Popular music education: A white paper by the Association for Popular Music Education

Abstract

The Association for Popular Music Education (APME), founded in 2010, is the world’s leading organization in popular music education, galvanizing a community of practice, scholarship and innovation around the field. APME presents herein a report on popular music education. Music education – meaning formal schooling in music – has tended most of the time to exclude almost all forms and contexts of music, and therefore has also elided most models of music learning and teaching. Popular music is among these excluded musics. Popular music education (hereafter PME) is complex, and can appear elusive, exclusive and inclusive. This is in part because of the complexity, fluidity and cultural contingency of the term, ‘popular music’. It is a term that many outside the academy do not recognize – for them, it is simply music that they like or with which they are familiar. Some individuals and subcultures invest considerable effort into discovering and partaking in local or global scenes, in physical or online spaces; others like the music that reaches them as more or less passive consumers in a music-saturated world. Popular music – as many other types of music – can sound vastly different (as well as often being strikingly similar) in different territories. PME’s variable status and characteristics are also the properties of a genre of music that is forever redefining itself, through the work of musicians, marketers and journalists – and, increasingly, educators. PME is inherently diverse and inclusive as a field, if not in every discrete instance. Individual programs and courses are often somewhat non-diverse, catering to the needs or a particular group of students, or reflecting the expertise of an educator or group of teachers. The label, popular music education, places its practices and practitioners outside of much mainstream discourse in music education and music teacher education, while it also serves as a rallying point for many who have felt excluded from normative discourse and practice in their field.