Popular Music in School: Remixing the Issues

Abstract

Over the last forty years, popular music in America has consistently shown great variety, origialioty, and evolution. These qualities are evident when we look at this period's popular musicians, such as the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Linda Ronstadt, Prince, Madonna, Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, and Usher. The variety is even more impressive when we broaden our consideration beyond the best-selling artists and consider all vernacular styles, including country, jazz, folk, R & B, rap, and Latin music.While American music has clearly flourished and evolved over the last several decades, it's difficult to say the same for American music education. Although there are important reasons to preserve long-standing traditions of school music, one wonders why the content of our music curricula doesn't better reflect the musical world in which we live. Participants in the 1967 Tanglewood Symposium challenged music educators to be inclusive of music of all styles and cultures, specifically including &dquo;music of our time&dquo; and &dquo;popular teenage music&dquo; in this directive 1 MENC has supported this mandate ever since, in part by devoting issues of the Music Educators Journal (MEJ) to popular music and by publishing a number of print resources, the most recent being Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education.2 In the 1991 special

Integrating popular music and informal music learning practices: A multiple case study of secondary school music teachers enacting change in music education

“…For formally trained music teachers, engaging in and implementing practices that are student-centered, democratic, and characterized by less systematic instruction may be overwhelming or may make them feel like they have lost control of the classroom (Abramo & Austin, 2014;Beitler & Thornton, 2008;Green, 2008;Woody, 2007). In a study by Abramo and Austin (2014), the participant admitted that lack of experience in informal learning and nonensemble music teaching made him reluctant to move away from using the formal music learning practices he learned in his music teacher education program.…”

“…Some may have difficulties in acquiring the correct instruments for popular music, and others may not teach appropriate vocal techniques. The vocal quality in popular music is drastically different than formal bel canto tone quality, and most popular music is written for one voice, which does not translate well to ensembles (Hebert, 2011;Woody, 2007).…”

Dalcroze meets technology: integrating music, movement and visuals with the Music Paint Machine

“…Often focusing on innovative monitoring possibilities, they easily support teacher-centred instruction (e.g. Bartel and Cameron 2004;Shernoff et al 2003;Woody 2007) and a didactics of transmission and reproductive imitation (e.g. Young, Burwell, and Pickup 2003).…”

Teachers’ Perspectives in Using Disney Songs in the Music Classroom

“…Many respondents explained that Disney music is merely a tool for teaching these concepts, as one participant commented, "like most tools it can be effective only insofar as you know how to use them." Woody (2007) exclaimed that teachers may not be opposed to teaching popular music but "fear they wouldn't know the first thing about actually doing it." The feedback gained from the survey seems to contradict this sentiment, as there were no comments mentioning that teachers specifically did not use Disney songs because they were intimidated by a lack of knowledge.…”