The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education

Perspectives and Practices

Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, Gareth Dylan Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350049420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education draws together current thinking and practice on popular music education from empirical, ethnographic, sociological and philosophical perspectives. Through a series of unique chapters from authors working at the forefront of music education, this book explores the ways in which an international group of music educators each approach popular music education. Chapters discuss pedagogies from across the spectrum of formal to informal learning, including "outside" and "other" perspectives that provide insight into the myriad ways in which popular music education is developed and implemented. The book is organized into the following sections:
- Conceptualizing Popular Music Education
- Musical, Creative and Professional Development
- Originating Popular Music
- Popular Music Education in Schools
- Identity, Meaning and Value in Popular Music Education
- Formal Education, Creativities and Assessment
Contributions from academics, teachers, and practitioners make this an innovative and exciting volume for students, teachers, researchers and professors in popular music studies and music education.

Part I

Conceptualizing Popular Music Education

1

Setting the Agenda: Theorizing Popular Music Education Practice

David Henson and Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Setting the scene in higher popular music education: Where are we?

Higher popular music education (HPME) is highly variegated, comprised of a hodge-podge 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 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.

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?

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:

• 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 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

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 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 selectin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Foreword Joe Bennett
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices Zack Moir, Bryan Powell, and Gareth Dylan Smith
• Part I: Conceptualizing Popular Music Education
• Part II: Musical, Creative, and Professional Development
• Part III: Originating Popular Music
• Part IV: Popular Music Education in Schools
• Part V: Identity, Meaning, and Value in Popular Music Education
• Part VI: Formal Education, Creativities, and Assessment
• Part VII: Epilogue
• Index
• Imprint