Journal of Popular Music Education - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019

This research examines the pedagogical practices of a self-taught musician who teaches music at an elementary school in Canada. Research on the ways that popular musicians teach has shown that many teachers use a combination of informal and formalized structures. We used Personhood theory as a conceptual framework to illuminate how the context and disposition of the musician–teacher informs their pedagogy. These findings demonstrate how context and disposition inform pedagogical practices and the ways that the teacher’s personhood contributes to students’ learning. We collected data through interviews with the teacher and school principal, distributed questionnaires to students and observed performances. Findings show that one’s personhood can contribute to the medium, message and messenger within a music education setting. Personhood theory helps frame the nested nature of these relationships and these findings point to the need to support development of in-service and pre-service teachers’ personhood.

Providers of higher education have a legal responsibility to provide accurate information to students. In an increasingly marketized sector, however, promotional imperatives place pressure on providers to ‘sell’ degrees to students. Given the indeterminate nature of popular music careers, not to mention the ‘intangible product’ that is higher education, the implicit or explicit indication of an assurance of career success upon completion of the degree could be regarded as being overstated. This article brings to bear a qualitative linguistic analysis of the terms and constructed meanings implied within promotional literature across a range of performance-based popular music degrees. It suggests that language in this context functions in a performative sense and can perpetuate questionable conceptions of popular music careers and the efficacy of degree courses. The article concludes with suggestions of improvements that might be made across the sector in the promotion of popular music degree programmes.

Guitar education has emerged as a discipline in K-12 institutions alongside ‘traditional’ music education such as band, orchestra and chorus in recent decades. Despite the substantial body of literature containing practical advice on teaching guitar, research-supported scholarship is lacking. The purpose of this study was to provide an evidentiary-based understanding of the professional profiles of guitar educators. A large sample (n = 1269) of guitar educators participated in the Guitar Educator Questionnaire (GEQ). Findings from the GEQ suggest a low per cent (7.9%) of music educators who teach guitar class consider themselves to be ‘guitar specialists’. A substantial number of respondents (68.5%) indicated that they rarely or never participated in guitar-related professional development, and 76.1% of respondents reported that their pre-service training provided little or no preparation for a career in guitar education.

Simplicity of thought and operation can help to define complex end results, with cybernetic systems being a useful means of defining this within songwriting practices. This study outlines utilization of cybernetic practices by key popular music composers, including David Byrne and Brian Eno, who benefited from an art school education which supported these practices. As postmodern creation became more evident within art colleges, systemized processes of creation, where hierarchies were delineated, supported freedom and experimentation within the creative process. The non-musician was able to express their musical creativity due to the rise of new technologies and the reduction of hierarchies, as exposed from interviews with Eno, his art school tutor Roy Ascott, and experimental composer Gavin Bryars. These elements of art school education that they discussed, helped a new generation of musicians to develop original and dynamic work in the 1970s; the results of this research suggest that these are practices that should be introduced and acknowledged within HPME.

In this position paper the author presents a perspective on rock drumming and music education. The author is a drummer and university professor who combines an autoethnographic account with consideration of theoretical frameworks including authenticity, flow and the autotelic personality. Through illustrative vignettes of rock drumming and music teaching, the author appeals to the essentially somatic experience of rock drumming. He argues that educators and educational institutions need to allow for rock’s inherent, authentic loudness or else risk misrepresenting the music and treating drummers unjustly. This means that the physical movements and resulting high volumes germane to much rock drumming in performance must be accommodated in rehearsals and practice. This article does not seek to privilege rock drumming over other forms, but argues that to include rock drumming authentically in education contexts means to acknowledge and celebrate its essence.

Australian university graduates of music industry degrees are often faced with challenges stemming from both Australia’s peripheral position in global music economies and the predominance of precarious work environments. This article presents an evaluation of a ‘studio model’ of education adopted by the Bachelor of Arts (Music Industry) degree at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. The studio model approach aims to better prepare graduates for careers in the contemporary music industry via hands-on and tacit learning experiences that ready them for ‘portfolio careers’. The case study evaluated here involved students working with an industry partner to deliver an on-campus music festival called Copresents in 2017. Student feedback indicated overall satisfaction with the studio, and that they were able to develop certain skills that would be valuable to them in a portfolio career, such as improved communication competencies and a better understanding of possible careers in the industry. We also demonstrate that students recognized ways in which the experience was curtailed by institutional and industrial requirements that ran counter to the ideals of studio learning. We note that the effectiveness of the model is limited in some ways by its placement at the intersection of the institutional needs of the university and the requirements of industry, neither of which are entirely in alignment with student needs.

This article highlights a composition project from an undergraduate musicianship course at a private liberal arts college. For the project, students studied a Prelude by J. S. Bach and utilized their analysis as a framework to compose new melodies. Instead of writing in the style of Bach, many students chose to transform their compositions into popular music styles. The study discusses the students’ processes and addresses how the new compositions were largely representative of popular music in a range of styles including heavy metal, punk, surf and rap. The unexpected transformations became an opportunity to implement a responsive pedagogy that became a bridge between classical and popular music. Implications for teaching are presented and include discussion of the use of popular music in the undergraduate theory classroom.

Teaching and learning popular music and world musics are prominent topics in music education but often play a supplement role in the classroom. The main purpose of this quantitative experimental study was to investigate the effects of Chinese popular music on students’ familiarity and preference for its traditional version. Participants were undergraduate students from a university in the northeastern United States who completed a pre-test, minimum four weekly treatments and post-test. Results suggest participation in a world music course may contribute to preference for Chinese traditional music, but short-term exposure to popular versions of Chinese traditional music does not seem to contribute to preference for Chinese traditional music. A reason for this may be that popular music has its own cultures and characteristics that are not necessarily transferable to music from other music genres. In addition, the personality traits of open-mindedness or closed-mindedness showed significant influence over preference for traditional or popular music, respectively.

What follows is a spoken word piece delivered at the Suncoast Music Education Research Symposium in February of 2019 to a group of higher education faculty and doctoral students. It is the intersection of hip hop lyrics and my white privilege, effectively composed as an artistic response to demonstrate the deep knowledge contained within hip hop lyrics and the value gleaned from their critical analyses. The impetus for this piece was my desire to show the conference attendees an alternative to perpetuated and damaging stereotypes about hip hop, a problem which I perceive as the prevalent understanding of hip hop culture and the dominant critique used to oppress this beautiful art form in educational spaces. A caveat about how I chose to sample some of the lyrics is worth mentioning. In some cases, the first-person perspective of the artists, embodied by their use of ‘I’ or ‘we’ in a song, was not appropriate and lyrics were altered to ‘they’ or ‘them’. This choice was to show internal reflection rather than to imply a lived or even co-opted experience by the author. It is important to stress ‘they’ have informed ‘me’. Jvaust as listening to a piece of music would likely be more powerful than studying the score, this piece may best be received by watching the performance.