Journal of Popular Music Education - Girls and Women in Popular Music Education, Jul 2022

This research article features the perspectives of two young women who create and perform as an indie band together. Their stories demonstrate a stark contrast between their relative success in this early stage of their career and the obstacles that they continue to face. Linked to an underlying feeling of imposter syndrome, they reveal an ongoing struggle with confidence as musicians, resentment of the gentrification and closure of music venues, unsupportive high school teachers and administration and age-related barriers to the indie music scene. Encounters with sexism and ageism within the music scene and industry allude to systemic issues resulting in a dearth of musical spaces in which young artists can participate safely. Through interrogation of existing pathways to musical experiences and deeper understanding of young artists and their experiences within these avenues, attention to these discrepancies is critical in all settings of music education.

Oumou Sangaré has used her voice to take on local political and social issues over her 30-plus-year career as a singer. However, those stances can be lost on global listeners who lack emic understandings of Sangaré’s context – the local music and politics of Wassoulou. Scholars in music education note the importance of contextualizing the musical cultures introduced to students, and this issue is paramount if the inclusion of world music is to be a decolonizing praxis. Considering the music of Oumou Sangaré, this article demonstrates that while metadata (lyrics, translations, interviews, profiles and media) can be found to teach and contextualize Sangaré’s music in the classroom, information on contemporary musicians is not always easily accessible in the digital and streaming age of music mediation. Further work is needed to provide music educators with increased access to this critical information for including world music and musicians in curricula.

As a popular icon across several cultures in East and South East Asia, Teresa Teng demonstrated and promoted natural, tender and unstrained aesthetics for beautiful singing. Although never included in either Chinese or Japanese formal music education curricula, Teng’s music provided an alternative for people to express their emotions outside of school music education and gradually influenced the aesthetic standard for singing in music education for generations. Through historical and cultural reporting, as well as an autobiographical narration, this article explores the significant influence of Teresa Teng in Chinese and Japanese music education realms from the late twentieth century until today.

Folk music and other popular styles associated with rural regions of the United States appear to be unlikely places to find lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and other gender/sexual minorities (LGBTQ+). Consequently, teaching folk music of the United States with attention to diversity, equity and inclusion can be challenging for music educators. In this article, I use Yves Bonenfant’s notion of ‘queer listening’ to discuss queer genders and sexualities in folk and popular music, applying the framework to three songs by women artists: Tracy Chapman’s ‘For My Lover’, the Indigo Girls’ ‘Closer to Fine’ and Amythyst Kiah’s version of ‘Black Myself’. By treating queerness as a ‘doing’ rather than a ‘being’, queer narratives of oppression, survival, resilience and triumph in folk music can be discussed in the music classroom with greater nuance in relation to history, performance and reception.

Female solo harmonica players began to be more commonly heard on stages and radio in the United States in the 1920s–30s. While still a male-dominated arena, several women soloists, male–female duos or women’s groups were featured performers in vaudeville, but also the ‘variety’ or ‘stage shows’ entertainment that emerged as vaudeville declined. Stage shows as well as acts that appeared as a prelude to movies at movie houses took on the air of a more ‘middle-class-friendly’ source of entertainment where women began to find a foothold and developed a reputation as solid performers. This article profiles three of these: The Ingenues, ‘Babe’ Didrickson and Mildred Mulcay. This article begins to fill in the gap of our understanding of the activities and impact of female performers of popular music in the decades before the Second World War.

This article seeks to gain insights into the musical learning journeys of Black female DJs in Ireland who make up part of the African diaspora and/or Black and Irish community. The DJs’ intersectional and multiple identities are discussed with a view to uncovering how such identities are both fashioned and perceived; projected and silenced; negotiated and dictated. The article presents macro-themes of learning and identity to examine issues relating to music in the home, musical influences, learning processes, in-/non-/formal education and cross-cutting issues relating to gender and ethnicity. These issues are contextually and personally bound, yet speak to the broader complexities, cultures and politics of representation in a male-dominated field. Data are analysed from interviews, media publications and broadcasts to trace three women’s DJ trajectories. Their voices are amplified in literal and metaphorical senses to expand the limited portrayals of their experiences and practices within popular music (education) scholarship.

A twofold ethnographic examination, this article gathers narrative accounts from a particular group of women who coalesced in 2017 on the coastal city of the Brazilian north-east, Recife. Described as a ‘poetic promenade’ between women songwriters and poets, ‘A Dita Curva’ came, indeed, as a poetic response during a wave of strong conservatism in Brazil. Three questions summarize the inquiries brought forward in this article: In which ways are the ditas questioning gender performativity within gender roles? How do they adapt and adopt feminist creative processes? How can these processes be applied to formal settings of music education? The article also situates Brazilian popular music within the country’s different regions as an attempt to challenge global notions of what Brazilian popular music constitutes. In this article, the term ‘women’ relate to persons self-identified as such, independently of how they were assigned at birth; analyses of behaviours of women are not linked to biology but to societal contexts, and gender is understood as neither binary, static nor fixed. Lastly, the discussion of gender is one seen through the lens of intersectionality, meaning that analyses of gender, race and class do not happen in an isolated manner but as inseparable categories. To write about the dita curvas is, in a way, to write about me. I share in many ways their existence within popular music and this field. I was born and raised in the same city where they have convened, and as a female artist and creator myself I have encountered similar barriers they have sought to identify and rebel against.

Review of: Integrating STEM with Music: Units, Lessons, and Adaptations for K–12, Shawna Longo and Zachary Gates (2021)

New York: Oxford University Press, 224 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19754-677-2, p/bk, $29.95