a “failure” (1999), British distribution networks developed by small-scale post-punk record labels— “independents” (1999: 34)—would eventually come to serve the underground indie market and support the delivery of independently produced music to large audiences trying to escape corporate influence. Indie music was conceived from these very ideals; collectives of musicians and music fans who had grown wary of major record labels’ influence and control, seeking out music that was a more authentic representation of the artist—an uncontaminated experience. Often of a slightly lower production value, sometimes recorded by the artists themselves, recordings of indie bands embody and value the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic inherited from the genre’s punk roots (Hibbett 2005). Indie values, then, represent a cultural response to the musical control and monopolization established by the big players in the global music industry. Indie as a cultural movement has been discussed by several authors, largely in regard to the musical phenomenon. As indie’s roots lie primarily in British and American music scenes (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 35), most of the broad conceptual discussions are based in these countries. However, because of the localized nature of indie music and its division into scenes (Bennett and Peterson 2004; Kruse 2003), there is a solid body of literature framed by specific geographic locations, namely Britain (Fonarow 2006), Canada (Finch 2015), the Czech Republic (Nanoru 2011), Indonesia (Luvaas 2009, 2013; Moore 2013), Taiwan (Chang 2010), and the United States (Azzerad 2001; 353

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Baker 2016; Harris 2012; Seiler 2001). Other authors have focused on more broad, global discussions pertaining to the concept of indie (Bannister 2006; Dolan 2010; Hesmondhalgh 1999; Hibbett 2005; Newman 2009; Shaw 2013). While these authors discuss the historical, sociological, and musicological conditions and implications of indie culture, there has been no attempt to frame the phenomenon within the perspective of music education. Such an endeavor is valuable, as the spirit and ethics behind the genre’s origins as a cultural backlash reveal a musical aesthetic based on principles of unrestricted artistry and musicians’ autonomy (Green 2008); these principles may aid the popular music education movement in finding an appropriate space within school settings.

Positioning the indie ethic as a constructive force

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Indie is in some respects radical. It calls for questioning or challenging the cultural status quo. Its spirit opposes structures of media ownership. It subverts reigning styles, genres, and meanings. It is a voice of the dispossessed. Its sensibility is intrinsically democratic: anyone can create. Michael Newman, “Indie Culture” (2009: 23) Incorporating the indie ethic into school music does not come without difficulties. As mentioned already, there is a long history associated with the word indie, fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies regarding its status as a movement (Hibbett 2005: 60), lifestyle (Azzerad 2001), and genre of music (Hesmondhalgh 1999: 35). While indie’s sonic borders are continually being blurred and broken, some specific attributes characterized the typical indie sound during its proliferation in the British and American 1980s (Hesmondhalgh 1999). Traceable back to its roots in “punk and 1960s pop” (1999), four-piece bands of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals tend to form the basic structure of indie bands, though the addition of keyboards, woodwinds, brass, strings, or a second drummer were not uncommon as the genre developed. Several authors have noted indie rock’s “fetishization” of the “jangly” guitar (Bannister 2006; Fonarow 2006; Hesmondhalgh 1999; Luvaas 2013), though guitar solos have at times been considered distasteful due to their showy and technical nature (Fonarow 2006: 42). An earnest indifference toward excessive production and professional recording equipment used for recordings also permeates the indie aesthetic, as expensive, high-fidelity recording quality might indicate a musical relationship dependent on the patronage of a record label. This can all be attributed to indie’s attention to musical simplicity and “drive for purification” (Fonarow 2006: 68). These values have also established the perception of an elitist aura that continues to taint the genre. The purity discussed earlier positions indie as “good,” in opposition to the “popular.” Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital (1986), Hibbett (2005) 354

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education

links the concept of indie to that of acquiring taste and likens the high-brow exclusivity associated with knowing a select group of relatively unknown bands to the same elitism associated with the cultivation of expertise in classical music; indie fans possess and gain cultural capital as the “conservators of good music” while other (popular) music is deemed inferior (Hibbett 2005: 60). On a more positive note, fans will also gravitate toward the bands that they perceive to be more honest, more authentic, and to exhibit a stronger connection to the music itself, being removed from the capitalist mentality of the mainstream music industry. Finding new fashionable artists has never been easier since the growing accessibility of online streaming services and the ease with which artists can distribute their music on these platforms. Unfortunately, corporate structures behind these streaming services are able to take advantage of customers’ music tastes through marketing algorithms that encourage their customers to find and purchase music from similar artists (Hibbett 2005: 56). Similarly, blogs and press outlets such as Exclaim!, Pitchfork, or independent “tastemakers” (reputable music critics who charge artists money for spots on playlists on streaming services) are also shaping the consumption of music, and in the authors’ experiences, are virtually inaccessible without established and influential publicity services. Since gaining widespread international influence, the indie genre has been distributed as a product no less tainted than the corporate music machine from which indie sought to distance itself in the first place. As Newman (2009) suggests, “The mainstreaming of indie amplified rather than diminished its salience as a cultural category. The fact that cultural products identified as independent are now produced and consumed under the regime of multinational media conglomerates has not threatened the centrality of alternativeness to the notion of indie” (17). Indie continues to grow as a genre but cannot prevent its aesthetic from being commandeered by mainstream popular music enterprises—commodified, romanticized, and massproduced. In spite of the later facets ascribed to the indie genre leaving the impression of a specific musical sound or haughty temperament amongst fans, the values embodied by the musicians and supporters who conceived the indie culture are integral to the evolving music industry, and to music education. Indie music embodies a DIY ethic in its truest sense—creating, performing, and sharing music through clever and thrifty means—sometimes with meager resources. In a sense, this is the only way that one can achieve true artistic freedom in music; removing all bureaucratic and capitalist obstacles (be they producers, record labels, or expensive studios) to focus solely on the music and its sociocultural influences. Responding to pressure exhibited by corporate institutions that promote and produce music, indie rejects control. The embodiment of the indie ethic within school music systems has the potential of a more balanced and nuanced approach to popular music education. One of the primary principles of indie is that of autonomy (Luvaas 2013: 95). Distancing itself from the mainstream and hierarchical corporate structures designed to generate profits from music (as mentioned), indie is nothing if not independent. There is an unspoken value in the honesty, integrity, and authenticity of music that 355

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

was not altered or changed at the hands of an international corporation. A rejection of the mainstream is a dedication to ignoring the influence of economic pressure throughout the process of writing, performing, or distributing an artist’s music. It is an attempt to bring honesty to the forefront of the musical experience, because “for indie, a raw, simple, under-produced quality to sound suggests closeness to the wellspring of musical authenticity” (42). More than that, indie music is a “culture of independence that was almost a form of protest” (Cavanagh 2000: viii). The ideals of indie music provide those both inside and outside of the margins a culture to create without judgment or boundaries. Such liberties inevitably result in a limitation of resources in the recording process. In many cases the indie community embraces less-than-ideal recording equipment and prefers the more “lofi” (low fidelity) sound. It is not the low-quality sound itself, but its clear representation of an honest, humble performance produced by modest means that brings value to a recording of lower quality; this is what brings a sense of humanism and an aura of authenticity to the music (Dolan 2010; Fonarow 2006). While authenticity itself is a loaded and convoluted concept with regards to musical genres and the degree to which those genres resemble cultures that they originated from, it embodies a raw experience in the context of musical performances, recordings, and their relationship with the artists.

Indie ethics in school music

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

For many, indie is the spirit of independence, being free from control, dependence, or interference. Self-reliance, not depending on the authority of others, has been the guiding value of indie music, as has the autonomy of the artist. Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt (2006: 51) It is not the authors’ intention in this chapter to suggest which music is better or more worthy of being learned. Our purpose here is to question and grapple with the educational values in popular music classrooms that embody the same intolerant and dominant pedagogical characteristics as Eurocentric large-ensemble-based music classrooms. The prevalence of large ensembles in school music (particularly in North America) reflects and perpetuates the dominance of global north-centric culture in our educational systems, and leaves little room to adapt and change to meet the changing needs of students and musicians in the twenty-first century (Allsup and Benedict 2008; Cremata 2017). This is not to say that music from the concert band, choral, or orchestral traditions has no educational value, but simply that using it as a foundation for music education does not account for far more relevant, diverse, socially conscious, and employable skills and experiences. 356

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education

Such is the basis of movement toward popular music in school classrooms. It is essential, though, to discuss the nature of popular music within our schools; it is an industry fed by corporate agendas and payrolls, and ultimately values an artist’s or a song’s ability to generate profit over their artistic merit or musical qualities. No matter what music is taught in classrooms, educators need to have these discussions with students. Students should be made aware that the Billboard Top 40 is full of songs written by ghostwriters, and that the artists that they are listening to may be entirely uninvolved with the creative process. Students must have an understanding of the corporate influencers whose currents run through the entire industry, so that they may make educated decisions about the music that they engage with and idolize.1 Just as students learn to engage with advertisements on television, radio, and other media formats, they should be made aware of the commercialism that permeates the music industry and recognize that the music that is marketed most heavily might not be the best music for them, but merely the most readily accessible. Kallio (2015) warned about potential problems of censorship in popular music education, a lesson we must extend to the music both inside and outside of our classrooms. Teachers’ discomfort or inexperience with popular music (Davis and Blair 2011; Jones 2008) is exacerbated by vague curricular documents (Kallio 2015; Ministry of Education 2010) that provide no guidelines or support for pedagogical approaches to popular music, and given that most music education degree programs (in North America, at least) are dominated by Western art music (Rodriguez 2004), there is no guarantee that graduates will procure experience in popular music genres. Further, the censorship (Kallio 2015, 2017) and intolerance (Senyshyn 2004) imposed by the often codified and regimented practice of popular music programs is still dominated by teachers’ musical preferences and actual popular music. The basic indie values of autonomy, independence, and artistic freedom can not only provide teachers with specific principles for the implementation of a more reflexive music education program based on their students’ needs but also undermine existing practices of musical censorship that may arise in existing music programs. In school music settings, prioritizing the indie ethic would allow students the opportunity to create, experiment, and collaborate musically without relying on the imposed musical values of teachers and administration. Teaching or at least embracing the indie ethic may be one way of resolving problems currently plaguing the mainstream in music education. Students should be uninhibited to choose their own artistic paths and to explore music on their own terms, regardless of their teacher’s, school’s, or curriculum’s musical tastes and preferences. Further, we believe that it is our responsibility as teachers to foster an indie ethic within our students and classrooms to challenge our own musical authority, resisting the institutional pressures inherent in mainstream music both in and out of school, and especially those that impose them. Allowing students to design and follow through with projects that are meaningful to them will help students develop more independent learning skills and apply them to musical endeavors linked to their own musical identities. Classrooms embodying the indie ethic can move away from recreating “great” music of the past, and 357

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

champion innovation through the combination of unique elements and staying true to musicians’ artistic visions. This is not to say that students should not learn great music or that they should only compose; rather, students should be able to have a say in what music they learn and how they apply the skills, techniques, and knowledge that they choose to dedicate their time to. Approaching classroom music in this way shifts the focus from the teacher and the classroom to the individuals and their artistic identities. It is worth considering how much more effectively students might achieve their fullest potential when they are given the opportunity and resources to create and engage with music on their own terms. Making music independently requires artistic decisions about arrangement, recording, tone quality, songwriting, graphics, marketing, and more. Given the opportunity to create and own their artistic visions, students may well appreciate and be more open to the foundations or elements of music, the specifics of which will vary depending on the genre or style of music. Some students may wish to jam with their friends, learn to record themselves using computer software, and share it with their friends and online communities. Other students may want to explore classical music on a more traditional instrument, in which they must learn an entirely different set of skills. In either case, if students are given the opportunities and resources necessary to succeed in learning music that they are interested in, we believe that they will be more engaged and take more ownership of their music learning and creating. It is not up to us to decide which music is worth making, but we can direct students to skills, resources, and knowledge that will open doors for them. As music educators, we must reconcile our own personal and highly developed musical tastes and skills with a classroom of learners whose identities are constantly being shaped by the music they learn, listen to, and engage with inside and outside of the school domain. In restricting and limiting the styles of music in which our students seek to immerse themselves, we deny them the independence of artistic expression and the opportunity to create with boundless passion. The indie movement’s anti-establishment mentality provided an inspiring response to the commercial stranglehold on the music industry, and can be a positive and cohesive force in the field of music education if divorced from the negative stereotypes and narrow musical categorization that will inevitably take hold in advent of new musical genres. In order to displace the currently rigid practices in school music, the same indie movement can take place. Teachers and students adopting an indie ethic will find themselves free from the predetermined, outdated, and imposing educational system’s musical limitations. Students will be encouraged to develop skills and knowledge in recording, multimedia, and musicianship applicable to whichever genre they may be interested in. They will have the opportunity to discuss, deconstruct, challenge, and appreciate various aspects of all styles of music, and (re)create them should they wish. Musical boundaries will be eliminated and defined by the students, not by outside pressures, just as those who are oppressed must restore humanity to both themselves and those who oppress them (Freire 1970: 28). Students will be autonomous musicians; exploring, creating, recreating, learning, and sharing in a community of limitless diversity and independence. 358

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education

This is certainly not the first attempt at reexamining the school music practices with popular music in mind (Allsup 2013, 2016; Cremata 2017; Folkestad 2005, 2006; Green 2001, 2008). The closely related efforts of hip-hop and punk pedagogies share many of the same tenets outlined in this chapter, providing other alternative voices in developing a critical mind-set of music education (Niknafs 2017; Söderman and Folkestad 2006; Söderman and Sernhede 2016; Teles Santos and Guerra 2017). It is the history and spirit behind the indie ethic that are the guiding principles by which popular music education may find a healthy home—popular music education not as the teaching of popular music but, rather, a philosophical and pedagogical approach that values equitably all people, all music, and their coexistence in plurality. Within the indie ethic is a strikingly human struggle for artists and everyone to maintain control of their own music and humanity; there is an undeniable integrity in the independence resting at the heart of indie culture. Embracing this ethos as a method of rechanneling and responding to both popular music and more traditional classrooms, teachers can help students develop autonomy, independence, and a love for music in its infinite possibilities—“something for all of us.” It may also give the movement of popular music education a set of guiding principles detached from the singular and dominant mainstream, with an alternative historical foundation, name, and face—or, rather, faces.

Note

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

1 It is worth mentioning that there is a distinction between popular music and “pop” music. For further detail, please refer to Moir (2017) who advocates for popular music composition as popular music education.

References Allsup, Randall E. (2013), “The Compositional Turn in Music Education: From Closed Forms to OpenTexts,” in Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith (eds.), Composing Our Future: Preparing Music Educators to Teach Composition, 57–70, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allsup, Randall E. (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allsup, Randall E. and Cathy Benedict (2008), “The Problems of Band: An Inquiry into the Future of Instrumental Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 16 (2): 156–173. Azzerad, Michael (2001), Our Band Could be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1881-1991, Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Baker, Andrea Jean (2016), “Music Scenes and Self Branding (Nashville and Austin),” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 28 (3): 334–355. doi:10.1111/jpms.12178. 359

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Bannister, Matthew (2006), “‘Loaded’: Indie Guitar Rock, Canonism, White Masculinities,” Popular Music, 25(1): 77–95. doi:10.1017/S026114300500070X. Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson, eds. (2004), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Björck, Cecilia (2011), “Freedom, Constraint, or Both? Readings on Popular Music and Gender,” Action, Criticism, & Theory for Music Education, 10 (2): 8–31. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986), “The Forms of Capital,” in John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, 46–58, Westport, CT: Greenword. Cavanagh, David (2000), The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry for the Prize, London: Virgin Publishing. Chang, Shih-Lun (2010). “The Face of Independence? A Visual Record of Taiwanese Indie Music Scene,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 11 (1): 89–99. Choate, Robert A., ed. (1968), Music in American Society: Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium. Washington, DC: Music Educators National Conference. Cremata, Radio (2017), “Facilitation in Popular Music Education,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 63–82. doi:10.1386/jpme.1.1.63_1. Davis, Sharon G. and Deborah V. Blair (2011), “Popular Music in American Teacher Education: A Glimpse into a Secondary Methods Course,” International Journal of Music Education, 29 (2): 124–140. Dolan, Emily I. (2010), “‘…This Little Ukulele Tells the Truth’: Indie Pop and Kitsch Authenticity,” Popular Music, 29(3): 457–469. doi:10.1017/S0261143010000437. Finch, Mark (2015), “‘Toronto is the Best!’: Cultural Scenes, Independent Music, and Competing Urban Visions,” Popular Music and Society, 38 (3): 299–317. Folkestad, Göran (2005), “The Local and the Global in Musical Learning: Considering the Interaction Between Formal and Informal Settings,” in Patricia Shehan Campbell, John Drummond, Peter Dunbar-Hall, Keith Howard, Huib Schippers, and Trevor Wiggins (eds.), Cultural Diversity in Music Education: Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century, 23–28, Brisbane: Australian Academic Press. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Fonarow, Wendy (2006), Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Fonder, Mark (2014), “Another Perspective: No Default or Reset Necessary—Large Ensembles Enrichmany,” Music Educators Journal, 101 (2): 89. Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum Publishing Group. Green, Lucy (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Press. Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Harris, Keith (2012), “Did New York Kill Indie Rock?,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 24 (3): 276–279. Hearn, James E. (2009), “The Representation of Major and Independent Record Labels in Billboard Magazine,” Journal of the Music & Entertainment Industry Educators Association, 9 (1): 113–132. Hebert, David G. (2011), “Originality and Institutionalization: Factors Engendering Resistance to Popular Music Pedagogy in the U.S.A.,” Music Education Research International, 5: 12–21. 360

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“Something for All of Us”: Indie Ethics in Popular Music Education

Hesmondhalgh, David (1999), “Indie: The Institutional Politics and Aesthetics of a Popular Music Genre,” Cultural Studies, 13 (1): 34–61. Ho, Wai-Chung (2014), “Music Education Curriculum and Social Change: A Study of Popular Music in Secondary Schools in Beijing, China,” Music Education Research, 16 (3): 267–289. Hibbett, Ryan (2005), “What is Indie Rock?,” Popular Music and Society, 28 (1): 55–77. Jones, Patrick M. (2008), “Preparing Music Teachers for Change: Broadening Instrument Class Offerings to Foster Lifewide and Lifelong Musicing,” Visions of Research in Music Education: 12. Available online: https://openmusiclibrary.org/article/172116/ (accessed November 17, 2018). Kallio, Alexis Anja (2015), “Drawing a Line in Water: Constructing the School Censorship Frame in Popular Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (2): 195–209. Kallio, Alexis Anja (2017), “Popular Outsiders: The Censorship of Popular Music in School Music Education,” Popular Music and Society, 40 (3): 330–344. Kirschner, Tony (1998), “Studying Rock: Toward a Materialist Ethnography,” in Thomas Swiss, John M. Sloop and Andrew Harman (eds.), Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, 247–268, Oxford: Blackwell. Kratus, John (2007), “Music Education at the Tipping Point,” Music Educators Journal, 94 (2): 42–48. Krikun, Andrew (2008), “Popular Music and Jazz in the American Junior College Music Curriculum during the Swing Era (1935-1945),” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, 30 (1): 39–49. Kruse, Holly (2003), Site and Sound: Understanding Independent Music Scenes, New York: Peter Lang. Luvaas, Brent (2009), “Dislocating Sounds: The Deterritorialization of Indonesian Indie Pop,” Cultural Anthropology, 24 (2): 246–279. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01131.x. Luvaas, Brent (2013), “Exemplary Centers and Musical Elsewheres: On Authenticity and Autonomy in Indonesian Indie Music,” Asian Music, 44 (2): 95–114. Ministry of Education (2010), The Ontario Curriculum: Grades 11 and 12: The Arts. Toronto: Queen’s Printer of Ontario. Available online: www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/ arts1112curr2010.pdf (accessed November 17, 2018). Moir, Zach (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Bloomsbury Singer Songwriter Handbook, 35–49, New York: Bloomsbury. Moore, Rebekah E. (2013), “Elevating the Underground: Claiming a Space for Indie Music among Bali’s Many Soundworlds,” Asian Music, 44 (2): 135–159. Nanoru, Michal (2011), “Here Be Dogs: Documenting the Visual Culture of the Czech Indie Scene,” Current Musicology, 91 (Spring): 49–86. Newman, Michael Z. (2009), “Indie Culture: In Pursuit of the Authentic Autonomous Alternative,” Cinema Journal, 48 (3): 16–34. Niknafs, Nasim (2017), “‘Khas-o-Khâshâk’: Anarcho-Improv in the Tehrani Music Education Scene,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (eds.), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 30–42, New York: Routledge. Rodriguez, Carlos Xavier, ed. (2004), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, Reston, VA: The National Association for Music Education (MENC). 361

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Seiler, Cotten (2001), “‘Have You Ever Been to the Pleasure Inn?’ The Transformation of Indie Rock in Louisville, Kentucky,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13 (2): 189–205. Senyshyn, Yaroslav (2004), “Popular Music and the Intolerant Classroom,” in Lee Bartel (ed.), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, 110–118, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators Association. Shaw, Kate (2013), “Independent Creative Subcultures and Why They Matter,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 19 (3): 333–352. Shuker, Roy (2012), Popular Music: The Key Concepts, third edition, London: Routledge. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), “Seeking ‘Success’ in Popular Music,” Music Education Research International, 6(1): 26–37. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2017), “(Un)popular Music Making and Eudaimonism,” in Roger Mantie and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure, 151–168, New York: Oxford University Press. Söderman, Johan and Göran Folkestad (2006), “How Hip-Hop Musicians Learn: Strategies in Informal Creative Music Making,” Music Education Research, 6 (3): 313–326. Söderman, Johan and Ove Sernhede (2016), “Hip-hop—What’s in it for the Academy? SelfUnderstanding, Pedagogy and Aesthetical Learning Processes in Everyday Cultural Praxis,” Music Education Research, 18 (2): 142–155. Swanwick, Keith (1968), Popular Music and the Teacher, Oxford: Pergamon Press. Teles Santos, Tiago and Paula Guerra (2017), “From Punk Ethics to the Pedagogy of the Bad Kids: Core Values and Social Liberation,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Mike Dines, and Tom Parkinson (eds.), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning, 210–224, New York: Routledge. Väkevä, Lauri (2006), “Teaching Popular Music in Finland: What’s Up, What’s Ahead?,” International Journal of Music Education, 24 (2): 129–134.

362

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

25

Children’s Construction of Cultural Knowledge and Musical Identity: Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study) Karen Howard

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The ubiquity of hip-hop music as an influential cultural symbol in the United States has reached global standing (Forman 2002; Hall 2009; Thibeault 2010). However, as a growing number of music educators propose that hip-hop music ought to be included in music education (Kruse 2016; Love 2015), it is not uncommon to witness a reaction of open disdain (Alim 2007; Koza 1994; Love 2015; Tobias 2014). Love (2015) found many music teachers to be resistant to hip-hop music because it was perceived as too mature or sexual in nature due to the genre’s one-dimensional representation in mainstream media. In the United States, these experiences often reinforce negative stereotypes of black and Latino students, particularly those in lower socioeconomic settings. The purpose of this chapter is to examine hip-hop culture in music education through the lens of critical pedagogy, particularly through a case study conducted on an afterschool music initiative in Minnesota. I will problematize children’s interactions with hip-hop music and hip-hop’s place within music education settings.

Critical pedagogy in music education Critical pedagogy represents what Irby and Hall (2011) described as “an approach to schooling that is committed to the imperatives of empowering students and transforming the larger social order in the interests of justice and equality” (218). The genre of hiphop emerged out of struggle and the need for black and brown people to express their frustration over the impact of long-time oppression and marginalization, and their need to be heard, seen, and understood by the dominant white culture thereby enacting a form of cultural expression and social praxis. Lyrics in rap music often tend toward politically motivated expressions of anger caused by social and cultural issues including racism, segregation, and glaring economic and educational disparities. A critical approach to hip-hop culture is a worthy endeavor able to bring empowerment to marginalized

363

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

groups, and to help our students recognize the force of music as a tool to express a range of experiences from celebration to the criticism of oppressive social conditions (Söderman and Sernhede 2016). Duncan-Andrade and Morell (2005) suggested that teachers who “recognize and draw upon (popular culture’s) centrality to the lives of youth” (288) can create meaningful encounters with hip-hop that can serve to lessen cultural divisions between students and teachers. Rather than restricting critical work relating to hip-hop to academia, the inclusion of school music students in the work surrounding hip-hop pedagogies can increase inclusivity for potentially marginalized groups (Irby and Hall 2011; Kruse 2016).

“Savin’ the Day”: A case study This study was developed during a period of social upheaval not seen since the civil rights movement (Day 2015; Inwood 2016; Murray 2016). This troubled social climate adds to the growing demand on music teachers to develop curricula that gives keen attention to matters of social justice. I conducted fieldwork in Minneapolis between 2015 and 2016. During this time, my focus was on an after-school hip-hop music initiative known as Beats and Rhymes (B&R).1 From a theoretical point of view, it is useful to view the cultural product and pedagogical process of B&R through critical hip-hop pedagogy described by Akom (2009) as attempting to:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

address deep-rooted ideologies to social inequities by creating a space in teacher education courses for prospective teachers to re-examine their knowledge of hip-hop as it intersects with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. (52) Tobias (2014) suggested that music educators allow students to engage with hip-hop in ways that are equivalent to the treatment of more commonly taught musics in US school settings. This process requires teachers that value musical content, but also cultural and historical considerations that lead to cultural knowledge.

Beats and Rhymes Situated in North Minneapolis, Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School (NSJ) was named after a civil rights activist who was the first elected black official in town. NSJ has been labeled a priority school under the federal Elementary Education Act2 meaning that students’ test scores placed NSJ in the bottom 5 percent of schools nationwide. Ninety-six percent of students qualify for government-subsidized free or reduced364

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study)

price school lunch making NSJ sixth in the state for children needing such financial assistance. The organization Beacons After School Programs is contracted by the local school district to provide in-house after-school care and multiple learning activities and classes for students at NSJ. For more than nine years, one of the after-school class offerings has been facilitated through the B&R hip-hop initiative. This innovative music program was founded by J. T. Evans and Ralph Jones through a substantial grant from a local business. The students receive daily after-school instruction grouped by kindergarten to second grade (ages 5–7), third to fifth grade (ages 8–11), middle schoolers (12–14), and high school students. The stated purpose of B&R is to give children the chance to experience making and recording music in a manner to which they can relate through the familiar medium of hip-hop culture. It was designed with the intention of providing challenging and positive opportunities for the lower income, culturally diverse youth at NSJ and in the surrounding neighborhoods. As program founder J. T. Evans emphasized, “It is all about finding any way that we can to connect to the kids” (J. T. Evans, pers. comm., October 21, 2015). The B&R program has produced and released eight albums to date. The “NSJ Crew,” named after the school, was the first group of students to record through B&R. In 2010, a satellite program was added named “Y.N.Rich Kids” —a play on the question “Why enrich kids?”—at the North Community YMCA Youth and Teen Enrichment Center allowing more classroom space for greater community involvement. Y.N.Rich Kids follows the same teaching and learning model as B&R. Both groups employ positive youth development approaches and project-based learning to promote leadership skills and cultural tolerance. The group teaches skills in music production and engineering, recording techniques, studio etiquette, beat-making software competency, performance, stage presence (what J. T. referred to as “swag”), song arrangement, lyric-writing strategies, and music industry awareness. B&R has several videos on YouTube including a documentary of the making of one of the videos, “Khaki Pants” (Beats and Rhymes 2013a). The childrens’ most famous tune based on total views on YouTube, “Hot Cheetos and Takis” (DaRichKidzzVEVO 2013), has upward of 20 million views across multiple social media postings and was even featured prominently in the most recent season of the Netflix series, Orange is the New Black.

The power of lyrics In the case of B&R, particular lyrics and images are powerful representations of the children’s life experiences, their local community, and important cultural figures. Following are examples of rap lyrics written by the children that challenge what they

365

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

perceive as society’s low expectations of them. In “The Business” 10-year-old Lauren raps about her mother’s high expectations for her academic achievement: Swagged out and gettin’ money, but my Mama don’t care, ‘Cause she won’t think it’s funny, If I got bad grades, my days would not be sunny. She send me to my room and tell me she ain’t raise no dummy. (Y.N.RichKids 2014) In “Honor Roll” we hear 8-year-old Ty Boogie displaying pride in his schoolwork: One plus two is three, and C comes after B. How did I know that? ‘Cause I do my homework, G. I’m a third grade menace, but I pay attention. I can read a chapter book and complete a full sentence, aight! (The NSJ Crew 2014) On the album “School House Rap!” (The NSJ Crew 2012b), several songs have the children rapping about inspirational topics. During “Conjunction Lesson” a 10-year-old encourages children to find their function and their purpose:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

So what’s your function? It ain’t gotta be rappin’. But once you find it just make sure you get to snappin’. We’re just kids from the “hood tryin” to do somethin’ good. Everybody think they know us, but we often misunderstood. (The NSJ Crew 2012a) These students show that they are able to handle topics such as class and race. They are living within these social constructs on a daily basis and are using the lyrics as a medium to identify who they are, how they see themselves, and how they would like society to view them. Howard (2014) found that upper elementary aged children (ages 8–11) are indeed capable of grappling with culturally sensitive issues such as these through music experiences, meaningful discussions, and opportunities to examine their thought processes.

Constructing cultural knowledge and musical identity through music Banks (2004) used the label of “knowledge construction” to refer to teachers helping “students to understand how knowledge is created and how it is influenced by the racial, ethnic and social-class positions of individuals and groups” (4). The children in B&R are building cultural and musical identities through what Aróstegui and Louro (2009) described as “interpretive interactions with members of their own community by sharing the same 366

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study)

rules of construction of knowledge to get understanding of reality” (19). McCarthy et al. (1999) explored the concept that popular music including hip-hop plays “a number of important social functions in the lives of children and adolescents” (5) including immediate reaction through the body, formation and repetition of identity, and the processing of emotions. For youth, musical preferences can link identity with particular social groups and express class, sexual, and ethnic associations. Children find means to bring together the disparate pieces of their musical identities. A strong example is taken from the liner notes from the album Savin’ the Day: The Return of the Y.N. Rich Kids!: We encounter love, loss, community violence, darkness, and adults who don’t believe in us. In the end, we return to earth with a powerful message … “Never give up on yourself or each other.” In “The Kids Do Stand a Chance” several individual children emphatically recite the title of the song that refers directly to them:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

We overcome what they say about us. The way they look at us, the way they act when we’re around. (Y.N.RichKids 2011b) A common lyrical theme is present in the previously mentioned “Honor Roll” and in “The Business” (Y.N.RichKids 2014). In these tunes, the children express their pride at achieving in school. The videos include familiar hip-hop images of flaunting cash, yet the children’s lyrics convert the message to the rewards of hard work and achievement, “My brother gives me cash when I get the good grades.” Comparing the odds of their success to Superman dropping down from Krypton, the students appear to acknowledge society’s lower expectations for their achievement. The children flip the stereotypical idolatry of so-called “gangsta” behavior on its head and instead insert their own success with schoolwork as something worthy of aspiration and imitation. Love’s (2015) findings support the children’s awareness citing instructional and assessment procedures that perpetuate a view of black and brown students as defiant and difficult. Love also found that music educators without a personal connection to hip-hop were more likely to find it not worthy of exploration with any depth, and this may translate to children in school music programs feeling that their musical identities are not worthy of exploration and appreciation.

Behind the scenes In order to better understand the ways that B&R guides the students through this process, the following section includes exploration of pedagogical techniques used in the sessions. The students come to class daily in groups of six to ten students according to their ages. During a lesson for the 6–8-year-olds, they engaged in a “swag” practice 367

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

session. With one of their recent tunes playing, J. T. led them through stylistic moves, ways to gesture while holding a microphone, facial expressions, and exclamations for encouraging fellow rappers, all characteristic of hip-hop stage presence. A class for the 8–10-year-olds focused on developing rhyming skill through a fastpaced game. With the children standing in a circle, a starting word (e.g., bat) is called out. Each child then needs to call out, in time, a rhyming word or they are “out” and sit down until a new word is started. While this class was in session, a tall teenager sauntered into the room at the back of the studio. He started to work with two middle school-age students, helping them with some lyrics they were crafting. This student was Avonte, one of the original members of B&R from the “Hot Cheetos and Takis” video. It took a moment for me to recognize him because he went from a small boy in a tank top in the video to this 6-foot-tall young man with a deep voice. This model has become part of the foundation of B&R; after years of study, the teenagers begin their apprenticeships and then officially work for the program, guiding the next generation. The teenage class is typically the last of the afternoon. On a particular day, they were sent with recording devices to scour the building for interesting sounds that they could then digitize and incorporate into loops and other effects for their current recording projects. There was also time set aside to listen to the latest changes from the studio on one of their songs. Students offered comments on what they thought of the changes, chatting amiably with each other and singing along on the chorus. A key component of B&R is a skilled engineer who understands the software used for creating loops, arrangements, and tracks. J. T. and Ralph guide the younger children through the recording process. Some of the children are able to memorize their lyrics, or read them in time off of the page. However, some children need more assistance. To address this, a common practice includes J. T. rapping a line as written by a child into the mic, and then having the child repeat it exactly as he did including his intonation and expression. The adult voice is then edited out so as to feature only the child’s voice. This rote teaching process allows for the students to take their lyrics to a more sophisticated level without stumbling over reading and long lines to memorize. Similarly, even the youngest children are included in the creation of beats. One of the facilitators may connect a digital sound to a particular key on the keyboard; then during the recording process, a child is cued at precisely the right moments to hit that key to include the sounds in the final track. As the students grow in the program, their involvement with the creation of beats increases all under the watchful eyes of J. T., Ralph, and the teen apprentices toward the end goal of creating their own works from start to finish. While some music teacher preparation programs may include within a methods course short experiences in using beat-making software such as GarageBand, many preservice and practicing music educators would need further instruction, modeling, and practice in order to feel comfortable organizing such instructional opportunities as utilized in the B&R program (Bauer 2013). Music teachers’ uses of communication and information technology to facilitate student learning was found to be limited (Dorfman 368

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study)

2008; Jassmann 2004). The B&R model is decidedly different from the “sage on the stage” model taught in many music education programs in the United States, and requires a rethinking of preservice training in order to send forward teachers who are comfortable designing such programs. The goals of the Beats and Rhymes program—to make a meaningful connection with the children and to help them develop a strong belief in their abilities and self-worth— are reflected in the lyrics from “Be Thankful Freestyle”: Now I understand what being a role model is. I’m just trying to be something like a movement, Not sit around and trying to be a cool kid. (Y.N.RichKids 2011a) The types of music teaching and learning in Beats and Rhymes allows the children to work as what Kruse (2016) labeled “cultural critics” (4) employing critical perspectives in response to structures both within and outside of their community. Music educators would do well to note Irizarry’s (2009) imperative “that we do not limit the exploration of the potential benefits of hip-hop in the field of education solely to students who identify with the culture” (491). Children of all races, socioeconomic settings, and educational backgrounds can benefit greatly from the model explored in Beats and Rhymes.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Implications for music educators Forman (2002) declared that from a critical perspective, “hip-hop’s various texts cannot be the whole story of youth, minority existence, racial identities, or spatial affinities” (15). Rather, the musical experiences become part of the children’s construction of cultural knowledge and contribute to their musical identities. Forman emphasized that “texts can be studied as representations of reality, but the textual rendering can never guarantee the produced outcome or the ‘reality effects’ that result when they are swept up into people’s lives” (16). Where does this leave music educators who are new to hip-hop and perceive rap to be “about the lyrics” and important mainly for African Americans? Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2005) emphasized the importance of bringing hip-hop to all socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups of students: Many students see school as a place where they must negotiate over how much of themselves they are willing to give up, rather than as an additive place where they can grow. Sadly, what we know is that far too many students across the board are generally unimpressed with the schooling that we offer them. (293–294) School music must be a place that students feel is worthwhile. Teachers need to discover how their students derive meaning from hip-hop or other musics that they listen 369

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

to rather than to imagine that students perceive it as their teachers do. The negativity toward hip-hop in music education can be disrupted through preservice teacher training (Love 2015) and continued professional development for practicing educators. Music teachers can work to consider and understand their students’ social contexts and their musical preferences. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of music in the lives of children, and by advocating for a more liberal and accepting stance on the part of scholars and educators who employ their own hierarchies of value in judging and critiquing hip-hop music (Alim 2007; Duncan-Andrade and Morell 2005). As Rose (2008) articulated, “We must fight for a progressive, social justice-inspired, culturally nuanced take on hip-hop—a vision that rejects the morally hyper-conservative agenda” (29). Music educators have the ability to be agents of change with an obligation to commit to a music education representative of the musical identities and cultural knowledge of not only themselves, but of the students in their classrooms and of the broader community so as to better know their world. I will close with the rap lyrics of a 9-year-old boy from B&R from the song “Let It Shine”: What up, young world? What up, old world? Don’t matter who you are, if you’s a boy or girl, Woman or man, just hope you understand, That you should do whatever you can to make your life worth living. (Y.N.RichKids 2011c)

Notes 1 The title from one of the group’s albums (Y.N.RichKids 2010).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

2 Information gathered from the district and school website (NSJ n.d.).

References Akom, Antwi A. (2009), “Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form of Liberatory Praxis,” Equity and Excellence in Education, 42 (1): 52–66. Alim, H. Samy (2007), “Critical Hip-Hop Language Pedagogies: Combat, Consciousness, and the Cultural Politics of Communication,” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 6 (2): 161–176. Aróstegui, Jose Luis and Ana Lúcia Louro (2009), “What We Teach and What They Learn: Social Identities and Cultural Backgrounds Forming the Musical Experience,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 182 (Fall): 19–30. Banks, James A. (2004), “Dimensions of Multicultural Education,” in James A. Banks, and Cherry M. Banks (eds.), Handbook of Multicultural Education, second edition, 3–29, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

370

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Beats and Rhymes (A Case Study)

Bauer, William I. (2013), “The Acquisition of Musical Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge,” Journal of Music Teacher Education, 22 (2): 51–64. Beats and Rhymes (2013a), “4 Days: The Making of Khaki Pants,” YouTube, October 3, 2013. Available online: https://youtu.be/5PQTrGtaLz8 (accessed November 27, 2018). Beats and Rhymes (2013b), “Beats & Rhymes.” Available online: http://beatsandrhymes.org (accessed November 17, 2018). DaRichKidzzVEVO (2013), “Da Rich Kidzz—Hot Cheetos & Takis,” YouTube, October 16, 2013. Available online: https://youtu.be/3qTYO7idTDc (accessed November 18, 2018). Day, Elizabeth (2015), “#BlackLivesMatter: The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement,” The Guardian, July 19, 2015. Available online: www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/19/ blacklivesmatter-birth-civil-rights-movement (accessed July 19, 2015.) Dorfman, Jay (2008), “Technology in Ohio’s School Music Programs: An Exploratory Study of Teacher Use and Integration,” Contributions to Music Education, 35 (1): 23–46. Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey M. and Ernest Morrell (2005), “Turn Up that Radio, Teacher: Popular Cultural Pedagogy in New Century Urban Schools,” Journal of School Leadership, 15 (3): 284–308. Forman, Murray (2002), The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hall, Marcella R. (2009), “Hip-Hop Education Resources,” Equity and Excellence in Education, 42 (1): 86–94. Howard, Karen A. (2014), “Developing Children’s Multicultural Sensitivity Using Music of the African Diaspora: An Elementary School Music Culture Project,” PhD diss., University of Washington. Inwood, Joshua F. J. (2017), “Critical Pedagogy and the Fierce Urgency of Now: Opening Up Space for Critical Reflections on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement,” Social & Cultural Geography, 18 (4): 451–465. doi:10.1080/14649365.2016.1197301. Irby, Decoteau J. and Bernard H. Hall (2011), “Fresh Faces, New Places: Moving beyond Teacher-Researcher Perspectives in Hip-Hop-Based Education Research,” Urban Education, 46 (2): 216–240. Irizarry, Jason G. (2009), “Representin’: Drawing from Hip-Hop and Urban Youth Culture to Inform Teacher Education,” Education and Urban Society, 41 (4): 489–515. Jassmann, Art E. (2004) “The Status of Music Technology in the K–12 Curriculum of South Dakota Public Schools.” PhD diss., University of South Dakota, Vermillion. Koza, Julia E. (1994), “Rap Music: The Cultural Politics of Official Representation,” The Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies, 16 (2): 171–196. Kruse, Adam J. (2016),“Toward Hip-Hop Pedagogies for Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 34 (2): 1–14. Love, Bettina L. (2015), “What is Hip-Hop-Based Education Doing in Nice Fields Such as Early Childhood and Elementary Education?,” Urban Education, 50 (1): 106–131. McCarthy, Cameron, Sylvia A. Glenn Hudak, Shawn Miklaucic Allegretto, and Paula Saukko (1999), “Introduction: Anxiety and Celebration: Popular Music and Youth Identities at the End of the Century,” Counterpoints, 96: 1–16. Murray, Cecil L. (2016), “It’s 2016 and the Civil Rights Era Hasn’t Ended,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2016. Available online: www.latimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fop-ed%2Fla-oemurray-1968-2016-comparison-20160807-snap-story.html&usg=AOvVaw3GmBzwlPnT_ T2DtASlSiEj. 371

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School (NSJ) (n.d.) “K–12.” Available online: http://nsj.mpls. k12.mn.us (accessed November 18, 2018). Rose, Tricia (2008), “The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk about When We Talk about Hip Hop— and Why It Matters, New York: Perseus Books. Söderman, Johan and Ove Sernhede (2016), “Hip-Hop—What’s in it for the Academy? SelfUnderstanding, Pedagogy and Aesthetical Learning Processes in Everyday Cultural Praxis,” Music Education Research, 18 (2): 142–155. The NSJ Crew (2012a), “Conjunction Lesson,” track 2 on School House Rap. Available online: https://ynrichkids.com/track/conjunction-lesson (accessed November 17, 2018). The NSJ Crew (2012b), School House Rap. Available online: https://ynrichkids.com/album/ school-house-rap (accessed November 17, 2018). The NSJ Crew (2014), “Honor Role.” Available online: http://ynrichkids.com/track/honor-roll (accessed November 17, 2018). Thibeault, Matthew D. (2010), “Hip-Hop, Digital Media, and the Changing Face of Music Education,” General Music Today, 24 (1): 46–49. Tobias, Evan S. (2014), “Flipping the Misogynist Script: Gender, Agency, Hip Hop and Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 13 (2): 48–83. Y.N.RichKids (2010), Savin’ the Day. Available online: http://ynrichkids.com/album/savin-theday (accessed November 18, 2018). Y.N.Richkids (2011a), “Be Thankful Freestyle,” track 20 on A Bunch of Kids Makin’ Noise!, vol. 1, hosted by DJ Advance. Available online: https://ynrichkids.com/track/be-thankfulfreestyle (accessed November 17, 2018). Y.N.RichKids (2011b), “The Kids Do Stand a Chance,” track 1 on The Kids Do Stand a Chance. Available online: http://ynrichkids.com/track/the-kids-do-stand-a-chance (accessed November 17, 2018). Y.N.RichKids (2011c), “Let it Shine,” track 23 on A Bunch of Kids Makin’ Noise!, vol. 1, hosted by DJ Advance. Available online: http://ynrichkids.com/track/let-it-shine (accessed November 17, 2018). Y.N.RichKids (2014), “The Business.” Available online: https://ynrichkids.com/track/thebusiness (accessed November 17, 2018).

372

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part VI

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Formal Education, Creativities, and Assessment

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

374

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

26

Taking a Note for a Walk: Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation Paul Kleiman

I am, after all, officially a professor of composition. No one’s quite had the nerve to hire a professor of improvisation yet! Fred Frith (quoted in Chan 2007)

Introduction

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Fautley (2010) observes that music education takes place against a constantly changing and complex background, and musical and pedagogical practices that may have been historically appropriate are now being questioned, while at the same time newer ideas and techniques are being applied in the classroom and studio. Savage articulates some of the tensions around musical assessment: Whether it is in teaching or research communities there always seems to be considerable unease about the how and why of musical assessment. Formative or summative, process or product, quantitative or qualitative, teacher or pupil based, the apparent opposites represent a picture of uncertainty. (Savage 2002: 38) In April 2014, I contributed one of the keynote presentations at the “Improvisation: Educational Perspectives” conference in Edinburgh. This chapter is based on that presentation. Standing at the lectern on the stage in front of about eighty music academics, practitioners, and students, hopefully I avoided conveying a picture of uncertainty, but I had to admit that I felt rather an interloper, as I am far more a drama and visual arts person than a musical one. Those familiar with the visual arts will know that the title of this chapter is adapted, somewhat shamelessly, from the artist Paul Klee’s famous line about drawing being about “taking a line for a walk.” In this chapter I am taking “for

375

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

a walk” some ideas not only about musical improvisation and creativity via a personal perspective, complexity theory, and an exploration of the origination-replication continuum but also wider issues about learning, teaching, and assessment in the area of popular music education.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A personal perspective I aim to play the piano most days, if I am near one. I work from home a great deal of the time, and I do a lot of writing. The work inevitably involves some complex problems—large and small—that need to be addressed. When I am stuck, simply fedup and frustrated, or just need a break, I’ll cross the hallway from my office to the room with the piano and play for ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. When I sit at the piano, I might choose to run through one or two of the classical pieces I’ve learned to play reasonably well over the years. Or I might choose a jazz or popular standard that I’ve picked up by ear, which involves a bit of improvisation in that sense of working relatively loosely within a recognized framework. I never play the same tune in exactly the same way: but, then, who does? Usually I just place my hands on or over the keys, and I wait to see what happens. I have no idea what is going to happen before it takes place. Something stirs. Something starts. A note or a chord is played. And off I go. Or off “it” goes, because I feel I’m not in conscious control of my fingers. I am, of course, but it doesn’t feel that way. David Sudnow in his now classic work Ways of the Hand (1978), which is a remarkable insider’s phenomenological account of learning to improvise jazz piano that was based mostly on his own introspection, describes having the most vivid impression of his hands making music by themselves. Sometimes, for me, it feels a bit awkward, as I travel down some musical cul-de-sac or find myself in a particular and sometimes toofamiliar groove. Other times it just flows, I’m “in the zone,” and I know, especially when it really flows, that it clears and refreshes not only my mind but also my spirit. In relation to “Flow” and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) influential work on that topic, we know that performances that combine Flow states with a degree of risk-taking might hold the key to achieving optimal levels of musical communication in improvisation. Being in the Flow or “groove” sometimes enables experienced improvisers to move beyond or extend their previous cognitive limits (Hsieh 2012). In Ways of the Hand, Sudnow illustrates in intense detail how it makes sense to describe the process as one in which the pianist’s hands are learning, or the pianist is hearing with their hands. He describes, when improvising, that knowing or sensing what notes are coming next relates to ways of moving around on familiar paths through the keyboard. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, in his foreword to the book, writes “there is finally no longer an I that plans, not even a mind that plans ahead, but a jazz hand that know at each moment how to reach for the music” (x). In the course of his analysis Sudnow uncovered many principles about learning; in particular what we might call 376

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

embodied learning. His analysis and observations resonate powerfully with the work and research around creativity in learning and teaching, and what might be referred to as learning or teaching at the “edge of chaos” (Kleiman 2011; Tosey 2002).

Learning at the edge of chaos There has been a growing interest, in recent years, in the application of complexity theory to learning and teaching in education (Cochran-Smith et al. 2014; Davis and Sumara 2006; Mason 2008; Morrison 2002; Tosey 2002). It is not the purpose here to delve into the esoteric and, inevitably, complex scientific and mathemical intricacies of the theory. Rather, as Mason (2014) indicates in regard to education, complexity is best used as a metaphor or lens through which to understand the nature of systemic continuity and change. The key attributes of complexity include:

● ● ● ● ● ●

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

●

small changes can have big impacts (the “butterfly effect”) similar conditions produce very dissimilar outcomes if it works once, no guarantee it will work again regularity and conformity inevitably metamorphose into irregularity and diversity effect is not a continuous straightforward function of cause learning occurs via interaction with complex environments outcomes are unpredictable and long-term predictions are impossible (Kleiman 2014).

Complexity theory is concerned with processes of change, evolution, and adaptation, often in the interests of survival. It signifies a complete break with the traditional linear, positivist, computational paradigm that has dominated educational discourses and practices for the past three hundred years. That paradigm, as Jonassen et al. (1997) describe, is one in which educational systems are understood as, essentially, closed systems that are the sum of their parts: learners, curriculum, technology, teachers, etc. The performance of the whole system can be regulated by controlling these parts, with the objective of achieving a state of equilibrium. Knowledge, in this paradigm, is perceived as an external, quantifiable object that can be transmitted to and acquired by learners, and in which the effectiveness of educational systems is a function of the effectiveness and efficiency of the transmission process (Jonassen et al. 1997). Figure 26.1 illustrates operating on the edge of chaos. Adapted from the seminal work of Ralph Stacey (1996) and, subsequently, Paul Tosey (2002), it explains a great deal about learning, teaching, and assessment, and what occurs in our various disciplines and art forms as we and our students traverse an often difficult and challenging pedagogic terrain in higher education.

377

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 26.1  Operating on the edge of chaos. Kleiman (2014) adapted from Tosey (2002).

At one end of the continuum there is certainty and agreement. As one moves further away from certainty and agreement one heads closer toward chaos, which represents a complete lack of certainty and agreement. Between lies a zone of complexity in which the factors and variables at play, and the connections between them, expand exponentially. Where there is total certainty and agreement everything is fixed, solid. This is a system in stasis, where there is no motion or progress. While a system in complete stasis is, essentially, a “dead” system, it is common to find systems, in education and elsewhere, that are certainly close to stasis. In these systems, attributes and traits such as order, predictability, standardization, conformity, reliability, and an aversion to risk, tend to dominate the institutional culture, discourses, and practices. The expectation of certainty can be observed, for example, in the construction of learning outcomes and the common “At the end of this module the student WILL be able to demonstrate a, b, c, d, e, f, g …” Within the structures and processes of higher education institutions there is often a very powerful, gravitational pull toward certainty and agreement. That pull is exerted by several factors including, for example, institutional governance processes and procedures, regulatory frameworks, and quality assurance processes.1 The power of that “gravitational pull” is compounded by individuals and groups developing and engaging 378

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

in what Trowler et al. (2003), referencing Huberman (1993), describe as “engrooved” practices.2 These practices, in contrast to the notion of the “groove” in ethnomusicology and popular music, consist of recurrent, usually unconsidered, sets of practices that are often closely associated with work or professional identity. Those participating in these practices act as “carriers” of “routinized ways of understanding, knowing how and desiring” (Reckwitz 2002: 249–250). A feature of these practices is that when the possibility of change arises and unless that change is strongly supported by, and embedded within, institutional and disciplinary discourses and cultures, it is difficult to unfreeze those practices. Alternatively, any change is merely temporary, and individuals sooner or later “snap back” to the familiar and fixed “engrooved” practices. It perhaps goes without saying, in regard to improvisation in music, that this negative notion of an inflexible and habitual “engrooved” practice has particular resonance. Sudnow’s Ways of the Hand, for example, is the story of how he, eventually, managed to escape his own deeply “engrooved” musical practices and ways of thinking. At the other end of the zone of complexity, where that zone approaches and stands on the threshold of chaos, one enters an area of activity described as “the edge of chaos.”3 It is the area of activity that holds the greatest fascination and risk, for both students and teachers, not only in regard to creative practice but also in regard to pedagogic practice. Operating at the edge of chaos involves activities in which excitements and passions mingle with tensions and anxieties. Energy and focus are high and aversion to risk is low. It is an area where the normal rules and “engrooved” practices no longer necessarily apply or work anymore. Even if they do, it may well be not in a way they are expected to. Arts practitioners and teachers, and others engaged in the creative practices of their disciplines, recognize that edge of chaos (Kleiman 2008a). They either embrace it with open arms or approach it with a sense of dread and foreboding; perhaps both, simultaneously. Robert Clark writing in The Guardian in the wake of the famous (or infamous) Leeds 13 art student scandal, identified some of those tensions in higher education:4 Art education is a seriously funny business. We demand that students conform to the formalities of the university and yet we secretly hope they will practise wild, if subtle rebellion. We require them to be versed in inherited theoretical vocabularies, but need them to energize us with some previously unseen thing … The very fact that so many students survive the contradictions is in itself wonderfully encouraging. (Clark 1998) The tensions that Clark is describing could apply equally to popular music improvisation in higher education: how it is perceived and where it is located along that continuum between stasis and chaos. The obvious location is right on the threshold of the edge of chaos. Certainly, in the case studies and narratives of “classically trained” musicians 379

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

moving into the realm of improvisation, there is a strong sense of the anxieties engendered by the move away from the certainties and agreements of their “comfort zones” (or, perhaps, their “engrooved” practices) toward and into a complex and seemingly chaotic unknown. But further consideration of where to locate improvisation leads to the conclusion that it can occur and be placed at almost any point along that continuum, except perhaps at the point of complete certainty and agreement where there is no room for improvisation. In regard to higher education, and focusing particularly on assessment, it would certainly suit those concerned with the regulatory and quality assurance frameworks, within which higher education pedagogy operates, if improvisation could be contained within certain agreed and clear parameters. As Fred Frith points out at the opening of this chapter, he was appointed as a “professor of composition” as no one had yet had the nerve to appoint a professor of improvisation.5

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The replication-origination continuum The four-stage replication-origination continuum of creativity in Figure 26.2 provides another lens on creativity and creative process, and also another way to regard what we do, or attempt to do, in education. One of the many challenges surrounding creativity (and, for that matter, musical improvisation) is the highly contested matter of definition. For the purposes of this particular chapter, creativity is bound up in notions of novelty and originality combined—to a greater or lesser extent—with notions of utility and value (Boden 2003; Gruber and Wallace 1999; Robinson 1999; Sternberg and Lubart 1999). While there is some dispute as to the extent to which creativity encompasses novelty and originality, Bruford’s (2015) thorough review of the literature demonstrates that there is far more disagreement as to the status and importance of value (i.e., product or outcome) and utility. Another key issue in discussing and defining creativity is whether the focus is upon those exceptional creative individuals who shift paradigms in knowledge and understanding, or whether it is upon all individuals and their potential for self-actualization. That enduring dichotomy, between “high-end” creativity and “everyday” creativity, still informs current conceptions and definitions. Burnard (2012) and Burnard and Haddon (2013) dismantle the traditional but enduring Romantic myth of the “lone creative genius,” and demonstrate convincingly that, in fact, there is a myriad of “musical creativities” that involve diverse and potent sets of social, collaborative, and pedagogical practices. As part of a research project into the conceptions of creativity in learning and teaching held by academics from a wide range of disciplines (Kleiman 2008a), participants (n=82) were asked the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with twelve different definitions of creativity, collected from established creativity researchers. What that research revealed was that the highest rated definitions in terms of agreement did not

380

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 26.2  The RFIO continuum of creativity (Kleiman 2008a, based on Fennel 1993).

include the requirement of value and/or utility. It highlighted the possibility, confirmed later in the research, that when considering creativity in the context of learning and teaching it is conceived far more as a process-oriented phenomenon than a productoriented phenomenon. The continuum consists of four elements: Replication: making or reproducing something, or engaging in an activity, that is an exact copy of an extant object or process. Formulation: working within the limitations and boundaries of a fixed or predetermined formula. It differs from replication in that there is some flexibility within the formula, and there are debates and arguments about what can be contained within the formula. Innovation: the bringing together and reformulation of existing materials, processes, and techniques to create new forms. This may involve working within established and recognized domains and fields, or to be working at and testing the boundaries of a particular domain or field. Origination: the creation of something entirely new. It often carries with it a “whiff of danger” and the genuine “shock of the new,” and it is often dismissed or delegitimized because it breaks just too many expectations and too many rules. There is an accepted perception that the “creative arts” embrace those disciplines that are focused on the “high end” of the creative continuum, i.e., on innovation and origination. At the same time higher education discourses, somewhat oddly, do not refer to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects as the “creative sciences,” although innovation and origination are, of course, integral to the discourses, practices, and cultures of those disciplines. It is also worth bearing in mind, regarding the creative arts, that there is a significant amount of work and study in these so-called “creative” subjects that is clearly replicative and formulaic. One does not attend a concert of classical music expecting the orchestra to start improvising freely. While the professional musicians in that orchestra will be highly skilled, and while some of those musicians may well be involved in other music activities that enable them to express their skills and creativity more freely, for the purposes of the concert they are expected to “follow the dots on the page” and the directions of the conductor. For centuries in the visual arts, replication was at the heart of art education, and to be a painter or sculptor one had first to spend many weeks, months, or even years carefully copying the works of the “masters.” It is, however, worth noting—regarding the RFIO continuum—the 381

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

drummer Bill Bruford’s comment, in his PhD thesis, on the extension and scope of creative music performance: Anecdotal and authorial evidence suggest that there is some agreement about the extension or scope of creative music performance—that Nicola Benedetti is more creative than the fiddler in the pub, that Nina Simone is more creative than Robbie Williams, that an improvising jazz group may be more creative than a tribute band—but some confusion as to why that might be. If creativity is seen as a prerequisite for the production of musical art, it follows that where art lies there lies creativity. (Bruford 2015: 26) There is an interesting parallel between the replication-origination continuum and Bruford’s functional/compositional continuum in which individual practitioners are theorized as being located along the “functional/compositional continuum” of control: At the functional extreme are those who typically play as directed by others with strictly governed license for interpretation; at the opposite extreme, practitioners determine and perform individual self-created parts. (43)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

It is easy to dismiss replication, but there are many instances, across all disciplines, where the need and ability to replicate existing knowledge and processes is essential, especially in areas such as medicine, and health and safety, where human life may be at stake. Replication and formulation are also central to success (and profits) in production and manufacturing. There is the commonly held idea and evidence for “the formula” for a hit song (Bennett 2014), and there are many examples, across the performing arts, of how what started out as original, relatively small-scale pieces of original work have been successfully reproduced.6

Considering assessment In regard to assessment and assessing work at different points along the creative continuum, it is logical to assume that the nature and form of assessment changes, or certainly ought to change, contingent on where on the continuum the work and its assessment are located. If what is being assessed is, essentially, replicative or formulaic knowledge, understanding, and skills, or the application/operation of a process that is replicative or formulaic, then assessment is likely to be relatively straightforward. In such cases a tick-box, competence-based, criterion-referenced assessment methodology would be appropriate. Though, as Race (2015) illustrates, competence itself isn’t as straightforward as it might first appear. For example, does a tick in the “competent” box 382

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

indicate that the student was simply competent on the day of the test, or does it mean their performance is consistently competent? The complications of assessing competence notwithstanding, in the case of the creative continuum and moving toward the edge of chaos, it is evident that the further one moves away from replication and formulation, and from certainty and agreement, the more complex, challenging, and exciting assessment becomes. That, inevitably, poses problems and sets genuine dilemmas for those responsible for guarding the pillars that support learning, teaching, and assessment in higher education: for example, academic standards, subject benchmarks, learning outcomes, and assessment criteria. Regarding the last two of those, anyone engaged in the teaching and/or assessment of improvisation will have a set of learning outcomes and assessment criteria that they utilize. Those outcomes and criteria may be tacit, having been acquired over years of experience, or they may be explicit and written down. Some academics and teachers may have had a hand in developing and writing those explicit learning outcomes and criteria as a requirement of their work. So those of us engaged in learning and teaching in higher education grapple with the complexities and tensions, and we identify the things we want to assess in relation to improvisation. Eventually we write them down and we end up with a list, in this case for music improvisation, that might look something like one or more of those listed in Table 26.1. The assessment criteria in Table 26.1 are all extant criteria for assessing music improvisation. They are, however, located in particular contexts: (1) a jazz ensemble (Gibbs 2011), (2) individual organ improvisation (University of Michigan 2017), and (3) “assessment criteria of mastering improvisation” (Ustinskovs and Ignatjeva 2013). There are clearly some similarities but also some obvious differences, particularly in relation to language. They beg the question as to what extent does the language employed in assessment criteria reflect the discourses and practices of a particular discipline, for example, music? To what extent do they reflect or represent the “academization” of that discipline? To what extent do students understand that language? Table 26.1  Three Examples of Criteria for Assessing Music Improvisation 1.

2.

3.

• Coherence • Instrumental fluency • Ensemble interaction • Invention • Expressiveness • Originality • Playing technique

• Thematic development • Musical form • Stylistic consistency • Rhythmic interest • Effective use of the instrument

• Content of improvisation and its revealing, sense of style • Dynamics • Time and agogics • Phrasing and form • Originality of the music material • Reproduction of rhythm • Use of the techniques of composition and improvisation • Use and development of the texture

Sources: Gibbs 2011; University of Michigan 2017; Ustinskovs and Ignatjeva 2013.

383

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The question of the language utilized in assessing music improvisation was highlighted in the introductory lecture by Wolfram Knauer (2004) at a conference on improvisation in music, which he titled “Noodlin’, Doodlin’ and Playin’ Around.” As those terms reflect a certain discourse and practice within the jazz domain they could be considered as terms of some value and utility in relation to developing learning outcomes and assessment criteria for improvisation. Quoting the percussionist Tom Nicholas, Knauer describes noodlin’ as the preparatory thinking, the playing with ideas and developments in the head of the improvising musician. Doodlin’ is the transmission of the noodlin’ onto the instrument, the physical test whether the thoughts can be executed. And finally playin’ around is the playful test whether what one invented in thought and then transferred to the instrument makes musical sense, fits together, holds interest and tension. It is entirely possible that noodlin’, doodlin’ and playin’ around could be made into workable assessment criteria, but that terminology—as it stands—would never get past a program validation panel. But that reflects a problem which I and others have been concerned about for a while. Too often, from a student’s perspective, learning outcomes and assessment criteria are written in a form of “edu-speak” that frequently requires translation into the discourses and practices of the domain and discipline. Regarding the criteria in Table 26.1, the appearance of “originality” in there is both obvious and interesting. It certainly places improvisation at one end of the replicationorigination continuum. Some, however, question whether improvisation can be “original” in the sense of utterly new. Duke Ellington, for example, doubted it: There is no such thing as unadulterated improvisation without any preparation or anticipation. It is my firm belief that there has never been anybody who has blown even two bars worth listening to who didn’t have some idea about what he was going to play, before he started. If you just ramble through the scales or play around the chords, that’s nothing more than musical exercises. Improvisation really consists of picking out a device here and connecting it with a device there, changing the rhythm here and pausing there; there has to be some thought preceding each phrase that is played, otherwise it is meaningless. So, it’s a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct. (Ellington 1962) Frith, writing from the perspective of a music educator as well as having a career that ranges across classical and rock music,7 notes that “musicians have always improvised. You recognize musically gifted children by the fact that they make things up” (10). The problem, in regard to teaching or enabling improvisation, is that Western music education is predicated on reading music and “doing as you are told.” 384

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

How can the practice of improvisation ever be compatible with “doing as you’re told”? Teaching, especially in an institution, is usually considered to be dependent on codification, and comparability. We need rules that can be identified, syllabi, tools for assessment so that declared goals can be reached and outcomes graded. But improvisation is not a genre with rules; it comes from deep inside you. (Frith 2010: 10)

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Following Ellington’s lead, a question that might be worth addressing is: “What do we mean by ‘original’ when we write the word in our assessment criteria?” Having clear, coherent, workable criteria, is only half the battle, however; the other half is about how we (teachers and students) interpret those criteria. The last set of criteria in Table 26.1 is from a research project into how 187 Latvian music teachers regarded and used recognized assessment criteria for improvisation (Ustinskovs and Ignatjeva 2013). The headline findings of an extensive and rigorous piece of both qualitative and quantative research were that over two-thirds of the music teachers not only disagreed significantly over the importance of the various criteria but also applied them very differently. Consequently, and in the language of statistics, inter-rater reliability, i.e., the extent to which different assessors agreed, was less than a third. Gibbs makes the following observation on the widespread phenomenon of course documentation becoming increasingly explicit, detailed, and highly structured, especially in relation to learning outcomes and assessment criteria: All of this is supposed to convey clear expectations. However, there is a growing realisation that, first, it is very difficult for anyone to understand what learning outcomes and criteria actually mean, or for two people to understand the same thing—including teachers and markers. (Gibbs 2014: 1) Scott (2011) adopts a far more critical view of learning outcomes. Not only do they remove power from students but, more importantly, they fail to recognize that learning is inherently relational at the individual level, and that what one individual learns from a learning event will be different from what another learns. This is because individuals relate to learning events differently, because of differing abilities, motivations, identities, and past experiences. Thus to some extent the whole notion of pre-defined learning outcomes become spurious. If this is true, then the best that learning outcomes can hope for is that they are loose notions of what it is intended a student might learn. (Scott 2011: 4) 385

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Other evidence-based research supports both the Latvian findings and Gibbs’s observation. Hung and Hargreaves (2002), for example, in a study on the assessment of piano improvisation undertaken in an English university, were surprised at the lower level of inter-rater reliability than might have been expected from more stylistically constrained tasks. They hypothesized that the differences between the personal and musical backgrounds of the judges may have been an additional factor in their result. The later Latvian research confirmed that hypothesis. Hung and Hargreaves go on to make the point that if effective assessment and high inter-rater reliability are required, then they are more likely to be achieved if the stylistic boundaries are carefully circumscribed. If, however, the aim is to study creative improvisation without any such constraints this may not be an appropriate approach. Hung and Hargreaves confirm, in regard to the creativity continuum, that if the desired outcome is low assessment complexity and high certainty and agreement then the pedagogic solution is to focus on the replicative and formulaic end of the continuum. But, as Driessen et al. (2003: 220) point out, “the use of stricter assessment criteria or more structured and prescribed content would improve inter-rater reliability, but would obliterate the essence of assessment in terms of flexibility, personal orientation and authenticity.”

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Assessing creativity/creative assessment So, what forms of assessment work for creative practices, particularly at the innovation and origination end of the creative continuum? Controversially, what used to be common practice in pre-learning outcome and criterion-referencing days actually works. Amabile’s original work (1982) on the consensual assessment technique (CAT) and, more recently, that of others (e.g., Baer and McKool 2009; Jeffries 2015; Kaufman et al. 2008), has demonstrated that the best, though by no means perfect, measure of the creativity of a work of art, a design, a theory, a research proposal, or any other artifact, is the combined assessment of experts in that field. It is important to note that the CAT differs significantly from all other common measures of creativity, for example, divergent-thinking tests, because it is not based on any particular theory of creativity “which means that its validity (which has been well established empirically) is not dependent upon the validity of any particular theory of creativity” (Baer and McKool 2009: 65). The CAT is based upon on an operational definition of creativity in which “a product or response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated” (Amabile 1982: 1001). As an exemplar of the CAT, Baer and McKool (2009: 66) note that Nobel Prize committees do not have a set of rubrics, complete checklists, explicit criteria, or score tests. Instead they ask a group of

386

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

experts. An important feature of the CAT is the evidence that while any group of experts may well have very different approaches to and even disagreements about the domain of work, there is normally a relatively high degree of inter-rater reliability. If one accepts that the most valid assessment of the creativity of an idea or creation in any field is the collective judgment of recognized experts in that field, one also has to acknowledge that experts in different times and places may come to different conclusions. One must pity, therefore, the unfortunate artists and scientists whose genius is only recognized when it is too late for them to enjoy their posthumous fame. The fact remains, however, that at any given point in time the best judgment one can make of the creativity of anyone’s ideas, poems, theories, artworks, compositions, or improvisations is the overall judgment of experts in their field. Despite the evidence that the CAT works in the context of assessing creative practices and outcomes, it is completely at odds with the current ethos, principles, and precepts of assessment in higher education. We cannot utilize what we know works for several reasons. The resources required, human and/or financial, are significant, and for any cohort of students there may be an insufficient number of subject experts to ensure validity. The CAT relies on comparisons of levels of creativity within a particular group, therefore it is not possible to create any kind of standardized scoring using CAT ratings that might allow comparisons to be made across settings. The evidence may well be convincing, but the assessment systems and frameworks that have been developed and implemented over so many years, despite their undoubted flaws and occasional absurdities, work well enough for students, their teachers and assessors, and their institutions. Students (and their parents/guardians) are highly unlikely to accept the CAT, and a CAT-based assessment scheme would never pass current quality assurancedriven validation requirements.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Improvising assessment The regulatory environment that envelops higher education in the UK (though it is a phenomenon that is not unique to the UK, see Black et al. 2015) is not a propitious one for innovation and originality in regard to assessment, and one of the common refrains from colleagues who are keen but unable to introduce innovative forms of assessment is that “the regulations will not allow it” or “that will never get past the validation panel.” There are, however, a growing number of examples of what, in the context of this book, might be referred to as “improvised assessment” that do get through validation and review protocols, which are assumed to be antithetical to creative learning and teaching and the assessment of creative practices. It is improvisation not in the sense of making it up on the spot but in Duke Ellington’s sense of thoughtful creation, combined—it must be said—with the courage of one’s convictions, the evidence to back up those convictions, and some political as well as pedagogical acumen.

387

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

These innovative approaches are often prompted by one or more of a number of drivers and pressures within higher education. Currently these include instrumental drivers, such as student satisfaction that is closely linked with the notion of the studentas-customer, and also progressive pedagogical drivers such as student-as-partners (Healey, Flint, and Harrington 2014) and student-as-producer (Neary 2013). Some of these progressive drivers regarding music education are explored in Randall Allsup’s Remixing the Classroom in which he also articulates some of notions mentioned earlier in regard to complexity and the edge of chaos: I want to consider a way of teaching in which outcomes are as unpredictable as they are (currently) certain. I want to be more open in helping students design experiences that fund their needs and wishes ….I share the idea that teachers are at their best when they are on the edge between knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning. (Allsup 2016: ix; emphasis in the original) Regarding students as genuine partners in assessment leads inexorably to involving them—to some or even a great extent—as agents in their own assessment rather than objects of assessment. Practices such as peer assessment and self-assessment are increasingly utilized, though they need careful planning and implementation (Hunter and Russ 1996), and the practice of negotiated assessment (Kleiman 2008b) has been introduced in some programs and institutions.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion This chapter opened with a personal perspective, and it ends with one. What follows is just one example of what can be achieved in the face of apparent institutional inflexibility, engrooved practices, and in the context of that burdensome regulatory framework. In 2005 a relatively small but prestigious university in the UK received a large amount of funding to set up a center for creative and performing arts. Part of the center’s work was to develop a master’s program in interdisciplinary arts. The director of the center, who was far more a practitioner than an academic, had a very clear vision for the center and some radical, creative ideas about learning, teaching, and assessment. My role was to act as one of the external advisors to the project, and I was aware that the university in question was very proud of its reputation and academic standing, and it zealously guarded its status and standards. Amongst the advisory group, including the director, there were intense discussions about the form and content of the curriculum and about how to develop and implement a truly radical approach to assessment. There were also heated debates about language and things such as module titles, as there was a strong desire to move away from what was sometimes referred to as “edu-speak” and to employ a form of language that was 388

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

more commensurate with the discourses, practices, and cultures of the creative and performing arts disciplines. I was concerned that, while I was in total agreement with the director’s vision for the program, it would not get approval via the validation process as it certainly challenged the existing discourses, practices, and culture of the institution. Eventually, some months later, the director called me to say that the program had been validated and was going ahead. After congratulating her I asked her what the first module was called. She said that, despite the excellent and informed advice she had received from myself and others, she had stuck to her vision and her “creative guns,” and the first module was called “Adventures in Interdisciplinary Arts.” I then enquired what the second module was called. She answered, “Further Adventures in Interdisciplinary Arts, of course!” I said, “You managed to get that through that validation panel?” “Yes,” she said, “all those serious academics around the table loved it.” The program was indeed structured as a series of creative adventures. As it was a postgraduate program, the students were mainly part-time mature students, most of whom were working and/or had care responsibilities. The group would gather late on a Friday afternoon and would embark on a full and intense weekend’s “adventure,” working with artists, choreographers, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, poets, writers, etc. to produce a creative outcome. After five years that creativity extended to the form and format of the official and highly regarded report to the funding bodies, which was written and presented as a graphic novel (Sanders 2010). In that report, the explanation of why the word “adventures” was chosen stands as a mission statement for all who believe not only that creativity should be at the heart of learning and teaching, but that we should also be able to improvise … with very serious purpose.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

We called our projects “Adventures.” This was a deliberate move, and highly resonant of Barnett’s urging to educators “hang on to a language of delight, wonder, care, excitement, fun, engagement, and love—the language in which the students is caught and entranced.” (Sanders 2010: 6)

Notes 1 All higher education providers (HEPs) in the UK are subject to, and accountable to, an increasing and increasingly complex number of regulatory bodies and frameworks, for example, the Office for Students (OfC), the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ), the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). For details of that regulatory complexity and international comparisons see Julia Black et al. (2015). 2 It is important to distinguish Trowler and Huberman’s negative use of the term “engrooved,” from the common positive usage and understanding of the term “groove” or “in the groove”

389

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

in ethnomusicology and popular music. Trowler and Huberman’s use of the term is linked directly to the colloquial notion of being “stuck in the groove,” i.e., pursuing a rigid and fixed course of action. 3 The term “edge of chaos” is used to denote a transition space between order and disorder that is hypothesized to exist within a wide variety of systems. It was first coined by the mathematician Doyne Farmer, but is now used across a number of disciplines and domains. 4 A group of second-year Leeds University art students caused a media uproar when their collective final year project “Going Places,” for which they had raised funds from the student union and private sponsors, apparently involved the whole group having a holiday in Spain. They then mounted an exhibition celebrating the holiday. In fact it was all an elaborate art hoax. For the story and archive of the whole controversy, see Crossley n.d. 5 It is worth noting that this is now no longer the case. Raymond MacDonald of the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh is a professor of music psychology and improvisation. 6 In popular music, there are various examples of the “recorded-in-bedroom-to-worldwide-hit” phenomenon, for example, White Town’s “Your Woman” (1997) recorded by Jyoti Mishra in his bedroom using an old multitrack Tascam and an Atari computer. At the time of writing, the fortunes of The Play That Goes Wrong provide a classic case of origination-to-replication. Originally a play devised by Mischief Theatre (formed in 2008 in the UK by three out-of-work drama graduates), it first played to tiny audiences in a room above a pub in London in 2012. Its reputation grew, first by word-of-mouth and then by rave reviews, and it gradually moved to larger theaters and on tour. By 2016 the play had already been licensed to be performed in twenty-nine countries and had been seen by over a quarter of a million people (Brown 2016). In 2017 it opened on Broadway in the United States where the success of the musical Hamilton has followed a similar trajectory: from a workshop production at the Vassar Reading Festival to Broadway, to several touring productions, to opening in London’s West End in late 2017.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

7 It is worth noting, when searching the literature on improvisation in popular music, that there appears to be a relative dearth of material when compared to the wealth of resources on improvisation in jazz and also in classical/contemporary music.

References Allsup, Randall E. (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Amabile, Teresa (1982), “Social Psychology of Creativity: A Consensual Agreement Technique,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43 (5): 997–1013. Baer, John and Sharon S. McKool (2009), “Assessing Creativity Using the Consensual Agreement Technique,” in Christopher Schreiner (ed.), Handbook of Research on Assessment Technologies, Methods, and Applications in Higher Education, 65–77, London: Information Science Reference. Bennett, Joe (2014), “Our Pop Song Formula: Revealed on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.” The Conversation, June 26, 2014. Available online: http://theconversation.com/our-pop-songformula-revealed-on-glastonburys-pyramid-stage-28431 (accessed September 29, 2017).

390

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

Black, Julia, Andrew M. Boggs, Heather Fry, Nick Hillman, Stephen Jackson, King Roger, Lodge Martin, and Simeon Underwood (2015), The Regulation of Higher Education, London: Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR). Boden, Margaret (2003), The Creative Mind, second edition. London: Routledge. Brown, Mark (2016), “The Play That Goes Wrong to Transfer to Broadway,” The Guardian, November 14, 2003. www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/14/the-play-that-goes-wrong-totransfer-to-broadway-jj-abrams (accessed ). Bruford, William (2015), “Making it Work: Creative Music Performance and the Western Kit Drummer,” PhD thesis, University of Surrey, Guildford. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/810288/1/ Bruford%20Thesis.%20Version%20of%20Record.pdf (accessed July 4, 2017). Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burnard, Pamela and Elizabeth Haddon (2013), Activating Diverse Musical Creativities: Teaching and Learning in Higher Music Education, London: Bloomsbury. Chan, Charity (2007), “An Interview with Fred Frith: The Teaching of Contemporary Improvisation,” Critical Studies in Improvisation, 3 (2). Available online: www. criticalimprov.com/article/view/293/617 (accessed December 9, 2016). Clark, Robert (1998), “Art Education: A Seriously Funny Business,” The Guardian, July 7, 1998: 40. Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, Fiona Ell, Larry Ludlow, Lexie Grudnoff, and Graeme Aitken (2014), “The Challenge and Promise of Complexity Theory for Teacher Education Research,” Teachers College Record, 116 (5): 1–38. Crossley, John (n.d.), “Leeds 13.” Available online: http://johncrossley.co.uk/John_Crossley/ Leeds_13.html (accessed November 18, 2018). Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhail (1990), Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York: Harper & Row. Davis, Brent and Dennis Sumara (2006), Complexity and Education: Inquiry into Learning, Teaching and Research, New York: Routledge. Driessen, Erik W., Jan van Tartwijk, Jan D. Vermunt, and Cees P. M. van der Vleuten (2003), “Use of Portfolios in Early Undergraduate Medical Training,” Medical Education, 39 (2): 214–220. Ellington, Duke (1962), “Where is Jazz Going?,” Music Journal, 20 (3). Fautley, Martin (2010), Assessment in Music Education, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fennel, Edward (1993), “Categorising Creativity,” Competence and Assessment, 23 (October): 7. Frith, Fred (2010), “Teaching Improvisation. Not Teaching Improvisation: What Does an Improvisation Teacher Do?,” Dissonance: Swiss Music Journal for Research and Creation, 111: 10–17. Gibbs, Graham (2014), “53 Powerful Ideas All Teachers Should Know About. Idea No. 2, April 2014,” The Seda Blog (blog), April 24, 2014. Available online: https://thesedablog. wordpress.com/2014/04/24/53ideas-2-students-respond-to-clear-and-high-expectations/ (accessed September 28, 2017). Gibbs, Louise (2011), “How Creative is Musical Improvisation?,” paper presented at Performance Studies Network International Conference, University of Cambridge, July 14–17, 2011.

391

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Gruber, Howard E. and Doris B. Wallace (1999), “The Case Study Method and Evolving Systems Approach for Understanding Unique Creative People at Work,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 93–115, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Healey, Mick, Abbi Flint and Kathy Harrington (2014), Engagement through Partnership: Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, York: Higher Education Academy. Hsieh, Su-Ching (2012), “Cognition and Musical Improvisation in Individual and Group Contexts,” in Oscar Odena (ed.), Musical Creativity: Insights from Music Education Research, 149–164, Farnham: Ashgate. Huberman, Michael (1993), The Lives of Teachers, London: Cassell. Hung, Hsiu-Chin and David J. Hargreaves (2002), “The Assessment of Piano Improvisation,” paper presented at the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) 10th Anniversary Conference, Liege, July 23–28, 2018. Hunter, Desmond and Michael Russ (1996), “Peer Assessment in Performance Studies,” British Journal of Music Education, 13 (March): 67–78. Jeffries, Karl K. (2015), “A CAT with Caveats: Is the Consensual Assessment Technique a Reliable Measure of Graphic Design Creativity?,” International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 5(1–2): 16–28. Jonassen, David H., Rebecca Jo Hennon, Anita Ondrusek, Marina Samouilova, Karen L. Spaulding, Hsiu-Ping Yueh, Tiancheng Li, Vida Nouri, Mark DiRocco, and David Birdwell (1997), “Certainty, Determinism, and Predictability in Theories of Instructional: Lessons from Science,” Educational Technology, 37 (1): 27–34. Kaufman, James C., John Baer, Jason C. Cole, and Janel. D. Sexton (2008), “A Comparison of Expert and Nonexpert Raters Using the Consensual Assessment Technique,” Creativity Research Journal 20 (2): 171–178. Kleiman, Paul (2008a), “Towards Transformation: Conceptions of Creativity in Higher Education,” Innovation in Education and Teaching International, 45 (3): 209–217. Kleiman, Paul (2008b), Negotiating Assessment: an Approach to Assessing Practical Work, Lancaster: PALATINE. Kleiman, Paul (2011), “Learning at the Edge of Chaos,” AISHE-J: The All Ireland Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 3 (2): 62.1–62.9. Kleiman, Paul (2014), “An Orderly Disorder: Creativity and the Chaotic Curriculum,” Keynote Address: Annual Learning and Teaching Conference, Middlesex University, July 14, 2014. http://mdxaltc14.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/keynote-ii-orderly-disorder-creativity.html (accessed January 11, 2018). Knauer, Wolfram (2004), “Noodlin’, Doodlin’ and Playin’ Around,” in Improvisation in Music: Documentation of the Conference October 2004, 22–24, Bonn: European Music Council. Mason, Mark, ed. (2008), Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mason, Mark (2014), Complexity Theory in Education Governance: Initiating and Sustaining Systemic Change, Oslo: OECD. Morrison, Keith (2002), School Leadership and Complexity Theory, New York: Routledge. Neary, Mike (2013), “Student as Producer: Radicalising the Mainstream in Higher Education,” in Elisabeth Dunn and Derfel Owen (eds.), The Student Engagement Handbook: Practice in Higher Education, 587–602, Bingley: Emerald Books.

392

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Improvising Assessment/Assessing Improvisation

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Race, Phil (2015), The Lecturer’s Toolkit; A Practical Guide to Assessment, Learning and Teaching, fourth edition, London: Routledge. Reckwitz, Andreas (2002), “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (2); 243–263. Robinson, Ken (1999), All our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education, London: National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. Sanders, Patrick (2010), Journey to the Centre of Excellence, Centre for Excellence in the Creative & Performing Arts. Available online: www.qub.ac.uk/cecpa/pdf/graphic_novel.pdf (accessed December 9, 2016). Savage, Jonathan (2002), “New Models for Creative Practice with Music Technologies,” in Linda Bance, Diana Harris, and Anice Paterson (eds.), How Are You Doing? Learning and Assessment in Music, 38–44, Matlock: National Association of Music Educators (NAME). Scott, Ian (2011), “The Learning Outcome in Higher Education: Time to Think Again?,” Worcester Journal of Learning and Teaching, (5). Stacey, Ralph D. (1996), Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics, London: Pitman. Sternberg, Robert J. and Todd Lubart (1999), “The Concept of Creativity: Prospects and Paradigms,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 3–15, New York: Cambridge University Press. Sudnow, David (1978), Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct, London: Routledge. Tosey, Paul (2002), “Teaching on the Edge of Chaos: Complexity Theory, Learning Systems and Enhancement Working Paper,” Surrey Research Insight. Available online: http://epubs. surrey.ac.uk/id/eprint/1195 (accessed October 9, 2016). Trowler, Paul, Murray Saunders, and Peter Knight (2003), Changing Thinking, Changing Practice, York: Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN). University of Michigan (2017), Organ Improvisation Competition. Available online: http://music.umich.edu/departments/organ/documents/cover-guidelines-2017.pdf (accessed July 6, 2017). Ustinskovs, Jevgenijs and Svetlana Ignatjeva (2013), “Latvian Music Teachers’ Survey on the Assessment Criteria of Mastering Improvisation,” Procedia—Social and Behavioural Sciences, 106: 1727–1741.

393

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

394

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

27

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Renée Stefanie

This chapter discusses the thought processes behind learning, teaching, and assessment (LTA) of creativity as a set of skills and processes. I utilize the work I have done in designing and delivering a module (course) that specifically tackles creativity as a practicable skill as the framework for this chapter. The contents of the module stem from research instigated by frustrations I experienced as a lecturer in performancebased music studies. The research, tools, and techniques with which I have explored and experimented have permeated my teaching and personal development across my interests and specialisms as a lecturer on a popular music program, voice coach, and performer in popular music idioms. I make use of them in teaching, learning, reflecting, creating, and communicating. Although I sought out and developed these ideas for the benefit of LTA, they have increased my awareness of my own processes in a way that has benefited speed and efficiency when solving problems. They have provided me with a framework for teaching that encourages me to consistently explore a range of options in how I present and interact with theoretical and practical concepts and ideas. Most rewardingly, they have given me the courage to take greater risks in my teaching and to explore, question, and experience frustration, unapologetically, as a catalyst for development.

Encouraging creativity in an assessment driven culture Figure 27.1 provides a visual summary of key items explored in personal reflection and research that contributed to the design of a module called “Creative Practice.” The aim of the module is to develop strategies and approaches for creative problem-solving, with improved awareness of the processes that contribute to individual creative activity. It is delivered over twelve weeks as a compulsory (core) module, in the third (penultimate) year of undergraduate study, for students enrolled on the BA popular music program at Edinburgh Napier University (ENU), Scotland. The program is delivered over four 395

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

years and incorporates three core threads of study. A thread in performance works with instrumentalists, vocalists, and composers in the development of skills that are applied in performance, arranging, and composition. A thread in technologies explores music software applications, and students are given the option to study recording studio theory and practice. A final thread is defined as “contextual studies,” which incorporates research and writing skills, music business, and musical cultures. Creative Practice is situated within this third thread. It explores cognitive skills and techniques with assessment design that invites students to apply these skills within a framework of their specialist interests, drawing from every thread of study they have undertaken with a view to enhancing autonomy. Over the course of the module, students are challenged to complete various small tasks (including a project of their own design) and they can adapt the parameters of these tasks to their individual musical interests as composers, performers, producers, promoters, writers, or educators. Each task is designed as a prompt for students to challenge and develop their critical and creative thinking skills. Throughout the module, we explore methods for merging or transferring knowledge and skills as a means to enhance creative ideas and outputs. I began exploring LTA to encourage and value creative risk in 2012, shortly after I began working for ENU. In my first two years of teaching on the popular music program I was responsible for working only with voice students. Many of these students were technically proficient and knowledgeable, but reticent to take musical risks such as improvising, or reinterpreting their performance repertoire. Queries from many undergraduate students tended to relate to specifics of assessment that highlighted an approach of replicating actions, techniques, or ideas. In discussion with the full cohort of students1 during a Creative Practice class in 2013/14, a student specializing in composition made a comment that stands out as exemplary of these strategic and extrinsically motivated approaches: “I ask myself, what does [examiner’s name omitted] like, and then I try to write that.” For many of my students, it was apparent that, when LTA was designed to prompt increased autonomy and creativity, they endeavored instead to generate outputs aimed at a specific demographic of one: their examiner. When exploring rubrics and papers shared by the Higher Education Academy (HEA), I found that risk-taking was frequently referred to as the gateway to creative innovation.2 This consensus is summarized in Jackson’s report for the HEA (2005) in which he notes that “Taking risks by moving into the unknown is part and parcel of trying to be creative” (2). Allowing for risk, and the possibility of failure when risks are taken, presented me with problems, working in what Kleiman (2005) describes as a “closed system” (14). I recognized the need for original contribution in order to advance individually and collectively but felt restrained by the need to set transparent criteria when assessing products; criteria that implied algorithmic, step-by-step, paths to solving a problem. As Jackson (2008) observes, creative thinking tends to be taken for granted, “subsumed within analytic ways of thinking that dominate the academic intellectual territory” (6). Burnard (2012) reframes the issue and points out that “assessment practices need to differentiate multiple creativities in music and acknowledge students’ 396

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Figure 27.1  Initial thought processes when considering creativity in an assessment driven culture.

397

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

own self-assessments, and provide a range of assessment practices that fit different contexts and purposes, whilst maintaining internal consistency and coherence” (259). Biggs and Tang (2007) state, “The climate must be such that students are encouraged to take risks, to dare to depart from the established way of doing things” (229). These authors provide a revision of the problem, suggesting it is within educators’ power to create a climate in which students can be empowered to take risks and learn from their failures as well as their successes. When considering LTA for the promotion of creative risk, I created a blueprint for the study of voice that aligned to Kleiman’s (2005: 13) adaptation of Fennell’s (quoted in Kleiman 2005: 13) lexicon of creativity (see Figure 27.2).

Figure 27.2  Considering progression of musical skill in correlation with Fennell’s Lexicon of Creativity. © Renée Stefanie. 398

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Following Kleiman’s (2005) example, I link this lexicon to LTA activity undertaken by undergraduate students. “Replication,” which for the purposes of LTA design I link to first year of university undergraduate study (level 7),3 is a useful basis for learning technique, such as manipulation of the vocal apparatus to vary tone and intonation. This aligns to Green’s (2002) description of copying as “the overriding learning practice for the beginner popular musician” (60). She explores the practicalities of replication and notes that “some of the musicians I interviewed thought that their creativity and technical understanding had also been improved through listening-and-copying practices” (73). “Replication” and “formulation,” in relation to developing creative skills, are relatively straightforward when aligning with learning outcomes4 and assessment criteria. Kleiman (2005: 15) notes that “Replication, for example, can be assessed via a teachit, test it, tick it methodology.” Amabile (1996) suggests that extrinsic motivation can be complementary to development when parameters are straightforward and activity is defined by an “external constraint,” such as an instruction to “give unusual responses” (161), which aligns with “formulation.” At level 9, which for the purposes of LTA design I link to the notion of innovation, extrinsic motivation in my students becomes problematic. Assessment in the third and fourth year of studies at my institution contribute to the average grade that determines an honors degree classification,5 which is a focus for many students and an extrinsic motivator. At level 9 we anticipate increased use of “higher order” thinking skills such as “analyzing,” “evaluating,” and “creating” (Churches 2008: 1). This suggests an increase in heuristic activity, shown to be hindered by extrinsic motivation (Amabile 1996: 161). Previous learning and successes can compound this problem. Weisberg (1999) reminds us, “individuals can easily be induced to perform inefficiently in problem solving situations, as a result of success with one specific solution” (229). In my experience, students who ask “What do I have to do to get the grades?” will favor tried and tested approaches. Often, in voice lessons, I observe students achieve something they have been striving for and notice a change occur. Instead of focusing on creating what they want, they try to recreate what they have just achieved. Mind-set shifts from exploration as a means to find a solution to a problem, to an effort to replicate the exact set of circumstances that led to their recent success. This has an impact on physicality, which has a negative effect on the student’s technical facility. Observing the impact of mind-set on physicality provides me with analogous insight into what Csikszentmihalyi (1996) describes as obstacles to “free deployment of mental energy” (345). I perceive equivalence in how the musculature of my singing students tenses, affecting physical flexibility needed to achieve their goal, and a mental tension (when extrinsically motivated) that inhibits flexibility of cognition. When designing assessment for modules delivered at ENU we are required to demonstrate transparency. It is expected that a student reviewing criteria for an assessment should be able to identify how marks are achieved and how, once they have received their feedback, marks have been lost. Reflection has led me to the conclusion 399

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

that assessment criteria will therefore be at the heart of our students’ motivation. I have endeavored, therefore, to use assessment as motivation for creative activity, risk, and challenging a “fixed” mind-set. When referring to mind-set, I incorporate rationale, intent, context, and interpretation as set out in my reimagining of Fennell’s lexicon (Figure 27.2) with a view to enhancing “growth mindest” (Dweck 2007). I identified two key questions as focal points for development; these are addressed separately in this chapter: 1 How can I use transparency in assessment criteria, and extrinsic “get the grades” motivation, to promote risk and exploration of the creative process? 2 Is it possible to formulate “straightforward” parameters for assessment that will challenge mind-set and stimulate creative development?

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Extrinsic motivation to promote exploration of creative process In theory, the problem described above had a simple solution; focus assessment design on process rather than product. My idea was to have students complete a creative project, such as a composition, and submit a patchwork text6 documenting their experimentation with techniques, delivered in classes over the course of the module, used to develop their creative output. By focusing on process students were free to take risks and potentially fail to achieve their end goal without risking a bad grade. The grade would be awarded for their ability to demonstrate (1) creative exploration, and (2) application of critical thinking and reflection when evaluating their approach and the resulting output. This initial plan required refinement in order to ensure that students participated in a manner that would best promote their individual learning and development. Many students were selective in trying techniques covered in classes, favoring items that could be easily demonstrated by following a straightforward template (such as SCAMPER, explored below) and avoiding techniques intended to motivate divergent thinking (such as Gardner’s “Multiple Intelligences,” explored below). Anecdotally, it seemed evident that there was a “cultural shift” in this module compared to the prior experiences and expectations of the students, with regard to other modules. In the first year that the module was delivered, one student wrote to me exclaiming their frustration that there were “no right answers” presented. They struggled with the freedom to experiment with a variety of approaches when completing creative outputs, requesting a step-by-step set of instructions to successful completion of a product, where success is determined by good grades. This highlighted, again, the challenges faced when trying to encourage heuristic approaches from students concerned with grades and degree classifications. I concluded that a selection of techniques must be assessed in some way in order to (1) provide a facsimile of an algorithmic pathway and ease the anxiety of students who

400

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

were unaccustomed to heuristic LTA, and (2) motivate students to try them. The revised LTA for Creative Practice is split into two components. The second will be covered later in this chapter. In the first component of the LTA approach for this module students are asked to devise a small project and submit a “learning contract.” The assessment brief asks them to set out parameters for a project, and methodology for approach, that aligns to a set of learning outcomes that have been devised by the student for the benefit of their individual creative development. Students are encouraged to actively seek to challenge themselves in their approach to completing their projects by taking a creative risk and/or trying techniques/methods/approaches that they have never tried before. The aim is to give students ownership of their project and the option to choose something that is directly relevant to their creative interests. The artifacts created for the project, such as compositions, mixes, or performances, are not assessed. Instead students are asked to submit a final product accompanied by an evaluation. The assessment brief requests that they provide: 1 A clear and objective evaluation of how well you have met your chosen learning outcome(s), including provision of evidence to back up your evaluation (taken from data collected or from reference to a part of your project). 2 Constructive feedback with suggestions for further development in relation to your chosen learning outcome(s) highlighting specific action or activity that can be taken.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Students are largely in charge of their own experience when undertaking this project. The assessment criteria are written to provoke and reward creative exploration and critical thinking, and students are coaxed to discover independently what is highlighted in this student’s reflection: It was a good way for me to discipline myself in learning new skills on my own and to complete my own research without being told by someone else what to do and what and where to look. This was particularly enjoyable and made me realize … I learn better if I find out the information myself. (Student reflection 2017)

Creativity as definable skills When considering creativity as a learnable skill I sought to identify key attributes associated with creative activity. Figure 27.3 highlights specific skills and key sources that provoked my thinking, underpinning the framework for teaching Creative Practice. 401

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

402

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 27.3  Consideration of creativity as a set of learnable skills.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Csikszentmihalyi’s (1999) observation that in order to engage in creative activity a “person must first of all be dissatisfied with the status quo” (332) represented (and reinforced) a thematic recurrence in texts I consulted. Feist (1999) refers to this trait as “norm doubting” (278) and I used the notion as the central point in the design of a linear representation of the creative process; designed for devising a step-by-step approach to LTA of creative practices. This model, shown in Figure 27.4, was built on a framework of the creative process outlined by Lehman, Sloboda, and Woody (2007: 133), and draws especially on the work of Weisberg (1993) and Csikszentmihalyi (1996) in considering activity that can be related to, and potentially stimulate, each stage of the process. As a means to provoke deep levels of questioning I ask my students to experiment with the Socratic Method.7 Cowan (2006) concludes “the dialogue format strongly encourages us to reflect-in-action on the soundness of our thinking” (104). His recounting of his experiences encouraged me to utilize the method as a means for challenging the robustness of individual thinking. I adopted a framework for the questioning technique presented by changingminds.org and present it as shown in Figure 27.5. I encourage students to reintroduce the initial question that started the dialogue when they notice a shift in thinking. I hope that in doing so they will be made aware of an altered, or broadened, perspective and an increased sense of possibility. The results of the dialogue can vary depending on the issue each student chooses to tackle and the depth to which they are willing to explore. At its best, the dialogue broadens perspectives on personal practice, as suggested in the following excerpts from student reflections: On the whole it has shown to me that actually often I don’t consider the right questions. In this case, the right questions were on a much more surface level, rather than the questions I normally ask myself, which take surface information forgranted … I find myself leaning back on the knowledge I take for granted so often. (Student reflection 2016) The Socratic dialogue encouraged me to examine my beliefs surrounding myself and my abilities and how these affect my rules for living. It not only encouraged me to do this but it gave me an idea of how I might refute these beliefs and how I can challenge these in more practical terms. (Student reflection 2017) The idea of returning to the same question as I started with was new to me and a lot more effective than I initially thought it would be. It forced me to reframe my answer with the addition of new knowledge I dug up on the way back to it. (Student reflection 2017)

403

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

404

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 27.4  A linear model of the creative process defining key activities around which to devise LTA. © Renée Stefanie.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Figure 27.5  A framework for the Socratic Method.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Exploration of perspective: Filtering thought process Weisberg (1993) provides compelling arguments to support the idea that creative thinking is an ordinary rather than an extraordinary attribute. He suggests that problemsolving stems from knowledge within specialisms and creativity from the capacity to draw from one domain in solving problems in another (262–263). Weisberg’s findings prompted me to seek out techniques for provoking thinking as to how skills and knowledge might be merged or transferred. Byron (2006) provided key ideas including an introduction to SCAMPER (17), a mnemonic designed to prompt creative thinking originated by Alex Osborne and further developed by Bob Eberle (1972). Byron (2006: 17) provides a set of questions prefixed with “what if …” for each letter in the mnemonic. For the benefit of popular music students I created a revised set of questions as shown in Figure 27.6. Students are asked to create three variations on a portion of work, for example, on a drum groove, the verse of a lyric, or the mix for the chorus of a song. Figure 27.7 shows a recreation of a mind map submitted by a student and is followed with an excerpt of their reflection. They used SCAMPER to prompt ideas when creating three variations on a mix:

405

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

406

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Figure 27.6  SCAMPER prompts, adapted from Byron (2006) and Passuello (2008).

407

Figure 27.7  Recreation of a student SCAMPER mind map from 2015—experimenting with mixing techniques.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

I have been faced with a similar task where I just had to create a rock mix and a pop/radio mix, but I felt that after I completed that task I didn’t give each mix its own characteristics; instead I played it safe and only really changed instrumental volumes. The scamper method forces new questions that enhance creative output and helped me want to use audio more freely and creatively to showcase that I have a diverse skill set and an open mind with regards to production techniques. (Student reflection 2015) I have realized that I need to develop a greater fortitude in forcing myself not to always seek the easiest path of completing a task … I found that taking the time to experiment with an idea and purposefully try out different combinations was really useful in forming my ideas about what the part I was working on should contain. This was because I was suddenly able to contrast the original idea with other possibilities and make value judgments based upon this. (Student reflection 2017) Considering three variations on a piece of creative work, I took further inspiration from Queneau’s book, Exercises in Style (1981), in which he describes a scene in a variety of linguistic and literary styles. Queneau’s work has also inspired Matt Madden (2006), who published a similar exploration of style in comic strips, each recounting the same narrative with “varying points of view, different styles of drawing, homages and parodies, as well as interpretations” (Madden 2006: 1). Considering Queneau’s and Madden’s work, I encourage students to experiment with a small portion of work by altering the “filter” of their thinking. Students may wish to perform, arrange, or mix a piece to emulate tropes that are associated with specific genres or styles, or focus on specific intentions of narrative or ambience, for example. The aim of this task is to promote a mind-set that focuses on intent or context with a sense of nuance. Students are encouraged to employ critical thinking skills by examining their decisions in relation to their intentions. My objective is for students to gain increased awareness of where and how they may have developed a “fixed” mind-set in their approach, and the affect this may have on creative output. This is demonstrated in the following excerpt from a student reflection. I did not find it too difficult to imagine or play my variations initially but to perfect it is more difficult as I found I was “set in my ways,” having played the original groove quite often. This meant that I was battling my own impulses to play something different, which opened up my mind to the idea that this could be happening all 408

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

409

Figure 27.8  Reframing Gardner’s multiple intelligences as “what if” scenarios.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

the time—as in, I will perhaps naturally (mentally and physically) tend towards playing things I am familiar with … this will likely alter my creative outlook and output. If I am able to be fully in control and detach from my “tendencies,” it could greatly influence my playing. (Student reflection 2017)

Exploration of perspective: Considering points of view

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The model of the creative process suggested by Dubberly et al. (2009) highlights observation as one of three key components of the creative process. They state “observation begins as a conversation with others,” highlighting the importance of learning from other people and cultures. I chose to use Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Model (Gardner 2006) as a framework for a third compulsory task intended to prompt thinking from an alternative point of view. I frame Gardner’s Intelligences as “what if” scenarios similar to Byron’s (2006) approach to SCAMPER. This is shown in Figure 27.8, below. As a means to encourage students to engage with this conceptualization of view point I ask them to create a short video educating others on a single item of technique or theory in an area of their expertise, or promoting an event or product (such as an artist or EP). I was able to realize that by using different perspectives I can broaden my own knowledge. This skill could be applied to my other studio practices for example; I could try to put myself in the musician’s perspective when trying to communicate in the studio. (Student reflection 2016) This approach of mixing logical and kinaesthetic seems to work well for me when communicating, although it takes more effort on my part to think logically about what I am trying to explain. This has already been useful to me in a band context, in communicating my ideas with clarity and making it easier for other people to understand what I am asking of them. (Student Reflection 2017) The three compulsory tasks I set are useful explorations of strategy and approach, but reflection provokes the absorption of the ideas. The final part of this assessment is to produce a wrap-around reflection in which I encourage students to consider the transferability of the techniques they have tried. I provide personalized (formative) and generic prompts for reflection on the completion of each task, for example, “What have you tried, or done, that has worked for you and how could you apply this in other contexts?” 410

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Conclusion Developing and learning is a process of proceeding “from the known to the unknown” (Biggs and Tang 2007: 93). Coupling this notion with that of enabling students to take ownership of their learning is at the core of this approach to exploring creative activity. My primary aim is to create circumstances for each student to discover for themselves, and possibly relearn processes that have diminished over time. There is no guarantee that every student will engage with the challenges involved in developing increased awareness of their own creative processes; however, introducing attributes of creative activity as items for assessment can motivate improved autonomy. As a consequence it has been my experience that, as I continue to refine the framing and teaching of these ideas, many of the students I am privileged to work with discover the value of taking creative risk:

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

That is the beauty of this system: it is about experimentation. If you don’t experiment with these variables you will never know what works better and what doesn’t. There will be failures—but without those failures you only know for sure that one system works— and by that extended logic you’ll feel unwilling to challenge those preconceptions, essentially missing out on the possibility of a superior system if you allowed for a little tweaking. (Student reflection 2016) The process is challenging and can be met with resistance. It can be uncomfortable for students and teachers. Self-doubt is as likely to creep in to my mind as that of those I teach. MacKinnon (1963) states; “those who have demonstrated true creativity will show a disposition to undertake problems where the degree of difficulty and frustration is great” (25). I believe that teaching creativity requires creativity, the kind of creativity underpinned by a disposition such as MacKinnon describes. In tackling issues that arise in the development and delivery of a module that deals with creative processes and mind-sets I have found that I require equal measures of empathy and belligerence. This is necessary if I am to make effective use of the learning potential of discomfort that my students will experience, as well as endure the periods of frustration this can cause and the inevitable discomfort that I will also experience. The techniques that I teach have also become the techniques employed in the refining and development of my own skills, knowledge, and approach in my teaching specialisms. In devising the means to teach, learn, and assess creative activity I have become increasingly aware of how my own creative processes are best supported. I have learnt to trust my sense of dissatisfaction with many of the tropes attached to the teaching of my discipline and channeled this in the exploration of transferable skills. I have become a more versatile teacher and creative practitioner, and I am optimistic that the more my own teaching is infused by these principles the 411

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

greater the likelihood I will be able to create a climate in which my students will feel empowered to develop a sense of self-awareness that will benefit their creative practices.

Notes 1 ENU’s popular music program, at time of writing, teaches a cohort of students who predominantly, but not exclusively, specialize as guitarists, pianists, drummers, vocalists, bassists, composers, and sound engineers. 2 The Higher Education Academy (HEA) is a national body in the United Kingdom dedicated to the development of teaching and learning provision in higher education. 3 SCQF level 7. 4 In the UK objectives, aims, and outcomes for a student’s learning experience are summarized as short statements, or “learning outcomes.” These form the parameters around which LTA for each module is designed. 5 In Scotland, students tend to study for four years, working toward an honors degree, although they may exit after three years with a BA. An honors degree is given a classification, with first class as the highest level of attainment, based on the average percentage (of grades) achieved across modules in their final two years of study. 6 A form of assessment devised in 1999 by Scoggins and Winter in which “individual pivotal learning moments and tasks would be documented and stitched together over a period of weeks” (Jones-Devitt et al. 2016: 3).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

7 The Socratic Method is employed in discussion as a means to probe and challenge thought processes in relation to a single concept or idea. I teach it as a means to challenge assumptions that may inadvertently manifest in individual perceptions of self, or purpose and approach, relating to popular music and creative activity. Maxwell (2014) states that it “Manifests a rigorous focus on one primary question or idea … This willful repetition affords us the experience of seeing a much richer variety of answers and possible views come in to play.”

References Amabile, Teresa M. (1996), Creativity in Context, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Biggs, John and Catherine Tang (2007), Teaching for Quality Learning at University, third edition, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Burnard, Pamela (2012), Musical Creativities in Practice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byron, Kevin (2006), Creative Problem-Solving. Available online: www.ttu.ee/public/i/ infotehnoloogia-teaduskond/Instituudid/biorobootika/Byron_Creative_Problem_Solving.pdf (accessed November 18, 2018). Churches, Andrew (2008), “Bloom’s Taxonomy Blooms Digitally,” Tech & Learning, April 1, 2008. 412

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“How Do I Get the Grades?” Creativity and Conflicts of Motivation, Risk, and Reward

Cowan, John (2006), On Becoming an Innovative University Teacher: Reflection in Action, second edition, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1996), Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York: Harper Collins. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1999), “Implications of a Systems Perspective for the Study of Creativity,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 313–335, New York: Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2004), “Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” TED2004 (video),February 2004. Available online: www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow (accessed November 18, 2018). Dubberly, Hugh, Jack Chung, Shelley Evenson, and Paul Pangaro (2009), A Model of the Creative Process, San Francisco: Dubberly Design Office. Dweck, Carol (2007), Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, New York: Ballantine Books. Eberle, Robert F. (1972), “Developing Imagination through Scamper,” The Journal of Creative Behaviour, 6 (3): 199–203. doi:10.1002/j.2162-6057.1972.tb00929.x. Edutopia (2010), “Pixar’s Randy Nelson on the Collaborative Age,” YouTube, July 2, 2010. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8 (accessed November 18, 2018). Feist, Gregory J. (1999), “The Influence of Personality on Artistic and Scientific Creativity,” in Robert J. Sternberg(ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 273–296, New York: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, Howard (2006), Multiple Intelligences: New Horizons, New York: Basic books. Grace, Nancy and Sarah Murnen (2008), The Five Colleges of Ohio: Creative and Critical Thinking: Assessing the Foundations of a Liberal Arts Education. A 3-Year Comprehensive Report, report to the Teagle Foundation, July 15, 2008. Available online: http://documents. kenyon.edu/reaccreditation/Year2TEAGLEFINALY2forDKOWReport.pdf (accessed November 17, 2018). Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Jackson, Norman (2005), “Assessing Students’ Creativity: Synthesis of Higher Education Teacher Views,” workshop notes, Higher Education Academy. Available online: http:// imaginativecurriculumnetwork.pbworks.com/f/ASSESSING+STUDENTS’+CREATIVIT Y+SYNTHESIS+OF+TEACHER+VIEWS.doc (accessed November 18, 2018). Jackson, Norman (2008), “Tackling the Wicked Problem of Creativity in Higher Education,” background paper for the ARC Centre for the Creative Industries and Innovation, international conference, Brisbane, Australia, June 2008. Available online: http:// imaginativecurriculumnetwork.pbworks.com/f/WICKED+PROBLEM+OF+CREATIVITY+ IN+HIGHER+EDUCATION.pdf (accessed November 18, 2018). Jones-Devitt, Stella, Megan Lawton, and Wendy Mayne (2016), HEA Patchwork Assessment Practice Guide, York: Higher Education Academy. Available online: www.heacademy.ac.uk/ knowledge-hub/patchwork-assessment-practice-guide (accessed November 18, 2018). Kleiman, Paul (2005), “Beyond the Tingle Factor: Creativity and Assessment in Higher Education,” ESRC Creativity Seminar, University of Strathclyde, October 7, 2005. Lehmann, Andreas C., John A. Sloboda, and Robert H. Woody (2007), Psychology for Musicians; Understanding and Acquiring the Skills, New York: Oxford University Press.

413

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Limb, Charles (2010), “Your Brain on Improv,” TEDxMidAtlantic, November 2010. Available online: www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv (accessed November 18, 2018). MacKinnon, Donald (1963), “The Identification of Creativity,” Applied Psychology, 12 (1): 25–46. doi:10.1111/j.1464-0597.1963.tb00463.x. Madden, Matt (2006), 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, London: Random House. Maxwell, Max (2014), “Introduction to the the Socratic Method and its Effect on Critical Thinking,” The Socratic Method Research Portal. Available online: www.socraticmethod.net (accessed November 18, 2018). Passuello, Luciano (2008), “Creative Problem Solving with Scamper,” Litemind. Available online: https://litemind.com/scamper (accessed November 18, 2018). Queneau, Raymond (1981), Exercises in Style, translated by Barbara Wright, London: John Calder Publishers. Schulz, Kathryn. 2011. “On Being Wrong,” TED2011, March 2011. Available online: www.ted. com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong (accessed November 18, 2018). Weisberg, Robert W. (1993), Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, New York: W. H. Freeman. Weisberg, Robert W. (1999), “Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories,” in Robert J. Sternberg (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, 226–250, New York: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Jurgen (2012), Creativity Now: Get Inspired, Create Ideas and Make Them Happen!, second edition, Harlow: Pearson UK.

414

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

28

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification Radio Cremata

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Background Music education, in recent years, has begun a paradigm shift (Seddon 2004). The reasons for this are multifaceted, but among the most central is the push in the profession to acknowledge and affirm young students’ values through school-based popular music education (PME) (Smith et al. 2017). I interpret PME to mean the teaching and learning of all forms of popular music, including musics with current or recent mass distribution and sales, both inside and outside of formal classroom settings (adapted from: Hebert 2011; Higgins and Campbell 2010). PME comes in many varieties embodying diverse musical and pedagogical approaches. We should be cautious to keep this definition broad and open to many forms of popular musics (Allsup 2008), and not fall into the trap of thinking of popular music education narrowly along the often favored white, male, or rock perspectives (Clauhs, Cremata, and Whitehead 2016). PME has not been very popular in schools in the United States, with a small number of notable exceptions (Krikun 2008, 2017). It was not until 1967 that the Tanglewood Symposium, a conference whose purpose was to discuss and define the role of music education in contemporary American society, declared: Music of all periods, styles, forms, and cultures belongs in the curriculum. The musical repertory should be expanded to involve music of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teen-age music and avantgarde music, American folk music, and the music of other cultures. (Choate 1968: 139) Forty years later, in large part because the ways through which people produce, consume, enjoy, express, and understand music changed dramatically, Tanglewood II (a second symposium, which took place in 2007) reexamined the issues. The process of implementing PME into school-based learning contexts in the United States has

415

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

been an ongoing process that has not gained much traction until recently (Powell et al. 2015). Previously, it has primarily been a hypothetical conversation, save for a few occasional disrupters putting PME into practice. It has, however, found its way into schools through small acts of subversion (Kratus 2015) and through other forms of deviance (Kallio 2017), but this is not without its challenges. Kratus (2015) questions why the vast majority of twenty-first-century tertiary music education culture still remains nearly identical to, and largely replicates that of, nineteenthcentury performers preparing to join orchestras and opera companies. If the culture that permeates tertiary music education is rooted in histories of Western art music promoting experiences in traditional bands, choirs, and orchestras (Kratus 2015), then preparing the next generation of PME educators may require some convincing, crafty teaching, and prolonged exposure to styles and habits that are wedded to popular musics. One might ask, who then would be best poised to be the future PME educators? Bell (2016) warns the profession not to fall into the trap of classical music pedagogues briefly encountering popular music pedagogy at weekend workshops. This would, arguably, not be a sufficient enough training nor foundation to deliver a nuanced and quality PME. If not, then music teacher education might need to address the reality that many programs favor and promote classical music pedagogy that tends toward non-learner-led, autocratic, teacher-centric contexts and practices; this, arguably, differs greatly from what some may consider effective popular music pedagogy. Today our musical culture is incredibly diverse, and opportunities for music engagement are many and varied. The music teacher education profession’s continued devotion to a singular model of music-making tends to ignore this diversity (Mantie et al. 2017). In professional development (PD) contexts where school music teachers receive in-service training and support, traditional pedagogies continue to dominate the culture. It is not uncommon for outdated and often recycled materials and ideas to remain staples in, for example, statewide Music Education Association (MEA) workshops. Examples include rigid methodologies derived from the approaches of Kodaly, Orff, and Dalcroze (Benedict 2010), conducted reading sessions often sponsored by curriculum merchants and profiteers (Regelski 2002). A content analysis of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME/MENC) workshops over a twenty-year period, reveals that historically it is rare to find popular music educators or students of popular music education programs in prominent spaces in statewide music education conferences (Palkki et al. 2016). PME in school-based settings, however, is growing in popularity at the national and international level. While I am a strong advocate for PME, I am also hopeful that maintaining a critical perspective will help promote a healthier and more sustainable PME for the future. This chapter explores some of the author’s concerns regarding the current popularization and schoolification of PME practices in school contexts. 416

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Schoolification In music education, when topics are introduced into school contexts, they become schoolified. I have invented the word “schoolification” (and its derivatives, e.g., schoolify, etc.) to provide nomenclature to school-situatedness. Simply, schoolification means that something has become school-ready, but a natural byproduct of the schoolification of PME is that it can then become something we can research and study (Green 2008; Kallio 2017). Schoolified PME is presentable to large groups and digestible to larger constituencies. As a result of its schoolification, it can (in some areas) become processed into materials and systematic curricula that are then codified and curated. Publishers in turn create method books, exercises, songbooks and recordings, and families and other constituencies gather ceremonially to share/celebrate students’ schoolified products in concerts. These are all valuable yet also problematic. Powell, Smith, and D’Amore (2017) point to the apparently intrinsic oppressiveness of schooling, and highlight the abundance of research from Scandindavia and the UK suggesting that “if ‘popular music’ becomes ‘school music,’ perhaps something is lost or inherently changed” (3). Additionally, there are concerns around the inclusion of popular music in schools regarding the plausibility or desirability for authentic musical experiences (Green 2002; Kallio, Westerlund, and Partti 2015; Lilliestam 1995). Wright and Davies (2010) locate all normative music education practices in a particularly middle-class, bourgeois aesthetic. Critical pedagogues (conflict theorists) such as Freire ([1970] 2007) and Giroux (2003, 2014) note the inherent “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu 2001) and injustice of school systems. Illich (1970) perceives the compulsory education project to be ridiculous, asserting that “rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible, we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system that promotes it” (10). This is the conundrum from which schoolified popular music education seems unable to escape (Smith 2015). It is prescient, then, to ask whether educational institutions can include and promote PME without distortion of some of the musical practices associated with popular music that might be considered rebellious, coarse, vulgar, and deliberately offensive (Bowman 2004). Seddon (2004) cautions that it is not possible to insert alternative music styles into a set of classroom practices that have been developed to deal with classical music. Froehlich and Smith (2017) remind us that music “has the advantage of being integral to our people’s lives outside of the school environment” (129). Outside perspectives add value to PME. Cremata et al. (2018) invite scholars to present case studies in an abbreviated “flash study” format (5) capturing the lived experiences of music learners inside and outside of school-based contexts. PME would do well to learn from the cultures that extend beyond schools. As we schoolify music, we strip it from its authentic cultural context and plant it in a foreign one. Allsup and Benedict (2008) explain that in school music contexts,

417

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

we perpetuate exclusive cultural contexts, authentic only unto themselves. Bowman (2004) adds that schools are by their very nature artificial, controlled environments creating musical cultures that differ in fundamental ways from those in the real world. If we are to situate PME in schools, what are some of the ways that we can do this to reflect the popular musical cultures authentically (Froehlich and Smith 2017; Kallio 2015; Middleton 1990; Moore 2001; Parkinson and Smith 2015)? Most school-based music education in the United States involves Western art music, and the occasional smattering of jazz and multicultural/“world musics.” Now, in large part due to Lucy Green’s seminal work in PME (2002, 2004, 2008, 2009), we are beginning to see a rise in school-based PME and scholarship discussing informal learning (Feichas 2010; Folkestad 2006; West and Cremata 2016). PME practice, and efforts worldwide by classroom teachers, some nonprofit organizations have mobilized to support it. Two organizations, Little Kids Rock (LKR) founded in 2002 and Musical Futures founded in 2003 have worked to bring PME into school settings. As of this writing, Musical Futures (although by no means exclusively focused on or around popular music) has rapidly scaled from 60 schools to a reported 600+ within the space of a few years, within the UK and worldwide (Musical Futures 2017). LKR has also accomplished large-scale replication, having already impacted over 400,000 students in over 29 cities across the United States (Little Kids Rock 2017).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The problems of circularization, materials, and pedagogies What kinds of PME are we seeing in schools today? What resources are in place to support them? Are the resources that are codified and disseminated into teaching materials at risk of ossification or methodolatry (Regelski 2002)? While there are other resources available for PME from a variety of outlets, the wide-scale impact of Musical Futures and LKR has made them worthy of consideration. As neither Musical Futures nor LKR are driven by a particular curriculum, their resources are rather “scattered.” As of this writing, there are pamphlets provided by Musical Futures, teacher manuals provided by LKR, and web-sharing communities such as “Jam Zone” (Little Kids Rock 2017) and “Community” (Musical Futures 2017). Additionally, Berklee Press and a host of other publishers have published method and song books in several varieties. In spite of the call for music educators to incorporate more music technologies in music instruction (Bell 2016; Cremata 2017; Cremata and Powell 2017; Egolf 2014; Finney 2007; Gullberg and Brändström 2004; Lebler 2008; Lebler and Weston 2015; Mellor 2008; Tobias 2015), very few resources to date involve technology or computerbased music production and performance. Moir and Medbøe (2015) remind us to consider the role music technologies play, not only in popular music and performance but also in music creation. We should heed Bell’s (2016) warning that we remain

418

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

cautious, particularly in school contexts, about erecting false divisions between musical technologies and musical instruments. Increasingly, the two are one and the same and should not be isolated from each other. As we consider PME materials, we ought to evaluate the extent to which there are diverse teaching materials that could enact regionally specific PMEs. For example, PME in London might look and sound different from PME in Miami. Owing to the time it takes to codify and disseminate them, many PME materials might already have or will quickly become outdated and/or unpopular in the eyes of contemporary students. Addressing this concern is not without its challenges or problematic outcomes. On the one hand, by working to promote schoolified, widely adopted materials, we potentially risk missing the uniquely diverse approaches individual teachers can bring to PME. On the other hand, if we diversify PME materials to represent the myriad of styles, regions, and cultures that are constantly evolving, we potentially work against its scalability and standardization. The notion of uniformity might seem appealing to some, while repulsive to others. The question then is whose values are worth honoring, or are they not mutually exclusive and capable of coexistence in a schoolified PME culture? To keep PME materials living and evolving, some may need to exist in repositories that are nimble, affordable, and accessible to diverse populations. We should be cautiously aware to not promote one particular style of popular music at the cost of others. In spite of her seminal contribution to the profession, Green (2004) reminds us that she had to exclude DJs and electronic musicians from her research because the learning practices “contain significant differences from those of guitarbased rock” (226). One might expect similar challenges for the practitioner who might be more inclined to promote their own versions of PME at the cost of excluding other potentially valuable PME approaches. Also worth noting is the tendency some in the profession may have to neglect underrepresented communities and musics favoring dominant commercially driven popular music cultures. PME schoolteachers need not be exclusively PME specialists. We should be mindful of respecting the many possibilities for various pedagogic approaches and styles in PME schoolteachers.They might benefit to be informed about and skilled in teaching broad learning styles including informal learning experiences (Lill 2016). Feichas (2010) explains that informal learning manifests in nonlinear, cooperative learning, controlled by a social group rather than an individual. To keep practitioners informed and scholarship on PME forward-thinking it is important to engage diverse readerships on broad and inclusive learning styles that explore binaries and spectra, not allowing, for example, a reductive binary of formal/informal to exclusively guide us (Folkestad 2006; Green 2002). We should all become more familiar with the challenges implicit to the formal/informal binary (Folkestad 2006; West and Cremata 2016). This will help keep PME responsive and adaptive to evolving learnerships. If we overlook this and canonize PME into a particularly small pocket of the musical and pedagogical ecosystem, we may be doing a disservice to the profession promoting a new kind of hegemonic division that crystalizes, ossifies, and potentially alienates. 419

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Are preservice teacher education programs in the United States or other locations worldwide currently doing the work of preparing diverse, eclectic, or highly specialized music educators? What role does PME play in their preparation? One might see the virtues for broad or deep musical experiences in preservice music teacher education. Some may be highly specialized popular music educators while others may be specialized in other areas such as classical orchestra, wind ensembles, or choirs, for example. With specialization comes the cost of developing depth in other areas of a future teachers’ musical and pedagogical foundation. If we are to work to ensure that schoolteachers are versatile then that would necessarily include PME in their experiences. Are the students in tertiary music teacher education programs promoted from K–12 PME contexts? Is PME a foreign concept to them? Are efforts to promote PME to classical music pedagogues in tertiary music teacher education settings more an act of conversion than anything else? If it is a matter of conversion (changing the ways, habits, values, and knowledge base of classical music pedagogues), then would we not benefit from deepened experiences to help establish richer popular music pedagogues foundational understanding? Once students have graduated and begun teaching, are certification standards in place to support PME in any form? In the United States, for example, in order to help satisfy job placement and marketability, preservice music teacher programs emphasize job preparation for targeted schools and districts (Conway 2002). For PME to take root in preservice teacher education programs and for certification standards to align with the pedagogies implicit to these contexts, we might identify schools encouraging PME to cooperate with preservice teacher programs in student-teaching contexts. This would empower preservice teachers to practice teaching in those contexts enabling and identifying the potential for employment through these pedagogies. Additionally, through an ever-growing interest in PME in scholarly writing, perhaps this might trickle down into and inform preservice teacher preparation programs’ curricular offerings.

Instrumentation and admission criteria Music education certainly ought to be much more than teachers teaching instruments. If it were just that, then technique and method books might certainly take central focus of most learning contexts. Are the instruments embedded in the culture of popular music ones that music educators are comfortable with and prepared to teach music with and through? Despite calls for the profession to validate musical expertise, interests, and backgrounds that do not conform to the traditional models of our secondary and tertiary music programs (Abril 2014), currently PME in schools are not typically facilitated by popular musicians (Bell 2016). Guitars also seem to be popular among PME educators. Why? Is the guitar still a significant part of the popular music soundscape? Consider that the electric guitar, along with rock and roll, rose to popularity over fifty years ago, in

420

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

the mid-1960s, are there other more popular PME instruments? Williams (2014) notes that it is ironic that just as rock music and guitars are being phased out of much current popular music culture, rock music and guitars are now being introduced into school music contexts. Perhaps, this observation can serve as a cautionary warning to the profession to remain inclusive to not only all forms of popular music instrumentation and styles but also promote underrepresented cultures through PME. In addition to guitars, much of today’s popular music is also currently being produced on computers and tablets using instruments typically omitted from admission criteria into preservice music teacher education programs (Bell 2016). For example, it is rare for preservice teaching programs to audition incoming freshman playing Ableton, iPad, or demonstrating virtuosity in manipulating sounds in a digital audio workstation (DAW). By including these and other instruments and platforms (not necessarily focusing on performance as the primary indicator of “musicianship”) into the audition process, or at a minimum part of the secondary instrument offerings, we might promote more opportunities to prepare music teachers to teach with these instruments. We should be mindful of the reality that admissions criteria often shape and guide curricula. If we follow a conservatory model of performance auditions that prioritize the needs of large classical music ensembles, we do a disservice to the music teaching profession and residually to the other 80 percent (Williams 2007), a large group of marginalized secondary K–12 students who elect not to participate in school music. Bell (2016) explains that students with contemporary music skills often struggle to be admitted to such programs. These omissions from the admission process favor cultural privileges defining the music that is valued (Kaschub and Smith 2014), the skin colors of the musicians who get to participate in those cultures (DeLorenzo 2016), and students’ levels of physical or mental disability (Froehlich and Smith 2017; Lubet 2011). Implicit to this discussion is that there are barriers to postsecondary music education and music teacher education that can be described as blatantly discriminatory (Kratus 2015).

Perfection, approximation, and inclusivity Some popular music contexts, perhaps in professional recording and performance settings, may value perfection, blend, and balance. Others, perhaps those in the K–12 contexts, such as those under the modern band moniker, may value approximation: where musical sounds are almost correct and are not intended to be exact. It is important to underline the previous two sentences, because there are at least two strands in PME: one aimed toward professionalization through standards/values of perfection and another aimed toward inclusivity through standards/values of approximation. In PME contexts, particularly those promoted for inclusive learning spaces such as LKR and Musical Futures, facilitators provide guidelines of approximation to keep the students on track. Powell and Burstein (2017) explain that “approximation is a process

421

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

by which students create and replicate versions of songs that, while not without flaws, are close enough to the original piece to be both fulfilling and educational for the student” (248). Lilly and Green (2003) explain that facilitators accept learners’ mistakes, congratulate them on their accomplishments, and guide them gently into accuracy and self-correction. Cremata (2017) notes that facilitators, while not necessarily promoting approximation, can help individuals and/or groups lead themselves, incorporating notions of diversity and democracy. Approximation has roots in language acquisition theory (Højen, Anders, and Flege 2006) and closely relates to notions of amateurism. Particularly in school contexts approximation may be a more readily attainable goal than accuracy/blend/balance/perfection. That is to say that asking amateurs or children to set goals closer to approximation than perfection may be a more feasible and rewarding endeavor promoting humane and student-centered pedagogies. However, it is important to note that PME facilitators can certainly promote musical values beyond approximation. If PME will ever become an equal member of the music education profession, we must first understand that it can involve a different set of aesthetic standards/values and musical goals than some of the music traditionally part of music education contexts. In some contexts, while these certainly can vary, PME might exchange goals of perfection, blend, and balance for approximation and amateurism. We have much to learn from Mursell (1936) and Regelski (2007) on musical amateurism. Regelski reminds us to consider the joys associated with amateur bowling and golf and the realistic goals of breaking 100 in each. By embracing amateurism and approximation in PME, we might engage and perhaps inspire wider participation. The inclusivity of schoolified PME could embrace marginalized student populations excluded by the aesthetic standards/ values of perfection. Critical to the dialogue in PME should be ways of creating access for greater numbers of students and to provide rewarding musical experiences for students with diverse backgrounds, needs, and abilities (DeLorenzo 2016; Lubet 2011).

Future directions for PME research The music education profession in the United States is in the early stages of incorporating PME and it is vital that scholars and educators coordinate critical inquiry and interrogation of popular music education (Christophersen and Gullberg 2017; Moir 2017; Smith et al. 2017; Hebert, Abramo, and Smith 2017). While scholarship certainly has been ongoing in PME, and entire journals and volumes are dedicated to it (notably the Journal of Popular Music Education and The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education), we would benefit from having a continuation and expansion of ideas both supportive and critical. By engaging contributors from perspectives of research and practice we can aim to engage in critique that both identifies dysfunction and potential for empowerment.1 For reasons of inclusivity, we might connect the

422

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

scholarly PME inquiry to long-standing music pedagogies so that more traditional music educators might witness synergies and possibilities. Not all research need be dedicated exclusively to the curricular realm. Not all curricula need be situated exclusively in brick and mortar elementary general music, middle and high school band/chorus/ orchestra/general, after-school, and community contexts. Our dialogue would benefit from encompassing a diverse musical landscape because that might help us clarify how PME functions in the lives of many. We must remain alert to the cultural currency implicit to PME. We should monitor the reality that no educators are immune to the tendency to value and promote their music from their childhoods and lived experiences. Bowman (2004) cautions us that schools can become musical museums, compensating for dwindling support from outside sources, serving curatorial functions. Scholarship should continue to keep a watchful eye on this habit and potential threat to PME becoming a manifestation of cultural tradition and preservation.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusions Schoolifying PME is problematic. Ongoing discourse on the schoolification of PME can help us understand some of its implicit benefits, challenges, and solutions. While this chapter is not exhaustive (nor necessarily pioneering), by examining the nexus of critical perspectives on popular music (Frith 2017), its potential to bridge the gap in school contexts (Rodriguez 2004) and interrogations on contemporary music education practices (Abeles and Custodero 2010), we can continue to forge forward with PME scholarship. I am hopeful that PME might help lead us away from the schoolified world of methodolatry where we reify methods letting them own us more than we own them. Regelski (2002) reminds us that in music education, we have a tendency toward methodolatry or an unquestioning devotion to a given way of practicing music education. Hopefully the development of PME materials will not inspire legions of discipleship. PME practitioners should very carefully unpack prepackaged curricula organized into preplanned lessons that require little in the way of teacher innovation, student/cultural considerations, and teacher supplemental planning. Additionally, curricula/materials for PME, particularly those promoted by profiteers and music man-type merchants should be critically evaluated and disseminated with great care. Through PME, perhaps we can move away from blind faith in method books based on drills and musical exercises and move toward participatory and relevant music learning. While music education operates as a self-perpetuating cycle that is tightly knit (Williams 2014), the power and attraction of PME might function as a puncture device to rupture the school music cultural bubble at various disruption points. None of those disruption points are as nimble and affect leaners more directly than the classroom

423

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

teacher and we should acknowledge the work being done each day by those educators who act as primary agents of change. It is my hope that more classroom teachers will become PME friendly and potentially have strong enough backgrounds in popular musics such that they can go beyond recreation and mimicking popular music genres, and encourage creation and development of new ones as PME (Moir 2017). In the end, schoolifying PME is not entirely problematic. At a purely cynical and strategic level, if we wish to keep the music education profession afloat, we ought to use PME to address issues of enrollment, sustainability, and relevance in music education. We must work together to negotiate the friction points between scholars in the profession and redirect old ideas into something new. We should be reminded to promote values associate with cultural democracy and return music education to learners in ways that engage them through the wonderful varieties of musics throughout all times and spaces. Schoolified PME is one such variety, and by interrogating and evaluating it we might help to enable its positive manifestations.

Note 1 We might continue to build on Hebert and Campbell’s (2000) article “Rock Music in American Schools: Positions and Practices Since the 1960s”—since then, several recent scholarly works Allsup (2008); Bell (2016); Bowman (2004); Cremata and West (2016); Froehlich and Smith (2017); Isbell (2007); Lill (2016); Moir (2017); Powell, Krikun, and Pignato (2015); Randles, Droe, and Goldberg (forthcoming); Tobias (2015); and Williams (2014) indicate that popular music education is a significant part of the discourse.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Abeles, Harold. F. and Lori. A. Custodero, eds. (2010), Critical Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice, New York: Oxford University Press. Abril, Carlos R. (2014), “Invoking an Innovative Spirit in Music Teacher Education,” in Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith (eds.), Promising Practices in Twenty-first Century Music Teacher Education, 175–188, New York: Oxford University Press. Allsup, Randall Everett (2008), “Creating an Educational Framework for Popular Music in Public Schools: Anticipating the Second-Wave,” Visions of Research in Music Education, 12: 1–12. Allsup, Randall Everett and Cathy Benedict (2008), “The Problems of Band: An Inquiry into the Future of Instrumental Music Education,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 16 (2): 156–173. Bell, Adam (2016), “The Production of Process: The Studio as Instrument and Popular Music Pedagogy,” in Ruth Wright, Betty Ann Younker, and Carol Beynon (eds.), 21st Century Music Education: Informal Learning and Non-Formal Teaching Approaches in School and Community Contexts, 379–392, Montreal: Canadian Music Educators’ Association (CMEA). 424

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

Benedict, Cathy (2010), “Methods and Approaches,” in Hal Abeles and Lori A. Custodero (eds.), Critical Issues in Music Education: Contemporary Theory and Practice, 143–166, New York: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2001), Masculine Domination, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bowman, Wayne (2004), “‘Pop’ goes…? Taking Popular Music Seriously,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 29–49, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Clauhs, Matt, Radio Cremata, and Baruch Whitehead (2016), “Co-Creating a Culturally Responsive Music Program with Teachers, Students, and Music Education Researchers,” School Music News: The Official Publication of the NY State School Music Association, April: 19–23. Choate, Robert A., ed. (1968) Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium, Washington, DC: Music Educators National Conference. Christophersen, Catharina and Anna-Karin Gullberg (2017), “Popular Music Education, Participation and Democracy: Some Nordic Perspectives,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zach Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 425–437, Abingdon: Routledge. Conway, Colleen (2002), “Perceptions of Beginning Teachers, Their Mentors, and Administrators Regarding Preservice Music Teacher Preparation,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 50 (1): 20–36. Cremata, Radio (2017), “Facilitation in Popular Music Education,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (1): 63–82. Cremata, Radio, Joseph Michael Pignato, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2018), Music Learning Profiles Project: Let’s Take This Outside, London: Routledge. Cremata, Radio and Bryan Powell (2017), “Online Music Collaboration Project: Digitally Mediated, Deterritorialized Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 35 (2): 302–315. DeLorenzo, Lisa (2016), “Is There a Colour Line in Music Education?,” in Lisa DeLorenzo (ed.), Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education: Diversity and Social Justice, 176–194, New York: Routledge. Egolf, Eva J. (2014), “Learning Processes of Electronic Dance Music Club DJs,” PhD diss., New York University. Feichas, Heloisa (2010) “Bridging the Gap: Informal Learning Practices as a Pedagogy of Integration,” British Journal of Music Education, 27 (1): 47–58. Finney, John (2007), “Music Education as Identity Project in a World of Electronic Desires,” in John Finney and Pamela Burnard (eds.), Music Education with Digital Technology, 9–20, London: Bloomsbury. Folkestad, Göran (2006), “Formal and Informal Learning Situations or Practices vs Formal and Informal Ways of Learning,” British Journal of Music Education, 23 (2): 135–145. Freire, Paulo ([1970] 2007), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, New York: Continuum. Frith, Simon (2017), Taking Popular Music Seriously: Selected Essays, Abingdon: Routledge. Froehlich, Hildegard and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), Sociology for Music Teachers: Practical Applications, New York: Taylor & Francis. Giroux, Henry A. (2003), The Abandoned Generation: Democracy Beyond the Culture of Fear, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 425

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Giroux, Henry A. (2014), Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education, Chicago: Haymarket Books. Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Green, Lucy (2004), “What Can Music Educators Learn from Popular Musicians?,” in Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (ed.), Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, 225–241, Reston, VA: National Association for Music Education (MENC). Green, Lucy (2008), Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology and Education, London: Altima. Green, Lucy (2009), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Gullberg, Anna-Karin and Sture Brändström (2004), “Formal and Non-Formal Music Learning amongst Rock Musicians,” in Jane W. Davidson (ed.), The Music Practitioner. Research for the Music Performer, Teacher and Listener, 161–174, London: Routledge. Hebert, David G. (2011), “Originality and Institutionalization: Factors Engendering Resistance to Popular Music Pedagogy in the USA,” Music Education Research International, 5: 12–21. Hebert, David G. and Patricia Shehan Campbell (2000), “Rock Music in American Schools: Positions and Practices since the 1960s,” International Journal of Music Education, 36 (1): 14–22. Hebert, David G., Joseph Abramo, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), “Epistemological and Sociological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zach Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–477, Abingdon: Routledge. Higgins, Lee and Patricia Shehan Campbell (2010), Free to be Musical: Group Improvisation in Music, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education. Højen, Anders and James E. Flege (2006), “Early Learners’ Discrimination of Second-Language Vowels,” The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119 (5): 3072–3084. Illich, Ivan D. (1970), Celebration of Awareness; A Call for Institutional Revolution, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Isbell, Dan (2007), “Popular Music and the Public School Music Curriculum,” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education 26 (1): 53–63. Kallio, Alexis (2015), “Drawing a Line in Water: Constructing the School Censorship Frame in Popular Music Education,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (2): 195–209. Kallio, Alexis (2017), “Popular ‘Problems’: Deviantization and Teachers’ Curation of Popular Music,” International Journal of Music Education, 35 (3): 319–332. Kallio, Alexis, Heidi Westerlund, and Heidi Partti (2015), “The Quest for Authenticity in the Music Classroom: Sinking or Swimming?,” I: Nordic Research in Music Education, 15: s. 205–224. Kaschub, Michele and Janice Smith (2014), “Music Teacher Education in Transition,” in Michele Kaschub and Janice Smith (eds.), Promising Practices in 21st Century Music Teacher Education, 3–23, New York: Oxford University Press. Kratus, John (2015), “The Role of Subversion in Changing Music Education,” in Clint Randles (ed.), Music Education: Navigating the Future, 340–346, New York: Routledge. Krikun, Andrew (2008), “Popular Music and Jazz in the American Junior College Music Curriculum during the Swing Era (1935–1945),” Journal of Historical Research in Music Education, 30 (1): 39–49. 426

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Popular Music: Benefits and Challenges of Schoolification

Krikun, Andrew (2017), “Teaching the ‘People’s Music’ at the ‘People’s College’: Popular Music Education in the Junior College Curriculum in Los Angeles, 1945–55,” Journal of Popular Music Education, 1 (2): 151–164. Lebler, Don (2008), “Popular Music Pedagogy: Peer Learning in Practice,” Music Education Research, 10 (2): 193–213. Lebler, Don and Donna Weston (2015), “Staying in Sync: Keeping Popular Music Pedagogy Relevant to an Evolving Music Industry,” IASPM@ Journal, 5 (1): 124–138. Lill, Athena (2016), “Informal Learning and Progression,” in Ruth Wright, Betty Ann Younker, and Carol Beynon (eds.), 21st Century Music Education: Informal Learning and NonFormal Teaching Approaches in School and Community Contexts, ch. 19, Montreal: Canadian Music Educators’ Association (CMEA). Lilliestam, Lars (1995), Gehörsmusik: blues, rock och muntlig tradering. Gothenburg: Akademiförlaget. Lilly, Elizabeth and Connie Green (2003), Developing Partnerships with Families through Children’s Literature, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Little Kids Rock (LKR) (2017), “How it Works.” Available online: www.littlekidsrock.org/theprogram/how-it-works/ (accessed November 18, 2018). Little Kids Rock (2018), “Jam Zone,” powered by Harman. Available online: http://jamzone. littlekidsrock.org (accessed November 18, 2018). Lubet, Alex (2011), Music, Disability, and Society, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Mantie, Roger, Sarah Gulish, Greg McCandless, Ted Solis, and David Williams (2017), “Creating Music Curricula of the Future: Preparing Undergraduate Music Students to Engage,” College Music Symposium, 57. doi:10.18177/sym.2017.57.fr.11357. Mellor, Liz (2008), “Creativity, Originality, Identity: Investigating Computer-Based Composition in the Secondary School,” Music Education Research, 10 (4): 451–472. Middleton, Richard (1990), Studying Popular Music, New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Moir, Zack (2017), “Learning to Create and Creating to Learn: Considering the Value of Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Justin Williams and Katherine Williams (eds.), The Bloomsbury Singer Songwriter Handbook, 35–39, London: Bloomsbury. Moir, Zack and Haftor Medbøe (2015), “Reframing Popular Music Composition as Performance-Centred Practice,” Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 8 (2): 148. Moore, Allan (2001), “Categorical Conventions in Music Discourse: Style and Genre,” Music & Letters, 82 (3): 432–442. Mursell, James L. (1936), “The New Educational Psychology,” Music Educators Journal, 23 (1): 22–23. Musical Futures. 2017. https://www.musicalfutures.org/who-we-are/background. Palkki, Joshua, Daniel J. Albert, Stuart Chapman Hill, and Ryan D. Shaw (2016), “20 years of the MENC Biennial Conference: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 64 (1): 14–28. Parkinson, Tom and Gareth Dylan Smith (2015), “Towards an Epistemology of Authenticity in Higher Popular Music Education,” Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 14 (1): 93–127. Powell, Bryan and Scott Burstein (2017), “Popular Music and Modern Band Principles,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zach Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 243–254, Abingdon: Routledge.

427

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Powell, Bryan, Andrew Krikun, and Joseph Michael Pignato (2015), “‘Something’s Happening Here!’: Popular Music Education in the United States,” IASPM@ Journal, 5 (1): 4–22. Powell, Bryan, Gareth Dylan Smith, and Abigail D’Amore (2017), “Challenging Symbolic Violence and Hegemony in Music Education through Contemporary Pedagogical Approaches,” Education 3-13, 45 (6), 734–743. Randles, Clint, Kevin Droe, and Adam Goldberg (forthcoming). “Creating a Customizable Music Education through Popular Music,” Music Educators Journal. Regelski, Thomas A. (2002), “On ‘Methodolatry’ and Music Teaching as Critical and Reflective Praxis,” Philosophy of Music Education Review, 10 (2): 102–123. Regelski, Thomas A. (2007), “Amateuring in Music and its Rivals,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 6 (3): 22–50. Seddon, Frederick. 2004. “Inclusive music curricula for the 21st century,” in Lee Bartel (ed.), Questioning the Music Education Paradigm, 212–227, Toronto: Canadian Music Educators’ Association. Tobias, Evan S. (2015), “Crossfading Music Education: Connections between Secondary Students’ In-and Out-of-School Music Experience,” International Journal of Music Education, 33 (1): 18–35. West, Chad, and Radio Cremata (2016), “Bringing the Outside In: blending Formal and Informal through Acts of Hospitality,” Journal of Research in Music Education, 64 (1): 71–87. Williams, David A. (2014), “Another Perspective: The iPad is a REAL Musical Instrument,” Music Educators Journal, 101 (1): 93–98. Williams, David Brian (2007), “Reaching the ‘Other 80%’: Using Technology to Engage ‘Non-Traditional Music Students’ in Creative Activities,” in presentation at the Tanglewood II Technology and Music Education Symposium, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, April, 2007. Wright, Ruth and Brian Davies (2010), “Class, Power, Culture and the Music Curriculum,” in Ruth Wright (ed.), Sociology and Music Education, 35–50, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

428

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

29

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning: Action Research via Media Technology Daniel A. Walzer

Introduction

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

As a growing subfield, popular music education connects contemporary culture, audiovisual media, and emerging technologies by pairing these elements with a balanced cross-section of theory and practice involving production, consumption, promotion, and innovation.1 For the popular music educator, how might a flexible, collaborative lesson plan entice young people to participate? This chapter argues that popular music and media technology can enhance all aspects of learning and creativity—for the teacher and for the music student alike. What follows is a discussion of how a thoughtful blend theory and practice enhance critical thinking in students using media and openended discovery. Accordingly, this chapter aims to pair practical instructional concepts emphasizing popular music with an optimistic educational framework espoused by scholars including Allsup (2016) and Eisner (2002, 1998, 1994, 1985). Although there is no “typical” student, the hypothetical scenario below might describe a young person with diverse interests in popular music, media, art, and technology.

Scenario 1 A high school student walks into her Music Technology class. This course affords the students a chance to make songs using digital recording software on various computers and tablets, keyboards, a drum machine, and assorted microphones. Chelsea is 14, interested in art, games, movies, and her mobile phone. Like her peers, Chelsea loves popular music, social media, and has recently become obsessed with an app that allows her to make spontaneous videos of herself singing along to her favorite songs. Outside of class, Chelsea often shares these videos by posting the content on social media. Chelsea looks forward to Music Technology because she gets to experiment with recording her voice and creating new songs. Chelsea and her classmates make beats, explore notation 429

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

software, and talk about how the lyrics in music have specific themes. Chelsea loves exploring her interests, sharing her new music with family and friends, and creating songs using the equipment provided in Music Technology class. We know nothing about Chelsea’s home life or cultural background. We have no information about her school or what her family is like. What we can see is that Chelsea loves being creative, and seems generally comfortable combining popular music and hands-on use of media technology for expressive purposes. Chelsea’s hypothetical story parallels what music education scholar David B. Williams (2017) refers to as “the other 80 percent,” which, in the United States, includes the vast majority of students not enrolled in band, orchestra, choir, and the like. Williams’s (2017) point is that there exists a large population of young people who do not actively participate in traditional music ensembles during the school day. How might music teachers find fresh ways to incorporate mobile phones, tablets, and inexpensive software to entice this group to take part in a music class? Moreover, is it conceivable that music teachers could incorporate these tools into rehearsals and lessons to enhance learning and practice strategies? The curricular examples discussed later in this chapter use media and technology as focal points designed to encourage students to produce short stories on topics that interest them. Considering that every school is different, the ideas outlined below are not prescriptive. Teachers can modify the concepts in the ways they see fit, as the overarching goal is to inspire critical thinking, reflection, and hands-on learning for all stakeholders. Instead of having the students write an essay, they might form groups and create a narrated presentation with images, voiceovers, and original music composed in a related program. The teacher may loosely assign some guidelines, or perhaps give the students a very detailed rubric for the activity. Both instructional approaches are viable possibilities here. The teacher, who often participates in the activities, might have the students create video blogs based on what the lyrics mean to them to upload to a classroom Wiki. The balance of individual and group work, seamlessly integrating multimedia and popular culture, is an example of digital storytelling at work (University of Houston 2017).

Digital storytelling, media production, and learning Digital storytelling (DST) is a method whereby people create personal vignettes of varying length using text, music, images, voiceover narration, video, and related content. Scholars have only recently explored DST’s vast possibilities in praxis (Ohler 2006; Robin 2006; Robin 2008), in higher education (Sadik 2008), and as a mode of reflective learning to promote peer collaboration and group feedback (Freidus and Hlubinka 2002). Other branches of scholarship pair DST with new media (Alexander 2011; Lundby 2008) and as a component of action research where emerging technologies in new media reveal the complexities of human observation in qualitative inquiry (Hearn

430

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning

et al. 2009). Ohler’s (2008) and Lambert’s (2013) critical texts detail DST’s historical origins, along with providing extensive information on ways to include it in classroom activities. Handler Miller’s (2014) important work connects DST’s recent developments while anticipating trends in mobile technology, augmented reality, gaming, and immersive environments. Nevertheless, despite these helpful resources, there appear gaps in the literature on DST’s application in music education.2 How do digital media and production software foster student creativity? For digital storytelling, students can use what they have available to them to assemble, edit, and produce multimedia content. A sensitive instructor notes that certain students demonstrate capabilities with technologies and curiosity with certain topics in common culture. Therefore, the digital media and production software included in a classroom or lab environment, in conjunction with an empathic reflexive educator, may help students to tell their respective stories in ways that print media cannot. Teachers may use production software to advance digital literacy concepts. Buckingham (2003) argues that production is an important aspect in helping students to develop aesthetic taste, critical thinking, and media literacy when they are required to make decisions on what aspects of the content to include in the final product. The student must consider how they procure original material, how that material is used, and how editing affects the storyline. Buckingham’s (2003) point is that when students have to think about the message the media conveys to the audience, they are likely to be more engaged with their production decisions. Although video and audio software facilitates quick edits, Buckingham (2003) encourages the students to be actively engaged in every decision they make about what and not to include. Equally, for music educators, fostering active engagement for students not accustomed to performance extends to the kinds of recorded stories and songs students produce, and the messages that content conveys to the audience.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Project-based learning Markham (2011) notes that project-based learning (PBL) is a sophisticated pedagogical model that includes both practice and applied theory. Markham counts problem-solving and ongoing feedback as two advantages to incorporating PBL into the classroom. Students tackle complex problems and use peer and instructor criticism to make improvements and work toward a final project. Once complete, the teacher and the students reflect on what aspects of the project worked based on the ongoing peer feedback throughout the course. PBL and user-generated content (UGC) advance collaborativelearning competencies by promoting active engagement, shared knowledge, and originality. Students work on a project that is both challenging and interesting, and see tangible rewards for their collective effort when the problem is solved, or when the final product meets their expectations.

431

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Integrating everyday devices and media into the music classroom bridges topical content with available technology that students then use to record sounds, take pictures, and produce short videos related to popular music and culture. Often, this media is shared online and Cayari’s (2018) research suggests amateur videos distributed via YouTube potentially advance informal music learning and technology concepts for students. Tobias (2016) examines the intersection of traditional learning and contemporary media in general music settings, framing such environments as an amalgam of the old and the new. Amateur music videos, like short media-enhanced stories, reveal a kind of creative enterprise, where the producer uses readily available technologies for artistic expression (Cayari 2018; Tobias 2016). Waldron’s (2013) UGC research with social media and community music illustrates that students engage with lessons in which they express an interest. Perhaps equally important, is how the teacher chooses to incorporate these tools in a way that enhances learning rather than focusing exclusively on technology. Tobias, Campbell, and Greco (2015) look at the ways that PBL connects “real world” issues to the music classroom. The authors examine PBL applications to improve teaching and learning in a variety of musical contexts. Snyder (2016) uses a constructivist PBL framework to engage college students in collaborating with peer organizations to produce podcasts and soundtracks in an undergraduate audio engineering course. These examples illustrate that when teachers incorporate theory that considers student interest and real-world applications, the learning evolves from a teacher-centered model to one that welcomes shared and collective exchanges between teacher and student, student and student, and class to peer organization (Tobias, Campbell, and Greco 2015; Snyder 2016). PBL encompasses traditional and nontraditional learning settings, where the relationships between teacher and student evolve to one that is more cooperative. Everyone has a role in determining how “successful” PBL is in the classroom. When the teacher steps back and gives the students some autonomy over creative decisions, the students then have the freedom to use their strengths for the benefit of completing the project. Drawing on Green’s (2008, 2005, 2002) research on informal learning, Cayari (2014) found that when junior and high school students produced music videos, their media production skills advanced, as did their passion for creativity outside of school. Indeed, when digital media are used to supplement traditional modes of writing and skill-based knowledge acquisition, music teachers can use media technology to support rehearsals, promote active listening, and inspire creativity. The students learn by doing, using the tools that they find compelling.

Theoretical framework Before exploring lesson plans, a theoretical framework concerning popular music and media education must be addressed. It is important to reiterate that popular music, media

432

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning

technology, and digital tools must lead to student learning, and perhaps incentivize teachers to reevaluate their approaches. The approaches examined in the following paragraphs ask teachers to consider leaving their comfort zones as the expert and consider how a collaborative, curated model of arts education might augment existing pedagogies. Allsup (2016) envisions a music classroom that functions much like an edgy (and at times unstable), creative laboratory where students and teachers collaboratively work to tackle learning objectives that are equal parts practical, messy, unpredictable, and thought-provoking. Most importantly, Allsup (2016) stresses that the music learning process should be stimulating and, at the very minimum, relevant for students. Allsup’s (2016) argument aligns with Elliot Eisner’s (1994) normative curricular theories, which frame arts education as a process designed to help people grow while simultaneously deriving personal meanings from their efforts (Walzer 2017). As noted above, popular music and media technology generate topical ideas for students to study, analyze, reproduce, and distribute. Nevertheless, satisfactorily implementing digital storytelling while furthering popular music education may be an intimidating prospect for educators. The point of deploying rich media into the music classroom has less to do with embracing technology, and more to do with adopting Freire’s ([1970] 1993) notion of co-intentional education, which describes how teachers and students work together to create and repurpose learning philosophies that stimulate reflection, analytical thinking, and focused ideas (Walzer 2017). DST’s effectiveness to supplement music teaching must push against what Eisner (1994) describes as transactional learning theory. In this context, transactional learning theory might describe how teachers simply dangle new technologies in front of students in the hopes of getting them to conform to prescriptive behaviors and learning outcomes (Walzer 2017). Put another way, digital technology cannot replace rigid, prescriptive teaching that leaves students feeling uninspired due to wholly quantitative performance rubrics and irrelevant music. Eisner (1998) believed that the arts integrate the mind and the body—there is an act of doing and an act of thinking—and Eisner argued that teacher-leaders model literacy and artistry by emphasizing critical thinking, originality, technique, and experimentation (Walzer 2017). For Eisner (1998), literacy is not limited to reading notation, memorizing music, and writing it on staff paper; on the contrary, his notion of literacy requires students to be engaged with all facets of music. Applying Eisner’s (1998) notion of literacy in the music classroom, one appreciates that while reading and writing notes on the staff have merit, so do the multiple ways that human beings express artistic thoughts through movement, technology, relevant content, and multimedia (Walzer 2017). Thus, when music teachers explore various pathways to inspire multimodal literacy, they break out of restrictive quantitative rubrics in favor of a holistic approach to instructing and learning. The methods discussed below aim to emphasize a qualitative artistic approach that helps students to discern personalized meanings, cultivate their imagination and aesthetics, and work together in the music classroom (Eisner 1998). 433

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Curricular example of dst in the music classroom

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Example 1: Media-enhanced rehearsals Ensemble directors may find some opportunities to include project-based learning, usergenerated content, and digital technology. For example, students working on a piece of music could separate and work in smaller groups, and instead of having someone function as the section leader, the students could record their parts and discuss possible ways to improve or change the music arrangements. Another possibility is for students to record parts using their cell phones, a web camera, or a portable camcorder. Once completed, additional students could transfer files and edit the footage. Editing the footage gives the students a chance to make decisions and, in a sense, “curate” the way a rehearsal is presented in the future (Eisner 1998). Closely watching the edited footage gives students a chance to analyze the rehearsal and build simple production competencies. After the editing stage, the teacher might solicit feedback from each member of the section and ensemble on what worked and what did not. As an additional rehearsal strategy, teachers could have students take pictures of a performance area and encourage them to create multimedia schematics that can be used to set up equipment, troubleshoot audiovisual issues, and even improve stage presence and choreography. Working in pairs, the students could be responsible for particular aspects of a production and build confidence in using equipment. In addition to textbooks and manuals, this approach is helpful in building confidence for ensembles that travel regularly. By working toward a deadline, this lesson plan reinforces Eisner’s (1985, 1998) theories that students connect more personally with the material when the tasks are applicable to their lives. When students produce media specifically designed to tackle problematic areas of rehearsal, they use DST to address musical and technical problems that can improve the performance later. For students interested in emulating the touring productions of their favorite popular music artists, DST offers possibilities to experiment with lighting, video, photo, and sound. In this example, the digital story might include the edited rehearsal package (complete with text, still images, audio clips, and voiceover narration) and short conversations with the conductor and members of the ensemble or cast. Interviewing selected participants may reveal key differences in how the conductor and musicians perceive the sound or quality of the “product.” Thus, rather than a conductor serving as the sole provider of quality control, showing interview clips allows other participants to express their input about the rehearsal itself. Some participants may not feel comfortable speaking in front of the entire ensemble. Therefore, the interviews give students a voice to express what they like and dislike about the music, the rehearsal strategies, and how they learn best. After the “packages” are assembled and viewed, the stories stimulate dialogue between the teacher and students about how to improve musical preparation. The teacher may see areas for improvement in his or her communication style.

434

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Example 2: A “studio reality show” Popular music beat makers and lyricists collaborating on tracks can produce catchy, melodic pieces for others to work on in different studios (Seabrook 2015). What might this mean for music educators interested in creating new ideas that incorporate media and digital storytelling? One possibility is to introduce some realism to the class project where a few students take on certain roles in the “studio.” The teacher might encourage students to simulate creating music for a television show with a quick turnaround time. Other students film the process as it happens. This could form the basis for a simple documentary where the students present their work to each other and perhaps outside of the classroom, as well. The realism of turning music around to meet professional deadlines coincides with the PBL philosophy that real-world problems require initiative and creativity. Moreover, students could use this type of project as an inspiration to produce a very simple reality show, later distributed to the class and their families. The idea that students could work on aspects of the track, producing it, mixing it, and creating vocal lines on top is one possibility. Second, for those students not interested in performing, they could be in charge of the recording. Another student could function in a producer capacity, encouraging others to create interesting ideas in the style of specific performers in popular music. Later, the teacher could introduce some peer feedback where students reflect on their creations, exploring how their styles differ from the popular artists they enjoy. Pairing DST with popular music education attempts to realign course content to support open-ended pedagogy, include topical content that interests students, and promote collaboration among all stakeholders (Allsup 2016). In the second example, the teacher might encourage particular students to produce short video diaries where they comment on the work-in-progress. The “artist” and the “crew” would discuss the particular issues they face in meeting deadlines and producing content that meets their objectives. Along the way, the teacher could introduce a series of guiding questions that challenge the students to think about the work they produce. What do the lyrics mean? What sounds should the song have? How should the song be mixed? Given these prompts, the students could then produce media vignettes that address creative blocks, problems with technology, and working with their peers. As the project wraps up, additional students could edit those clips and show the progression of the song from start to finish. The DST “package” could include clips of the progression of the song, along with the teacher’s perception of the undertaking. The teacher may use the remaining time to have students debrief about their particular experience and rate their own level of involvement in the project. Additionally, the teacher could solicit feedback from everyone about the meanings behind the music and the entire production cycle. The DST examples mentioned above enhance PBL in several ways. First, it is clear that PBL respects the teacher’s knowledge of the content area. Rather than forcing students to learn musical and technological concepts by rote, the teacher designs a holistic lesson 435

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

plan that blends traditional and technology-mediated learning approaches. Second, PBL incentivizes student engagement through compelling subject matter and by problemsolving. Third, the critical thinking and thoughtful manner in which students engage with real-world scenarios instills a sense of practicality in their classroom work. Fourth, students work in groups. Team-based exercises require that each person contributes and communicates to meet deadlines and make adjustments throughout the project.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

DST implementation in the music classroom Some teachers may find it difficult to deploy new technologies in music classrooms and elsewhere right away. As Gikas and Grant (2013) point out, one of the major challenges of introducing new technology is the pushback that comes from colleagues who express reticence or hesitation in changing their established teaching and rehearsal methods. Additionally, some schools lack sufficient resources for preservice teachers. Educators with a passion for new technology may find themselves in a minority among colleagues and institutions that express reticence to change. Ultimately, as Allsup (2016) argues, the technology-mediated approaches discussed here must help advance student curiosity and engage experiential learning and personal creativity in popular music education. Gikas and Grant’s (2013) research on mobile technology and social media in higher education suggests that students appreciate the expediency of mobile devices. However, some guidance and training for music teachers and younger students may be needed to avoid a steep learning curve with new tools. When deployed thoughtfully, mobile devices and media technology afford many opportunities for situated learning, multiplatform communication, nimbleness, and diverse lesson experiences (Gikas and Grant 2013). Digital technologies expose students to a variety of roles beyond simply integrating media production into specific lessons. Although tablets, cell phones, laptop computers, and open-source multimedia software (e.g., Shotcut and YouTube for video, and Audacity for audio) come with options to edit and distribute media, students may not understand the role of such tools in the bigger picture of the class without guidance embedded into each project. Although teachers may be excited to integrate these ideas into their lesson plans, administrators may wonder how these technologies enhance student learning.

Final thoughts This chapter offered some curricular examples that music educators may want to explore in their own praxis. The ideas are open-ended, as DST and PBL embrace a “learning by doing” ethos. With care and judicious use of new media technology and popular 436

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning

content, teachers may find DST a helpful supplemental resource for culturally relevant, team-based modules in the music classroom. Such modules can engage students to think about, build, create, revise, and produce individualized stories that advance their learning and reflective skills. DST offers music educators and students a chance to explore media and technology as vehicles for creativity and reflection. Though students can work on pieces individually, the group interaction they experience as members of teams, reinforces the project-based learning model. Likewise, when students choose the project and their role in that pursuit, they have ownership over their learning. With sensible guidance, production-centered activities help students understand how media technology helps to communicate and revise ideas, advance critical thinking, and foster multiplatform literacy. Adams and Hamm (2001) argue that media literacy requires active engagement. When students take control of their learning by incorporating media and popular music, they accomplish two goals. First, they use familiar tools to edit and produce content. The students must experiment and use aesthetics to make artistic decisions. Second, the students focus on topics that interest them and allow them to express themselves outside the boundaries that they have previously considered. Correspondingly, when educational leaders offer professional development opportunities for music teachers to learn new skills, their pedagogy likely improves, as does their ability to promote inclusivity in the classroom and learning. Music teachers may be somewhat hesitant to include complicated technology in their lesson plans. When considering DST concepts, incorporating everyday tools such as cell phones and open-source technology is an excellent starting point. Moreover, teachers need not spend excessive amounts of money on the latest software. What matters is how thoughtfully the technology and popular content inspire students to work together and create personalized narratives appropriate for their grade level. Similarly, teachers may create their own stories for use in professional development sessions and for ethnographic research. Elliot Eisner (1985) describes real-world applications of skill as the expressive objective. Indeed, when students acquire DST-related skills, their technological proficiency expands. Likewise, so too does their ability to experiment and use intellectual reasoning for artistic purposes (Eisner 1994). For music teachers, this same logic applies. DST, paired with critical reflection, expands the methods whereby music educators can document their teaching and use media to journal about their practice (Walzer 2016). Eisner (1998) believed that artists use their brains and bodies to fulfill some tangible goal or mission. Although the finished result is essential, we may infer that Eisner’s theories embraced the process rather than the completed artifact. Moreover, Eisner’s (1998, 2002) writings espouse that the thinking associated with creating something prepares people for life’s intricacies, and fulfills the premise that arts education serves to reflect human potential and authenticity. DST affords students a chance to express themselves in diverse ways while fostering an ethos of cooperation and content creation. 437

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Ultimately, DST facilitates an exchange of ideas between the teacher and the student. Both parties cocreate and use the process of editing and producing content as a source of critical inquiry, and a way to communicate in contemporary ways. Though the personal needs of a teacher may differ from those of the student, both parties will likely benefit from working collaboratively and adopting a respectful, discovery-based way to deliver feedback. Similarly, emphasizing popular music need not overlook other genres. Quite the opposite may occur, where teachers introduce jazz, classical, and world music styles and give students the opportunity to repurpose that content in their own way. Inclusive popular music education need not be confined to the latest fads and gadgets. What is more, DST need not replace established methods of rehearsal, performance, composing, and improvising. What matters is that teachers feel welcome to use the music classroom, the stage, and elsewhere as a fertile place for experimentation and new ideas, where students of all kinds can participate in musical activities by using their entire selves. Digital Storytelling fulfills that niche in a multitude of ways, and teachers may find it useful to give agency to the lifelong learning process for young musicians.

Notes 1 In addition to the diverse scholarship presented in this edited collection, the Journal of Popular Music Education from Intellect is a germane resource for scholars to explore. 2 I have written on DST and its applications in music and audio education. In addition to a more comprehensive review of the DST literature, the article features curricular possibilities and some theoretical considerations for educators. Please see Walzer (2016) for detailed information.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Adams, Dennis M. and Mary Hamm (2001), Literacy in a Multimedia Age, Norwood: Christopher-Gordon Publishers. Alexander, Bryan (2011), The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media: Creating Narratives with New Media, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Allsup, Randall Everett (2016), Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Buckingham, David (2003), Media Education: Literacy, Learning and Contemporary Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cayari, Christopher (2014), “Using Informal Education through Music Video Creation,” General Music Today, 27(3): 17–22. Available online: http://gmt.sagepub.com/ content/27/3/17.short (accessed November 7, 2016). Cayari, Christopher (2018), “Connecting Music Education and Virtual Performance Practices from YouTube,” Music Education Research, 20 (3): 360–376. doi:10.1080/14613808.2017.1383374. 438

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Digital Storytelling, Reflective Teacher Inquiry, and Student Learning

Eisner, Elliot W. (1985), The Art of Educational Evaluation: A Personal View, London: Taylor & Francis. Eisner, Elliot W. (1994), The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Eisner, Elliot W. (1998), The Kind of Schools We Need: Personal Essays, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishers. Eisner, Elliot W. (2002), The Arts and the Creation of Mind, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Freire, Paulo ([1970] 1993), Pedagogy of the Oppressed, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, new revised twentieth anniversary edition, New York: Continuum. Freidus, Natasha and Michelle Hlubinka (2002), “Digital Storytelling for Reflective Practice in Communities of Learners,” ACM SIGGROUP Bulletin, 23 (2): 24–26. Available online: http://alturl.com/hnyjb (accessed November 8, 2016). Gikas, Joanne and Michelle M. Grant (2013), “Mobile Computing Devices in Higher Education: Student Perspectives on Learning with Cellphones, Smartphones & Social Media,” The Internet and Higher Education, 19 (October): 18–26. Available online: http://alturl. com/2wobt (accessed November 7, 2016). Green, Lucy (2002), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Farnham: Ashgate. Green, Lucy (2005), “The Music Curriculum as Lived Experience: Children’s ‘Natural’ Music Learning,” Music Educators Journal, 91 (4): 27–32. Available online: http://discovery.ucl. ac.uk/1479473/1/Green2005Music27.pdf (accessed January 30, 2018). Green, Lucy (2008), Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy, Farnham: Ashgate. Hearn, Greg, Jo A. Tacchi, Marcus Foth, and June Lennie (2009), Action Research and New Media: Concepts, Methods and Cases, New York: Hampton Press. Lambert, Joe (2013), Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, New York: Routledge. Lundby, Knut, ed. (2008), Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-Representations in New Media, New York: Peter Lang. Markham, Thom (2011), “Project Based Learning: A Bridge Just Far Enough.” Teacher Librarian, 39 (2): 38–42. Available online: http://alturl.com/j56r9 (accessed November 8, 2016). Miller, Carolyn Handler (2014), Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment, Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Ohler, Jason (2006), “The World of Digital Storytelling,” Educational Leadership, 63 (4): 44–47. Available online: http://alturl.com/gsynb (accessed November 6, 2016). Ohler, Jason (2008), Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Robin, Bernard R. (2006), “The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling,” in Caroline M. Crawford, Roger Carlsen, Karen McFerrin, Jerry Price, Roberts Weber, and Dee Ann Willis (eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2006, 709–716. Orlando, FL: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Available online: www.learntechlib.org/p/22129 (accessed November 7, 2016).

439

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Robin, Bernard (2008), “Digital Storytelling: A Powerful Technology Tool for the 21st Century Classroom,” Theory into Practice, 47 (3): 220–228. Available online: http://alturl.com/ wwrew (accessed November 7, 2016). Sadik, Alaa (2008), “Digital Storytelling: A Meaningful Technology-Integrated Approach for Engaged Student Learning,” Educational Technology Research and Development, 56 (4): 487–506. Available online: http://alturl.com/ojq7e (accessed November 6, 2016). Seabrook, John 2015. The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. New York: W. W. Norton. Snyder, Kyle P. (2016), “Understanding Project-Based Learning in the Audio Classroom: Using PBL to Facilitate Audio Storytelling,” in Proceedings of the 141st Audio Engineering Society Convention, paper no. 9601, Los Angeles: AES. Available online: www.aes.org/e-lib/browse. cfm?elib=18405 (accessed November 7, 2016). Tobias, Evan S. (2016), “Learning with Digital Media and Technology in Hybrid Music Classrooms,” in Carlos R. Abril and Brent M. Gault (eds.), Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints, 112–140, New York: Oxford University Press. Available online: https://tinyurl.com/ycljojj5 (accessed November 6, 2016). Tobias, Evan S., Mark Robin Campbell, and Phillip Greco (2015), “Bringing Curriculum to Life Enacting Project-Based Learning in Music Programs,” Music Educators Journal, 102 (2): 39–47. Available online: http://mej.sagepub.com/content/102/2/39.short (accessed November 6, 2016). University of Houston (2017), “What is Digital Storytelling?” University of Houston Education. Available online: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/page.cfm?id=27&cid=27 (accessed July 10, 2017). Waldron, Janice (2013), “User-generated Content, YouTube and Participatory Culture on the Web: Music Learning and Teaching in Two Contrasting Online Communities,” Music Education Research, 1 (3): 257–274. Available online: http://alturl.com/cxu5y (accessed November 8, 2016). Walzer, Daniel (2016), “Digital Storytelling in Music and Audio Education: Inspiring Modern Reflective Practice with Relevant Technology,” TOPICS for Music Education Praxis, 2016 (3): 46–76. Available online: http://topics.maydaygroup.org/articles/2016/Walzer2016.pdf (accessed November 6, 2016). Walzer, Daniel (2017), “An Analysis of Music and Audio Educators’ Use of Adult Learning Principles for Non-traditional Learners Using Computer and Media Technology,” unpublished PhD diss., University of the Cumberlands, Williamsburg, KY. Williams, David (2017), “The Other 80% Music Home.” Music Creativity through Technology. Available online:. https://musiccreativity.org/index.html (accessed July 9, 2017).

440

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

30

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production Ross Bicknell

Introduction

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Savage (2012) suggests that historical, cultural, and sociological backgrounds of digital technology should be taught when using production tools. According to Ofsted1 (2009) English school students were often asked to complete tasks separated from such meaningful context—a problem long associated with inclusion of popular music in educational settings (Green 2001; Hebert et al. 2017); Ofsted noted an inherent conservatism in many pedagogies applied in music technology and production classrooms at secondary school level in the UK. I have observed similar patterns in some higher education (HE) and further education (FE)2 settings in west London, England. This article expands on some of these ideas, including observations based on my classroom experiences as an educator at a music college in this geographic location. I consider integration of cultural and contextual studies in a production classroom context, and will discuss integration of DIY approaches to creativity into a formal education context, i.e., “formalizing the informal” (Smith 2013: 29). I look at the roles of electronic dance music in the above discussions, focusing on the DIY aesthetic of techno.

The techno DIY aesthetic Electronic dance music3 is a meta-genre (McLeod 2001: 1) whose definition crystallizes in house and techno music of the late 1980s. It often has a 4/4 beat with a repetitive kick drum of around 120–140 bpm as its main signifying feature. Techno is from Detroit and is inspired by science fiction, krautrock, especially the band Kraftwerk, with minimalist electronic instrumentation (Wilton 2011). It differs from house in that it contains few or no vocals. It is also unlikely to contain any performance other than that of the producer. Alvin Toffler coined the term “Techno

441

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

rebels” in his book The Third Wave (1981), a futurist treatise on the transition toward a postindustrial society, which influenced the genre name (Toop 1995: 215). Since the emergence of techno in the 1980s, it can be seen as an antithesis to music school practices that guard gates to creativity. An example of gate guarding is intense grading systems of proficiency. “In pursuing an ideal sound, idiosyncrasy must be controlled and is nearly always considered wrong” (Green 2001: 212). No “musical” training, however, is necessary to be able to operate an 808 drum machine.4 Electronic dance music’s democratizing nature in this way makes it a useful tool in the classroom—notwithstanding the critique that has been leveled at such notions of the democratizing potential of technology by, for example, Adam Patrick Bell (2015). Techno engages creators and listeners with the grammar of music, as implied in the origins of the term. It comes from “technology,” the systematic treatment of “art” (Tekhne), and “speaking, discourse” (Logia) (Chantrell 2004). It also engages us with futurist, utopian, and dystopian ideas about technology contained in popular science fiction. This is reflected in postindustrial soundscapes, the samples and the use of the synthesizers used in soundtracks from the likes of Vangelis and John Carpenter. The musical materials, the grammar with which they are arranged, the technology and the manner of its usage are tightly bound together. Pope (2011) suggests that Detroit is a helpful metaphor for the way techno music can be understood, asserting, “the city was a universally-recognised work of art when it was designed and realised as the modernist future of the Western world and it becomes even more aestheticised as this once utopian vision/realisation flips over onto its opposite, a realisation and a vision of dystopia” (41). This dystopian future is “the now” for those living in Detroit. It is also reflected in the ways techno producers made their music in the 1980s and 1990s: They relied on the often antiquated tools they had available at hand. The Roland TR-303, TR808 and TR-909 for instance were initially developed to faithfully reproduce the sound of bass and drums, failing miserably in this function; they were quickly appropriated by techno producers for their synthetic sounds. (Pope 2011: 38) This experimental DIY attitude is also mirrored in the people of downtown Detroit’s forced embracing of DIY living principles in the face of abandonment by the authorities and mainstream commerce.5 The sonic qualities of techno have an immediacy that make it sound as though it could be thrown together if one knows the technology. It suggests the playability of a 1980s Nintendo game, which makes it motivating and accessible to make and consume. A techno producer’s experiments and the sonic processes they devise are the key to appreciating this music. 442

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production

Production ideology A techno producer is nearly always the sole originator of their music. The techno producer’s set up6 has influenced the DAWs (digital audio workstations)7 of today, which in turn have affected the way music sounds and is made, with many “bedroom producers” working in solitude, covering a range of roles formerly adopted by multiple agents; Adam Patrick Bell (2014) notes, for instance, that such “a hybrid approach is demonstrative of how the musician-engineer barrier is challenged in the DAW home studio paradigm” (1). Brian Eno (1983) spoke of these new possibilities, asserting, “Once you become familiar with studio facilities, you can begin to compose in relation to those facilities … actually constructing a piece in the studio” (129). Logic Audio and other software can incorporate simulations of TR-909s and 808s as well as synthesizers from these periods, for example, the famous Roland bass synthesizer TB-303 (A Guy Called Gerald), the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 (John Carpenter) and the Yamaha CS-80 (Vangelis). They accommodate different fusions of technique and kit, for example, the ability to trigger samples, put drum machines through effects units, and gradually manipulate parameters by hand in an improvisational manner. This allows the output to be as relevant and the process to be as tangible and creative to a producer in a techno DIY set up as if using hardware, but with economic and practical benefits.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Timbre as differentiation Timbre is a key factor in differentiating most popular music genres, and the music’s producers, from one another; as Blake (2012) noted, that “timbre, more than any other musical parameter, musically expresses differentiation” (12). Moorefield (2005) argues compellingly that “Before [Brian] Eno, pop’s sound effects and various delays and distortions were arrangement devices, built around songs” (54). In techno music “after Eno,” manipulating timbre is intrinsic to the composition, distinguishing tracks from one another. For example, delay can be manipulated to create a melody/riff, such as in Orbital’s “Remind” (Orbital 1993); modulation, side chaining, and compression8 are the main features of techno influenced “glitch” tracks by Flying Lotus, like “Zodiac Shit” (Flying Lotus 2010). Timbre is a key component in consumption as well as production of techno; Pope (2011) finds that “The techno listener devotes attention to each fragment (e.g., industrial noise) in its integral relationship with the whole of the individual track” (39). When teaching, I focused on these sonic “fragments” that students and I could then isolate and discuss. The repetition and gradual morphing of fragments over extended periods suit this approach well, and can give focus to what can otherwise become an overwhelming practice due to the vastness of the options at the disposal of students in a modern-day DAW. 443

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Institutions/praxes Randall Allsup notes that “Considering the diverse array of music that’s accessible in today’s global world, it is surprisingly easy to figure out what counts as official knowledge among music educators” (2010: 1). As Elliott and Silverman advise, it follows that “Praxis always includes ethics … musics are powerful ‘affordances’ that allow people to feel and understand (nonconsciously and consciously) the social, cultural, gendered … dimensions of others’ personhood” (2015:110). In other words, music-making is “loaded.” Bull (2016) have all contributed to the idea that “college music education around the world is dominated by the hegemony of western art music, and to a lesser extent, jazz” (cited in Cremata et al. 2016: 1). In many areas of the music college in which I work in northwest London, one can translate art music to a similar hegemony in a very limited area of popular rock, jazz, soul, and indie music (Smith 2014; Smith and Shafighian 2013). Praxes that remain primarily DIY practices (techno, punk, hip-hop) and those that form a hegemonic dominance across PME form very different propositions for educators. Elliott and Silverman (2015) remind us that different praxes should be considered as part of an intersubjective and intercultural experience—“Teachers and learners face the possibility that what they believe to be universal is not” (194). The implications of understanding this point are profound, and can require a comprehensive rethinking of the assumptions and structures that underpin and perpetuate institutions of higher music education (Hebert, Abramo, and Smith 2017; Smith 2015a). Tensions can appear between practices and attendant sets of assumptions when, for instance, people used to working in different professional domains converge in a music education space. I witnessed a model in higher popular music education (HPME) in which producers or engineers were given teaching jobs in the classroom, where their studio and music industry credentials were prioritized over teaching experience. The production course prospectus touts “Highly experienced industry tutors to guide your learning experience” and “respected industry practitioners” (ICMP 2018). Commercial/ industrial and pedagogical perspectives and practices do not always mix well, especially if left uncritiqued or unchallenged (Jones 2017; Smith and Shafighian 2013).

Problems The College claims on its website that its BA Hons creative musicianship degree “develops your creativity while expressing your own unique ‘creative voice’” (ICMP 2018). A common context for many music production lessons in HPME is a classroom lined with DAWs, each with a set of headphones. This is not a situation where students can interact with the processes of live recording. Practitioners are often used to recording and producing artists in high specification production studios, and inevitably this can be 444

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production

the knowledge and genre bias they try to pass on, sharing mixing techniques and ways to streamline and refine live performances. Some students may have recordings with which they can work, but many do not. This is a problem for first-year undergraduate students who have chosen to study for a degree that will hopefully enable them to produce music. I have regularly witnessed half-full production classrooms at ICMP, exemplifying a lack of student engagement in the subject matter. These students are taught how to “polish” or refine music, and to view working in the DAW as a separate stage in the production process rather than as integral to producing their own music. The type of output at the institute often follows certain aesthetics that belong to certain praxes only, as mentioned above (Smith 2015b; Smith and Shafighian 2013). Classes are thus often taught with a strictly vocational focus imposed by teachers upon learners, and can be visibly out of step with contemporary commercial music norms, musical and identity aspirations of learners, and the established DIY, creative practices in the field of techno production. Tasks in these classes can include track laying, making a ringtone, mixing stems, or tidying a vocal performance—useful technical skills but merely facilitative to the act of creating music with a unique voice, as opposed to the act itself. These tasks are not adequately creative, as sole use of production lessons and only partially contribute to encapsulating the meaning of being a music producer in 2017 (Askerøi and Viervoll 2017; Thompson and Stevenson 2017). I wished to use technology to explore creativity in order to live up to the claims made by the college’s website and to meet the needs of contemporary students.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Creative voices The “voice” mentioned on the college website cannot exist in a cultural vacuum. Creative acts/artifacts representing individuals’ creative voices exist in culture and are absorbed by audiences in relation to other works, cultural activities, engagements, moments, or products (Barrett 2011; Cole 1996). Awareness of contexts of consumption—in the broadest sense of the music ecosystem rather than purely commercially (Bennett 2015)—must be a key component of any course that proposes to teach creativity. The DIY construct is crucial in today’s production environment. The technology used to create is affordable, learnable (via internet platforms, e.g., YouTube), community based (with built in “share” functionality), and accessible. The output is thus varied and specific, with new subgenres created all the time (McLeod 2001: 60), including, for example, vapor-wave, glitch, drill and bass, wonky, IDM (intelligent dance music), and footwork. Genres are embraced, discarded, and reabsorbed at an intense rate, in many cases without the makers having received any musical schooling within institutions. There are ways of doing things within each of these different praxes that differentiate between genres, and the means of differentiation are often hard to detect unless one

445

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

knows the scene, the culture, and the music. Teachers can utilize students’ and their own knowledge by examining traits of genres and their cultural significance.

Classroom approaches 1. Synthesis techniques I have found the teaching of synthesis techniques to be invaluable in my production classes, as it moves the subject away from the often held idea that we are trying to recreate “real” sounds. An example of a class I taught involved small groups of students researching the different component parts of a synthesizer,9 making reference to examples of their use, cultural aspects of their development, and providing commentary on related aesthetics.

2. Sonic environments

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The (virtual) studio environment of the Logic DAW offers a variety of musical instruments that are in some ways simpler to master than traditional popular music instruments, but also significantly more challenging due to the level of creative choice available and the potentially endless environments/sonic worlds that can be accessed or created. We explored this in a class in which I assigned to students environments, for example, a car park, swimming pool, or subway system. Students composed ambient music relating to these and described their creative process, also discussing cultural aspects of these environments and their relationships to the work.

3. Accessing accidental music Another class involved a beat-making exercise that drew on close-up imagery of organic and manmade formations. Musical examples from techno influenced genres influenced by natural and manmade environments were played and analyzed. The results were inspiring, and the next week students selected panoramic landscape environments to musically interpret, at the same tempo as the reference tracks inspired by close-up formations. After that they had to combine these tracks (they were not informed this would be happening). They then had to work with the new combinations that occurred. One of the pedagogical purposes of this lesson was to explore “accidental” music; music is often made in such ways. Failure and accident are likely to be invaluable and frequent results of using DAWs and as Cascone (2002) suggests, could be acknowledged and woven into the creative process, perhaps especially in a DIY techno context. 446

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production

4. Theme and meaning Techno producer Jeff Mills notes that techno wasn’t always designed to be dance music, but it had its routes in being a kind of futurist statement (Gieben 2013). Techno artists raise such issues in song titles and cover designs, relating their music to discussions of genre, process, meaning, and value. Such a self-referential genre is thus a valuable pedagogical resource. In my classes, we looked at Russolo’s Futurist Music Manifesto (1916), relating it to techno, tech-step, drum ’n’ bass, and contemporary consideration including science-fiction media such as the film Bladerunner (regularly sampled in techstep and techno) and its dystopian themes of immigration, over population, technology’s dangerous developments, climate change, AI, and issues of individual and collective identity in the advanced stages of a global capitalist economic reality (Reynolds 1999). Cyborg theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, accelerationist ideas, and futurism were discussed in relation to these tracks during three-hour lessons involving short musicological analysis lectures, student micro-research tasks, teaching of practical techniques, practicing of these techniques, subsequent analysis and discussion of the results. Elements, references, features, and gestures that make up the bricolage that is the underlying aspect of these tracks include influences such as sci-fi, horror, and Belgian techno. They feature samples (used both functionally and as intended thematic reference points) from experimental jazz, industrial noise, and the “Amen” sample.10 Production techniques include distorted bass lines, filter sweeps, and other synthesis techniques.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Conclusion Sometimes I have heard from colleagues that “you cannot teach creativity.” I have also heard them use this adage as an excuse to focus purely on teaching a relatively narrow range of technical skills in restricted contexts, rather than to explore more complex issues of music’s meanings and what a creative voice might actually be saying. This attitude resists the opening up of the subject to let alternative musical praxes in to creative classroom discussion. I suspect on one level this attitude is designed to nullify further exploration, which may lead to difficult situations for an educator who is used to an instructional method in which the teacher (or producer) has all the answers. Often industry-sourced professionals may know no other way to teach having had little pedagogical training, so in this sense the forces (often commercial considerations) that demand the reputations of educators to meet these criteria also stifle and undermine the learning experience. Prejudices against and lack of engagement with DIY creative practices in production such as techno are implied also by the above observed comment. The comment implies that they would rather not become involved in the creative aspects of production teaching and perhaps do not respect those uses of production that

447

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

transcend more traditional views of the role of a producer and reveal an alternative side to the subject, a different, more involved way of being creative with it. In my experience you are much more likely to provoke a creative response from students if seeking to engage in a pluralistic, Socratic model for the classroom that draws from a variety of viewpoints rather than a didactic method. New praxes to draw on can come from students perspectives, the wider musical landscape, the “technosphere” (Toffler 1981) and DIY perspectives. The DIY techno aesthetic brings into play multiple viewpoints through its use of sample-based bricolage; it thus mirrors the kind of classroom dynamic I have tried to create. I have found there is not only a nice symmetry to this but constant bleed occurs between these processes, which becomes evident to educator and student alike as the semester progresses. Combinations of techniques and certain skill sets that characterize genres contain within them ideas; to learn to use these techniques creatively is to interact with their meanings in culture, beyond the “music itself.” I contend, therefore, that moving away from purely technique-orientated learning approaches in creative production pedagogies is desirable, due to restrictive and potentially stagnating implications for learners as well as the creative fertility of the music ecosystem. Cultural context is one of the most potent considerations for educators when working with students creating music. Pedagogically embedded fusion of the elements I have discussed may ensure learning at a deeper level, producing creative work of more potency, value, and relevance.

Notes 1 The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) UK. 2 Education below the level of a university degree for people who have left school.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

3 The popular term EDM connotes a relatively recent, highly commodified version of electronic dance music for many. For this reason, I will not use this acronym. 4 The Roland TRX-808 Drum machine was released in 1980 and discontinued in 1983. 5 Julien Temple’s (2010) film Requiem for Detroit depicts industrial decay and collapse in Detroit. 6 Drum machine, sampler, synthesizer, midi sequencer. 7 DAWs comprise of a computer with midi/audio sequencing software, for example, Logic, Cubase, a midi controller (usually a keyboard), and audio/midi input/output device. 8 Side chaining can enable a pulsing/throbbing effect by routing different channels to each other to affect volume. For example, every time a kick drum plays it automatically turns down the synthesizer for the time the kick is audible. Modulation, for example, chorus, flanger, phaser affect pitch, gain, and various other parameters at varying speeds. Can often result in a shimmery effect. Compression evens out the volume of a piece of audio by making loud parts quieter and quiet parts louder. The more extreme the use, the more audible it is as a timbre (Snoman 2014). 448

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production

  9 Oscillator: Generates initial sound source. Low frequency oscillator (LFO): Oscillates at an inaudibly low frequency, used to affect other parameters at slow rate of modulation, for example, pitch, volume. Filter: Filters out chosen frequencies. Envelope: Controls how a sound is triggered, for example, attack, decay, sustain, release (ADSR) (Cousins and Hepworth-Sawyer 2014: 225–261). 10 The “Amen” break refers to a sample of a drum pattern from “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons (1969).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Allsup, Randall E. (2010), “Choosing Music Literature,” in Harold F. Abeles and Lori A. Custodero (eds.), Critical Issues in Music Edu-cation: Contemporary Theory and Practice, 215–235, New York: Oxford University Press. Askerøi, Eirik and André Viervoll (2017), “Musical Listening: Teaching Studio Production in an Academic Institution,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 231–242, Abingdon: Routledge. Barrett, Margaret S. (2011), “Towards a Cultural Psychology of Music Education,” in Margaret S. Barrett (ed.), A Cultural Psychology of Music Education, 1–16, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bell, Adam Patrick (2014), “Trial by Fire: A Case Study of the Musician-Engineer Hybrid Role in the Home Studio,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 7 (3): 295–312. Bell, Adam Patrick (2015), “DAW Democracy? The Dearth of Democracy in ‘Playing the Studio’,” Journal of Music, Technology and Education, 8 (2): 129–146. Bennett, Toby (2015), Learning the Music Business: Evaluating the ‘Vocational Turn’ in Music Industry Education, London: UK Music. Blake, David K. (2012), “Timbre as Differentiation in Indie Music,” MTO, A Journal for the Society for Music Theory, 18 (2): 1–18. Bull, Anna (2016), “El Sistema as a Bourgeois Social Project: Class, Gender, and Victorian Values,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 15 (1): 120–153. Cascone, Kim (2002), “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal, 24 (4): 12–18. Cole, Michael (1996), Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Chantrell, Glynnis (2004), Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories, second edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Cremata, Radio, Joseph Pignato, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2016), “Flash Study Analysis and the Music Learning Profiles Project,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 15 (5): 51–80. Elliott, David and Marissa Silverman (2015), “A Response to Commentaries on Music Matters: A Philosophy of Music Education,” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, 14 (3): 106–130.

449

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Eno, Brian (2016), “The Studio as Compositional Tool,” in C. Cox and D. Warner (eds.), Audio Culture, Readings in Modern Music, 129, London: Bloomsbury. Flying Lotus (2010), “Zodiac Shit,” track 5 on Cosmogramma, Warp, compact disc. Gieben, Bram E. (2013), “Space is the Place: Techno Pioneer Jeff Mills Introduces His Live Score to Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon,” The Skinny, February 1, 2013. Available online: www.google.co.uk/amp/www.theskinny.co.uk/festivals/uk-festivals/music/space-is-theplace-techno-pioneer-jeff-mills-introduces-his-live-score-to-fritz-langs-woman-in-themoon%3famp (accessed January 23, 2018). Green, Lucy (2001), How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education, Abingdon: Routledge. Hebert, David G., Joseph Abramo, and Gareth Dylan Smith (2017), “Sociological and Epistemological Issues in Popular Music Education,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 451–478, Abingdon: Routledge. Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) (2018), “BA (Hons) Creative Musicianship Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocal, Songwriting, Other Instrument.” Available online: www.icmp.ac.uk/course/ba-hons-creative-musicianship (accessed January 23, 2018). Jones, Michael (2017), “Teaching Music Industry in Challenging Times: Addressing the Neoliberal Employability Agenda in Higher Education at a Time of Music-Industrial Turbulence,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 342–354, Abingdon: Routledge. McLeod, Kembrew (2001), “Genres, Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13: 59–75. Moorefield, Virgil (2005), The Producer as Composer: Shaping the Sounds of Popular Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Orbital (1993), “Remind,” track 6 on Orbital, Internal, compact disc. Photek (2007), Form and Function Vol. 2, Sanctuary Records, compact disc. Pope, Richard (2011), “Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture,” Dancecult, Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1): 24–44. Reynolds, Simon (1999), Generation Ecstasy, into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, New York: Routledge. Russolo, Luigi (1916), The Art of Noises, English translation. Available online: www.unknown. nu/futurism/noises.html (accessed November 27, 2018). Savage, John (2012), “Those Who Can, Play; Those Who Can’t, Teach,” in Chris Philpott and Gary Spruce (eds.), Debates in Music Teaching, 169–185, Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2013), I Drum, Therefore I Am: Being and Becoming a Drummer, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2014), “Popular Music in Higher Education,” in Graham Welch and Ioulia Papageorgi (eds.), Advanced Musical Performance: Investigations in Higher Education Learning, 33–48, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan (2015a), “Neoliberalism and Symbolic Violence in Higher Music Education,” in Lisa DeLorenzo (ed.), Giving Voice to Democracy: Diversity and Social Justice in the Music Classroom, 65–84, New York: Routledge.

450

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Techno DIY: Teaching Creativity through Music Production

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Smith, Gareth Dylan (2015b), “Masculine Domination and Intersecting Fields in Private-sector Popular Music Performance Education in the UK,” in Pamela Burnard, Ylver Hofstander, and Johan Söderman (eds.), Bourdieu and the Sociology of Music and Music Education, 61–79, Farnham: Ashgate. Smith, Gareth Dylan and Atar Shafighian (2013), “Creative Space and the ‘Silent Power of Traditions’ in Popular Music Performance Education,” in Pamela Burnard (ed.), Developing Creativities in Higher Music Education: International Perspectives and Practices, 256–267, London: Routledge. Snoman, Rick (2014), Dance Music Manual: Tools, Toys, and Techniques, third edition, Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Surgeon (1999), Force + Form, Tresor, compact disc. Temple, Julien, dir. (2010) Requiem for Detroit, London: Films of Record Ltd. The Winstons (1969), “Amen, Brother,” Metromedia, vinyl 7 inch. Thompson, Paul and Alex Stevenson (2017), “Missing a Beat: Exploring Experiences, Perceptions and Reflections of Popular Electronic Musicians in UK Higher Education Institutions,” in Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, and Phil Kirkman (eds.), The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 203–216, Abingdon: Routledge. Toffler, Alvin (1981), The Third Wave, London: Pan Books. Toop, David (1995), Ocean of Sound, London: Serpent’s Tail. Wilton, Peter (2011), “Techno,” in Alison Latham, Oxford Companion to Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online: www.oxfordreference.com/search?q=Techno&sea rchBtn=Search&isQuickSearch=true (accessed January 23, 2018).

451

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

452

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Part VII

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Epilogue

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

454

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

31

On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever John Kratus

The image of “the road” is an enduring one in popular songs. From Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” to Sheryl Crow’s “Every Day Is a Winding Road,” to Chuck Berry’s “Route 66,” to the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’,” the long and winding road in popular music has transported generations of listeners to the destinations of their dreams. As popular music education takes its place in the contemporary music curriculum, it has its own set of roads, leading students and educators to as yet undiscovered end points. In some settings, the road has been an easy one, like a speedy super highway, and in other settings the road has been an arduous dirt path. This chapter describes a personal road to popular music education, explores the motivation to take to the road, and explains why the road is never-ending.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

A personal journey First, a personal road: I decided to become a music teacher because I wanted a career that enabled me to play guitar every day. In retrospect, that seems to me like a foolish reason for a 19-year-old to pursue a lifelong career as a music teacher. I had no particular love of school music as a student, and I had no music teacher role models that I revered. My most salient memory in elementary general music was being asked to strum my finger across a cardboard picture of an autoharp on my desk, pretending to press the buttons and change chords. One lucky child would be selected to go to the front of the room and strum a real autoharp, while the rest of the class had to pretend, being careful not to smudge the cardboard with our dirty fingers. One aspect of school music I thoroughly enjoyed was performing in my elementary school choir, singing songs in foreign languages in two-part harmony. I was even selected by my choir teacher to sing on a program at a local TV station when “educational television” was in its infancy. But those cheery feelings toward choral singing changed when I reached junior high school at age 12. The discipline in the boys’ choir was so bad that we rarely sang, and when we did, it was rubbish like unison sea chanties. Yo-ho-ho!

455

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Our winter concert was such an embarrassment that I sailed away from formal school music in seventh grade. The following year, the guitar became my passion. I took lessons for six weeks at a local music store but quit when I found out that my teacher could not play guitar. After that, I was self-taught, avidly listening to recordings, imitating my guitar-playing friends, and writing songs. For Christmas one year, my parents bought me a stereo reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I immersed myself in making double-tracked recordings of my songs. In high school, I was an active member of my school’s Guitar Club, and I performed at several school hootenannies. Notably, the faculty advisor for the Guitar Club was not a music teacher. Meanwhile, I taught myself to play bass guitar and joined a rock band with three of my friends. We practiced two hours a day after school, had a manager, and played gigs at high schools and in bars at which we pretended to be over the drinking age of 18. In the summer between high school and college, I played four nights a week in the resident band of a biker bar. We were getting paid to be real musicians and loving the gritty experience of performing for semi-inebriated audiences and eating breakfast in all-night diners at 4:00 a.m. But as far as my high school’s music teachers were concerned, I was a nonmusician. Once I made the decision as a second-year college student to major in music education, I had to take a semester off to learn to play classical guitar well enough to pass an audition. After passing the audition and becoming a music education student, all my teaching methods classes in college felt like variations on the same theme: break down music to its component parts, teach those parts in isolation, and then reassemble the whole. The process was supremely logical, but terribly sterile, aiming for perfection rather than discovery. I was taught that music is a fixed, preexisting object. It was the students’ job to do something with it: perform it, analyze it, describe it, sight-read it, or notate it as accurately as possible. I wondered, what was the joy in that? I wanted to be a successful teacher, and so eagerly adopted all I was taught. But the music I was being taught and what I knew to be music were two completely different things. After I graduated from college in 1975 with my degree in music education, I taught general-choral music to students between the ages of 4 and 15 in urban western New York. I had come prepared to teach with all the music literacy methods I learned in my college classes: solfege, notation, and folk songs in all the modes. After graduating I read books from the public library on Orff and Kodaly in an effort to expand my teaching repertoire. But I found myself relying much more on my rock band skills than on the teaching methods I had learned in college and from library books. I conducted junior high choirs with a twelve-string guitar strung around my neck. I wrote songs for my elementary students to sing (“Ralph, the Giant Snowball” was my greatest hit). I taught music by ear more than I did with notation. The concerts my students performed used very few scores from the standard school repertoire and were mostly popular selections that I arranged from musicians like Stevie Wonder, Carole King and Billy Joel. For example, my junior high choir performed The Beatles’ “Let It Be” in three456

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever

part harmony, with four flutes, bass guitar, drums, and piano. I continued to play on weekends in rock bands, but I hid that from my students, fearful of what their parents and my school’s administration might think. I loved teaching music in my peculiar way but was certain that I was doing the “music teacher” thing all wrong. I felt like I was faking it. Time changes everything. Here I am, writing the concluding chapter for a book on popular music education and feeling like I was born forty years too soon. When I was teaching children in the mid- to late-1970s, there were no resources that I knew of to guide me, no role models in music education for what I was doing. Many years later I discovered that a Canadian music educator, Hans Fenger, was teaching music the same way I was, and at the same time I was teaching. A recording of his elementary school students’ concerts made in 1976–77 was released as a CD by Bar/None in 2001 as The Langley Schools Project: Innocence and Despair (Wikipedia 2018). It included arrangements of songs by musicians like David Bowie, the Beach Boys, and Paul McCartney. The recording became a cult classic, and many music reviewers listed it as one of the best albums of 2001. Reviewer Neil Gaiman wrote, “I wish every school taught music like this” (Chusid n.d.). In 2003, Mike White wrote a screenplay inspired by the Langley Project; it became the hit movie, School of Rock (DeRogatis 2003). What a long, strange trip it’s been!

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Wanderlust In the intervening years since my fledgling efforts as a novice music educator, the music teaching profession, for the most part, has evolved. The profession has now developed to the point that special interest groups in popular music education have been established in both the International Society for Music Education and the National Association for Music Education (USA). The Association for Popular Music Education has been created and holds annual conferences with sessions on pedagogy and scholarly issues. The academic Journal of Popular Music Education and other international and national journals are now publishing articles on popular music education. The production of the Bloomsbury handbook you are reading is another example of the growing influence of popular music education. Despite these advances, it is also necessary to acknowledge that the adoption of popular music education varies wildly from school to school. Not everywhere on this road are conditions accommodating to popular music education. Whereas some universities today require music education majors to perform in a popular music ensemble, at other universities students can be kicked out of practice rooms for strumming a guitar while singing a song. Some elementary and secondary schools engage students in creating original music in popular music ensembles, and in other schools the influence of popular music extends only so far as the marching band playing “Hang on Sloopy.” In many

457

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

schools and universities, popular music still resides somewhere outside the canon, and the teaching of vernacular musicianship is nonexistent. For teachers in those schools, introducing popular music education practices can potentially damage their reputation and career. The orchestra teacher who transforms her large ensemble into a series of self-directed chamber groups may be risking her position in the school. The same can be said of the elementary general music teacher whose classes adopt vernacular musicianship models like those developed by Musical Futures or Little Kids Rock, or about the college professor whose methods classes learn to perform on ukuleles or iPads. In some settings, the road to popular music education is beset with obstacles. Teachers who pursue the road under such conditions must be prepared for a journey into the unknown. The preservice music educators in Fraser Gottlieb’s chapter (Chapter 19) came to understand the educational value of creating and performing popular music in small groups, but they worried that this approach would not be accepted in their schools. In my own collegiate teaching of vernacular musicianship to music education majors in a music methods class, students reported that the learning experience was unique and valuable to them. For example, one of the students wrote, anonymously, “In working on these projects it was wonderful to see how much personal ownership and pride and sheer joy were present, aspects that are sadly missing from many students’ large ensemble experiences.” Another student wrote, “Our group created a trusting environment and I felt very encouraged to just explore on my instrument. I had never had that feeling before.” Regardless of the benefits they perceived, students also expressed concerns that future school employers would not allow them to teach this way. At a recent professional conference in the United States, a college professor and two of his undergraduate students presented a session on a vernacular musicianship teaching project at a community center in an urban neighborhood. The undergraduates were highly articulate and enthusiastic about their experience and the effect they had on their students. One student said that the project had changed her entire approach to teaching. During the Q&A, I asked her how she would incorporate what she had learned into her future teaching. She hesitated and said that she might teach a little of it if she had time at the end of the year, but that she had to cover the curriculum first. The belief that many music educators and preservice educators have, that societal expectations constrain them to teach decades-old practices, is an impediment to the evolution of music education. Before embarking on any arduous passage, one must feel a sense of wanderlust, that is, a strong desire to travel. For many, it may be easier to stay home, make a pot of tea, and watch Netflix. It is certainly easier to stay within one’s comfort zone, teach as one was taught, and conform to the traditions and expectations of one’s school. A sense of wanderlust, the same joyful need to explore new vistas that Willie Nelson expresses in “On the Road Again,” is a necessary first step to change. I want to acknowledge that the adoption of popular music methods and repertoire in my own music teaching was a natural outgrowth of my teenage experiences as a 458

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

musician. I was doing nothing special, simply employing the skills I had developed as a practicing popular musician. Yes, I was being a rebel in terms of what a music teacher in the late 1970s in the United States was expected to do, but the musicianship and teaching approach came naturally to me, given my personal history. The wanderlust that led me to doing popular music education had been growing in me since I was 13. Similarly, in Julie Beauregard’s chapter (Chapter 20), her interest in revising the existing course offerings at her school may be traced to her being “a lifelong fan and practitioner of popular music” (291). Most collegiate music education majors, especially those in the United States, have had very different musical experiences. For the most part, as students they performed in large ensembles (i.e., band, orchestra, and choir) in which they excelled. Their acceptance as college music majors is dependent on their passing an audition of “standard repertoire” for their instrument or voice. They may have received awards and scholarships for their musical achievement in school ensembles. They likely revered their high school ensemble teacher. It is completely understandable that these young professionals would wish to replicate this experience that was so valuable to them for their own students someday. For those teachers, the wanderlust to explore new forms of music education may not come easily. And yet, many classically trained musicians are now adopting the practices of popular music education. What would cause this wanderlust, this feeling of unease with the status quo in music education and a need to take to the road and explore the unknown? The answer may lie in the ever-changing nature of music itself. Composer Libby Larsen wrote: Do we educate about music or let music educate us? This question is at the heart of good music education. That is, of course, because music is always changing. It is always ahead of us. Yet our job as educators is to try to fix music in time, to make it stand still long enough so that we can figure out how best to teach it. Sometimes we hold music captive to our purposes too long. It’s then that we are in danger of micromanaging it and imposing definitions on it which ultimately remove its immediacy and drain music of its spirit. (Larsen 2000) Draining “music of its spirit,” as Larson writes, can render music education irrelevant in the minds of students. A decades-old model of music-making and music education cannot be expected to attract contemporary students, without extraordinary efforts by music teachers to attract and retain students. Kratus (2007) writes that musical experience in school and out of school has increasingly diverged, regarding the reasons students engage in music, the social aspect of musical experience, the use of technology, the ways in which performances are experienced, the musical styles employed, and the musical instruments used. Williams (2011) points out that the dominance of large ensembles, especially the concert band, in secondary schools has made it more difficult 459

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

for teachers to create and offer additional options for music classes. Parenthetically, it should be noted that wind bands reached their height of popularity in the United States in the 1890s, when wind bands were the popular music of their time (Rhodes 2007). It seems odd that many traditional music educators in the twenty-first century promote the popular music of 130 years ago, while ignoring the popular music of today. The irony in all this is that our musical past matters. Newer music does not improve upon older music, it is just different. Older music is still valued, but its place in the music curriculum cannot displace newer music. Music education throughout its history has always changed to reflect present-day musical practices. In nineteenth-century conservatories, students were not taught the sackbut and cittern of an earlier age; they were taught instruments used in contemporary orchestras. It is reasonable to expect that present-day music teachers would adopt contemporary musical practices, instruments, and repertoire, not those of the 1890s. But educating music students in large ensembles, performing unfamiliar repertoire in accordance with the aesthetic judgments of a single conductor creates its own inertia. Only wanderlust can lead a classically trained music educator in a traditional teaching setting to take the first steps down the road to popular music education. In the last section of this chapter, I address Libby Larson’s comment that “music is always changing. It is always ahead of us” (Larsen 2000).

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

The road goes on forever Regardless of how one defines “popular music education,” one characteristic that underlies all definitions is that popular music education is popular, that is, it is reflective of the prevailing spirit of its time. The German philosopher Georg Hegel is credited with coining the word zeitgeist: “No man can surpass his own time, because the spirit of his time [der Geist seiner Zeit] is also his spirit” (Hegel 1833: 275). Hegel meant that we are creatures of our own time. We cannot surpass our time into the future, nor do we belong in the past. Music education philosopher Bennett Reimer channeled Hegel when he wrote that music education philosophy “must be conceived of being ‘of a time’” (1970: 2). Music education has zeitgeist if it reflects the music of its time. Music education in the 1850s had zeitgeist by making use of the prevailing music of its time in ways that were widely accepted in the 1850s. Historical evidence shows that the music education in schools and conservatories during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was popular music education, because it reflected the spirit of its time. What is popular in one era is not necessarily popular in the next. Music education today that employs decades-old repertoire and teaching methods has lost its zeitgeist. Popular music education, then, is always evolving, because “music is always changing.” There is no final destination on the road to popular music education. The destination is always one highway exit beyond our present location. In 1963 songwriter Robert Earl Keen wrote “The Road Goes on Forever,” a song about the continuity of life’s journey while thwarting life’s conventions. In 1995 the song was recorded by 460

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever

The Highwaymen, a superstar group comprised of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Willie Nelson. Similar to the theme of Keen’s song, the road to (and the road of) popular music education is more about the journey than the arrival. Music is transitory. Popular music styles are always changing, from jazz to rock to pop to hip-hop. The ways of listening to music are always changing, from albums to CDs to digital downloads. The ensembles musicians perform in are always changing, from orchestras to brass bands to jazz bands to rock bands to electronica. The ways musicians share music are always changing, from live performances to analog recordings to Audacity and GarageBand files uploaded to SoundCloud, to real-time improvisation across vast distances over the internet. Given this trajectory, it is certain that today’s popular music education will not be popular music education a decade or two from now. There is no way to predict what music will be in the future or how to best teach it. Because music is always in transition, it is necessary for music educators to be able to adapt to future musical styles, practices, and meanings that cannot be known in the present. For music teachers that means being open to new musical styles, new instruments, new ways to listen and compose music, and new ways to teach. For collegiate music teacher educators, their teaching of preservice music teachers should prepare them to adapt to changing musical worlds rather than to follow slavishly various learning theories or standard conducting models that are better suited to professional musicians. One example from this book of a teacher with the wanderlust to try something new is Kaitlyn in Martina Vasil’s chapter (Chapter 17), who developed a means to combine vernacular musicianship with the Orff-Schulwerk approach she had learned in college to create new, more relevant, and challenging classes for her students. The challenge for the music education profession is that the primary qualification for being a music teacher is to be an outstanding musician. But in a changing musical landscape, what is an “outstanding musician”? For example, the musicianship developed by playing the violin for ten years in orchestra and as demonstrated in a recital at the end of a degree program, can serve as a primary qualification for becoming a music teacher. What happens when this music teacher leads an iPad ensemble or teaches students to compose with Audacity? Libby Larson’s critique of music education identifies this problem: “[Music educators] try to fix music in time, to make it stand still long enough so that we can figure out how best to teach it” (Larsen 2000). The problem is that music outside the school walls does not stand still. Music educators may find themselves teaching musical practices in which they have not had many years of prior experiences. This can be a very uncomfortable situation for one whose identity is just as an expert musician. The Finnish educator Yrjö Engeström examined the differences between learning in which the knowledge is stable and fixed, and learning in which the knowledge is evolving. He described traditional learning, in which “the knowledge or skill to be acquired is itself stable and reasonably well defined. There is a competent ‘teacher’ who knows what is to be learned” (Engeström 2001: 137). He contrasted this with learning in which the content is emerging and unknown 461

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

and the knowledge and skills “are literally learned as they are being created. There is no competent teacher. Standard learning theories have little to offer if one wants to understand these processes” (Engeström 2001: 138). Popular music education is continually evolving and adapting to new musical styles, practices, and technology. Preservice music educators in many universities are taught to teach as though the musical knowledge and skills they will be teaching are well defined, when, in fact, they may be emerging and unknown. Popular music education requires a new pedagogy. Engeström (2001) suggests three keys to establishing a new pedagogy: (1) creativity, rethinking the teacher’s role in the classroom; (2) confrontation, facing our fears of the unknown by meeting new challenges; and (3) collaboration, working with others, because no one person has all the answers. As applied to music education, the music teacher with little understanding of hip-hop music needs to be humble enough and willing to accept student expertise in sharing knowledge to teach the class. This is not an admission of weakness on the teacher’s part; it is a sign of strength. In writing this chapter, I have come to realize that the popular music education practices I employed in the late-1970s would be inadequate today. Music and music education have moved on. Back then, I wrote the songs for my students and arranged the choral ensemble performances they sang. The creativity and control all came from me. Given what I have learned today, I would make the following changes:   1 Improve the various means for me to collaborate with students and for students to collaborate with each other through arranging and composing music (Henson and Zagorski-Thomas, Chapter 1).   2 Be conscious that replicating popular music repertoire creates its own hegemony (Hess, Chapter 2). One way to avoid this may be to give students a greater say in the music to be performed.   3 Use stave notation even less frequently than I did. Encourage students to learn music by ear (Dean, Chapter 5).   4 Find ways to connect my students’ performances to the community in which we live through local performances and by inviting local musicians to work with the students (Gulish, Chapter 7).   5 Teach my choral students vocal techniques that are more appropriate to popular music (Reinhert, Chapter 9).   6 Teach students to use software to create backing tracks to their performances (Bell, Chapter 12).   7 Show students how to compose their own music for the class to perform (Moir and Hails, Chapter 14).   8 Be more attentive to creating a popular music curriculum rather than making it up as I go along (Beauregard, Chapter 20).   9 Be more conscious of encouraging students of all genders to participate in popular music education (Powell, Chapter 23).

462

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

On the Road to Popular Music Education: The Road Goes on Forever

10 Adopt an “indie ethic” to allow students to create music outside of school norms and with a stronger sense of independence (McArton and Niknafs, Chapter 24). 11 Take students’ creativity into account when grading (Stefanie, Chapter 27). 12 Be more conscious of “approximation” in student performance rather than “perfection” (Cremata, Chapter 28). In ten years, these suggestions will seem antiquated, because music and music education will have moved on. Back when I was teaching children, I did the best that I could, given my zeitgeist. But the road goes on. Music educators, especially those who strive to be popular music educators, must continue to learn and evolve in their teaching. They do not have the option of teaching the way they were taught. Professional resources like websites, professional conferences, in-service education, interactions with like-minded colleagues, journal articles and books (e.g., this one) can help teachers to reinvigorate their teaching. One wonderful thing about being a teacher is that a teacher is a lifelong learner. Rev up your engines and explode into space. This road goes on forever.

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

References Chusid, Irwin (n.d.), “The Langley Schools Music Project,” Songs in the Key of Z. Available online: www.keyofz.com/langley/ (accessed November 18, 2018). DeRogatis, Jim (2003), “High fidelity: Jack Black Stays True to His ‘School’,” Jim Dero (blog), September 28, 2003. Available online: http://www.jimdero.com/News2003/ Sept28SchoolofRock.htm (accessed November 18, 2018). Engeström, Yrjö (2001), “Expansive Learning at Work: Toward an Activity Theoretical Reconceptualization,” Journal of Education and Work, 14 (1): 133–156. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1833), Geschichte der philosophie, Berlin: Betlag von Dunder. Kratus, John (2007), “Music Education at the Tipping Point,” Music Educators Journal, 94 (2): 42–48. Larsen, Libby (2000), “MENC Vision 2020 Conference Address: Music Instruction for 2020,” Libby Larsen (blog). Available online: https://libbylarsen.com/index.php?contentID=276/ (accessed November 18, 2018). Reimer, Bennett (1970), A Philosophy of Music Education, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Rhodes, Stephen L. (2007), “The American School Band Movement,” A History of the Wind Band. Available online: www.lipscomb.edu/windbandhistory/rhodeswindband_09_ americanschoolband.htm/ (accessed November 18, 2018). Wikipedia (2018), “The Langley Schools Music Project,” May 22, 2018. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Langley_Schools_Music_Project (accessed November 18, 2018). Williams, David A. (2011), “The Elephant in the Room,” Music Educators Journal, 98 (1): 51–57.

463

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

AAA narrative song form 158–9 assignment 160 AABA thirty-two-bar song form 158–9 assignment 160 AATS. See American Academy of Teachers of Singing Abbey Road 114, 120 Ableton 421 Ableton Live 174 Ableton Push 178 Abrahams, Frank 2 Abril, Carlos 102 ABRSM. See Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music academic exercise 94 academic musicianship, incompatibility 265 Acapella Maker--Video Collage 224 accelerometer 48 acceptability, viability/value (contrast) 285 accidental music, access/exploration 446 accompanying gesture 326 acoustic drum kit, coordination 195 action-choices, perceptions 83 action research media technology, usage 429 scenarios 429–30 action theory 83 active identity realization 306 active learning realization 306 Adapted Expressive Performance Approach (AEPA) 4, 141 practice 142–3 reflections 146–7 tiers 143 admission criteria 420–1 adolescents, popular music (making) 101 applications 109–10 background 101–3 Be Well, impact 108–9 momentum, sustaining 105–7 ADSR 48 Advanced Placement (AP) curricula demands, RGT curricula demands (comparison) 268

Advanced Placement (AP) Music Theory course content, comparison 269–70 course development 265 standards, RGT electric guitar standards (comparison) 267–9 teaching 5 Advanced Tier (AEPA) 143 advertising, course development (relationship) 292–3 AEPA. See Adapted Expressive Performance Approach aesthetic experience 303, 308–10 Aguilera, Christina 130, 326 Allsup, Randall E. 351, 388, 429, 444 alternative providers (APs) 47 American Academy of Teachers of Singing (AATS) position paper 129 American Orff-Schulwerk Association 251 Anka, Paul 132 anti-colonial framework 34–5 anti-colonialism, theoretical framework 30–1 apprenticeship 21 approximation, impact 421–2 APs. See alternative providers Art as Experience (Dewey) 308 artistic citizenship, social interactions (relationship) 136 artist inspiration, Romantic notion (transposition) 172 artist, Romantic notion (transposition) 172 art-music 277–9, 284 Art of Organized Noize, The (documentary) 174 Art Schools, pedagogical characteristics 63 assessment assessment-based goals 271 consideration 382–7 creativity, encouragement 395–400 criteria 383–6, 383t criterion-referenced assessment methodology 382–3 term, usage 180–1 assessment driven culture, creativity (consideration) 397f

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

assignment “buy-in” 117 criteria, creation 163 in-class delivery 164–5 assimilation, conscious competence model 332 Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) exam models 48 Association for Popular Music Education (conferences) 251 attentive listening, student usage 34 Audacity 224, 461 audio track, inclusion 223 audio-visual recording/editing software, usages 224 aural dictation 267 aural skills 130, 271 authenticity correspondence 67 discourses 60 authentic learning, informal learning practices (overlap) 67 autonomy (indie principles) 355–6 auxiliary send/return 48 aversive disablism 141 B&R. See Beats and Rhymes band placement 276 band width 48 Bareilles, Sara 130 Barrett, Margaret 305 Barr, Robert 20 Barthes, Roland 203, 208 basic musicianship skills 135 Battle of the Bands 102 Bayley, Amanda 323 BBC Young Musician of the Year, example 47 Beach Boys, The 457 Beacons After School Programs 365 Beatles, The 120, 173, 456 beat mapping 48 Beats and Rhymes (B&R) 364–6 case study 363 understanding 367–9 Beauregard, Julie 5, 289, 459 Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Brookfield) 162 Beethoven, study 61 Beginner’s Guide to Electronic Drums (Terry) 189

behavioural gestures 325–6 Behr, Adam 108 Bell, Adam Patrick 4, 171, 442, 443 Bell, Thom 115 Benedetti, Nicola 382 Bennett, Joe 76, 165 Bergen Community College 342 performance opportunities 346 Songwriting Workshop 155 Bergen Community College, Pop/Rock Ensemble 347 gender discrimination 343 playing 346 Berkless College of Music 62 Berry, Chuck 455 Be Well Bakery and Café 104 impact 108–9 performance 107 Beyoncé 327 Bicknell, Ross 6, 441 Biesta, Gert 229 “black box” analogy/approach 331, 332 Blackman Santana, Cindy 84 Blakey, Art 86 Bomb Squad 173 Bowie, David 120–2, 277, 457 branding, advice 103 Britain’s Got Talent 12 Brookfield, Stephen 153 Bruford and the Beat (Bruford) 187 Bruford, Bill 4, 83, 187, 380, 382 Cain, Tim 2 canon formation 63–4 musical canon, performers (student position) 50 musical works 207–8 popular music focus 34 rock canon, concept (study) 65 teaching 29 traditional jazz canon, centrality (restatement/reinforcement) 65 Western art music canon, performance 49 canonical repertoire conservation 46 interpretation/reinterpretation 47 musician, performer role 47 canonic rules 213

465

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

canonization, refusal/denial 69 Care Quality Commission, adult social care services publication 141 Carey, Mariah 326 Carfoot, Gavin 3, 59, 60 Carpenter, John 442 Cash, Johnny 461 cause-effect, rejection 305 Cayari, Christopher 4, 219 CCM. See contemporary commercial music chameleon (vocalist category) 130 channel path 48 chaos learning 377–80 operating 378f Charles, Ray 263 children, music education 232–4 Chord Progressions for Songwriters (Scott) 296 chords charts 34 construction, applied knowledge 268 progressions, analysis 277 syncing 279 CHR. See contemporary hits radio circularization, problems 418–20 Clarke, Kenneth 233 Clark, Robert 379 Clarkson, Kelly 130 classical ensemble model, replication 38 classical music education, PME (distinction) 205–6 teacher, power 32 term, usage 204–5 classical singing, pedagogy 128–9 classroom arrangement, creation 279 band placement 276 components 252 contexts 307 course structure 295–6 mixed approach 280 music, presence 33 music video projects, facilitation 219 participants, interviews 281–6 perseverance 36–7 popular music education 275 remixed classroom, study (open approach) 67–8 sessions 276–7

social dynamics 281–2 student-led approach 278 teacher-led approach 278–80 techno DIY approaches 446–7 codification 209–10 Cohen, Leonard 132, 280 Cole, Michael 304 collaboration (core skill) 16, 18–19 collaborative devising 18 collaborative process, assignment 161 colleagues, perceptions (reflective practice) 163–4 collective virtual ensembles, voices (synergy) 222–3 coloniality, music education (relationship) 31–5 colonial relations, theorizing 30–1 Commercial Music, program (interviews) 76 common-practice music, study 267 common-practice period, relationships 269 common-practice piece 270 communication music teacher usage 368–9 skills, strength 143 community bridges, building 104–5 learning component 21 “community of practice,” development 192 competencies, development 205–6 complexity, attributes 377 complex learning environment 175 composer notion 213 objectified expressions 207 perception 207–8 performer, dichotomy 211 composing, importance 19–20 composition 74 education 209–12 importance 14 lessons 203–4 notion 213 tasks 277 teaching 204 compositional practice, enculturation 204 compositional skills 271 compositional tactics, usage 14 compositional value, ideas (preconception) 208 compression 48 computer-based music technologies, use 293

466

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

concert band program, usage 263 Condon, Shawn 331 conducted following, creative freedom (contrast) 220–1 confidence, importance 328–9 consensual assessment technique (CAT) 386–7 conservation 207–8 constructive feedback 401 contemporary commercial music (CCM) 129 genres, stylistic/technical underpinnings 130 pedagogy 132 styles, pedagogies 136 vocal programs, skills (absence) 134–5 contemporary hits radio (CHR) 175, 177, 180 assessment, term (usage) 180–1 process, emulation 178 contemporary music, canonization (refusal/ denial) 69 content-based constraints 159 content, co-constructing 255, 256 content, development 23 control, “functional/compositional continuum” 382 Cook, Nicholas 321 coordination, development 187 copyright law, discussion 296 core skills 16–20 course curriculum, crafting 292–6 development, advertising (relationship) 292–3 new course, initiation (preparation) 291–2 structure 295–6 Course Selection Guide (course description) 293 Cox, Gordon 233 creative assessment 386–7 creative collaboration 161 creative decisions, making 180 creative development 4 creative enabler 172 creative freedom, conducted following (contrast) 220–1 creative music-making, increase 102 “Creative Practice” module 395 creative practices, LTA (step-by-step approach) 403

creative process exploration promotion, extrinsic motivation (impact) 400–1 linear model 404f creative risk, promotion 398 creative skills, exploration 283 “creative” subjects 381 “creative voice,” expression 444–5 creative voices 445–6 creativity 2, 395 assessment 386–7 consideration 397f core skill 16, 19–20 definable skills 401–4 development 187 encouragement 395–400 institutionalized creativity, paradoxes 59 learnable skill 402f lexicon 398 LTA 395 perceptions/experiences 84 RIO continuum 381f teaching 22 teaching, music production (usage) 441 Cremata, Radio 6, 415 criterion-referenced assessment methodology 382–3 critical pedagogy 363–4 critical thinking 282 cross-case patterning, enabling 114–15 cross-key relationship 269 Crow, Sheryl 455 cultural capital, notion (Bourdieu) 354–5 cultural hierarchization 207–8 cultural knowledge child construction, case study 363 construction 366–7 culturally relevant music 38 culturally responsive popular music pedagogy, practice 37–9 culturally responsive teaching 35–7 cultural music, consideration 38 cultural psychology impact 84–5 perspective 83, 304–5 situating 305 cultural realm 46–7 cultural relativism 233 cultural value realm 51–2

467

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

culture heroes, role 207 curriculum (curricula) crafting 292–6 creation 22 planning 254 prominence, argument 165 template 294f written curriculum document, idea (creation) 293–5 Cursley, Joanna 2 daimon (true self), living 311 David Wesley YouTube channel 222 DAW. See digital audio workstation “dead” system 378 Dean, James 3, 73 Defiant Ones, The 174 degree-level education, use-value 46 deliberate practice 90–4 necessity, recognition 93 perception 93 democratic pedagogical paradigm, goals 311 Denzin, Norman 308 Derrida, Jacques 203, 208 de-skilling, examples 12 despecialization 213 Dewey, John 308–9 digital audio workstation (DAW) availability 174 DAW-based electronic music 15 ensemble editing 222 mixing 116 production 306 proficiency, development 178 skills 174–5 usage, skill 131, 132 digital disruption 61 digital media, usage 6 digital natives 158 digital storytelling (DST) 6, 48, 429 curricular example 434–6 effectiveness 433 implementation 436 learning, impact 429 media production, usage 430–1 digital technologies, usage 436 directional change, impulse 61 disabilities. See learning disabled learners, “reasonable adjustments” 147

distance collaboration 156–8 do-it-yourself (DIY). See techno do-ityourself network 2 practices 153 do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic embodiment 355 inheritance 353 Dr. Dre 171 Drexel University 124 audio archives/music industry program (case study) 115–17 Dreyfus, Hubert 376 drill material 267 drum kit learning/teaching experience (see Edinburgh Napier) “plug and play” features 189 setup, components (see hybrid drum kit setup) study (see higher popular music education) teaching 188–9 technologies, student education 189–90 time 93–4 drummer education 85–6 formal aspect 85–6 drummers action, theorizing 85 teaching/learning 96 drumming, cultural artifact 84–5 DST. See digital storytelling Duran Duran 121 Dylan, Bob 132 Eberle, Bob 405 Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) 190, 395 drum kit learning/teaching experience 190–1 modules 399–400 EDM. See electronic dance music educational goals, realization 156–7 Education Reform Act 233 educators (vocalist category) 132 “edu-speak” 384 egalitarianism 312 eighth-grade general music 254–5 electric guitar female electric guitarists, perspectives 339–44 male-dominance 344–5

468

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

performance ability 271 Registry of Guitar Tutors (RGT) electric guitar standards, AP music theory standards (comparison) 267–9 usage 263, 266–7 electronic dance music (EDM) 15, 172, 289, 441 electronic drum curriculum face-to-face classes 192 online consolidation activities/support 192–3 preparatory activities 192 projects, sharing 196 semester one curriculum 191t software/hardware, selection 193–4 student learning experience 191–4 electronic drums, performance (usage) 187 electronic performances, student development 194–6 Ellington, Duke 384, 387 Elliott, David 304, 309, 311, 444 embodied cognition, structure 326 Emerick, Geoff 114, 173 emotional presence 147 employability agenda 53 enculturation 2, 86, 204 End of Cycle Report for Conservatorires (UCAS) 49–50 Engeström, Yrjö 86, 461, 2 engrooved practices 210, 379–80 Eno, Brian 172, 173, 443 ensemble-based learning 29 ensembles development 221–2 editing 222 ethnic ensembles 351 importance 135–6 leadership 327–8 trust/confidence/expression 328–9 entrainment 18 entrepreneurship 2, 133–4 ENU. See Edinburgh Napier University environment. See complex learning environment development 23 male-focused environment 341 performance environment 329–30 equalisation 48 Erskine, Peter 84, 92

Estill, Jo 129, 145 ethnic ensembles 351 ethnography, impact 323 eudaimonia 240, 303, 310–14 orientation 312–13 Eurocentricism, teacher (power) 32 Evans, J.T. 365, 368 Exclaim! (blog/press outlet) 355 Exercises in Style (Queneau) 408 expressive gesture 326 background/aims/research questions 323–4 defining 324–5 usage 321 expressive movement, identification 325–7 expressive performance approach 141 expressivity, teaching 330–2 External Examiner 189 extrinsic motivation, impact 400–1 face-to-face classes 192 student preparation 192 face-to-face learning 191 face-to-face time, productivity 192 facilitator, role 331 failure 353 chances, reduction 90 experience 95 facing, motivations 36–7 false dichotomies, perpetuation 206 FE. See further education feedback 399–400 constructive feedback 401 loops 19 peer feedback 435 usage 264 female electric guitarists, perspectives 339–44 female multi-instrumentalist, self-description 340 female musicians, perspectives 337 Fenger, Hans 457 Filmora (Mac) 224 finalizing (track-and-hook phase) 180–1 Finney, John 5, 229 First Access 231 Fischer, Lisa 130 “flash study” format 417 Fleet, Paul 75, 76 Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) 376 FL Studio 174, 178

469

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

folk/celebrity cultures, popular music existence 2 Fonarow, Wendy 353 formal education, creativities/assessment 6 formal instruction absence 128–9 availability 95 formal learning experiences 89 informal learning, dualism 62 formulation 399 RFIO continuum 381 Foundation Tier (AEPA) 143 questions 144–5 France, Martin 84 François, David 222 Frith, Fred 375, 380 Frith, Simon 13 Froehlich, Hildegard 308 Fujiyama (Jimbo) 189 fun, identification 92 further education (FE) settings 441 Futurist Music Manifesto (Russolo) 447 fuzzy criteria 176 Gaiman, Neil 457 Gamble, Kenneth 115 “gangsta” behavior 367 GarageBand (app), usage 254–5, 368, 461 Garcia, Manuel 128 Garland, Judy 120 gates 48 Gault, Brent 102 Gaye, Marvin 277 GCSE. See General Certificate of Secondary Education gendered instrument, playing 337 General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), music syllabus requirements 48 generalized problem-solving activities 23 genre bias 445 geste accompagnateur 324 geste effecteur 324 geste figure 324 gesture 324 Girlpool 278 Global Education Reform movement 31 global multimedia industry 2 Goehr, Lydia 203

Golden Ears 118 Goldsmith, Adam 75 “good sound,” standards 12 Gottlieb, Fraser 5, 275, 458 graduate employability 165 Grammy Museum 292 Grateful Dead 455 Green, Lucy 103, 305 Gritten, Anthony 322, 328, 331 groove 18 playing, “go-to” positions 190 Groove Pizza 177 group improvisation/variation 18 group peer learning 255, 256 “growth mindset,” enhancement 400 guided participation 21 Guilana, Mark 84 guitar. See electric guitar guitar-based notation systems, usage 265 guitar-based performance tasks, accomplishment 270 playing, challenges 344 playing, dedication 342 Guitar Hero 340 Gulish, Sarah 4, 101 habitus 307. See also popular music personal habitus 159 Hails, John 203 Hall, Rick 173 “hanging out” 4, 85 hardware, selection 193–4 Hargreaves, Roger 85 harmonic analysis 267 harmonizing, ability 130 harmony 17 textbooks 209–10 Harrison, George 120 HE. See higher education Hegel, Georg 460 HEIs. See higher education institutions Henson, David 1, 3 Hess, Juliet 29 heuristic LTA 401 “high-end” creativity, “everyday” creativity (dichotomy) 380 higher education (HE) default semantic 76 music study 210

470

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

personal experience 73–4 pool, norm-referenced access 54 popular music, post-structuralist critique 203 programs 204–5 settings 441 singers, music vocalists (teaching) 127 songwriting pedagogy 153 study/practice 45 Higher Education Academy (HEA) 396 higher education institutions (HEIs), engagement (failure) 53–4 higher popular music education (HPME) 4, 11 curricula 129 drum kit, study 188–9 epistemic/socioeconomic challenge 45 music program, entry (threshold standards) 54 participation, implicit message 52–3 preparation 322 programs, impact 137 project 154 higher popular music performance education (HPMPE) 11 agenda, setting 22–4 content, development 23 environment, development 23 “high-performance,” notion 51 high school, popular music (curriculum crafting/implementing) 289 hip-hop 174 music, ubiquity 363 Hispanic female guitar player, self-description 345 Hollies, The 120 Horning, Schmidt 173 Horn, Trevor 171 Howard, Brittany 344 Howard, Karen 363 Howe, Dylan 84, 85, 90 HPME. See higher popular music education HPMPE. See higher popular music performance education Huff, Leon 115 humanity, object 311 Hunter, Mark 3, 45 hybrid drum kit setup notation 197f

hybrid drum kit setup, components 188f “hybridized learning” approach 330–1 hybrid musical genres, student-led learning 66 ideas collaborative development 279 prompting, SCAMPER (usage) 405 identify (learning component) 21 identity 5–6, 303, 304–8 learning trajectory 305–6 realization 2, 306, 307, 312 transformation, learning (impact) 305–6 I Drum, Therefore I Am (Smith) 240 Illich, Ivan 312 illustrators, usage 327 imitation, usage 255, 256 iMovie 224 impedance 48 improvisation 17–18, 205, 283, 383 assessment 375, 387–8 group improvisation 18 music improvisation, assessment (criteria) 383t personal perspective 376–7 “spontaneous improvisations” 250 improvisational skills 271 inclusivity 255, 421–3 Incze, Steffen 263 indie ethics 351 positioning, constructive force 354–6 presence 356–9 indie music, origins (cultural backlash) 353–4 indie principles 355–6 indie rock, fetishization 354 individual expression 19 individuality 131 individuation 312 informal learning 66–8, 249, 255–8 European approach 90 experiences 419 formal learning, dualism 62 practices, authentic learning (overlap) 67 productivity 83 reinforcement 67–8 research 109 usage 86–7 informal musical learning, competencies (development) 205–6

471

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

information technology, music teacher usage 368–9 in-humanisation 311 innovation concept, emphasis 60 discourses 66–8 innovation-tradition models 64 RFIO continuum 381 term, usage 61–3 tradition-innovation binary 61 usage (see jazz education; tradition) innovative knowledge, codification 209 institutionalization impact 59 path 63–4 institutionalized creativity, paradoxes 59 institutionalized education 65 institutions, techno DIY (relationship) 444 instruction formal instruction, availability 95 large-ensemble instruction, prevalence 102 quality, cultural divide 89–90 instruction, availability cultural divide 89–90 increase 90–1 practice, linear connection 95 instructor/director, role 34 instrument flexibility/malleability 130 focus 122 gendering 338–9 pitched instrument, prejudice 96 playing, importance 310 unpitched instrument, shortcomings 88 instrumentalists (vocalist category) 133 instrumental performance 134 instrumental training, relationship 47 instrumentation 279, 420–1 Intermediate Tier (AEPA) 143 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) 13 internationalism 312 International Society of Music Education (ISME) 457 Popular Music Special Interest Group 102 interpretation, usage 47 interpretive skills 271 inter-rater reliability 385–6

intra-ensemble communicative relationships, formation 323 ISME. See International Society of Music Education “Jam Zone” 418 Janae, Kelley (multi-instrumentalist) 340–1 “Java Jam” 102 jazz artists, canonization (scholarship approach) 63–4 institutionalization 63–4, 66 scholarship 64 studies, acceptance 65 traditional jazz canon, centrality (restatement/reinforcement) 65 jazz education discrediting/neutralization 64–5 incorporation 59 innovation/tradition, usage 63–4 validity 59–60 value, construction 64–6 Jenkins, Gary 340 Jennings, Waylon 461 Jensen, Karl 327 Jimbo 189, 196 Joel, Billy 456 Johansson, Karin 86 John, Elton 120 John, Ryan 2 Johns, Glyn 173 Jones, Norah 131 Jones, “Philly Joe” 86 Jones, Ralph 365, 368 Journal of Popular Music Education (JPME) 1, 13, 24, 102, 351, 412 Journey (band) 280 “juke box” musicals, proliferation 12 Keen, Robert Earl 460 Kelly, Blair 4, 141 King, Carole 456 Klee, Paul 375 Kleiman, Paul 6, 375 KLÖ audio archive case study 118–20 classroom analysis 118–20 Klossner, Heather 251 Knauer, Wolfram 384

472

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“knob twiddling” 47 knowledge construction 366–7 expansion 39 innovative knowledge, codification 209 master-apprentice transmission/inheritance 209–10 perception 377 repertoire knowledge 130 knowledge, acquisition 92–3, 251 capacity 51 self-study/peer teaching, usage 255, 256–7 knowledge production/validation, processes 31 K-Pop 174 Kramer, Eddie 173 Kratus, John 6, 161, 455 Krikun, Andrew 4, 59–60, 153, 156, 164, 351 Kristofferson, Kris 461 Labelle, Pattie 115 Langley Schools Project, The 457 Lanois, Daniel 173 large-ensemble instruction, prevalence 102 Larson, Libby 459, 460, 461 Lawton, Richard 251 leadership determination 327–8 role 285 learners, musical lives (recognition) 35 learning 2 breadth/depth 282–3 components (Wenger) 21 content, presupposition 86 disabilities 142 (see also musicians) disciplined approach 91 ensemble-based learning 29 experiences 94–5 group peer learning 255 holistic process 255 HPME environment 23 “hybridized learning” approach 330–1 impact 430–1 informal learning 66–8, 249, 255–8 integration 251 “learning by doing” 85–6, 90 meta-learning, understanding 21 objectives 268 occurrence 205, 251 parental involvement 83

practice 74 processes 13 producing 171 realization 306, 307 spaces, teacher curation 308 teacher-centered learning 29 learning approaches 94–5 change 89 learning environment 13. See also complex learning environment describing 20–2 student journeys, differences (see local learning environments) learning outcomes 264–5 evaluation 401 learning, teaching, and assessment (LTA) 395–9, 401 activity 399 consideration 398 design (flowchart) 404f exploration 396 heuristic LTA 401 step-by-step approach 403 lecture theater, multitracks (usage) 122 Led Zeppelin 277 Leeds 13 art student scandal 379 Leeds Beckett University audio/music programs, case study 120–3 lecture theater, multitracks (usage) 122 multitracks, usage 121 outcomes 123 recording studio, multitracks (usage) 122–3 Leman, Mark 326 Lennon, John 120 Lexicon 400 knowledge 48 Lexicon of Creativity (Fennell) 398f “Life on Mars” (Bowie) 121 Lion King, The 254 listening, usage 255, 256 literacy, notion 433 Little Kids Rock (LKR) 102, 292, 340, 418, 421, 458 program, participation 345–6 local learning environments, student journeys (differences) 23 local music communities, engagement 110 Logic Audio 443 Logic DAW 446

473

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Logic Pro, usage 174 Logic Pro X 193, 194 London and SE Twenty-first Century Music Practice Research Network 13, 24 London College of Music 330 Examining Board 266 LoVetri, Jeannette 129 low fidelity (low-fi) sound 356 LTA. See learning, teaching, and assessment lyrical content, analysis 277 lyrics power 365–6 writing, experiences 176 MAD Dragon Music Group 116 Mann, Manfred 120 Marchetti, Emanuela 327 Maroon 5 280 Martin, George 114, 172, 173 Martin, Max 174, 177 Master-apprentice model 32 master-apprentice transmission/inheritance 209–10 master/pupil relationship 47 Masters, instruction 113 materials, problems 418–20 Matthews, Stephen Ralph 4, 153 Mayer, John 131 McArton, Lloyd 351 McCartney, Paul 457 McClintock, Anne 311 McKenzie, John 51–2 McNally, Kirk 4, 113 MEA. See Music Education Association MEAE. See music education as aesthetic education meaning (learning component) 21 meaning (techno DIY) 447 meaning-making process 84–5 media education, theoretical framework 432–3 media-enhanced rehearsals, example 434 media production, usage 430–1 media technology, usage 429 Meek, Joe 171 melody/vocal line, usage 253 memorization, ability 130 Mercury, Freddie 130 metacognitive activity 175

meta-learning skills 23 understanding 21 meta-pedagogy 21 metrical skills 85 MIDI controllers 178 information, requirement 195 percussion controller 195 Program Changes, usage 195–6 projects 351 sequencing 293 signals, routing/manipulating 193 Millard, Brad 3, 59 millennial music education 234–6 Miller, Mitch 171 mind map, re-creation 407f Mitchell, Joni 131 mobile devices, expediency 436 Moir, Zack 1, 4, 52, 67, 165, 203 motivation, creativity/conflicts 395 movement analysis (Labaon), adaptation 142 Movie Maker (Windows) 224 multimodality, importance 325 multiple intelligences (Gardner) 400 reframing 409f Multiplication Is for White People (Delpit) 36 multitrack audio archives, popular music education (relationship) 113 analysis 124–5 case studies 115–23 study design 114–15 multitracking 221–2 multitrack materials, usage 124 multitrack one-person recording 221–2 multitrack recording, creation 121 multitracks, usage 122–3 music components 14 composition 254 cultural knowledge/musical identity, construction 366–7 curricula 31–2 degrees (UK), quality/qualities (codification) 47 eighth-grade general music 254–5 First Access 231 functions 282 hybrid curriculum, learning outcomes 271

474

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

improvisation, assessment (criteria) 383t industry, career (establishment) 162 instruments, learning 345–6 knowledge, reification 60 learner selection 251, 257 learning 255, 256, 358 literacy, NAFME definition 265–6 national curriculum 233–6 ownership, absence 263–4 pedagogy, strategies 33 performance 103 performer (gestural/nonverbal delivery), elements (framework) 325f practice, relationship 309 presence 33 preservice music educators, perspectives 275 programs, proliferation 54 schoolification 417–18 school music 229, 356–9 schools, sausage factories 11 selection, cultural relevance 37–8 seventh-grade general music 253 sociality, emphasis 32–3 teacher education, barriers 421 teacher-identified elements 32 teaching 208, 308 types/styles, preferences 176 values 304 variety 33 video projects, facilitation 219 vocabulary terms 270 writing 204 musical authority, challenge 357–8 musical boundaries, elimination 358 musical canon, performers (student position) 50 musical covers 38 musical creativities 380 musical development 4 musical exploration 255, 256 musical expression composer/conductor choices 14 mode 352 Musical Futures 102, 418, 421, 458 musical identity child construction, case study 363 construction 366–7 contribution 369

musical insecurities 252 musical notation, guitar-specific forms 265 musical performance, expressive movement (identification) 325–7 musical piece, structure (determination) 14 musical playground 219 musical quality, approach 15–16 musical skill, progression (consideration) 398f musical styles, canon (teaching) 29 musical “success,” notions 352–3 musical taste, building/maintenance 303 musical works, canon 207–8 music classroom DST curricular example 434–6 implementation 436 music education. See higher popular music education; popular music education children, access 231–2 coloniality, relationship 31–5 context, cultural psychology (situating) 305 critical pedagogy 363–4 danger 37–8 goal 103 informal learning 249 millennial music education 234–6 nonformal education 249 pre-HE 48–9 purposes 240 role, discussing/defining 415 music education as aesthetic education (MEAE) 309 Music Education Association (MEA) workshops 416 music, educators benefits 109–10 implications 369–70 Music for Children (Orff/Keetman) 250 musicians informal learning strategies 33 term, usage 47 unionized workforce, employment 53 musicians (learning disabilities) case study 143–5 circumstances 145 communication skills/confidence, strength 143 performance techniques 141 repetitive behaviors 143 single-minded focus 144

475

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

sung/spoken material, repetitive delivery 143 twang quality, access 146 musicianship 134–5 basic musicianship skills 135 development 187 indicator 421 tasks 267 Music Industry Program (Drexel) 115 musicing 309 music-making 255, 280, 310 belief 164 experiences 103 research 109 music notation 75 software 132 music production literature 173–4 usage 441 music technology 180–1 incorporation 418–19 usage 175, 176 music theory Advanced Placement (AP) music theory standards, RGT electric guitar standards (comparison) 267–9 teaching, electric guitar (usage) 263 music vocalists, teaching 127 Musikkhøgskole 88 mutual constitution, processes 305 Myers, Melody 221 NAMM Show 340 National Association for Music Education (NAFME) 416, 457 music literacy definition 265–6 National Curriculum Working Group for Music 233 “natural” abilities, effect 94 Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School (NSJ), music 364–5 Nelson, Willie 458, 461 neocolonialism 37 neutral encouragement 90 neutralizing force 65 new course, initiation (preparation) 291–2 Newman, Michael 354 Nicholas, Tom 384 Nichomachean Ethics 240

Niknafs, Nasim 351 Nirvana 86 non-academic cultural form 60 non-cognitive skills, development 255 nondeliberate practice, value 83 nonformal teaching 249, 255–8 nonverbal communication background/aims/research questions 323–4 defining 324–5 usage 321 non-verbal interaction, initiation 327 normative music education 30–2 assumptions 32 “norm doubting” 403 North American cohort, failure (experience) 95 notation 34 guitar-based notation systems, usage 265 hybrid kit setup notation 197f knowledge 75 legend 197f literacy 74 method 196 music notation 75 non-real-time/nonlinear techniques 14 percussion controller notation, example 197f skills 77 sound, visual representation 73 standard, development 196 notation skills, value (consideration) 73 background 74–6 student interviews 76–8 Novation Launchpad 178 NSJ. See Nellie Stone Johnson Elementary School O’Hear, Anthony 233 online communication, usage 154 online consolidation activities/support 192–3 online learning 191 online support 193 open-source production software, usage 6 Orff, Carl 250, 416 instrumentarium, usage 252, 254 Orff Echo, The 251 Orff Schulwerk 249–51 approach 5, 461 informal learning 255–8 nonformal teaching 255–8 usage 252–8

476

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

origination. See replication-origination continuum out-of-school music learning experiences 292–3 out-of-tune track, exclusion 223 Overlie, Mary 325 ownership 285–6 Pangello, Caterine 240 Parker, Charlie (phrasing) 67 participation, barriers (reduction) 337 participatory music experiences 176 passive identity realization 306 passive learning realization 306 Patterning (app) 178 PAu. See pedagogic authority PBL. See project-based learning PD. See professional development pedagogical exploration/inclusion 324 pedagogical paradigm, goals 311 pedagogic authority (PAu) 307 pedagogic practices 210 pedagogy (pedagogies) 135 critical pedagogy 363–4 impact 35 problems 418–20 peer feedback 435 peer-learning environment, skills 134 peer teaching, usage 255, 256–7 Peiffer, James 294 Pendergrass, Teddy 115 Penfield Central School District, curriculum template 294f Penfield High School, popular music (example) 289 percussion controller notation, example 197f perfection, impact 421–2 performance 135–6. See also instrumental performance achievement 141–2 approach (see Adapted Expressive Performance Approach) ensemble, levels 290 environment 329–30 persona 323, 329–30 skills 135 solo performance 143 student preparation 322–3 techniques 141 usage (see electronic drums)

performer composer, dichotomy 211 expressive delivery 323 gestural/nonverbal delivery, elements (framework) 325f performing rights organizations (PROs) knowledge 131 Perform or Else (McKenzie) 51 Perry, Linda 132 personal experience, reflective practice 164 personal habitus 159 perspective, exploration points of view, consideration 408–10 thought process, filtration 405–10 perspective, realization 410 Phillips, Sam 173 Philly Groove, uncovering 116–17, 124 “Philly Soul” 115 Philosophy of Music Education (Reimer) 309 phrase, singing 146 PicPlayPost (Apple) 224 Pipe, Liz 5, 321 pitched instrument, prejudice 96 pitches 14, 17, 23 intensity, increase 145 richness 326 Pitchfork (blog/press outlet) 355 place of importance, assignment 160–1 PM. See popular music PMC. See popular music composition PME. See popular music education poetry, writing (experiences) 176 points of view, consideration 408–10 Pop Rocks 252–4, 257 popular music (PM) acceptance, increase 291–2 aural/autodidactic transmission 206 canon 34, 120 composer/performer dichotomy 211 creation/re-creation 75 creation, spaces (usage) 101 emphasis, increase 264 ensembles, female musicians (perspectives) 337 existence 2 genres, timbre (differentiation role) 443 graduates, skills 133–4 habitus 52–5 impressions 278–9

477

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

inclusion 253 instrument, consideration 296 instrument gendering 338–9 originating 4–5 pedagogy 32–5 (see also culturally responsive popular music pedagogy) performance, expressivity (teaching) 330–2 perspectives, shift 284 post-structuralist critique 203 practices, characteristics 13 schoolification, benefits/challenges 415 skills acquisition, learning processes/ environments (necessity) 13 styles, characteristics 15–16 styles, promotion (caution) 419 teacher discomfort/inexperience 357 teaching, Schulwerk (usage) 252–8 techne 52–5 theoretical framework 432–3 understanding, development 293 vocalists, skills/techniques/knowledge 129–30 popular music composition (PMC) 165 history 211 popular music (PM) curricula crafting/implementing 289 value systems 45 popular music education (PME) aesthetic experience 303, 308–10 change, necessity 13–15 changes 462–3 classical music education, distinctions 205–6 conceptualization 3–4 context 204 definition 250–1 ensembles, importance 135–6 eudaimonia 303, 310–14 future 29, 455 identity 5–6, 303, 304–8 indie ethics 351 innovation/tradition 63–4 institutionalization, impact 59 institutions/innovation/tradition (see tertiary popular music education) meaning/value 5–6 meta-pedagogy 21 multitrack audio archives, relationship 113 Orff Schulwerk, relationship 249–50

personal journey 455–7 perspectives/practices 1 practice, theorizing (agenda setting) 11 problematic definitions 204–5 research, future 422–3 scholarship 2 schoolification 6 school usage 5 techne, consideration 45 term, usage 211 value 63 value, construction 64–6 popular music (PM) performance education background/aims/research questions 323–4 expressive gesture/nonverbal communication, usage 321 Post-92 sector, representation 53 post-Blairite instrumentalism 51 postsecondary jazz education, examples 62 post-secondary music education, barriers 421 post-structuralist philosophy 209 posture, awareness 133 Powell, Bryan 1, 337 PowerDirector (Windows) 224 power, expression 65 power imbalance 312 practice. See deliberate practice community/communities 83, 86 elaboration 93 learning component 21 master-apprentice transmission/inheritance 209–10 notion, refocusing 83 praxes, impact 444 preservice music educators, perspectives 275 pride/ownership 285–6 Prince 172 problem-solving, impact 20 producer conceptions 173 creative hub 171 plurality 171–3 producing, learning 171 production assignment 119 teams, formation (track-and-hook phase) 176 professional development (PD) contexts 416 professionalism, business behaviors 51

478

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

project-based learning (PBL) 431–2 model 437 projects devising 20 large-scale projects 23 PROs. See performing rights organizations Pro Tools, usage 122–3 pulse importance 16–17 meaning 94 Purcell, Henry 277 purpose, dilemmas 61–2 purposive listening, student usage 34

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

“quack-medicine” ethos 12 qualification, term (usage) 237–8 quality, approach. See musical quality Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Music Benchmarks 15 Subject Benchmark Statements 47 Queensland University of Technology (QUT), music degree program 60 racism, victimization 313 Raining Jane 278 Ramone, Phil 173 rap music, lyrics (direction) 363–4 rational animals, identification 240 “reality effects” 369 “reality” television shows, exposure 12 realize, term (usage) 306 Reay, Diane 312 re-colonial relations, theorizing 30–1 recording advice 103 projects, impact 295 studio, multitracks (usage) 122–3 Red Hot Chili Peppers 86 RedZone Entertainment 179 reflective dialogue, enhancement 157–8 reflective teacher inquiry 429 reflective teaching practices 153 Registry of Guitar Tutors (RGT) advanced placement exam 266 content 269 curricula demands, AP curricula demands (comparison) 268 electric guitar standards, AP music theory standards (comparison) 267–9

topic listings 270 vocabulary, grouping 270 rehearsal 18–19 content, decision 91 leadership role 328 presentation, curate 434 Reimer, Bennett 309, 460 Reinhert, Kat 4, 127 remixed classroom, study (open approach) 67–8 Remixing the Classroom (Allsup) 388 repertoire knowledge 130 repetitive behaviors 143 replication 399 approach, hegemonic possibilities 30 formulation innovation origination (RFIO), creativity continuum 381 replication-origination continuum 380–2 Reservoir Media 116 reward, creativity/conflicts 395 RFIO. See replication, formulation innovation origination RGT. See Registry of Guitar Tutors rhythm 16–17, 23 acumen, increase 134 concepts, application 189 metric perception 14 riffs, singing (ability) 131 Rihanna 179 risk, creativity/conflicts 395 Rock Band (video game) 342 rock canon, concept (study) 65 rock music, cultural relativism 233 Rockschool exams 48 Rogoff, Barbara 21 roles, inversion 107 role variety/stretch 175 Rolling Stones 130, 279 Roth, David Lee 338 Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, The 1, 2, 13, 102, 422 Rubin, Rick 172, 173 Rundgren, Todd 173 “sage on the stage” model 369 Salmins, Ralph 84, 92 “Savin’ the Day” (case study) 364 scaffolding 21 provision 191

479

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

SCAMPER 400, 405 approach 408 mind map, re-creation 407f prompts 407f scene, entry 101 schismogenesis 327–9 schoolification 6, 206, 417–18 benefits/challenges 415 school music 33 indie ethics, presence 356–9 significance/purpose 229 schools curriculum, context 289–91 environment, outside performance 108 new course, initiation (preparation) 291–2 PME, usage 5 setting, praise/applause (inauthenticity) 106–7 song book, making 230–1 Scott, Ken 114, 123, 124, 173 audio archive 120–1 Scott, Peter 54 Seabrook, John 172, 174, 175, 177 Seay, Toby 4, 113 secondary instrument, skill 131 self-actualization 312 self-confidence, change 278 self-directed band, impact 281 self-directed learning 281–2 self-improvement, ideal 51 self-reflective ability, improvement 282 self-reflective creative songwriters, development 165 self-reflective practices 159, 162 self-study, usage 255, 256–7 sense-making, activity 84 sensible, distribution (university role) 54 seventh-grade general music 253 sexism, victimization 313 Shaking Through (Weathervane Music online series) 113 sharp criteria, absence 176 Shilling, Chris 310 short story, referencing (assignment) 161 Shusterman, Richard 308, 310 sight reading (sight-reading) 85, 271 sight singing 271 sight-singing skills 130 Sigma Sound Studios Collection 115

Silent Disco 230 Silverman, Marissa 304, 311, 444 Simone, Nina 382 singers individuality 131 music vocalists, teaching (see higher education) specialization 130 singer-songwriters (vocalist category) 131 singing, pedagogy. See classical singing, pedagogy Sirkis, Asaf 84 situated learning, concept 324 skills creative skills, exploration 283 creativity (definable skill) 401–4 development 85 learnable skills 402f level, absence 91 musical skill, progression (consideration) 398f skills-based curriculum 264 skills-based tasks, understanding 271 toolkit 133–6 skills, acquisition 92–3, 251 capacity 51 self-study/peer teaching, usage 255, 256–7 Skyline Recording Studios 118 Skype, usage 154, 157–8, 164 small-group collaboration 281–2 SMART Board, usage 254 Smith, Gareth Dylan 1, 5, 240, 303, 327 Smule (app) 224 “Snowball Self” model 306–7 social dynamics 281–2 social/emotional growth, opportunities 255, 257–8 social hierarchies, position (complexity) 313 social interactions 175 artistic citizenship, relationship 136 socialization, function 238–9 social realm 49–51 social space 208 socio-economic dynamics, change 153–4 Socratic Method 403 framework 405f software, selection 193–4 soloistic virtual ensembles 220–1 solo performance 143

480

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

Index

Somatic Voicework 129 song book, making 230–1 form, assignment (see AAA narrative song form; AABA thirty-two-bar song form) preparation 144 song-lifting 32–3 Song Machine Project 4, 173–81 Song Machine, The (Seabrook) 172–5, 177 Song Maker (Google) 179 songwriters backgrounds 156 individuality 131 vocalist category 131–2 songwriting acumen 132 advice 103 assignments 158–61 deployment 165 educators, reflective practice 161–5 impact 39 institutions/programs 155–6 pedagogy 153 project 154 track-and-hook approach 176 sonic environments 446 sonic signature 119 sound musicianship 68 recordings, perspective 121 visual representation 73 Soundbreaking (documentary) 174 SoundCloud 461 Soundgarden 86 Soundtrap 174 spaces claim, necessity 337 creation 101 SPD-20 MIDI functionality 193 pad/trigger pedal numbering, inclusion 194f Spears, Britney 61 Spector, Phil 171 Spektor, Regina 131 spoken material, repetitive delivery 143 “spontaneous improvisations” 250 Springsteen, Bruce 455 stage, engagement 147 “standard repertoire,” audition 459

Stargate 177 StarMaker 224 Starr, Ringo 122 stasis 378 stave notation, usage 74–5 Steele, Shayna 130 Stefanie, Renée 6, 395 Stemp, Morris 53 stereotypes, perpetuation 206 stick control 85 Stillie, Bryden 4, 187 stimulus-response, rejection 305 Strategy 2020 (Edinburgh Napier University) 190 strikers, types 85 Stronen, Thømas 84 structure 23 importance 17 student learning 429 experience (see electronic drum curriculum) students availability 158 context, provision 23 development (see electronic performances) education (see drum kit) eyes, reflective practice 162 journeys, local learning environments (differences) 23 open approach 6 performance preparation 322–3 professional career preparation 3–4 reflection 405–8 SCAMPER mind map, re-creation 406f, 407f skills, usage 255 student-centered approach 292–3 student-defined models 68 student-led approach 278 student-led band, abilities 285 student-led group, problems 283, 285–6 student-led model 276 studio reality show, example 435–6 subjectification 239–40 substandard audio track, inclusion 223 Sudnow, David 376, 379 sung material, repetitive delivery 143 Supertramp 120 survey instruments, usage 264

481

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

symbolic violence 312, 417 synthesis techniques 446 Tagg, John 20 Tanglewood II (symposium) 415–16 Tanglewood Symposium 275, 351 taxonomies, compilation 267–8 teacher-centered learning 29 teacher-centered model 432 teacher-controlled activity 34 teacher-directed band, progress 282 teacher-led approach 278–80 teacher-led band, presentation 283 teacher-led model 276 teaching 2 expressivity, requirement 331 techne 47. See also popular music consideration 45 technical development 4 technical ear training (TET) methods 118 technical skill, importance 321 technique (core skill) 16–18 techno do-it-yourself (techno DIY) 441 accidental music, access 446 aesthetic 441–2 classroom approaches 446–7 creative voices 445–6 institutions/praxes, relationship 444 problems 444–5 production ideology 443 sonic environments 446 synthesis techniques 446 theme/meaning 447 timbre, differentiation role 443 technological advances 157 technological affordances/limitations 224 technology. See music technology inclusion, teacher hesitation 437 skills 135 usage 19 “technophallus” 339 tempo, importance 16–17 temporal skills 85 tertiary higher popular music education (tertiary HPME), development 153 tertiary music education, popular music (entry) 66 tertiary PME, purpose (dilemmas) 61–2 tertiary popular music education, institutions/ innovation/tradition 59

TET. See technical ear training themes (techno DIY) 447 theory 74 music theory (teaching), electric guitar (usage) 266–7 reflective practice 164–5 therapists (vocalist category) 132 thin vocal fold (TVF) 145 Third Wave, The (Toffler) 442 Thompson, Paul 113 Thomson, Paul 4 thought process, filtration 405–8 timbre 17, 23 differentiation role 443 production 14 timing 16–17, 23 Tin Pan Alley 160 Titze, Ingo 129 Toffler, Alvin 441 tonality 17 electrification 263 tonal musicianship 68 tool acquisition formal learning, usage 89–96 informal learning, usage 86–7 top-liners 171 topliners, track (input) 178–9 top-lining (track-and-hook phase) 178–80 strategies 179 Tower of Power 263 Townshend, Pete 324 track-and-hook 175 approach/phases 176–81 trackers 171 tracking (track-and-hook phase) 177–8 tradition innovation-tradition models 64 term, usage 61–3 usage (see jazz education; popular music education) traditional jazz canon, centrality (restatement/ reinforcement) 65 tradition-innovation binary 61 training-style activities 23 transformative processes 86 triple-minorities, identification 345 troubleshooting, impact 20 trust, importance 328–9 TVF. See thin vocal fold

482

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

twang quality 145 access 146 two-way bridges, building 277 UGC. See user-generated content Ultrabeat (Logic) 178 “Umbrella” (Rihanna) 179 unconscious competence 332 unconscious incompetence 332 undergraduate popular music performance degrees, notation skills (value) 73 background 74–6 student interviews 76–8 Understanding By Design (Wiggins/McTighe) 294 Understanding Small Music Venues report 52 United Kingdom (UK) compulsory education curricula 50–1 music degrees, quality/qualities (codification) 47 Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Music Benchmarks 15 United Kingdom (UK) HPME courses 16 student entry 11–12 universalism 312 universities, quality (attitudes/opinions) 54 University of Auckland, research-led programs 155 University of Victoria courses, offering 119 KLÖ audio archive, case study 118–20 unpitched instrument, shortcomings 88 Urban, Keith 340 user-generated content (UGC) 431–3 value construction (see jazz education; popular music education) placement 51, 52 viability/acceptability, contrast 285 “value for money” 46 Vangelis 442 Vasil, Martina 5, 249, 461 Vasquez, Kayla (guitar player) 341–4 Verses Project 37, 39 viability, value/acceptability, contrast 285 virtual learning environment (VLE) 191–2 Visconti, Tony 172, 173

VLE. See virtual learning environment vocal athletes 127 vocal function, advanced knowledge 130 vocal health/function 136 vocalists, categories 129–33 vocal pedagogues 128 vocal pedagogy, approach 128 vocal technique/application 131 extended vocal techniques, usage 136 vocal technique, understanding 133 Vocology 129 voices cultural vacuum 445 exercises, knowledge 133 function/anatomy/health 136 rawness 45 synergy 222–3 tertiary function 127 Voice, The 12, 45, 75 Wackerman, Chad 84 “Wall of Sound” 172 Walzer, Daniel A. 6, 429 WAM. See Western art music Washington, Jr., Grover 115 Ways of the Hand (Sudnow) 376, 379 WEAM. See Western European Art Music Weathervane Music 113 Welten, Ruud 311 Wenger, Etienne 305 Westalke College of Music 62 Western art music (WAM) 304 canon, performance 49 lexicon 48 Western classical music education, normative music education 31–2 Western drummers, learning experiences analysis 86–9 cultural psychology, impact 84–5 cultural psychology, perspective 83 data set, observations 95–6 deliberate practice 90–4 experiences, data 95 findings 94–6 instruction, availability/quality (cultural divide) 89–90 methodology 84 parental involvement 87–8 tool acquisition, formal learning (usage) 89–96

483

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury

Index

status 208 term, usage 207 work-in-progress, comment 435 work of literature, referencing 161 work-concept 207–9, 213 dominance 209 term, usage 207 workplace effectiveness 175 writing, impact 19–20 written curriculum document, idea (creation) 293–5 X-Factor, The 12, 45 Young, Eric 251 Young, Neil 131 YouTube, perception 219 Zagorski-Thomas, Simon 3, 11, 13, 171, 172 Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky) 20, 192

Copyright © 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.

tool acquisition, informal learning (usage) 86–7 turning points 88–9 Western European Art Music (WEAM) methods 62 Western high-low culture divide 64 what if scenarios 409f What’s That Sound? (Covach/Flory) 295 Who, The 324 Williams, David 102 Williams, David B. 430 Williams, Robbie 382 Williams, Tony 86 Will, Mike 177, 180 Wonder, Stevie 172, 456 work assessment, consideration 382–7 digitally-based practices, absence 36 legacy 114 notion 212

484

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education : Perspectives and Practices, edited by Zack Moir, et al., Bloomsbury