The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education

Gareth Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman, Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317042006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Popular music is a growing presence in education, formal and otherwise, from primary school to postgraduate study. Programmes, courses and modules in popular music studies, popular music performance, songwriting and areas of music technology are becoming commonplace across higher education. Additionally, specialist pop/rock/jazz graded exam syllabi, such as RockSchool and Trinity Rock and Pop, have emerged in recent years, meaning that it is now possible for school leavers in some countries to meet university entry requirements having studied only popular music. In the context of teacher education, classroom teachers and music-specialists alike are becoming increasingly empowered to introduce popular music into their classrooms. At present, research in Popular Music Education lies at the fringes of the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, community music, cultural studies and popular music studies. The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education is the first book-length publication that brings together a diverse range of scholarship in this emerging field. Perspectives include the historical, sociological, pedagogical, musicological, axiological, reflexive, critical, philosophical and ideological.

Part I

Introduction

1

Foreword

Lucy Green

Popular music education has come of age. This volume stands as one of the first major testaments to that maturation process. Its 60 contributing authors together represent research from a wide and varied range of localities, nations and cultures, adopting an equally diverse set of research methods and theoretical perspectives. There has always been and will always be music – whether it is labelled popular or anything else – outside of schools, universities, instrumental teaching studios and other educational institutions. There will, therefore, always be ways of passing on music which occur relatively or completely independently of such institutions. Thank goodness. But what these authors have shown, collectively, is just how much can be gained by bringing all kinds of popular music into the educational field. They’ve also shown what a complicated, challenging and controversial operation that is.

In their Introduction the editors suggest the entrance of popular music into education represents something of a paradigm shift, and I agree. The primary stage in the shift involved a slow change of curriculum content from around the 1960s on. Soon after the turn of the millennium, this was followed by an increasing interest in and willingness to adapt pedagogies so as to accommodate the new content through teaching and learning practices which reflect the qualities of the music involved as closely as feasible. What we have now is a meta-field: one that researches what else happens when popular music’s presence in education causes changes to both curriculum and pedagogy; and, more importantly perhaps, what could happen and what should happen. Furthermore, the answers to those questions are – as is abundantly clear from this Research Companion – very different depending on the social, cultural and musical contexts.

The authors would probably all agree that, despite regional differences, the majority of children and adults, at least in those geographical localities represented between these pages, have for too long been alienated from music-making. Whilst opportunities to listen to a vast range of music have soared exponentially for the majority of people in the last few decades, opportunities to make music, alone or with others, seem to have narrowed, especially perhaps during the second half of the 20th century. Now those opportunities are burgeoning, and part of the reason for that is of course because the music which is most popular to most listeners is being made available to them in other ways: available so that they can play, sing, compose, improvise, record and produce it, as well as listen to it with more open ears.

I suggested above that there has been and will always be music outside educational institutions. But that goes along with the fact that the musical production and transmission processes involved in such music have been limited to small numbers within any society: members of musical families, for example, or of specialist or subcultural musical groups, not the vast majority of people. Now there is the chance to change that situation. The authors in this Research Companion represent that chance, which is also reflected in the practices and scholarship of many others throughout the world. Congratulations PME – good luck; and congratulations too to the editors, authors and publishers of this step forward in the field of music education.

2

Popular music education (r)evolution

Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran and Phil Kirkman

In the last several decades (and to greater and lesser extents in different countries), the presence of popular music has grown in schools, universities and conservatoires. Perhaps this amounts to a paradigm shift. When describing the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote the following:

At the start a candidate for paradigm may have few supporters, and on occasion the supporters’ motives may be suspect. Nevertheless, if they are competent, they will improve it, explore its possibilities, and show what it would be like to belong to the community guided by it. And as that goes on, if the paradigm is one destined to win its fight, the number and strength of the persuasive arguments in its favor will increase. More scientists will then be converted, and the exploration of the new paradigm will go on. Gradually the number of experiments, instruments, articles, and books based upon the paradigm will multiply.

(Kuhn, 1962/2012, pp. 157–158)

It is possible to see to the evolution of scholarship and practice in popular music education as somewhat analogous to what Kuhn describes here. 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. PME sits within music education and often falls under popular music studies (PMS); PME and PMS share, for instance, much of the terrain surrounding The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Scott, 2009). Mantie (2013) discusses the lack of a coherent conversation around “popular music pedagogy” in (principally US) writing, and in Jørgensen’s (2009) comprehensive study of higher music education, the reference to PME is minimal, with a majority of higher popular music education provision taking place in institutions not recognized by his typology of “institutions for higher music education” (Parkinson & Smith, 2015). PME is a discrete area of scholarly focus; to quote an album title by drummer Bill Bruford (1999), it often finds itself to be both “a part, and yet apart”.

Contributing authors to this book work mostly, although not exclusively, in higher education settings of one kind or another, teaching and with experience and expertise in a wide range of intersecting, overlapping subjects and sectors pertinent and party to PME. These include early years, primary, secondary, further and higher education, adult education, musicology, music teacher education, sociology of music, sociology of music education, music business, music marketing and promotion, popular music studies, community music, songwriting, music production, composition, technology, performance, improvisation and special educational needs. This diversity speaks to the breadth and depth of the community forming in and around PME. The purpose of this book, then, is to take stock of PME – to see some of who, what, why, where and how popular music education is in the present, and to suggest some considerations that might help with (to use a colleague’s phrase) “navigating the future” (Randles, 2014).

2010 saw the birth of the Association for Popular Music Education (APME), and in 2015 there were at least three international conferences on popular music education – the Research in Popular Music Education one-day symposium at the University of Huddersfield in the UK, the APME conference at the University of Miami in the US and the Ann Arbor Symposium at the University of Michigan in the US. The July 2016 launch of the Popular Music Education Special Interest Group at the 32nd World Conference of the International Society for Music Education followed three biennial PME conferences (in 2010, 2012 and 2014) at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in the UK, and conferences hosted by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (UK and Ireland branch) with the UK’s Higher Education Academy (2014) and the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium VIII (2011) in the US.

Academics have written elsewhere about epistemological issues surrounding what the scholarly and education communities might mean by ‘popular music education’ (Abramo, 2011a, 2011b; Allsup, 2008; Ballantyne & Lebler, 2013; Cloonan, 2005; Cloonan & Hulstedt, 2012; Feichas, 2010; Hebert, 2011a, 2011b; Humphreys, 2004; Karlsen, 2010; Kratus, 2007; Lebler et al., 2009; Mantie, 2013; Parkinson & Smith, 2015; Smith, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Snell & Söderman, 2014; Väkevä, 2006, 2010; Wang & Humphreys, 2009; Westerlund, 2006). The present volume is thus not intended to provide a definitive account or description of PME. Rather, we aim to highlight something of the breadth of the field, including some of its interests, salience, shortcomings and challenges. One issue faced by popular music education as an emerging area of scholarship is that many popular music educators, institutions and communities exist ‘beneath the radar’ of publications such as this. We are also sensitive to perennial issues around language and access to scholarly discourse, meaning that many perspectives and practices would necessarily be excluded from these pages. Nonetheless we invite readers to engage with this volume, and to critique its approach, its contents and its assumptions. Following collections such as those by Rodriguez (2004), Oehler and Hanley (2009) and Audubert et al (2015), and a special issue of IASPM Journal (2015), we view this volume very much “as part of an ongoing process of the development of PME” (Green et al., 2015). We hope this book serves to help our field avoid becoming one in which “we seem to be more prone to acting our way into implicit thinking than we are able to think our way explicitly into acting” (Bruner, 1996, p. 79). Viva la (r)evolución!

Overview of the book

Part I: Introduction

Lucy Green and the book’s editors have provided what we hope is a helpful introduction to this volume, and Rupert Till concludes the opening part with an overview of perspectives and practices in popular music education internationally, focusing primarily on higher education. Contextualizing these perspectives with accounts of his own approaches to teaching, learning and assessment, Till takes the view that, given the breadth of popular music(s) in the world and the learning that takes place, publications such as the present volume are timely and necessary in an expanding field.

Part II: Past, present and future

This part contains a range of chapters that provide descriptive and analytical accounts of PME, taking stock of historical contexts, discussing contemporary practices and approaches, and suggesting frameworks relevant to reflexive work in the field for the future. It opens with Andrew Krikun’s exploration of historical precedents for contemporary PME in the US. He describes the emergence of commercially motivated PME in private schools, and the vocational rationale for the inclusion of popular music training in technical colleges in a new era of mass culture. This chapter is complemented by David A. Williams and Clint Randles’ discussion of the complexity and complications inherent in trying to incorporate popular music learning into the curricula of mainstream schools and the programmes training teachers who work in compulsory public education in the US today; since, and perhaps despite, the development of popular music in North America, it appears difficult to weave this music into school experiences. Aleksi Ojala then describes the development of a new pedagogical approach called ‘learning through producing’ in Finland, a country where PME is normative and highly developed. Based on studies with secondary-school students, the method uses online and other technologies to connect in-school music-making with the ‘real-life’ experiences of technology-conversant students in the 21st century.

In the first of three papers presenting perspectives and practices from the Asian continent, Wai-Chung Ho discusses the power and cultural politics of popular song in the People’s Republic of China, and the role of the education system in perpetuating and (re)producing meanings of artefacts and attitudes, emphasizing national connectivity and collectivity. Siew Ling Chua and Hui-Ping Ho discuss incorporation of informal and non-formal learning approaches in popular music pedagogy in schools in Singapore. They focus on the roles and approaches taken by teachers in a student-centric learning paradigm, and ask how emphases on technology and cognitive autonomy could inform developments for the future. Hei Ting Wong then presents a case study of a for-profit popular music college in postcolonial Hong Kong, in the context of a national and historical Eurocentric classical music tradition. She compares ideology and curriculum at the school – which focuses on local ‘Cantopop’ culture and music industry – with similar institutions in the US and the UK.

The next three chapters explore models, contexts and implications of higher popular music education (HPME) from perspectives giving particular consideration to the position of HPME in preparing students for life beyond the education system. Seán McLaughlin looks at the ways in which UK institutions construct popular music through perpetuating ideologies and the pervasive emphasis on vocationalism in higher education, in the context of the music-industrial landscape in which graduates seek employment. Simon Warner then presents empirical data interrogating the purpose and epistemological locus of popular music studies in a UK context, finding tensions between axes of practical/critical, traditional/popular and private/public provision. Gavin Carfoot, Brad Millard, Samantha Bennett and Christopher Allan follow with a typology of undergraduate PME in Australia, proposing parallel, series and integrated modes as a potentially helpful means of differentiating, studying, reflecting upon and developing PME provision internationally.

This part explores the context and broad content of PME on four continents, across public, private, compulsory and higher education, leading into the following part, where the focus narrows to discuss more specific ‘delivery’ of PME in a wide range of studies.

Part III: Curricula in popular music

Chapters in this part discuss and critique aspects of curricula – past, present and potential – raising various issues salient to popular music education in a range of higher and mainstream education contexts. In the first of four chapters centring on provision in higher education, Emma Hooper presents a case for inclusion of cultural theory in popular music programmes, arguing that the music must be understood in terms of its context, and raising the question of the responsibility of musicians vis-à-vis social-political activism. Paul Fleet gets to grips with another perennial issue in teaching in HPME, discussing – via an overview of UK provision – the role of musical (stave) notation in an arena that frequently elides this traditional Western representation of musical intentions. Diane Hughes then gives a detailed explanation of and rationale for an approach to pedagogy in contemporary popular singing – an increasingly taught, but under-theorized, mode of voice application warranting its own approach separate from reified pedagogical methods in other musical traditions. Jo Collinson Scott follows, deconstructing myths around inspiration and ‘creative block’ in the context of songwriting pedagogy and assessment. Focusing on teaching at the master’s-degree level in the UK, she analyzes empirical data from songwriting pedagogues, and argues that the key to successful songwriting education may lie in abandoning the notion of the muse.

Two chapters span higher education and compulsory mainstream education: Paul Thompson and Alex Stevenson present interview data from an empirical study into the dearth of UK HPME and broader PME provision that focuses on electronic music. The authors contend that in order to meet artistic needs of contemporary popular musicians, further scholarly and practitioner attention in this area is required. Axel Schwarz and David-Emil Wickström describe a music intervention project in Germany in which HPME students visit local schools to engage children and adolescents in music-making workshops. This programme seeks to develop musicking in school pupils as well as to broaden the career horizons of college students studying popular music.

The final two chapters in this part focus on complementary e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Past, present and future
• Part III Curricula in popular music
• Part IV Careers, entrepreneurship and marketing
• Part V Social and critical issues
• Index