Popular Music and Music Education

Yeah, my school music lessons were chocka with listening to symphonic music.

If I wanted to be flip, I'd link up a "School Of Rock" screen capture right here; but then again, that would be the serious answer as well. Yeah, a genre needs to reach a certain degree of cuddliness before it can be inflicted on kids as a part of the curriculum, and while the hormonal wailing of, say, Led Zep is not quite there yet (hence the comic effect of "School Of Rock" etc.), Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly are comfortably in that zone. So, ten more years.

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I remember certainly most of the music I was exposed to in elementary school was more pop and folk. But when I refer to music education, I guess I'm specifically referring to something along the lines of school bands/orchestras/choirs, which employ the instrumentation of symphonic/classical music. (Although what to teach in primary school music lessons is a good question, too.)

The School of Rock/Rock School point is apt, I think. School band/orchestra programs are kind of cost efficient in the sense that everyone is playing the same material and require only the instrument to play. For this reason, a lot of school music programs have jazz bands that usually play material written for largeish ensembles and not necessarily small combo stuff. If in ten years a high school wanted to introduce a rock performance class, how would they be able to accomodate a class of 25 or 50 or 100 students?

I'm not familiar with music education, but I would guess that some type of pop composition/performance cirricula exists in some of our citadels of higher ed, although I can't verify that. Dartmouth does have a graduate program in electro-acoustic music that takes about three students a year, and Keith Fullerton Whitman teaches at Harvard, although I think these programs are rooted more in the symphonic tradition and less in the "I wanna make a glitch pop record!" tradition.

Considering the fact that the theory of evolution is not yet a settled question in some regions of the country, I think public schools will start teaching pop music as soon as hell freezes over. Also, this stuff a) costs money, unless we think kids are going to be lugging around their own axes and amps and such, and b) would probably require class sizes to be a lot smaller than is remotely feasible. Plus, who's pop music are we talking about here anyway? Symphonic music is convenient because it's pleasant, non-controversial (we're a long way from Sacre du Printemps here), and a relatively agreed upon idiom, at least in the eyes of your typical parent/ property tax payer. Start teaching pop music and you might as well throw a Molotov cocktail into a PTA meeting. All it takes is one insane parent and a slow news day and you have yourself a story on Fox News.

Although it was a good 14 years ago, when I last studied music at school (ages 12-14) I can't recall much classical or jazz being played to us in the classroom. Certainly all of the instrument tuiton was within the realm of popular music, mainly blues-based and simple Beatles arrangements (IIRC, our teacher was a big blues fan.) We were also allowed to play our own choice of music in the classroom, to discuss and write about it. I remember the assignment for one class was to write a review of the Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane single. after our teacher had played it to us and explained the context

Also, does a popular music idiom have to go out of style and its aficionados reach middle age before music academia recognizes and teaches it?

Maybe! (see above.) But I would suppose that it largely depends on the individual schools and teachers, ranging from some being the bastion of conservatism to the rather more enlightened (see Dizzee Rascal's teacher!)

in fourth/fifth/sixth grade (ages 9, 10 and 11) my teacher played us queen and billy joel and herbie hancock and genesis and the beatles, which i actually do consider part of the reason that from such a young age i was really, really into music. i think some pop music is definitely present in most american curriculums for elementary and middle schools, judging from my childhood and friends of mine who have children who have beatles singalongs in music class. most of the beatles catalog is accessible to even the youngest of kids, though there are obvious exceptions, and there's plenty of other songs that 8 or 9 year olds or younger kids can listen to.

unfortunately i believe past grade 8 or 9 there isn't really music appreciation in schools. everyone does band/orchestra/choir at that point, and yes, that is very much rooted in classical and jazz, though some schools have jazz bands that do versions of pop songs. those are relatively large ensembles, though - 10-25 students, all doing versions of jazz and pop standards.

there's no real study of rock n' roll past a certain age. perhaps there should be, so people would at least have a wider understanding of music outside of just what's on the radio or what their parents listen to. it's been the dominant musical style of the past 40-odd years, and most have accepted it as a valid art form. i'm not sure, but i'd assume plenty of music programs in various schools have pop music comp/performance programs. berklee college of music teaches you how to be a bland but technically gifted jazz/pop/r&b performer and composer. other schools, i dunno, but i'm sure it's out there.

i think the only way you could do it would be for a district to strike a deal with a company like fender for cheap, decent guitars and amps, and set up a couple practice spaces with drum kits and keyboards in them, and let group of up to five or six practice for an hour a couple times a week. it's not impossible, and hell, that could be one way low-income kids could afford musical instruments. a guitar isn't any more expensive than a clarinet or a euphonium, and i am pretty sure more kids would rather play the former than the latter. maybe it does happen somewhere, who knows.

this is coming from someone who went to a very unremarkable, rather small high school in new england, so it may be different in other parts of the country. though i am aware of the growing trend of school districts cutting back funding for music programs and arts programs in general, which is obviously horrible.

My sixth grade music teacher played us songs like "One Tin Soldier" and "American Pie" complete with in depth lyrical analysis and discussion of the use of metaphor etc. The middle school band teacher played in this funky jazz oriented covers band at the school dances. It seemed that there was a lot of crossever between the pop world and the educational experience. Of course, this was in the late 70's USA...

in university I took a class called "popular music unti1 1960". it mostly sucked (boomer-wannabe "rock'n'roll saved the world" teacher). you can google the course name (change 1 to l) for the syllabus.

Late 70s, small town USA, my 6th grade music teacher had us make a "modern dance" piece to the "Overture to Tommy" as done by Tomita- each class did their own interpretation, ours being based on the "Time Machine" I remember it being videotaped. If it could be recovered, it might be as fascinating as the Langley School Music Project. But more likely a quick meme on YouTube.

I took a class in the late 80s in my college's music department on the "Roots of Rock and Roll", taught by the critic Robert Palmer. Changed my life, to the extent that I've gone on to pop rather too seriously. I've also wondered it that made me among the first write rock criticism with university training.

Funny thing about the class is that most of the students dropped out. I think they thought he'd be playing the White Album backwards, not talking about drum and fife music. (African-American Drum and Fife S/D anyone? Never pursued that section of folk recordings...)

a.b., would that have been at Dal? I know the instructor, actually. I teach popular music studies at uni myself, but not in a music department, so it's sociological rather musicological.

oh no i've been caught already! heh. probably the main reason i didn't like the course was because i was expecting it to be a technical study of pop (it was a dept. of music course) but it was mostly sociology.

I had a "music appreciation" class in middle school (jr. high) that was like what folks described above--kids bringing in pop songs, discussion of lyrics, and we did some show tunes. (The most memorable moment being when the teacher had us do "We Love You Conrad" from Bye Bye Birdie and, when the girls refused to do their part, the boys agreed to switch with them; certainly no one was more surprised about that than me.) In orchestra we did a mix of classical and pop/Broadway but there was rarely much context given either way. I did take a music theory class and that's probably what's stayed with me the most.

As much as I wish there was more study of popular music, I feel pretty strongly that if we're going to have more and better music education, which we should, it should be premised on a fairly classical conception of leaning about music--scales and harmony and all that kinda crap. I mean, enough people have taught themselves to play guitar, bass, and drums over the years that I don't think it's really something you need to be teaching in school. I do think it would be useful for those people, as well as people who only listen to music, to have an understanding of how that music is made in the way people used to, so we could, amongst other things, stop using vague, descriptive words when we talk about music, and could instead stick to the concrete terms that have stood up fairly well over the past few hundred years. But maybe this is just me.

I really wish that my music history class in high school had apportioned the material a little closer to a model based on volume of music (not amplitude) rather than chronology. I mean, we spent several weeks on Chansons and Madrigals and learning to tell one set of monks from the other, and then we spent one day total on the 20th century pop (half devoted to jazz, the other half devoted to the Beatles). For all of jazz, we got When the Saints, Strange Fruit and Miles Davis doing Bye Bye Blackbird. For the Beatles, we got Elenor Rigby, Obladi Obladah and Blackbird. At least they were easy to pick out on the listening final, unlike (for me at least) trying to tell one minute of Beethoven from one minute of Bach. The only other 20th Centrury guy we needed to know was Stravinsky, and Rites of Spring is still easy to pick out.
And color me among those who think that a better understanding of 20th century music culture is more valuable than being able to pick out Sumer ist Acumin In from Lady Mondegreen...