from Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom,

ed. Biamonte, v-viii (Scarecrow Press, 2010)

Introduction
Nicole Biamonte

The essays collected in this volume offer a broad range of ideas and tech-
niques for teaching music classes using elements of popular culture that
resonate with students’ everyday lives: popular songs and genres, video
games, music videos, television shows, mixes, mashups, MP3s, turntables,
and online resources. Each chapter provides a pedagogical model for incor-
porating pop culture and its associated technologies, encompassing a wide
variety of music courses. This volume is designed for use by college and
secondary-school music teachers, although many of the methods and ma-
terials detailed herein can be adapted to any educational level. It can serve
as a teaching resource, a primary textbook for music pedagogy courses, or
supplemental reading for courses in criticism, analysis, or cultural studies.
Assimilating elements of popular culture into classroom music teaching
both acknowledges their prevalence and takes advantage of their poten-
tial to enrich course content and promote interactive learning. Students’
cultural identification with these media makes them powerful tools for
fostering classroom engagement. In the digital age, recorded music, video,
and other multimedia materials have become ubiquitous commodities,
easily accessible at little or no cost, which can reinforce the learning of
music concepts and techniques in the verbal, auditory, visual, and kines-
thetic domains.
The three essays in the first section, “General Tools,” explore practical
applications that can be implemented in almost any music class: sound-
mixing techniques, iPods and other portable media storage devices, and
YouTube and other online video sources. The middle section, “Teaching
Musicianship and Music Theory,” comprises essays that call upon popular
songs or other aspects of pop culture to demonstrate music-theory topics

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 vi Introduction

or to develop musicianship skills. Classes in theory and aural skills lend

themselves particularly well to the inclusion of examples or paradigms
drawn from popular music since these courses focus on concepts and
methodologies that are not necessarily tied to a particular repertoire. In
contrast to this top-down model of incorporating content into an estab-
lished framework, the essays in the final section, “Teaching Music Analy-
sis and Criticism,” follow a bottom-up model, in which the examination
of musical, lyrical, or visual content serves as a point of departure for
addressing broader issues and contexts.
In “Appreciating the Mix,” Benjamin Bierman argues compellingly for
the development of enhanced listening skills through an understanding
of the sound-mixing process, presented within the context of a music ap-
preciation course. The first part of the chapter explains how to manipulate
a stereo field using panning and volume, creating (or subverting) aural
analogues to the physical placement of sound sources, and offers sample
assignments. The second part surveys sound-production techniques and
aesthetic values in jazz, classical, and popular music genres through inter-
views with producer-engineers and scholars. While the chapter is focused
on teaching music appreciation, the sound-mixing unit could be incorpo-
rated into many other types of music classes.
The following two chapters explore the full functionalities of portable
media players and streaming Internet video, both of which are powerful
and flexible teaching tools that can be integrated into classes in any dis-
cipline. Kathleen Kerstetter’s essay, “Pod-Logic,” describes the capabilities
and teaching potential of the iPod beyond music playback, elucidating its
lesser-known functions, such as sound recording, video playback, data stor-
age, and (for the iPhone and iPod Touch) software applications. In “Global
Connections via YouTube,” Hope Munro Smith surveys the landscape of
Internet video and discusses using YouTube in the context of an ethnomu-
sicology class, although the techniques and issues considered are, again,
more generally applicable to any classroom setting.
The next three chapters suggest models for incorporating popular music
into traditional undergraduate theory classes. All three authors advocate
demonstrating new concepts within the context of a familiar genre and for
granting students agency by including student-selected examples. Nancy
Rosenberg’s chapter begins with a solid grounding in the philosophy of
music education, followed by a wide spectrum of examples, activities,
and resources for teaching aspects of rhythm and meter. The chapter by
Heather MacLachlan is similarly grounded in learning theory and offers
numerous sample lessons and musical examples of chord types, progres-
sions, motives, and other pitch-based structures. A mathematical perspec-
tive is presented by James R. Hughes, who treats several of the same top-
ics—chords, progressions, melodies, and rhythms—as transformations of

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 Introduction vii

musical space and relates them to notational conventions and patterns

through a transcription exercise.
In a chapter focused on formal analysis, Keith Salley asserts the impor-
tance of comprehending structures aurally through active listening, which
he compares to a kind of vicarious composition. The chapter integrates ap-
proaches to form, hypermeter, and phrase structure in jazz standards and
musical theater repertoire and provides examples of expository, develop-
mental, cadential, and connecting phrase functions. My own chapter con-
siders the simplified forms of notation used in the video games Guitar Hero
and Rock Band, surveys the formal terminology used in the games, and
reimagines the sparser note cues at easier levels of difficulty as implicit ana-
lytical reductions. This chapter also serves as a pivot between the pedagogi-
cal applications of the formal issues discussed in the preceding chapter and
those of the video game technology investigated in the following chapter.
The pair of chapters that conclude the book’s middle section suggest
new technologies for developing students’ musicianship, with a focus on
rhythm skills. In “DDR at the Crossroads,” Brent Auerbach, Bret Aarden,
and Mathonwy Bostock present a detailed study of the potential of the
video game Dance Dance Revolution for rhythmic training. They describe
the outcomes of a semester’s classroom use of the game as a rhythmic com-
ponent of an aural-skills lab and of a pilot experiment designed to measure
the game’s effects on rhythm sight-reading. In her chapter on turntablism,
Karen Snell reports on her experiences with turntablism classes and ex-
plains the ways in which studying turntable techniques can help to develop
students’ rhythmic abilities, pitch discernment, improvisational skills, and
a broad awareness of popular music styles and subgenres.
The third section of the book, like the first, begins with an essay on music
appreciation. James A. Grymes discusses his adoption of American Idol as
a tool for teaching music criticism and exploring a wide variety of issues
related to performance studies, including vocal technique, interpretation
and expressivity, stage presence, repertoire selection, and marketing and the
music industry. Victoria Malawey’s chapter provides an analytical model for
cover songs, comprising a set of broad and specific musical parameters that
serve as a basis for nuanced comparisons of different versions of a song,
which might have in common only a generalized melodic, rhythmic, and
lyric profile. Lori Burns, Tamar Dubuc, and Marc Lafrance delineate sets
of both musical and visual interpretive parameters for interrogating the
relationships between music and images between an original music video,
or sourcetext, and a cover version, or adaptation. The authors designate this
relationship as “cotextual” and offer a prototype for graphically represent-
ing the correlations between musical and visual events.
The following two chapters investigate stylistic elements of rap music.
Alyssa Woods examines constructions of gendered, racial, and class iden-

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 viii Introduction

tity in rap, situating new research on the expression of black masculinity

through vocal quality, flow (rhythmic delivery of the lyrics), and production
effects within the context of earlier work on lyrical and visual representa-
tions of masculinity. In “Crunkology,” Ali Colleen Neff details a course that
explores the Southern hip-hop subgenre of “crunk” from a cultural studies
standpoint, unpacking a host of aesthetic, social, political, economic, racial,
and gender issues through analysis of crunk music and lyrics. The final
chapter, Wayne Marshall’s “Mashup Poetics as Pedagogical Practice,” is a
trenchant consideration of mashups, not simply as clever juxtapositions or
recontextualizations of existing material but as “musically-expressed ideas
about music,” whose new intertextual meanings constitute audible musical
analyses and cultural critiques.
This book is intended as a broad and varied but not comprehensive
survey of some possible uses of popular culture in music classes. Pop-
culture tools whose music-educational potential is not examined here are
blogs, podcasting, and other digital journalism; wikis and other collabora-
tive information resources, social-networking sites such as Facebook and
MySpace; and online environments such as Second Life. Perhaps these top-
ics might be addressed in a future volume that includes explorations of new
cultural tropes and technologies as yet unknown.
Since the essays in this book focus on the practical pedagogical appli-
cations of pop-culture elements and technologies, the vexed and thorny
questions of what constitutes popular music, whether it has or should
have a canon, and whether it can or should be addressed using paradigms
originally developed for Western art music—all of which have been argued
at length elsewhere—are addressed within this volume only implicitly, if at
all. The underlying assumption of this collection, however, is that popular
culture and popular music are vitally important both as teaching tools and
as subjects for scholarly inquiry. Much can be taught with these materials,
and much can be learned from them as well.

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