Teachers the world over are discovering the importance and benefits of incorporating popular culture into the music classroom. The cultural prevalence and the students' familiarity with recorded music, videos, games, and other increasingly accessible multimedia materials help enliven course content and foster interactive learning and participation. Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Music Classroom: Teaching Tools from American Idol to YouTube provides ideas and techniques for teaching music classes using elements of popular culture that resonate with students' everyday lives. From popular songs and genres to covers, mixes, and mashups; from video games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero to television shows like American Idol, this exciting collection offers pedagogical models for incorporating pop culture and its associated technologies into a wide variety of music courses.
Biamonte has collected well-rounded essays that consider a variety of applications. After an introduction, the essays are organized in 3 sections. The first addresses general tools and technology that can be incorporated into almost any music class: sound-mixing techniques and the benefits of using iPods and YouTube. The middle section uses popular songs, video games, or other aspects of pop culture to demonstrate music-theory topics or to develop ear-training and rhythmic skills. The final section examines the musical, lyrical, or visual content in popular songs, genres, or videos as a point of departure for addressing broader issues and contexts. Each chapter contains notes and a bibliography, and two comprehensive appendixes list popular song examples for teaching harmony, melody, and rhythm. Two indexes cross-reference the material by title and by general subject. While written with college and secondary-school teachers in mind, the methods and materials presented here can be adapted to any educational level.
Industry Reviews
A dizzying array of technology is now available to assist teachers and students in accessing music. While recorded versions of many genres of music have been readily available for generations, tools such as YouTube.com, Pandora.com, and Grooveshark.com have made a variety of recordings available for free. Additionally, a variety of computer programs and games allow students to mix, analyze, and play with music as never before. In editing Pop-Culture Pedagogy in the Classroom, Biamonte (McGill Univ., Canada) has assembled a timely collection of essays that assist classroom practitioners and those interested in music education. The book deals with pertinent issues such as building listening skills through sound-mixing techniques, integrating aural skills and formal analysis through popular music, and using American Idol to introduce music criticism. The chapters mix explanations of some of the key concepts related to various learning objectives for students with practical ideas and techniques related to how to teach these in the classroom using aspects of popular technology with which students are familiar. A strong complement to Thomas Rudolph's Teaching Music with Technology (2004). Summing Up: Recommended. General readers; upper-division undergraduate students and above.
