Critical Perspectives in Canadian Music Education

Nine: Still Wary after All These Years: Popular Music and the School Music Curriculum

N I N E Still Wary after All These Years: Popular Music and the School Music Curriculum June Countryman The use of popular music in the school music curriculum was given its first enthusiastic endorsement in 1967 at the influential Tanglewood Symposium when leaders from the American education, music education, and professional music worlds met to discuss the role of music education in a changing world. One of Tanglewood’s resulting eight goals was for the National Association for Music Education (MENC) to “advance the teaching of music from all periods, style, forms and cultures” (Mark, 2000, p. 2). Yet, after all these years, Canadian music educators are still uneasy about how much popular music to include in their programs and how best to incorporate it. Why are music educators still wary? What are the factors that continue to make popular music’s place in Canadian music education programs such a difficult issue? In this chapter, I ponder three interrelated themes that help account for our ongoing insecurities with bringing popular music into our secondary music classrooms: (1) our own musical preparation, (2) our large-group performance emphasis, and (3) our professional isolation and role socialization. 13 5 13 6 J u n e C o u n t r y m a n Music Teacher Preparation Music teachers typically begin specialized musical training in their childhood or early teen years. This training almost always includes private lessons outside of the public education system. Admission to postsecondary music programs includes a solo audition requiring an advanced level of performance skill. This is virtually the only route to becoming a school music educator. While a few teachers with other majors do teach music, most secondary school music teachers are products of Bachelor of Music programs. In university music study the music education paradigm is strongly aligned with classical music, which today includes jazz as concert music, and musical theatre. However there is still an implicit hierarchy of “taste” and, consequently program definition that favours real (serious) classical music. Along with this there is a general intolerance of popular music. (Bartel, 2004, p. xiv) Music performance is prized, of course, and this creates a product   –   as opposed to a process   –   orientation, which, if unexamined, functions as tacit confirmation of how music education should be. Naturally, many music graduates who choose to teach in the school system want to recreate the kinds of musical experiences that were so profoundly meaningful for them in their own high school and university lives. The cycle continues: many new music educators envision school music programs as revolving around students performing in large ensembles, learning their music by reading traditional music notation, and being led by a teacher/conductor. Elevating students’ musical tastes with “serious” repertoire is an overarching goal. In addition to the primarily classically oriented university music students , there is a second group of music majors who combine their classical music studies with a rich “outside” life performing various popular music styles. They lead bands, write songs, develop arrangements, find gigs, play bass in one group and guitar in another, and many of these musicians become music educators too. They would appear to have the skill set to enable them to more readily introduce popular music performance and small-group improvising and arranging into the secondary school music program, and some of them do. Others, in my experience, continue to lead the double musical lives they began in university, keeping their popular music performing as a personal, after-hours passion, and running traditional band and choral programs in their schools. Senyshyn (2004) believes that many music teachers feel there is something unethical about popular music. It merely entertains, whereas “good” S t i l l W a r y a f t e r A l l T h e s e Y e a r s 13 7 music uplifts and ennobles. He notes that “this false and misleading elitism ...distorts the power of music. We do this at the expense of students’ identities and values which are passionately based on the very music that is, at times, suppressed” (p. 119). This attitude may be true for some music educators. Others, I think, embrace various popular musics, and recognize their students’ investments in these styles, but do not see how popular music can have any role in their school music program beyond programming the occasional pop arrangement for their ensembles. Musician Robert Fripp...