Popular Music Education: A Call to Action

Special Focus on Popular Music Education by Bryan Powell, Gareth Dylan Smith, Chad West, and John Kratus, Guest Editors Popular Music Education A Call to Action Abstract: This is the editors’ introduction to the Special Focus Issue on Popular Music Education. Also included is a forward from Robert A. Cutietta, editor of the 1991 Music Educators Journal Special Focus Issue on Popular Music Education. Photo of John Kratus courtesy of the author Photo of Bryan Powell courtesy of the author Photo of Chad West courtesy of the author T his is the third issue of the Music Educators Journal (MEJ) to address popular music education. The first MEJ Photo of Gareth Dylan Smith courtesy of the author issue on the topic appeared in 1969, influenced by the 1967 Tanglewood Symposium, which was cosponsored by the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), now the National Association for Music Education (NAfME). The Tanglewood Symposium was a meeting of educators, musicians, psychologists, and business professionals to discuss the future of music education in the United States. The resulting Tanglewood Declaration urged that “the musical repertory should be expanded to involve music of our time in its rich variety, including currently popular teen-age music.”1 Former MENC president Wiley L. Housewright wrote in the introduction to that MEJ issue, “There is much to be gained from the study of any musical Bryan Powell is an assistant professor of music education and music technology at Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey; he can be contacted at [email protected]. Gareth Dylan Smith is a visiting research professor of music at New York University; he can be contacted at [email protected]. Chad West is an associate professor of music education at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York; he can be contacted at [email protected]. John Kratus is an independent scholar and a music professor emeritus of music education at Michigan State University, East Lansing. He can be contacted at [email protected]. www.nafme.org Copyright © 2019 National Association for Music Education DOI: 10.1177/0027432119861528 http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mej 21 Foreword to the 2019 Special Focus Issue on Popular Music Education by Robert A. Cutietta It is amazing that it has been twenty-eight years since the last issue of Music Educators Journal devoted to popular music. I remember being the editor of that issue very well. The most challenging Photo of Robert A. Cutietta part of being the editor was by Gus Ruelas finding people to write the articles. The problem was that so few people were actually teaching popular music in a substantive way. I suspect that the editors of the current issue had an easier time finding authors today, but perhaps not. I have always advocated the teaching of popular music as long as it was done authentically. This is not to be confused with the common practice of choirs, orchestras, or wind ensembles playing pop tunes. There is so much wonderful literature written specifically for these ensembles that they do not need to do this. Instead, I have always felt that pop music should be treated with the respect it deserves and performed authentically by the ensembles for which it was written. When I was editor of the Special Focus Issue on Popular Music Education, I could speak from a philosophical foundation, but now I can speak about this from a very interesting and unique perspective. I am dean of the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. My school made the decision in 2009 to create a popular music performance and songwriting program as a separate but equal Bachelor of Music. We hired new faculty and built new facilities to accommodate this new degree, and it has been an overwhelming success. We have learned quite a bit in the past ten years. First of all, the introduction of popular music did not, as some feared, “diminish” the other degrees that we already had in place. Many faculty members worried that introducing a popular music degree would “ruin our reputation” as a school. It now stands proudly side by side with our jazz, classical, early music, movie scoring, composition, and other programs. The difference is that it is now the most selective program in the school, with an acceptance rate of about 5 percent. This makes it one of the most selective programs on the entire University of Southern California campus. Because of this selectivity, the students accepted are outrageously talented and driven. They have altered the culture (for the better) of the entire school. Why is the acceptance rate important? It is important because it highlights the fact that we are still one of just a handful of university-based popular music performance programs in the country, and we can teach only a limited number of students. Think about this: we are forced to reject 95 percent of the students who apply. Most of these students have the musical talent and ability to major in music, but we, as a profession, have abandoned them. Those we turn away lament that there are so few options for these young people to follow their dreams and major in music in a university setting. The collegiate music profession is failing them. There is another reason this is important. When we started the program, we did not know where these students would come from. As expected, many of them came from outside traditional K–12 music education programs or, perhaps more likely, were only minimally engaged. Their education—and it is deep and intense—came from outside the traditional high school music program. Precollegiate music education did only slightly better than collegiate in helping these students. There is a lesson for music educators here as well. We lament that music programs are being cut, but in reality, we still have not made much of an effort to change with the times and reach the huge masses of students who want to be taught. There seems to be no end to the number of students who want to write songs, produce music, write music for media, or learn to play instruments or how to create music on a computer. In short, it seems that many students today want to be music creators more than music re-creators, but our field is still focused on training performers, or re-creators. Would our programs be in the process of being eliminated or cut if we, as a profession, had followed this fundamental shift and directed our attention at a broader range of students to whom we teach music? One must wonder if we are still philosophically dedicated to reaching and educating as many students as possible. When we witnessed the success of helping these young musicians, we went further. At our spring commencement, we graduated our first students with a bachelor of music degree in production. I say this only because it is still more evidence that students are out there; they desire these degrees, are musically talented, and have few places to turn. We don’t really talk of “recruiting” students to these programs. We don’t need to. We spend more time discussing how an audition should look for musicians whose primary instrument is the recording studio. I do suspect things are changing. I think they will change quickly now, but there is no way to know. The infrastructure we have built for teaching music in our traditional way is strong and inflexible. Still, like all the change we see happening across all segments of our society, I think change is inevitable. I hope that this change will allow us to better meet our mission of educating as many students as possible in music in the broadest sense. These young musicians deserve no less from us. Robert A. Cutietta is the dean of the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He can be contacted at music [email protected]. 22 Music Educators Journal September 2019 creation. Rock, soul, blues, folk, and jazz cannot be ignored.”2 The 1969 MEJ issue appeared at a time when popular music was rarely included in school music programs and was widely believed to be inappropriate for school settings. Many music educators needed curriculum models and professional support before they would be willing or able to include popular music in their programs. The articles in the 1969 MEJ issue provided philosophical rationales for the inclusion of popular music education, some theoretical knowledge of rock music, and descriptions of exemplary programs. The second MEJ issue on popular music was published a generation later, in 1991, and was edited by Robert A. Cutietta, currently dean of the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (see his foreword on p. 2 of this editorial). Times had changed in the intervening years between Tanglewood and 1991. Cutietta noted that “pop music has permeated just about every aspect of every school program in the country,” being found in general music textbooks and choral and instrumental arrangements.3 The problem, he believed, was that popular music tunes were being used superficially to entice students into traditional forms of music education (e.g., “Hang on Sloopy” for marching band). The inherent qualities of popular music—its spontaneity, creativity, contemporary relevance to students, and authenticity—were buried in eightymember-large ensembles. Twenty-eight years later, this third issue of MEJ devoted to popular music education makes its appearance. Once again, times have changed as popular music has changed, as have students’ music experiences, with the advent of YouTube, digital downloads, music apps, MP3, iPad ensembles, Amplify, GarageBand, and many other innovations. But a half-century after the first discussion of popular music education in the pages of MEJ, many of the issues and impediments remain the same. Most music teachers are still educated in a collegiate system that promotes the popular music practices of previous centuries but www.nafme.org not the popular music practices of the present day. Learning music from notation is still considered more valuable than learning music by ear. Obeying the intentions of composers and conductors is still more important than promoting individual performers’ creativity. And yet, times change, and the wheel turns. In recent years, professional music education organizations have recognized the significance of popular music education. NAfME has established a Special Research Interest Group in Popular Music Education, and the International Society for Music Education has created a Special Interest Group in Popular Music Education. Other developments in this area include the introduction of a new international journal, the Journal of Popular Music Education, and the formation of the Association for Popular Music Education. The charitable organization Little Kids Rock provides instruments and in-service teacher education that is changing in-school music education for hundreds of thousands of students. The times they are a-changin’. A single issue of MEJ cannot provide a comprehensive guide to popular music education. Indeed, recent publications, such as the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education, and regular issues of the new Journal of Popular Music Education, feature more perspectives, insights, and practices than can be addressed by the editors and authors in this issue of MEJ. Moreover, the burgeoning body of scholarship and pedagogical resources in popular music education indicates that, finally, music education in the United States may be catching on to what our professional peers in Northern Europe and Australia have recognized—that popular music is vital to our culture and the lives of our students and therefore must be included meaningfully in music education in American schools. The authors and editors of this issue hope to offer support for a more inclusive and diverse form of music education, one that makes use of the practices of popular music. We have now passed the tipping point. Why Teach Popular Music? In 1922, the official slogan of the Music Supervisors’ National Conference was “Music for every child, and every child for music.” Nearly a hundred years later, we still cannot claim that we have fulfilled these goals, in large part because we have not altered our product to reflect the ways music is valued within society.4 According to the most estimates, approximately 20 percent of high school students participate in high school band, orchestra, and chorus programs.5 While some students may have no interest in learning music of any kind, there are far more who have music interests that are not served by traditional band, orchestra, and choir programs. In schools throughout the country, there are digital producers and songwriters, hip-hop artists, garage band musicians, self-taught guitar players, YouTube sensations—all talented musicians who may see no connection between their music interests and the opportunities available to them in school. This is detrimental to the future of music education and is a missed opportunity for meeting the music needs of a large percentage of students in our schools. Calls for change within American school music education have been heard as far back as the early- to mid20th century, when MEJ authors argued that the profession had not evolved with contemporary American society, did not reflect society’s musical values, and should include the teaching of popular music in schools.6 While countries such as Scotland and the Nordic nations have long embraced popular music as the primary means of school music education, American school music programs have generally maintained their long traditions of bands, orchestras, and choirs. However, in a growing number of American schools, popular music ensembles, songwriting, beat making, and other popular music practices are gaining prominence as our profession strives to provide culturally and socially relevant music experiences to a wider and more diverse student population. 23 We want to be clear—school music education is a big enough field to both advance its practices and preserve the music offerings that are valued by current students, their teachers, and our communities; to choose one music over others does little to advance the availability and viability of music in our schools. The editors wish to affirm our band, choir, and orchestra traditions and those educators devoted to them while expanding the vision to include popular music, improvisation, composition, music technology, and musics from around the world for the benefit of all.7 Summary of Articles The editors recognize that popular music is an ambiguous term that means different things to different people. We also realize that writing on popular music education is as nuanced as the languages through which it is communicated and that systems and practices outside of American-based K–12 contexts will not be fully accounted for in this collection. This Special Focus Issue provides an overview of popular music education since the previous Special Focus Issues on the topic in 1991 and 1969. Included are articles engaging with popular music from a cultural standpoint (Niknafs), framing popular music education within amateurism (Kratus), pedagogical approaches for teaching popular music (Burstein and Powell), teaching popular music in choral music classes (Kastner and Menon), and using technology in popular music education (Clauhs, Cremata, and Franco). 24 A final “call to action” comes to us from two NAfME presidents in the 1930s. Marguerite V. Hood and Lilla Belle Pitts encouraged music educators to incorporate the popular music of its day in their teaching. Hood wrote, “Music must be connected in some way with a personal knowledge, feeling or idea on the part of the average listener. . . . Why is there such a distinct gap between the music heard in school and that chosen by the average child for enjoyment?”8 She encouraged a greater emphasis on popular music in music education. Pitts, writing of the jitterbug, wrote about the “kinship between American youth and American popular music. On the whole, this is music made by the young for the young. The best of it teems with life and energy. . . . Like youth, it is in the making.”9 The phrase used to describe popular music by Lilla Belle Pitts, “in the making,” is an important one to consider; it “teems with life and energy.” Popular music education is more focused on the process of nurturing students’ unique forms of musicianship (i.e., “in the making”) than it is on developing a musical product of a polished, public performance. Popular music education is not about inducting students into unfamiliar musical worlds. Rather, it is about nurturing the musical worlds that already reside within them. The editors of this Special Focus Issue of MEJ encourage readers to consider the ideas presented in the issue’s articles. The articles were selected from among forty-four proposals submitted by music educators around the world. We are mindful that the editors of the next MEJ issue on popular music education, a generation from now, may find these articles quaintly old-fashioned. In 2019, they represent the state of the art. NOTES 1. “The Tanglewood Declaration,” in Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium, ed. Robert A. Choate (Washington, DC: Music Educators National Conference, 1968), 139. 2. Wiley L. Housewright, “Youth Music: A Special Report,” Music Educators Journal 55, no. 9 (November 1969): 45. 3. Robert A. Cutietta, “Popular Music: An Ongoing Challenge,” Music Educators Journal 77, no. 8 (April 1991): 27. 4. John Kratus, “Music Education at the Tipping Point,” Music Educators Journal 94, no. 2 (November 2007): 42–47. 5. Kenneth Elpus and Carlos Abril, “High School Music Ensemble Students in the United States,” Journal of Research in Music Education 59, no. 2 (2011): 128–45. 6. Royal Stanton, “A Look at the Forest,” Music Educators Journal 53, no. 3 (November 1966): 37–39; William A. Fisher, “Music in a Changing World,” Music Supervisors Journal 19, no. 4 (March 1933): 16–17, 62–64; Richard Kent, “Popular Music,” Music Educators Journal 45, no. 2 (November/December 1958): 52–54. 7. Chad West and Matthew Clauhs, “Strengthening Music Programs while Avoiding Advocacy Pitfalls,” Arts Education Policy Review 116 (2015): 57–62. 8. Marguerite V. Hood, “Practical Listening Lessons: Are They Possible?” Music Supervisors Journal 17, no. 5 (May 1931): 21–22. 9. Lilla Belle Pitts, “Music and Modern Youth,” Music Educators Journal 26, no. 2 (October 1939): 19. Music Educators Journal September 2019