Conference Agenda

Now, decades after the founding of popular music studies and the new musicology debates, (almost) no one questions popular music’s place in our curricula. But what exact part does popular music play in the curriculum?

At a moment where many departments are revising program requirements and course offerings with the aim to diversify and decolonize the curriculum, popular music offers its own solutions and challenges. For example: Popular music may already be an antidote to the elitism of Western classical music, but the ubiquitous “History of Rock” and “History of Jazz” classes also threaten to calcify into canonic lineages of great men. In our curricula, popular music classes (alongside world music) present the greatest diversity of musicians of color, queer artists, and working-class audiences, yet most popular music textbooks rarely go beyond the borders of the US and the UK.

How might we identify and solve such challenges? What might popular music studies learn from its own pedagogical past? What pedagogies might popular music studies learn from or teach other subdisciplines of musicology?

In this keynote address, Suzi Analogue (UNC Chapel Hill Music), an innovative force at the crossroads of music production, technology, and pedagogy, presents "Soundscapes Of Learning: Rhythm Rhymes & Revolution in Education." Drawing on her multifaceted expertise, Suzi will expound on a pioneering approach to education, demonstrating how sound and rhythm can invigorate pedagogical methods and ignite a transformative learning experience.

Suzi's presentation will unveil a pedagogical paradigm that celebrates the profound impact of auditory stimuli on cognition, memory retention, and critical thinking and culture. Through a compelling synthesis of personal experiences, empirical research, and dynamic case studies, she illustrates how the integration of sound and rhythm amplifies engagement, breaking down traditional learning barriers.

Furthermore, Suzi Analogue will introduce a forward-thinking perspective on inclusivity in education. By incorporating rhythm and rhyme, educators can create a harmonious learning environment that resonates with diverse learning styles and backgrounds. Her insights challenge conventional pedagogical practices, paving the way for a more accessible and empowering educational landscape.

Moreover, Suzi will demonstrate how technology serves as an enabler, not a disruptor, in this pedagogical revolution. By leveraging digital tools and interactive platforms, educators can craft immersive auditory experiences that harness the full potential of today's tech-driven learners.

Join as Suzi Analogue guides us through a captivating exploration of "Soundscapes Of Learning," challenging us to rethink the very essence of pedagogy in higher education. Together, we will embark on a revolution in teaching and learning that promises a more inclusive, dynamic, and student-centered educational landscape.

After years of teaching courses devoted to popular music, I found that my students were more engaged during units in which we analyzed music videos. Eventually, I added so much music video content to these courses that I developed a separate class devoted entirely to music videos. My pedagogical approaches, repertoire, and theoretical framework eventually coalesced into the textbook Interpreting Music Video: Popular Music in the Post-MTV Era (Routledge, 2021). In this short panel presentation, I’ll share how a course on music videos can address some of the challenges institutions are facing in efforts to diversify and decolonize our curricula. First, if you want to decenter white men, you have to decenter “rock.” A history of the 1990s, for example, should center on hip-hop videos by Public Enemy and Queen Latifah that foreground the struggles facing Black people in urban environments. Second, while it’s true that MTV aired mostly videos from the US and UK, the advent of YouTube opened up a new world of videos that are just as worthy of study. “Gangnam Style” (2012) and “Despacito” (2017) are among the most famous, but Asma Lamnawar’s “Andou Zine” and Oumou Sangaré’s “Kamelemba” offer students a valuable glimpse into cultures and experiences that they’ve probably never encountered. Third, if we want to decolonize our coverage of music videos from the Western hemisphere, we must look to those created by Indigenous musicians. Supaman’s video “Why” (ft. Acosia Red Elk), for example, uses traditional Apsáalooke instruments and dance to convey an English-language message about the struggles faced by his people. Music videos solve the challenges named above better than recorded audio alone. Their vital role in today’s curriculum stems from the power of words, music, and images to combine into a rich audiovisual message of resistance.

Differentiated instruction (DI) emphasizes “adaptation of aspects of instruction to differences between students” (van Geel et al. 2019). DI encourages students to demonstrate core learning goals in a way that utilizes their strengths and prior experiences. This paper presents some ways the author employed DI in a seminar on the theory and analysis of popular music, as well as some ideas for future improvements to this and similar courses. I have taught this course at multiple universities, to students with a variety of musical backgrounds, including MM, MA, DMA, and PhD students in various programs. Recently I proposed the course become a cross-listed elective that includes undergraduates too.

One thing students found particularly useful was the weekly analysis assignments in an open-ended format. Students were given multiple pieces to choose from that related to the weekly topic (such as timbre and texture, form, or metrical dissonance). They were instructed to make a representation of some aspect of the music, such as “a form chart or timeline, transcription into some kind of notation, DAW recreation, spectrogram or waveform, line graph or bar graph, or any other kind of visual representation.” They were also directed to write a few sentences accompanying their diagram(s), making meaning of their observations. Knowing that some students have less experience with musical analysis than others, I encouraged them to be creative in representing how they understand the music. Students appreciated the openness of this exercise, however one area they suggested for improvement was providing future opportunities to revisit some diagrams and “polish” them based on prior feedback. These assignments were just one way DI was incorporated into the class, but they may inspire others to include similar opportunities for students with varying backgrounds and vocabularies to express their understanding of any aspect of popular music.

One danger of teaching popular music is that students are too familiar with the music, thereby lacking the aesthetic distance to appreciate it. This particularly rings true when one teaches speech-melody relationships in Cantonese popular music to native Cantonese speakers. If students are native Cantonese speakers, they find it difficult to appreciate how hard it is to map Cantonese speech tones onto melodic tones, because they are the authority to decide whether Cantonese tones are mapped naturally onto a musical interval.
In this paper, I present a short introduction of one lecture I delivered in a course on Cantopop for a group of master’s students in Hong Kong, which offered students an opportunity to unlearn their native tongue. Since most students in Hong Kong do not learn Cantonese in a systematic way in schools, in that lecture, I first presented a general introduction of Cantonese speech tones, and presented a methodology as to how to map them onto melodic intervals. I then divided them into groups, and asked them to compose a twelve-bar melody with obsolete Chinese characters that are not in use anymore. They had to re-learn their pronunciations, and fit them onto a melody as if they were non-native speakers. They were then asked to perform their work, and in my experience, the “mediocre” performances made them realize how difficult it is for a non-native Cantonese speaker to write lyrics to a melody.
Through this case study, I wish to suggest that to expand the purview of popular music, we can approach popular music in the curriculum or within the instructor’s expertise from the perspective of an outsider’s culture, thus de-centering students’ perspective of knowledge, and defamiliarize their musical knowledge with which they might believe they are most familiar in the process of unlearning.

This presentation is a reflection on my experience of rebuilding and delivering "Introduction to Jazz" for an undergraduate class of 126 students at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2022. Initially, the class's structure represented the collision of my positionality as a teacher of color and practicing jazz artist with “ungrading”: a praxis of “pedagogical disobedience” that I sought to refine through the philosophies of bell hooks, the assessment strategies of Jesse Stommel, and the critical listening practices of jazz scholars David Ake and Vilde Aaslid. Over the course of the semester, I attempted to maintain a dynamic approach to curriculum and pedagogy through conversation with my two graduate colleagues (who doubled as teaching assistants) and my PhD research cohort at large, while evaluating the social, aesthetic, and political questioning that my students brought (and at times didn't bring) to the table. Through these interactions, what developed substantially for me was a conviction for decolonial jazz pedagogy as the integration of critical, long-form listening and short-form writing into the undergraduate student's lifeworld.

Following this narrative, I share some of the revisions and reorganizations made to the "Introduction to Jazz" syllabus and curriculum, the learning environments we devised, and the creative research outputs generated by the students. In particular, I discuss our radical restructuring of class content around 1973 and the decision of Roe v. Wade as a midpoint for jazz history, our devotion of substantial in- and out-of-class minutes to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and the gradual handover of class content and grading power from myself to my teaching colleagues and students. I also highlight some of the crossmodal, interdisciplinary work that students undertook as they capaciously interpreted our call for a final research project through musical composition, oral history and lifewriting, ethnographically-grounded visual art, and the digital humanities.

Academia, and the humanities in particular, is pushing diversity initiatives, specifically through calls to include Afro-diasporic and hip hop culture in the curriculum of music programs, conservatories, and departments. As a non-Black woman of color who has benefited from this particular attempt towards diversity, I wrestle with the problem of teaching disrespectability politics in an institution of respectability, namely, teaching college courses on hip hop and its “ratchet” discourse and politics of irreverence (Chepp 2015). In exploring this topic through the medium of a conference paper, I use the phenomenological approach of Frantz Fanon (1952), bell hooks (1992) and Jennifer Nash (2014), as well as my own personal experience as an educator, to ask such questions as: Is the act of teaching disrespectability in an institution of respectability a colonial act? Is theorizing disrespectability an act of concluding, assuming a post-respectability politics reality? Does placing hip hop into a syllabus and confining it to theoretical frameworks quicken hip hop culture’s conclusion? In asking these and other questions, I hope to uncover the complicated, and potentially problematic nature of teaching Black popular culture, specifically American hip hop, in institutions of higher education.