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The incorporation of popular music studies within the music higher education community represents a significant change of institutional mission and identity. The traditional curriculum centered on common-practice classical music, and later jazz, has served the academy well over many years, both for performers and for music education students training for work in the K-12 environment. Music educators who favor adding popular music ensembles and courses find the decision to embrace this music self-evident – the music is all around us, and it most especially surrounds our students. Further, they are aware of the supply and demand problem that places strictly classically trained musicians and their jazz brethren at a serious disadvantage for meaningful employment. However,  most schools still offer only classical and jazz options for their students, ignoring the music that, according to Lucy Green “produces the vast proportion of the music which the global population listens to, dances to, identifies with and enjoys.”¹Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5.  While the validity of popular music as an appropriate field of study and performance has been advocated for several decades at this point, and while there is energy provided by recently established innovative collegiate programs in the United States and elsewhere as well as the founding of relatively new popular music associations, the movement toward popular music at all educational levels remains sluggish. The band-orchestra-choir model remains the dominant structure, with classical and jazz musics the most common offerings for the college music major. As a result, the embrace of popular music instruction and ensembles remains a controversial decision for administrators and teachers at all levels. The reasons for inclusion are numerous, but four are most prevalent:

• Popular music is as valid as any other music, especially in terms of the creative aspect;
• The music results from a combination of composition (songwriting), instrumental and vocal performance, production, and marketing – and many colleges and even some high schools are now equipped to educate students in all of these areas;²Joe Bennett, “Towards a Framework for Creativity in Popular Music Degrees,” The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, ed. Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 288.
• The music is by its nature ‘popular’, and thus a needed addition in the competitive world of music employment options where classical and jazz graduates struggle to find meaningful work performing the music they studied in college, and;
• Music education students at many institutions require the preparation to successfully work with young people who would participate in the school music program if there were alternate offerings to traditional concert band, jazz ensemble, orchestra, and choir experiences.³Footnote textRobert A. Cutietta, “When We Question Popular Music in Education, What is the Question?”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 246.

John Covach, in a discussion of the growth of the American college system and its curricula, states that “the highbrow nature of classical music made it a good fit for colleges and universities, placing music comfortably beside literature, philosophy, and other disciplines in the arts and humanities.”⁴John Covach, High Brow, Low Brow, Knot Now, Know How: Music Curricula in a Flat World (2017), 323-4. Draft sent via personal correspondence. By studying the classical tradition, and later jazz, at hundreds of colleges and universities, students over many decades have achieved great heights of artistic expression, and many have led successful careers. Thus, while these two art musics emphasize beauty, passion, creativity, and a sophistication presumably on par with the study of other high disciplines, the question for higher education faculty and administrators is this: does popular music belong alongside these two musics as an equal partner?

 

The Popular Music Debate

Discussions surrounding popular music in higher education, as well as in the K-12 levels, have been ongoing for decades. The 1967 Tanglewood Symposium suggested that “popular teen-age music” should be added to the musical repertory in the K-12 setting.⁵Robert Choate, “Music in American Society: Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium,” Report from the Music Educators National Conference, Washington D.C. (1968), 139. Two years later, the Youth Music Institute was held at the University of Wisconsin, where thirty-one educators were instructed in the “music of the youth.”⁶Emmett R. Sarig, “Ignoring Rock,” Music Educators Journal, 56, no. 3 (1969): 46. The term “youth music” was used as a springboard for the 1969 Music Educators Journal special issue, where an overriding focus was on the majority of students who do not participate in K-12 music programs. The topic was revisited with another special MEJ issue in 1991. In the introductory piece for the issue, Robert Cutietta noted that while popular music has entered the classroom in the form of arrangements of pop songs for band and choir, “I doubt that the writers of the Tanglewood Declaration would find much reason to be happy about the state of pop music education today. What we have done is not what they intended.”⁷Robert A. Cutietta, “Popular Music: An Ongoing Challenge”, Music Educators Journal, 77, no. 8 (1991): 27. In 2004 he reiterated the point: “As long as the primary musical ensembles in the schools are wind ensembles and orchestras, then pop music has a very limited place in our curriculum”.⁸Ibid, 3, 247. Fortunately, with recent additions to the literature such as The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, published in 2017, recent articles in the College Music Symposium, and the formation of organizations dedicated to popular music research and education such as the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the Institute for Popular Music, and the Association for Popular Music Education, the discussion as has gained momentum.

 

The First Challenge to the Status Quo – Jazz

We have seen this debate before as jazz music entered the music education mainstream. In the article “Jazz – An Educational Problem” published in the Musical Quarterly in 1926, Edwin Stringham states: “I share the view that jazz is the most distinctive contribution America has made to the world-literature of music. What we now need is the proper guidance for the jazz germ…It is for the open-minded American musicians and musical educators to discover, preserve, and develop the worthy elements of jazz”.⁹Edwin Stringham, “Jazz – An Educational Problem,” Musical Quarterly 12 (1926): 195. This broad and enlightened approach to a new trend in music was written in the same year that Jelly Roll Morton’s masterpiece Black Bottom Stomp was recorded and before Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and vocal acrobatics were heard on Hotter Than That recorded with the Hot Five. Jazz was in its infancy. Decades later, jazz is now an accepted and embraced art form in virtually every urban and rural area, in middle and high schools, and most especially on most college campuses.  Stringham’s point of view is forward-thinking to say the least, and is not the only one from that year regarding a musical tradition beyond the mainstream; Clarence Byrn, a high school music educator, told a gathering of music educators that “we must train our music students to live in 1926 not 1620”.¹⁰Clarence Byrn, “A Vocational Music Course in the High Schools,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Music Supervisors National Conference (1926): 240.

While these early accounts of support for jazz education are indeed surprising, the debate about the value of jazz music as an educational endeavor worthy of the academy has been a long journey. In 1941, Peter Dykema and Karl Gehrkens wrote in their influential book The Teaching and Administration of High School Music, that “jazz and art music are at opposite poles of the musical earth”.¹¹David G. Hebert, “Originality and Institutionalization: Factors Engendering Resistance to Popular Music Pedagogy, Music Education Research International, 5, (2011): 14. William Schumann, president emeritus of Julliard, told an audience at a  MTNA conference that “if there is one thing that American students do not need in their schools it is an introduction to the practice in the arts of entertainment….One of the functions of our schools is…not to take the line of least resistance and use materials which are already familiar to the students, but to expand their horizons.”¹²Feldman, “Jazz: A Place in Music Education?,” Music Educators Journal, 50, no. 6 (1964): 62.  In 1964, Harry Allen Feldman and Bert Konowitz argued the merits of jazz education in the pages of the Music Educators Journal. Feldman (who takes the negative view of jazz to the extreme) asks “How does one reconcile the teaching, in one room, of performance with technical precision, beauty of sound, and uncompromising fidelity to the demands of the composer, only to teach in an adjoining room, to ignore all this because – in the words of Whitney Balliett – “higgeldy-piggeldy runs, staccato braying, bleak, ugly tone, barely struck notes’ all are what now constitutes modern artistry?”.¹³Ibid., 64 And, quoting Professor Ernest Bacon of Syracuse University, Feldman amplifies on this notion: jazz “makes an art out of vulgarity, is monotonous, pornographic”.¹⁴Ibid. Konowitz, in his answer in the subsequent issue of the journal, can barely contain himself has he refutes the descriptions of jazz as vulgar and pornographic. His thoughtful comments extoll the virtue of learning to improvise, of the high level of musicality inherent in jazz performance, and concludes “the school as a symbolic agent of change must take up this slack in the music program if it is to serve the students…Shall the student see the classroom as a distortion of what actually exists?”.¹⁵Bert Konowitz, “In Answer to Jazz: A Place in Music Education,” Music Educators Journal 51, no. 1, 149.

Jazz music and its inclusion in the school setting is being used here as an example of not only the tension that arises when long-held assumptions are challenged, but also as a means of understanding both sides of the issue of adding popular music as a valid endeavor. One could question the pairing of jazz and ‘music of the people’ - which jazz certainly is not, and definitely not post-Swing era jazz - but it can serve as a useful example of the struggle between refinement (as in, practice makes perfect) and the more informal approach of jazz and popular music. Ted Gioia, in his piece Jazz and Primitivist Myth, describes the uninformed early accounts of jazz that focused primarily on a fascination with primitivism.  He quotes Charles Delaunay, whose Hot Discography appeared in France in 1936, who insisted that the “unreflective and instinctive relationship of the ‘primitive’ artist with his art was seen as a positive virtue. The overly refined and self-conscience attitude which the European artist took toward his work was a hindrance, an obstacle to the creative act”.¹⁶Ted Gioia, “Jazz and The Primitivist Myth,” Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1989): 135. Jazz educators have struggled with how best to teach an inherently spontaneous art form as the music has become institutionalized within a large educational industry. “Indeed, the veering of jazz education from the creative foundations of the jazz tradition parallels, and is arguably inherited from, the veering of European classical music studies from the creative foundations of the European tradition”.¹⁷Patricia Shehan Campbell et al., “Transforming Music Study from its Foundations: A Manifesto for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation of Music Majors”, The College Music Society, (Nov. 2014): 40. Jazz educator Wayne Bowman cautions that the addition of jazz within the collegiate environment created “school jazz”, where “relatively few of the socio-musical priorities” such as non-conformity and independence are honored.  Its inclusion “did little to transform the way music educators conceptualized music, or curriculum…jazz paid a steep price for admission to the academy”.¹⁸Wayne Bowman, “’Pop’ Goes…? Taking Popular Music Seriously”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 30.

Popular music educators today warn of inhibiting the informal learning process of popular music by clinging to the master-student model. “When this occurs, the informal learning practices of a popular musician are frequently forsaken”.¹⁹Naomi Hodges and Don Lebler, “Popular Music Pedagogy: Dual Perspectives on DIY Musicianship,” The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, ed. Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 273-4. Popular music education can be extremely informal and peer-driven, which poses a dilemma for educators of middle, high school, and college music programs as they debate the addition of popular music offerings: What is the balance in the formality of instruction? As institutions consider adding popular music programs, the issue of formal vs. informal training is critical. This naturally leads to the question of rigor within these programs. John Covach cautions that popular music programs “have… tended to be perceived as weak academically, with their severest critics accusing them of pandering to students, the schools’ eye on goals more financial than educational”.²⁰John Covach, “Rock Me, Maestro,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 61, no. 21 (2015): 8, accessed October 14, 2917, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Rock-Me-Maestro/151423.

 

Analysis and History vs. Performance and Practice

The academic study of popular music, known generally as “Popular Music Studies” (PMS), has been deemed an appropriate field of musicological study for several decades. Joe Bennett references Phillip Tagg and Robert Clarida’s work Ten Little Title Tunes as he describes the approach of ‘music as context’, where liberal arts programs as well as schools of music emphasize the study of popular music with the focus on social and cultural aspects. He goes on to contrast it with the musical preparation inherent in a ‘music as music’ approach found in the classical and jazz genres, and suggests that “PMS may not necessarily be the first port of call in providing a scholarly context to underpin the learning of students who wish to make popular music”.²¹Ibid, 2, 292. Rupert Till notes that “there has for too long been a gulf between popular music research and popular music education, both of which are core to popular music studies.”²²Rupert Till, “Popular Music Education: A Step Into the Light,” The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 20. Robert Fink warns of economic considerations interfering with the placement of popular music as a field of study. A ‘backlash against “pop triumphism” and its “market hegemony”, could allow its economic dominance to set the agenda of cultural criticism and analysis.” He asks rhetorically, “…can’t we [traditional musicologists] be left in peace to tend our own gardens? Is there no place for a considered elitism? A retreat from the marketplace?”²³Robert Fink, “It Ain’t Us Babe,” New Music Box, from New Music USA, (2014), accessed October 15, 2017, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/it-aint-us-babe/. Fink concludes that this is no longer possible and supplies as evidence the fact that the last three generations of new music composers don’t see music this way. Why should we be ignoring the enormity of the popular music industry?

 

Stratification of Music and the Flattening of the Music Curriculum

Laurence Levine, in Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, recounts the intermingling of art forms in 19^th century America, the resulting awareness of so-called ‘highbrow’ forms within the general population, and the subsequent segregation of these forms as they went their separate ways:

If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them. Too many of those who considered themselves educated and cultured lost for a significant period--and many have still not regained--their ability to discriminate independently, to sort things out for themselves and understand that simply because a form of expressive culture was widely accessible and highly popular it was not therefore necessarily devoid of any redeeming value or artistic merit.²⁴Laurence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), Kindle location 2677. 

Levine questions the resulting “tendency to see culture on a vertical plane, neatly divided into a hierarchy of inclusive adjectival categories such as ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘mass’, ‘folk’, and the like”.²⁵Ibid., Kindle location 386. He bemoans the fact that a banal play can be categorized as ‘popular’ even if it is seen by a very few, while a Shakespeare masterpiece is categorized as ‘high art’, may be seen and enjoyed by millions, and not be considered ‘popular’. “The use of such arbitrary and imprecise cultural categories has helped obscure the dynamic complexity of American culture in the 19^th century”.²⁶Ibid, Kindle location 387. It is not a stretch to conclude that this obscurity continues, as do the labels. Wayne Bowman, as he makes the case for popular music education, states that “There is no inherently popular music, no music that is of its own ‘high’ or ‘low’. It is we who make it so...any music has a potentially viable claim to artistic or popular success”.²⁷Ibid., 18, 45.

The narrow approach to music education that dominates higher education is a primary focus in the 2014 College Music Society’s Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major, where the authors take issue with the reliance on interpretive musical study at the expense of the creative. They argue that we have gone far afield from what it meant to be a musician in the past. “Were Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt alive today, their musical lives would likely more closely resemble those of today’s creative jazz artists and other improvisers/composers/performers than interpretive performance specialists whose primary focus is repertory created in, and for, another time and place.”²⁸Ibid, 17, 12.  Greg Sandow, in a blog post reacting to the Kendrick Lamar Pulitzer Prize announcement, suggests that musical literacy should be expanded to include much more than reading and writing music, and that popular music production methods, where extremely sophisticated and sensitive software programs are utilized, represents musical literacy as well.²⁹Greg Sandow, “On the Future of Classical Music”, ArtsJournal.com, April 14, 2018 http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2018/04/coming-to-grips.html Further, the difference between classically-trained and aurally-trained musicians is seen most clearly in the ability and attitudes about musical notation. Ironically, both populations bemoan the practice in disparate ways: those who have learned to play by ear regret that they cannot read music and thereby communicate more completely with colleagues; formally-trained musicians lament that they are tied to the page and can’t improvise. Both cite notation as a “detriment to the fullest expression of their musicianship.”³⁰Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, “Popular Music in Music Education: Toward a New Conception of Musicality”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 19.

John Covach advocates for an ‘integrated music curriculum’ and has developed a model that blends preparation in a broad range of styles, combining analysis, creativity, and interpretation.³¹Ibid., 4, 324. He references Thomas Friedman’s bestseller, The World is Flat, as he suggests that traditional barriers have largely disappeared and that “in many ways, we are living in a flat world of musical styles – a world in which almost any style can be given serious intellectual consideration”.³²Ibid., 4, 319. In The Crisis of Classical Music in America, Robert Freeman ponders the endurance of several basic assumptions: “…that the symphony orchestra should remain the backbone of a music school’s enrollment plans, that instrumental and vocal students learn optimally from weekly lessons from well-known specialists, and that the road to musical heaven lies straight through the practice room, remain unexplored axioms inherited from the nineteenth century”.³³Robert Freeman, The Crisis of Classical in America: Lessons From a Life in the Education of Musicians (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), Kindle location 539. Covach goes further : “considering the status of classical music in a flat world and its limited appeal within the culture at large, an outsider observing current university-level music training and education might wonder why classical music is still so central to the curriculum”.³⁴Ibid., 4, 321. This “central repertory”, identified by ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl in his examination of large mid-west music schools, has dominated higher education pedagogy for decades.³⁵Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 84. Covach warns that “the most narrowly focused classical musician” emerges from these programs into a world of career-building challenges inconceivable in the past.³⁶Ibid., 4, 323. An even more serious problem involves music participation in general, despite the best efforts of music education programs nationwide: “the most advanced formal music education systems, like ours in the United States, tend to have the least musically participatory populations.”³⁷Robert Woody, “Popular Music in School: Remixing the Issues,” Music Educators Journal, 93, no. 4 (2007): 36.

Perhaps the most appropriate place for popular music performance should be within a “contemporary music” unit – emphasizing music that is newly created or produced, rather than interpreted - where jazz studies, composition, music technology, and songwriting could share a common core of coursework blended with experiences unique to each area. The CMS taskforce cited earlier emphasizes the value of improvisation and composition and takes the position that these activities can strengthen the academy as a whole. “This positon does not suggest that there is no longer a place for interpretive performance in the emergent vision, but that when this important practice is reintegrated within a foundation of systematic improvisation and composition, new levels of vitality and excellence are possible…”.³⁸Ibid., 17, 2.

 

Popular Music Offerings as Broad Vocational Experiences

The higher education community is facing increasing scrutiny in all fields with rising costs and challenging employment scenarios for graduates. This is especially true in the arts, where a specific job at the end of the academic journey can be elusive. Schools of music and conservatories are increasingly embracing the thorny issue of the imbalance between available positions in orchestras and jazz ensembles and yearly graduation rates. To combat this, schools are adding courses in business and personal management, entrepreneurial skills, internships, and portfolio development, to traditional classical and jazz degree programs. At a slowly increasing rate, the addition of popular music programs is a natural reaction to this same trend. These programs lean toward a vocational approach, by emulating and in fact re-creating the music industry itself on the college campus. In the eyes of some administrators, it is not enough to prepare musicians as musician-specialists; they must also receive training as recording engineers, songwriters, small business owners, producers, as well as performers. While the result of this approach can lead to a broadly skilled individual rather than an expert or artist, it does reflect how the music is actually created.  Joe Bennett points out that the instrumental performance of a popular music ‘hit’ is often not complex or challenging. But it is the song itself in its entirety, with a distinctive vocal interpretation, as well as its production that defines the song’s value and ultimate success. According to Bennett, administrators and faculty, as they debate the education of popular musicians in today’s music school, should value versatility as well as societal relevance in making curricular decisions, even as it goes against the values instilled in those who were trained to be ‘experts.’  He states: “Employable music graduates of the future may find themselves in any number of different, unpredictable musical (and extra-musical) situations in their professional lives. The broader their skillsets and the wider their personal listening canons, the better placed they will be to respond to whatever creative gigs might come their way.”³⁹Ibid, 2, 295. Thus Bennett is arguing for a redefinition of the entire higher education music curriculum, agreeing with Covach that the ‘flat’ approach serves all students.

It is sensible to assume that there will always be institutions that remain focused on the classical and/or jazz traditions. Conversely, there are institutions that were founded upon and continue to emphasize popular music as their primary focus; Berklee and the Musicians Institute are two well-known examples. However, there are successful examples of schools who have folded in popular music study within their traditional framework. The Thorton School at the University of Southern California, Cincinnati Conservatory, Belmont, BYU, Webster, the University of Oregon, and others have added popular music programs – some are well-established, others are relatively new. These programs typically consist of singer/songwriter tracks, ‘professional musician’ programs, film scoring, and emphases such as American music studies and roots music. Most programs combine these fields with technology and marketing coursework. There is also a trend toward the ‘flattening’ of music offerings pioneered by the University of Miami with their experiential music theory curriculum. Several overarching questions should be asked as the debate unfolds in the collegiate curriculum discussion: How can these programs be made robust and challenging, and remain current? And should the flattening of music offerings be encouraged, thereby providing all music students, despite the genre or major, a core experience, particularly early in the curriculum?

 

Widening the Door

High school music programs do not include each and every student who may be interested in a career in music; there is a population that does not participate in the band-orchestra-choir structure. Frequently, creative musicians come from an informal, aural-based background and could benefit from a college music program, but do not play the only two kinds of music ‘allowed’ – classical or jazz. If given the opportunity, however, these students could potentially lead successful lives in the music industry. What typically occurs is that these ‘informally educated’ musicians arrive on campus (after somehow getting through the audition process, often with the help of a hastily-engaged teacher offering last minute advice in the classical or jazz genres) where they face the following problem: “After an extended period of informal learning practices…students enroll in the hope of expanding, enhancing or fine-tuning their knowledge acquisition through more formal learning methods…they want to be taught materials relevant to contemporary popular music, not how to write retrograde inversions of twelve-tone rows or how to improvise over Giant Steps at 160 bpm.”⁴⁰Clive Maxwell Harrison, “Rock Guitar in the Conservatoire: The Confluence of Informal Formal Music Education”. College Music Symposium (2017). Accessed March 4, 2018, https://symposium.music.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=11363:rock-guitar-in-the-conservatoire-the-confluence-of-informal-and-formal-music-education&Itemid=124. This model does a disservice to these students, who may be talented, intelligent,  intuitive, and ambitious – they just play the ‘wrong’ kind of music.

 

Popular Music Instruction for the Music Education Student

It stands to reason that if there are public school teaching positions available that require popular music teaching, then collegiate music education programs need to respond by providing appropriate coursework, ensemble experience, and perhaps even private lessons in popular music styles and practices. While this may take some individuals out of their comfort zones, the benefits, both personally and professionally, could be profound. The challenge of developing coursework in popular music for music education majors is wrapped up in the very nature of the music – that it is an aural-based music, performed in small group settings, encompassing a vast array of styles, and is best created in a democratic and collaborative fashion without a central leader/conductor. Music education students who have not performed in settings where creativity and collaboration are central would do well to place themselves in those situations – in rock groups, jazz combos, ‘crossover’ classical ensembles, songwriting seminars, and informal jam sessions. Lucy Green states that music teachers must “put themselves into the position of young popular musicians, and try out some informal learning practices for themselves”.⁴¹Ibid., 1, 214. Thus while some music education programs are adding coursework and ensembles that reflect creativity and progressive trends, the music education student should emulate the best practices of the popular musician/artist, by embracing the entrepreneurial and creative spirit of informal music-making.⁴²Scott Emmons, “Preparing Teachers for Popular Music Processes and Practices”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 170.

 

Moving Forward

Adding popular music ensembles and courses at any level will be for naught if the music is not respected as a valid form of expression. Simply acknowledging that students are listening to this music is not enough to warrant including it in the school setting. Perhaps the reticence of many educators and administrators can be attributed to the ‘why popular music’ question remaining unanswered for them. Fortunately, the momentum supplied by the recent increase in collegiate programs will perhaps help answer this concern. Therefore, if the questions posed in the introduction to this article, focused on the validity and acceptance of the music, the readiness of schools to teach all aspects of the industry, the economic viability, and the need for teacher preparation are being answered in the affirmative, then popular music will become more established and accepted in educational institutions at all levels.

The eventual embrace of the jazz idiom in educational settings sheds light on a new balancing act, now with popular music, determining if it can indeed co-exist with the classical and jazz traditions. If it is determined that it is indeed a worthwhile endeavor, perhaps we should be doing our part to improve the popular music product. After all, this has been our mission all along as educators – the musical genre really shouldn’t matter.

 

Notes

1. Lucy Green, How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5.

2. Joe Bennett, “Towards a Framework for Creativity in Popular Music Degrees,” The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, ed. Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 288.

3. Robert A. Cutietta, “When We Question Popular Music in Education, What is the Question?”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 246.

4. John Covach, High Brow, Low Brow, Knot Now, Know How: Music Curricula in a Flat World (2017), 323-4.         Draft sent via personal correspondence.

5. Robert Choate, “Music in American Society: Documentary Report of the Tanglewood Symposium,” Report from the Music Educators National Conference, Washington D.C. (1968), 139.

6. Emmett R. Sarig, “Ignoring Rock,” Music Educators Journal, 56, no. 3 (1969): 46.

7. Robert A. Cutietta, “Popular Music: An Ongoing Challenge”, Music Educators Journal, 77, no. 8 (1991): 27.

8. Ibid, 3, 247.

9. Edwin Stringham, “Jazz – An Educational Problem,” Musical Quarterly 12 (1926): 195.

10. Clarence Byrn, “A Vocational Music Course in the High Schools,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Music Supervisors National Conference (1926): 240.

11. David G. Hebert, “Originality and Institutionalization: Factors Engendering Resistance to Popular Music  Pedagogy, Music Education Research International, 5, (2011): 14.

12. Feldman, “Jazz: A Place in Music Education?,” Music Educators Journal, 50, no. 6 (1964): 62. 

13. Ibid., 64

14. Ibid.

15. Bert Konowitz, “In Answer to Jazz: A Place in Music Education,” Music Educators Journal 51, no. 1, 149.

16. Ted Gioia, “Jazz and The Primitivist Myth,” Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1989): 135.

17. Patricia Shehan Campbell et al., “Transforming Music Study from its Foundations: A Manifesto for Progressive Change in the Undergraduate Preparation of Music Majors”, The College Music Society, (Nov. 2014): 40.

18. Wayne Bowman, “’Pop’ Goes…? Taking Popular Music Seriously”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 30.

19. Naomi Hodges and Don Lebler, “Popular Music Pedagogy: Dual Perspectives on DIY Musicianship,” The      Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, ed. Gareth Dylan Smith, Zack Moir, Matt Brennan, Shara Rambarran, Phil Kirkman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 273-4.

20. John Covach, “Rock Me, Maestro,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 61, no. 21 (2015): 8, accessed October 14, 2917, https://www.chronicle.com/article/Rock-Me-Maestro/151423.

21. Ibid, 2, 292.

22. Rupert Till, “Popular Music Education: A Step Into the Light,” The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music Education, 20.

23. Robert Fink, “It Ain’t Us Babe,” New Music Box, from New Music USA, (2014), accessed October 15, 2017, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/it-aint-us-babe/.

24. Laurence Levine, Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), Kindle location 2677.

25. Ibid., Kindle location 386.

26. Ibid, Kindle location 387.

27. Ibid., 18, 45.

28. Ibid, 17, 12.

29. Greg Sandow, “On the Future of Classical Music”, ArtsJournal.com, April 14, 2018 http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2018/04/coming-to-grips.html

30. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, “Popular Music in Music Education: Toward a New Conception of Musicality”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 19.

31. Ibid., 4, 324.

32. Ibid., 4, 319.

33. Robert Freeman, The Crisis of Classical in America: Lessons From a Life in the Education of Musicians        (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), Kindle location 539.

34. Ibid., 4, 321.

35. Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 84.

36. Ibid., 4, 323.

37. Robert Woody, “Popular Music in School: Remixing the Issues,” Music Educators Journal, 93, no. 4 (2007): 36.

38. Ibid., 17, 2.

39. Ibid, 2, 295.

40. Clive Maxwell Harrison, “Rock Guitar in the Conservatoire: The Confluence of Informal Formal Music Education”.  College Music Symposium (2017). Accessed March 4, 2018, https://symposium.music.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=11363:rock-guitar-in-the-conservatoire-the-confluence-of-informal-and-formal-music-education&Itemid=124.

41. Ibid., 1, 214.

42. Scott Emmons, “Preparing Teachers for Popular Music Processes and Practices”, Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: Reston, VA), 170.

 

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