The ambivalence of becoming a small business: Learning processes within an aspiring rock band

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 585-599
Author(s):  
Tobias Malm
Keyword(s):  
Small Business ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Organisational Form ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Social

The process of becoming a rock musician strongly relates to the organisational form of the band (Bennett 1980; Green 2002; Behr 2010). At all levels of ambition and success, membership of a band provides the musician with a natural entry point for performing to an audience and forging a potential career (Smith 2013a). The ‘micro-organisational’ (Bennett 2001) development of a band, therefore, is an important career prerequisite for rock musicians (Behr 2015). However, the social and practical challenges of musicianship seem to be continuously underemphasised within the field of popular music studies (Cohen 1993; Kirschner 1998; Lashua 2017; Weston 2017; Kielich 2018). Therefore, in this article I will focus on an aspiring rock band's informal learning processes in becoming a small business together. The study provides insights into the educational and organisational aspects of band practices and contributes to the fields of popular music, education and organisation studies – fields that are converging in the emerging interdisciplinary research area of ‘organising music-making’ (Beech and Gilmore 2015).

Diversifying Musical Experiences in Schools and Music Teacher Preparation Programs

2019 ◽  
pp. 891-901
Author(s):  
Robert H. Woody ◽  
Mark C. Adams
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Education Programs ◽  
Preparation Programs ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Large Ensembles ◽  
Classical Traditions

This chapter discusses the innate differences between vernacular music-making cultures and those oriented in Western classical traditions, and suggests students in traditional school music education programs in the United States are not typically afforded opportunities to learn skills used in vernacular and popular music-making cultures. The chapter emphasizes a need to diversify music-making experiences in schools and describes how vernacular musicianship may benefit students’ musical development. It suggests that, in order for substantive change to occur in music education in the United States, teachers will need to advance beyond simply considering how to integrate popular music into their traditional large ensembles—and how preservice music teacher education programs may be the key to help better prepare teachers to be more versatile and philosophically open to teaching a more musically diverse experience in their future classrooms.

Trans Voices Speak: Suggestions from Trans Educators about Working with Trans Students

2021 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-56
Author(s):  
Christopher Cayari ◽  
Felix A. Graham ◽  
Emma Joy Jampole ◽  
Jared O’Leary
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
The Past ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Trans People ◽  
The Social ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Music Classrooms

The social climate in the past decade has seen a rise in visibility of trans students in music classrooms and ensembles, leading to a need for scholarship on how to serve this growing population. Literature is being published to address this topic; however, the lack of scholarship by trans educators might lead many music educators to conclusions and practices that can be, at the very least, discouraging to some trans students and may disrupt their learning experiences. This article was written by four educators who identify as part of the trans community (a genderfluid and gender-nonconforming individual, a trans man, a trans woman, and a gender-nonbinary person) to fill this gap in the literature by illuminating some of the pitfalls inherent in the lack of discussion on (and by) trans people in music education. In addition, this article provides five actionable suggestions for working with trans students: (1) Learn about the trans community, (2) inspect your language and biases, (3) represent the diversity of trans people in your teaching, (4) promote healthy music-making and identity development, and (5) model allyship.

scholarly journals Theory and Fieldwork

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Shepherd ◽  
Beverley Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Social Contingencies ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Social ◽  
Academic Study

Abstracts John Shepherd This intervention suggests that the recent and welcome emergence of fieldwork as a prominent feature of much current work in popular music studies has deflected attention from an undertaking that characterized the early days of popular music studies: that of developing from within the various protocols of cultural theory concepts to explain the meanings, significances, and affects that music as a socially and culturally constituted form of human expression holds for people. In tracing a shift from theoretical to ethnographic concerns in work carried out in popular music studies by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, social anthropologists, and sociologists, it is suggested that a renewed emphasis on theory in musicological work in popular music studies may be of consequence for the academic study of music as a whole. Beverley Diamond In response to the editor's question concerning theory and fieldwork, this colloquy argues that the two are inseparable. Further, the importance of fieldwork in providing "alternative theory" which challenges the consistencies of academic thinking is emphasized. For this reason, the article eschews disciplinary history as a means of tracing important theoretical currents in music scholarship and, instead, presents arguments which confront the hegemonies of any history, any discourse of intellectual continuity, positing incidents which expose the social contingencies of theory.

Measuring pre-service music teachers’ creative identities: a cross-cultural comparison of the United States and Singapore

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Clint Randles ◽  
Leonard Tan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Teachers ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Music Listening ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Service Music

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to examine and compare the creative musical identities of pre-service music education students in the United States and Singapore. The Creative Identity in Music (CIM) measure was utilized with both US and Singapore pre-service music teacher populations (n = 274). Items of the CIM relate to music-making activities often associated with creativity in music education in the literature, including composition, improvisation and popular music performance. Results suggest, similar to findings of previous research, that while both populations are similar in their degree of creative music-making self-efficacy and are similarly willing to allow for creativity in the classroom, Singaporean pre-service music teachers value the areas of creative identity and the use of popular music listening/performing within the learning environment to a significantly greater extent (p < 0.0001) than their US counterparts.

The Impact of Technologies on Society, Schools, and Music Learning

2017 ◽  
pp. 276-290
Author(s):  
Valerie Peters
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Culture ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Rock Band ◽  
Music Making ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines how music education can benefit from the use of new electronic tools and materials for music making that allow learners to combine their interests and prior understandings toward deepening their engagement in music. By exploring how rhythmic video games like Rock Band bridge the large chasm that exists between youths’ music culture and traditional music education; how inexpensive recording hardware and software such as Audacity and GarageBand have provided youth with opportunities to compose and perform as only professional musicians could in the past; and how software like Impromptu successfully engages youth in music composition and analysis by enabling users to create and remix tunes using virtual blocks that contain portions of melodies and rhythmic patterns, this chapter argues that twenty-first-century music education, with the help of new technology, has the potential for engaging greater numbers of young learners in authentic music making and performance.

The Göteborg connection: lessons in the history and politics of popular music education and research

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Tagg
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
International Association ◽  
Turn Of The Millennium ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Media Hegemony ◽  
Work Education ◽  
Political Economic

BothPopular Musicand the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) have been in existence for almost a generation. Given the radical social and political changes affecting the general spheres of work, education and research since the establishment of those two institutions in 1981, it is perhaps time for popular music scholars to review their own historical position and to work out strategies for the brave new world of monetarism facing those who will hopefully survive another generation after we quinquagenarian baby boomers of the rock era have disappeared from the academic scene. Of course, such a process of intellectual and ideological stocktaking requires detailed discussion of a wide range of political, economic and social issues that cannot be covered in a single article. I will therefore restrict the account that follows to a discussion of one particular set of historical strands affecting the development of popular music studies. This part of our history is virtually unknown in the anglophone quarters that have, for obvious reasons of language and music media hegemony, dominated the international field of popular music studies. It is, however, as I hope to show, a story of considerable relevance to more general problems of music education and research at the turn of the millennium. I shall return to these broader issues at the end of the article.

scholarly journals Pedagogical Fundamentalism versus Radical Pedagogy in Music

2017 ◽  
pp. 256-276
Author(s):  
Heidi Partti
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Digital Citizenship ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Radical Pedagogy ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Face

Due to the increasing media influence in society, the systematic development of media literacy in music education is a matter of the utmost importance. This chapter engages in an exploration of the role of the school in the face of the social-cultural changes that new media technologies have brought about in the wider culture of music making and learning. It is argued that it is equally unhelpful to adopt the strategy of “pedagogical fundamentalism,” according to which students are passive victims of harmful and damaging media, as that of “pedagogical populism,” which uncritically buys into utopian fantasies about social change autonomously produced by technology. Instead, the chapter argues for the importance of radical pedagogy in music education by suggesting that schools should aim to build balanced approaches to new media that will contribute to the development of the cultural competencies required for students’ growth into digital citizenship.

Bubble Tea pop: Christine makes Mandopop

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Patrick Bell ◽  
Christine Chen
Keyword(s):  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Musical Background ◽  
Learning Journey

The purpose of this case study was to examine Christine’s learning journey and music-making processes of songwriting in the Mandopop style over the course of a series of lessons. We begin this article by outlining our purpose and qualitative method, followed by a primer on Chinese popular music (C-pop). Next, we present a portrait of Christine to provide some context of her musical background, how she became interested in C-pop, and how she became interested in songwriting. We then proceed to describe Christine’s four-month songwriting journey with Adam as her instructor, and conclude by considering the implications of this case study for making Mandopop in music education.

scholarly journals Growing Old Together: Pop Studies and Music Sociology Today

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-343
Author(s):  
TOM PERCHARD
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Popular Music Studies ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
The Social ◽  
Media Communications

Popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop's original academic journal (1971), later in that of a much-taught textbook (1995). In many minds at late century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: Western art music's true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn't have to matter – and critically minded, social science-trained pop scholars usually didn't care enough to argue. Yet music sociology's first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the 1980s and 1990s that was the New Musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. That, then, was the situation twenty years ago, at least in the Anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making.

East meets West: Learning-practices and attitudes towards music-making of popular musicians

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie O. Mok
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Significant Finding ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Learning Practices ◽  
British Colony

Learning-practices of popular musicians are a prominent theme in Western music education literature; however, there appears to be a shortage of such literature in Asian countries. With the aim of comparing East and West, a qualitative study was conducted to investigate the learning-practices and involvement in music of Hong Kong popular musicians. Since Hong Kong is a former British colony, the study intended to investigate whether these practices resembled Western practices, or if they were derived from elements indigenous to Hong Kong. Interviews and observations of the informants’ performances and rehearsals were used to obtain data. It was found that all the informants learned mainly in an informal way and participated actively in music-making – similar to the Western popular music-making scenario – but the shadow of the mentor–apprentice learning relationship inherent in Chinese culture also appeared. Lastly, achievement-driven motivation in learning, which is prevalent in Chinese society, was also found among the informants in the present study. This may not be a significant finding in the context of popular music generally, but it is an issue in which Asian educators may be interested.

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