Popular Music

A Teacher's Guide

Graham Vulliamy, Edward Lee

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317223382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The approach of this book, first published in 1982, is multi-disciplinary. Popular music, it is argued, is not only a musical but also a social phenomenon; the criteria needed to assess it are different from those used in the appreciation of 'classical' music. The first section of this guide is devoted to setting out just what those criteria should be. A second section puts forward bases for course construction that are detailed and flexible. A final section provides a list of further resources.

SECTION II

Guidance for teachers and classroom projects

1 INTRODUCTION

This section of the ‘Teacher’s Guide’ is devoted to a series of essays which are designed both to explore key themes for the guidance of teachers and to discuss various practical classroom projects. The first, on Alternative Criteria, considers the implications for a teacher’s classroom work of the view that popular music needs to be approached and evaluated using different musical concepts from those applied to serious music, and different notions of culture from those traditionally used in the assessment of art and high culture. The four essays which follow are directed particularly at music teachers. They indicate what the more general ‘alternative criteria’ thesis means in concrete terms, with reference to key areas of our musical experience, and they suggest a range of new classroom activities. The essay entitled Popular Song Lyrics continues in similar vein but, because of its subject-matter, should be of special relevance to English teachers as well as to teachers of music.

We have directed the bulk of our teaching suggestions in section II towards the guidance of music teachers. This is because our experience suggests that many music teachers recognise the need to incorporate popular music into their teaching, but lack the knowledge to do so. The basic principles of oral-aural musical traditions, like the Afro-American one, are very rarely dealt with in the training of music teachers. Consequently, we see it as an important role of a guide like this to fill in such gaps in the education of music teachers and suggest practical ways in which popular music can be introduced into the classroom.

However, other subject areas have more readily incorporated popular music into teaching. Chief among these have been the teaching of social and general studies in schools and of liberal studies in further education. Here teachers who are themselves knowledgeable and enthusiastic about pop have used this medium as a stimulus for both project work and the discussion of social issues. Such teachers are rarely short of ideas. Nevertheless, we thought it would be useful to end this section with some suggestions of special relevance to such social studies teachers. The essay entitled Youth Culture focuses upon one of the most important sociological themes raised by any consideration of pop music. The final essay, Black Studies, highlights the key role that a study of contemporary popular music could play in an important and growing area of the curriculum. It provides the kind of detailed information which many teachers are acutely conscious that they lack. Sound guidance is clearly of great importance in an area of such social sensitivity.

These final two essays obviously by no means exhaust the potential use of this series in school subjects other than music. They should, however, be sufficient to act as a catalyst to enable other teachers to see the potential for project work from themes in the books of this series. Thus, for example, history teachers will find useful material on the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation in Edward Lee’s ‘Folk Song and Music Hall’, and on the social effects of both war and depression in Graham Vulliamy’s ‘Jazz and Blues’ and John Shepherd’s ‘Tin Pan Alley’. Geography teachers could use both ‘Jazz and Blues’ and Simon Frith’s ‘Soul and Motown’ to highlight the causes and effects of black migration within the United States, and so on. This merely serves to demonstrate that any comprehensive survey of the origins, nature and impact of popular music in our society cannot help but be truly inter-disciplinary.

A NOTE ON REFERENCES

Since the various books in the series are referred to in all the essays, we have for convenience adopted the following abbreviations:

‘Folk Song and Music Hall’ – (EL)

‘Jazz and Blues’ – (GV)

‘Tin Pan Alley’ – (JS)

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ – (DR1)

‘Soul and Motown’ – (SF)

‘Reggae and Caribbean Music’ – (DH)

‘Contemporary Folk Song’ – (BC)

‘Rock Music’ – (DR2)

We have also listed all the references given in the essays in section II together at the end of the section.

2 ALTERNATIVE CRITERIA: meaning and implications

It is sometimes argued that the use of popular music by teachers constitutes an abandonment of educational and artistic principles. We reject this view, since we believe that, apart from the value of popular music as a means of motivating pupils, this field of music, like all others, has its own intrinsic worth and system of values. It is to this demonstrable network of values that we here apply the term ‘alternative criteria’. The purpose of the next few pages is to indicate in more detail what the essentials of this value system are, and in what ways it differs from received notions of ‘culture’. We end by suggesting some of the implications of applying this alternative value system to school music teaching, with especial reference to the use of this series.

VIEWS OF CULTURE

Before considering the term ‘alternative criteria’, it is useful to clarify what people generally mean when they talk of ‘culture’. In particular one needs to understand the distinction that many critics make between ‘high culture’, ‘folk culture’ and ‘mass culture’.

A major concern of many discussions of culture has been the possible effect of advanced industrialisation on the quality of the artistic activities of a society. It has been argued that the standardised techniques of mass production and the intense commercialism of modern economies has led to a decline in the best of both high and folk culture.

High culture is usually defined in terms of artefacts created by a cultural elite within an established aesthetic tradition. It is assumed that judgments are made of such products by critics who are independent both of the producers and the ‘consumers’ of the product, and hence have ‘objective’ standards. Folk culture is usually defined as the traditional culture of people in rural environments, although since the evolution of industrialised urban societies, some commentators have referred to an ‘urban folk culture’. What is seen by many to be replacing traditional high and folk culture is a mass culture, the term applied to the products of a commercialised ‘art industry’, propagated through the mass media.

Much cultural criticism during the twentieth century has centred upon an attack on mass culture. Critiques have come from both conservatives and from radicals – the literary criticism of F.R. Leavis and T.S. Eliot being examples of the former, and the writings of members of the Marxist Frankfurt School, notably T.W. Adorno, being examples of the latter. The starting-point for attacks on mass culture (in which popular music has often been used as the principal target) is that such products are made solely for commercial ends and that they are therefore necessarily standardised in the interests of mass marketing. Consumers are believed to be merely passive objects who are unscrupulously manipulated and commercially exploited by the producers of mass culture. In addition, the production of mass culture is assumed to debase the quality of response to other cultural works, in that it accustoms audiences to a version of the best high and folk culture in which depth, distinctiveness, and potentially disturbing elements have been filtered out.

Whilst conservatives and radicals agree in many respects in their criticisms of mass or popular culture, they disagree in their explanation of the causes of the problem. Conservative critics tend to emphasise the inadequacy of mass audiences, as the following quotations (Leavis, 1943; and Eliot, 1948 respectively) illustrate:

In any period it is upon a small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends; it is (apart from cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted first-hand judgement.

It is an essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the minority, that it should continue to be a minority culture.

Radicals, on the other hand, blame not the audiences but those who are alleged to regard cultural works as merely another form of product to be sold in a mass market. Art (including music) is thus as subject to the needs of business as any other product, be it perfume or soap flakes. Art is necessarily debased by an exploitative process, which is concerned with the maximisation of profits, rather than with the quality of the product or the best interest of the audience.

We obviously do not share the negative judgments of such critics of mass culture, at least in the case of music. We do not have space to rehearse the arguments here, especially since many of them can be found in Vulliamy (1976a) and Vulliamy (1980a). It must suffice to say that the various assumptions underpinning notions of high, folk and mass culture can be shown to be theoretically sterile and empirically invalid. In particular, analyses by sociologists of the processes of legitimation of various art forms show that such processes are highly culture-specific (see, for example, Bourdieu, 1971). Even the ‘highest’ culture is not ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ the influence of social and economic factors.

From our point of view, the greatest disadvantage of hostile views of mass culture is that they are unnecessarily negative and restrictive. Critics of popular culture usually do not recognise the alternative criteria of quality specific to particular cultural products. Instead they misleadingly apply inappropriate critical canons derived from analyses of high cultural works. In the case of popular music we argue for an alternative view, which is set out below.

THE CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH

Perhaps the most important assumption which we make is that the music teacher needs to view his subject in a less ethnocentric way. We feel that a cross-cultural approach is the inevitable outcome of an examination of world music in a spirit of rational enquiry. Another result of such an examination is the recognition that the study of other musical cultures can be aesthetically and educationally valuable to British schoolchildren – the practical need for such an approach in a multicultural society should no longer need stressing. The incorporation in this series of a book on reggae (which is, at least in origin, a West Indian urban folk music) is an indication of our commitment to the study of the music of other ethnic groups as a part of a modern curriculum. Just as our view of the nature of high cultural assumptions leads us to reject generalised attacks on popular music, so our cross-cultural view of music leads us to assert the value of Afro-American forms, which constitute the bulk of modern popular taste. It should be noted that the term ‘Afro-American’ is not merely a piece of academic jargon – the label reflects the way in which we interpret the musical phenomenon, which contains elements as related and yet as diverse as reggae and ballroom dance music. We should mention, however, that some writers would prefer to distinguish white derivatives (such as the music of Tin Pan Alley) from the black traditions of the New World, to which they feel the term ‘Afro-American’ is more accurately applicable. We have preferred to keep the term as a more general one, describing black music by some such label, when necessary.

Because of the ubiquitousness of popular music through broadcasting and recording, it is as familiar a part of our daily life as t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Routledge Popular Music Series
• Acknowledgments
• Section I Why this series?
• Section II Guidance for teachers and classroom projects
• Section III Further resources