No abstract

This book is a practical blueprint for teachers who want to begin teaching project-based music technology, production, and songwriting to secondary and college-age students. It aims to inspire teachers to expand beyond the usual ensemble offerings and to create a culture of unique creativity at their schools. The approach primarily draws upon the authors’ experiences developing and implementing the music technology program at Lebanon (Ohio) High School, one of the nation’s largest secondary-level programs, and courses at New York University and Montclair State University. While the lesson templates can be used with any hardware and software setup, the popular digital audio workstation Ableton Live is used for specific examples and screenshots.

The author demonstrates the musical richness of Kanye West’s song ‘Famous’, describing its dense interplay of rhythms, harmonies, timbres, vocal styles and nested chains of intertextual reference. Hip-hop is at odds with the performance-oriented traditions of American music education. By developing an appreciation for this producer-driven art form, educators can find ways to make their own practice more culturally relevant and open to student creativity. Students can approach cultural artefacts and texts the way that producers approach recorded music, looking for fragments that could be appropriated and repurposed to form the basis of new works.

A central difficulty of building a curriculum around current popular music styles is the rapid evolution of those styles. In this chapter, we give strategies for maintaining a music technology program’s cultural relevance over longer time spans, without rewriting every lesson plan every year. Rather than trying to respond to every new development in popular culture, we propose that teachers follow the hip-hop ethos of maintaining freshness. And rather than chasing novelty, we suggest that teachers look for common threads across popular styles and trends, and teach to those commonalities. We also propose identifying out-of-date styles that have become appealingly retro, since these can become a long-lasting feature of the curriculum without losing freshness. We also give strategies for maintaining cultural continuity as student cohorts graduate, and how the same set of technical skills can underlie a wide variety of genre-based projects. Finally, we address broader problems like adapting to new teaching formats and the ramifications of committing to a software platform.

Whether or not we make the best use of technology in the music classroom, young people will continue to find unexpected uses for it elsewhere. There is no historical precedent for the informal learning possibilities afforded by inexpensive and ubiquitous computers. Are young music learners best left to their own devices, literally and figuratively? Or can we structure a classroom around these devices, combining independent play with guided group activity? Will formal educational settings always compromise or even negate young people’s autonomy and independence? Perhaps if we think of the music room as a maker space rather than a classroom, we can admit some of the imaginative play and authentic expressiveness that students find outside school. Music education will happen wherever people gather together, using whatever materials are at hand. A school is necessarily an ad hoc society; ideally, it can be a genuine artistic community as well.