Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
Seeking “Success” in Popular Music
Gareth Smith
Institute of Contemporary Music Performance—London, U.K.
Boston University—Boston, U.S.A.
to critique this in concert with the other subject
matter. Any assumptions that I make in this text are,
therefore, included as part of a consciously reflective
autoethnographic approach (Chang, 2008). To
exclude my subjective voice “would have been
dishonest” (de Rond, 2008, p. xii).
I have been a drummer for 25 years, and
have been self-employed as such part-time since
1999. I have mostly performed and recorded in
musical theatre “pit” bands, punk, rock, folk, blues,
and jazz bands, and with singer/song-writers of many
a hue. I also began teaching in 1999. I taught mostly
drum set, guitar, clarinet, and general music in
elementary and secondary schools for a decade
before I began working at a college of further and
higher
music
education—the
Institute
of
Contemporary Music Performance (hereafter, the
Institute) in London, England. At the Institute I teach
drum set performance to undergraduates in a range of
styles such as Blues, Rock, and Jazz; I teach
ensemble classes including Creative Ensemble,
Rhythm Section Workshop, and Advanced
Performance Workshop; I taught Harmony and
Theory for two years, and increasingly I teach
popular music studies courses including Music in
Context, Music and Society, Cultural and
Philosophical Studies, and History of Popular Music.
I also teach Research Skills and supervise around
fifteen students annually through undergraduate
Dissertation courses, one of which I also lead. My
work as a performer continues to inform my work as
an educator, and vice-versa, in a symbiosis that
breathed life to this article.
The Institute where I work could arguably
be seen as an example of an extension of the northern
European “fait accompli,” in which popular music is
included and valued in the U.K.’s music education
system (Hebert, 2011, p. 13; Mantie, 2013, p. 342).
However, the Institute is a post-compulsory, higher
education institution, broadly modelled at and since
its inception almost 30 years ago on U.S. (Los
Angeles) college, Musicians Institute. The
pedagogical model has tended, perhaps out of a
perceived need, to overtly and rigorously systemize
and legitimize its provision, to “formalize the
informal” learning practices (Smith & Shafighian
Abstract
From an autoethnographic perspective as a
performer, educator and scholar, I consider
constructions and presentations of success, what it
means to be a popular musician in the 21st century,
and how these issues are dealt with in the higher
popular music performance education institution
where I work. This position paper explores success as
construed in music education and popular music
studies in relation to changing contexts and practices
in popular music. While popular music has a growing
presence in music education and the literature of the
field, institutions, scholarly publications, and
mainstream media infrequently and inadequately
address trends in popular music practice such as the
widespread adoption of portfolio careers. Under- and
mis-representation of popular music’s canon and
practices, and ideas of success thus threaten to
under-value the majority of popular music and
popular musicians, a problem that should be
addressed in higher popular music performance
education and across the music education profession.
Drawing also on literature from music business and
economics, I call music educators to challenge
traditional approaches and assumptions, engaging
critically with the present in order to prepare for the
future.
Introduction
This article was written in response to the
call-for-papers for the 2013 Suncoast Music
Education Research Symposium (SMERS IX), which
had the theme of “navigating the future”—an
inherently unknowable domain. In order to negotiate
the unpredictable, it seems prudent to take time to
reflect critically upon the present. To do this, I
discuss three interrelated areas in which I work as a
practitioner—popular music performance, popular
music education, and scholarship in these related
areas. This paper reflects my own perspective on, and
experiences in, the fields about which I write and the
issues that I discuss. It is a truism that an “invisible”
authorial voice is present in most scholarly writing;
by foregrounding my own voice I wish to highlight
its centrality to my work. I could not write this paper
without my discrete positionality, so I invite readers
26
Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
2013, p. 257) that are typically identified as being
native to popular music (Green, 2001, 2008). As the
Institute’s full name implies, the primary focus for
student activity is performance of popular music (I
critique the conflation of terms “popular,”
“contemporary,” and others in Smith, in press).
Given that education programs in popular music are
considered (even assumed) in this context to be
worthwhile—they are the school’s raison d’être—I
turn my attention to assumptions that may underlie
and inform educational practice, and the potential
implications of these assumptions in and beyond
higher popular music performance education
(hereafter, HPMPE).
My emic perspective is a limiting factor in
this paper, and also a strength. Bresler and Stake
(2006) advise that “in music education, we have a
need for … experiential understandings of particular
situations” (p. 278). Muncey (2010) adds that
“subjectivity doesn’t infect your work, it enhances it.
Making links between your own experience and your
[scholarly] work is healthy” (p. 8). Muncey’s work
comes from the field of health care studies, but it is
clear that her observations regarding the value of
reflexive, autoethnograhpic writing speak also to the
ongoing experiences of those working in music
education, and perhaps especially in the emerging,
less-well-established domain of popular music
education. I stand at the intersection of current
directions in scholarly practice and music education
and find, as Muncey affirms, “there is no distinction
between doing research and living a life” (2012, p.
3).
the music business who value music knowledge in or
from the popular music industry. They state that
“Academics have a vital role to play in keeping the
public informed in ways that are not processed by PR
companies or designed to serve corporate ends”
(Williamson, Cloonan, & Frith 2010, p. 470). Equally
important, of course, is that scholars in music and
education are able to accommodate the knowledge of
those “on the ground” in popular music performance.
As I hope to illustrate, in order to navigate the future,
scholars, performers, and educators need to share
expertise in a broad dialogue that embraces the
overlapping boundaries of music performance,
scholarship and education. As is indicated by the
literature on learning in popular music (e.g., Green
2002, 2008; Smith, 2013a), there is often little or no
distinction between musician, educator, and learner—
between music practices and music education—in
popular music. Few writers appear to be directly
involved with knowledge from these three domains;
the world of HPMPE is at the crossroads. In such a
broad and under-researched field as popular music
education (Mantie, 2013; Smith, 2013a), it is
especially vital that all proceed with open ears, eyes,
and minds.
I seek in the following pages to describe and
explore two related problems. The first of these is
that HPMPE programs, courses and institutions may
be in danger of de-valuing many popular musicians
(including the overwhelming majority of their own
students, faculty, and alumni) and those musicians’
work through adherence to a tacit and underinterrogated epistemology of “success.” Bennett
explains how this situation exists across higher music
education: “The learning cultures within music are
unlikely … to encourage broad purviews of career or
broad definitions of what it is to be a successful
musician” (Bennett, 2013, p. 236). As HPMPE
programs proliferate, this situation is becoming
untenable, and serves our students poorly, since
“Building a successful career depends on
entrepreneurial activities and carving out a niche
market” (Bennett, 2013, p. 235). The second problem
is that this potential epistemological deficit is
accompanied and exacerbated by the adherence to
similar,
prohibitively
exclusive
assumptions
regarding success in popular music, both by scholars
in the field of popular music studies, and by
commentators in the wider public consciousness and
the mainstream media. The overall aim of this paper
is, thus, to challenge, broaden, or re-contextualize
perspectives of colleagues in HPMPE and beyond, by
exploring what appear from my perspective and
context to be salient issues regarding how the
Aims of This Paper
Jorgensen (2009) advises us that “the field
[of music education] is in need of robust conceptual
theories of music education” derived from research
that includes “systematically describing the field” (p.
415). I offer nothing here so bold as a conceptual
theory of this broad field. Instead, this paper may be
viewed as the type of descriptive work sought by
Jorgensen, and as a response to Mantie’s invitation in
his remark that: “researchers may wish to document
practices … outside of the United States to more
adequately determine the actual extent and forms of
engagement with popular musics” in music education
(Mantie, 2013, p. 347). Hopefully this paper may
thus contribute to the valuable work of colleagues
attempting to construct much-needed theories of our
profession.
Williamson, Cloonan, and Frith (2011)
describe a lack of trust between professional
academics who value scholarly knowledge in or from
academia, and professional musicians and others in
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Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
HPMPE community and others construe success in
popular music.
Popular Music in Education
Popular music performance has a steadily
growing presence in education—from elementary
school to Master’s programs—in many countries
including the U.K., Argentina, Finland, Sweden,
Australia, U.S.A. and South Korea (see for example,
Abramo, 2010; Allsup, 2008; Feichas, 2010; Green,
2008; Krikun, 2009; Mantie, 2013; Partti, 2012;
Randles & Smith, 2012; Smith, 2013a, 2013b;
Westerlund, 2006). While in the U.K. and much of
northern Europe popular music and education could
arguably be seen as relatively comfortable
companions, the music education system in the
U.S.—the country that spawned many of the most
commercially successful popular music artists and
styles of the last century—has largely been reluctant
to adopt curricula that include popular music of
musics (Hebert, 2011).
In the U.S., however, the situation appears
to be changing, albeit gradually and only at the
margins of the mainstream. In 2007, John Kratus
wrote provocatively that the country’s school music
education was at a “tipping point” (Kratus, 2007, p.
42), about to undergo systemic change following a
beginning trend toward new models of classroom
music education. This shift looks set to include a
greater incorporation of popular music in curricula
(Allsup, 2008), as championed by the iconoclastic
leadership of the Music Education area at the
University of South Florida (Williams, 2007). In
2012/13, a handful of the advertisements for
vacancies for music education faculty members at
U.S. universities included mention of popular music
among the specialisms welcome in applicants; while
unprecedented, this is not (yet?) indicative of a broad
national trend.
There has been a notable increase in
scholarly activity around popular music in education
in recent years (Mantie, 2013), including conferences
in 2010 and 2012 at London’s Institute of
Contemporary Music Performance: “The Place and
Purpose of Popular Music Education” and
“Sociology and Philosophy of Popular Music
Education,” the 2011 Suncoast Music Education
Research Symposium on “Popular Music Pedagogy,”
and the 2011 formation of the Association for
Popular Music Education (A.P.M.E.) in the U.S., led
by Christopher Sampson at University of Southern
California’s Thornton School of Music (as I finish
this article, A.P.M.E.’s second quarterly Newsletter
has just been published). With the fast pace at which
(inherently trend-based) popular music moves, and
with the desire that music educators often feel—
perhaps necessarily—to write and publish curricula
and “moethods” text books that can be of some use at
and beyond their publication date, I am keen that this
paper be viewed as the product of a very particular
set of experiences at a specific point in time. As
Allsup (2008) underlines, there is a danger of
approaches or perspectives becoming reified or
overstated. Restlessly evolving, genre-defying
contemporary musician Robert Glasper says: “Some
people say, ‘You’re the future of jazz.’ I’m not the
future—I’m just now. Jazz is so far behind that the
present actually looks like the future” (Glasper, cited
in Aveling, 2012, p. 112). Substituting the words
“music education” for “jazz,” I would re-phrase
Glasper’s assertion thus: “I’m not the future—I’m
just now. [Music education] is so far behind that the
present actually looks like the future.” We in the
music education professions, whether already heavily
invested in the paradigm of HPMPE or edging
towards of popular music/s in compulsory school
settings, cannot afford to stand still.
Popular Music Studies and Popular Music
Performance
The fields of popular music performance
and popular music studies have infrequently collided
in the extant literature. In discussing “popular music
studies,” I refer to that wide branch of scholarship
championed by the International Association for the
Study of Popular Music (IASPM) that investigates
popular music textually, contextually, historically,
culturally, and sociologically, having no explicit
concern with music education. Popular music studies
(as it thus defined for this paper) also tends largely to
exclude popular music performance as an area of
interest. Indeed, when I have, at various IASPM
conferences over the last five years, presented papers
on learning and identity in popular music education,
and on the embodied experience of performing
popular music, I have found my studies to be
somewhat anomalous (although of sufficient interest
to be accepted for presentation).
In late summer 2012, I received a call-forpapers from @IASPM, IASPM’s online peerreviewed journal, for a special edition that would
explore popular music performance. Isolating
performance in this way underlined for me the
“orthodox” assumption that when one studies popular
music one is not studying performance. A week later,
as if to underscore this dichotomy, an editorial piece
in the newly reinstated IASPM U.K. and Ireland
newsletter declared that “every issue now we intend
to let the other side of the fence have their say—in
each edition we will be asking a practicing musician
for their perspective and opinion on popular music
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Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
studies” (McLaughlin, 2012, p. 12). In that edition of
the newsletter, Rod Jones of Scottish rock band
Idlewild gives a 245-word response to this invitation,
in which he talks only about the pros and cons of
popular music performance programs in the U.K.; he
clearly appears to misunderstand the question,
believing “popular music studies” to refer to the
study of popular music performance, in the sense of
working hard at being a performer. This is quite an
understandable error, and underlines the centrality of
performance in popular music to those who perform
it—this does look like the most obvious way to study
popular music. However, to bifurcate the two fields
of “performance” and “studies” creates a false duality
that is misleading because it is at odds with the
experiences of popular musicians.
I have always found difficulty in
conceptually separating “popular music” from
“popular music performance,” since to me the former
implies the latter. Without the performance there
would be very little popular music (and historically,
most popular music has been performed). While this
is a gross over-simplification and could engender
volumes of discussion, it is from this perspective that
I write; being a professional drummer, I have always
approached the teaching of music and writing about
music and musicians as a drummer, first and
foremost. I have not, as it were, left my musicianship
at the door when entering the office to write or the
performance classroom to teach.
Attending the inaugural meeting of the U.K.
Punk Scholars Network in late 2012, it struck me that
those of us who straddle McLaughlin’s “fence” are
growing in number. We are reaching a point where it
is no longer healthy or tenable—if it ever was—to
maintain the epistemological barrier between
performers and scholars. This is not to say that
scholars need to be performers; but rather that
academia could consider using a less divisive lens.
Berger (2002) observes “a huge gap between the
experience of living a normal life at this moment on
the planet and the public narratives being offered to
give a sense to that life” (p. 176). Musicians
increasingly lead protean or portfolio careers
(Bennett, 2008, 2013; Hallam & Gaunt 2012; Partti,
2012) that Burnard (2013) identifies as “boundaryless careers”; those of us working in HPMPE need to
recognize this as soon as possible, or else risk
holding the frame up quite a long way from the
picture. Our institutions need to recognize diverse
manifestations of success for musicians, and to
reflect these back, through curriculum and pedagogy,
to our students so that they are all the better prepared
for navigating the future. Bennett (2013) asserts that
students across higher music education “need to form
themselves for entrepreneurship even while they are
studying.
This
requires
a
future-oriented
epistemology developed within a safe study
environment that rewards leading as well as learning,
such that the ‘future self’ is self-defined as one who
combines knowledge and action in the creation of the
new” (p. 238).
Construing “Success” in Parliament1
In April 2012 I attended a debate in a
committee room at the House of Commons in
London, where the question under discussion was
“Where are the musicians of tomorrow coming
from?” Present at this 90-minute debate, along with
several elected Members of Parliament, were
representatives of the Music Industries Association,
the Youth Music charity, British Phonographic
Industry, and the Institute. I attended with four
students and our Managing Director. The
representatives of these various institutions
(including the Institute’s Managing Director) had
each prepared a response of five-to-ten minutes that
they read aloud, prior to the general debate. I was
surprised that each response, without exception, was
only addressing the same tiny part of the tabled
question; presenters appeared to be answering the
related—but wholly different—question: “Where are
the professional musicians of tomorrow coming
from?” This is an important question, and worthy of
debate at the House of Commons. However, it is not
the question that I was expecting to hear discussed.
As debate followed the prepared speeches,
the tone of the session took on a still narrower focus.
Attendees were trading answers to the yet-furtherremoved question, “Where are the famous musicians
of tomorrow coming from?” The Right Honourable
Member of Parliament chairing the session allowed
the debate to proceed for almost its full term before I
interjected to express my concern that we appeared to
have been distracted by a different matter from the
one that we had been asked to discuss. My remarks
failed to alter the course of the dialogue. I wonder if
the apparent underlying assumptions of this debate
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
The Houses of Parliament (often referred to as
just "Parliament") are the two debating houses of the
U.K. government. In the House of Commons,
democratically elected representatives "Members of
Parliament" (or "MPs") debate and pass laws on
behalf of the populace. The House of Commons
functions in conjunction with the House of Lords,
whose members ("Peers") are not democratically
elected. MPs in the House of Commons refer to one
another in the third person as "the Right Honourable
Member."
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Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
are indicative of those of a majority of people across
the education and music sectors. In our
commercialized, media-rich world, have we become
enculturated to equate “musician” with “celebrity
performer”? My answer to the question initially
posed (“Where are the musicians of the future
coming from?”) is this: the musicians of the future
are coming from a substantially changed cultural
understanding of what it means to be a musician.
Attempts are being made to incorporate a
broad range of musics and musical experiences into
the world’s music classrooms (e.g., Burton, ed. 2012;
Green, 2008) that are meaningful to the students
involved. As Jorgensen (2009) and Mantie (2013)
advise, above, a key challenge is for music educators
in institutions to remain responsive to what we see
around us. Partti (2012) challenges the status quo,
thus:
Construing “Success” in Music Education
Popular public mythologies are aggressively
perpetuated with regard to musicianship and musical
“ability” and “talent” via the celebrity-saturated
charade of television shows like The X-Factor and
The Voice touting a false and transparent made-fortelevision meritocracy. These myths are compounded
by the work of scholars in education who espouse a
different notion of what it is to be musical than is
mostly prevalent in the contemporary literature.
Narrow and potentially misleading views of what it is
to be “naturally” musically able can be found in such
constraining models as Gagné’s “Differentiated
Model of Giftedness and Talent” (Gagné, 1998, p.
39). I discuss the problems inherent such models in
Smith and Durrant (2006).
Welch (2001) writes that “the limiting
concept of humankind as either musical or unmusical
is untenable. The neuropsychobiological research
evidence indicates that everyone is musical
(assuming normal anatomy and physiology)” (p. 22).
This being the case, the science is very much at odds
with the tone of (and undertones of) the debate in the
English Houses of Parliament. Durrant (2003),
echoing Welch, explains that it is up to society—
including but not exclusive to the formal education
system—to realize each person’s inherent musicality:
Formal music education, if operating from a
place of fear and defensiveness, turns inward by
advancing
the
development
of
a
compartmentalised musicianship that is firmly
rooted in particular genres, styles and
communities, and conforms to a reactive role in
the midst of the supercomplex cultural
landscape. … this stance seems not only
unsustainable as a way forward for 21st century
music education, but also utterly irresponsible.”
(p. 90)
Partti’s words are as salient to compulsory education
as they are in HPMPE. Following Burnard’s (2012)
acknowledgement of humans’ numerous and varied
musical “creativities” (pp. 17-18), I contend that it is
incumbent upon music educators to embrace a
pluralistic view of multiple (perhaps infinite)
potential “musicalities.” We should be asking our
students and ourselves, “How can my musicality help
you more fully to realize (in both senses of the word)
yours?” We must commit to what Partti (2012)
describes as “the school (or college) as an institution
that guides students towards increasing agency” (p.
88), including musically.
In the music education community there is
broad agreement with the view that all people are
musical, that musical experiences should be available
to all and that, by extension, all should therefore have
access to meaningful music education. The website
of the International Society for Music Education
(ISME) states: “We believe that lived experiences of
music, in all their aspects, are a vital part of the life
of all people” (International Society for Music
Education, 2012). Similarly, the mission of the
National Association for Music Education (NAfME)
in the U.S. is: “To advance music education by
encouraging the study and making of music by all”
(National Association for Music Education, 2012).
Wright (2012) suggests, “We can surmise that many
children and young people who fail and drop out of
formal education, far from being either uninterested
(or unmusical) simply do not respond to the kind of
music instruction it offers,” bringing to bear upon
music educators a weight of social responsibility,
Although we have capabilities, this does not
necessarily mean that abilities will be learned.
Abilities are learned and elaborated only if the
people, places, things, and events in our
surroundings support that learning. Our
experiences, therefore, determine the extent to
which our human capabilities will be converted
into increasingly refined abilities. (p. 13)
While the job of the music educator may be
construed broadly (or maybe narrowly) as to
actualize the musical abilities of those in his or her
care, these abilities may not necessarily fit into the
existing categories prescribed by, for instance, extant
curricula or the criteria for assessing excellence in
performance at a wind band, chamber string, or punk
rock performance.
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Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
engaging young people with music so that they can
develop into empowered and actualized members of
the society. This does not need to have anything to do
with winning high school band competitions or
getting through to the final round of a made-fortelevision “reality” talent contest. These should not
be taken off the table either, but a broader vision is
required of what being a musician is—from the first
years of music education, through college or
university, and beyond (Mantie, in press).
& Shafighian, 2013). The Bachelor of Music in
Popular Music Performance program aims to equip
students with a sort of tool-kit of skills useful to the
jobbing, craftsperson musician. The Bachelor of Arts
in Creative Musicianship program seeks to develop
the unique creative, collaborative skills of individual
artist musicians, with a particular focus on the
importance of collaboration for the entrepreneurial
musician (Burnard, 2012; Smith, 2013b); and the
Bachelor of Arts in Songwriting combines these
approaches (Institute of Contemporary Music
Performance, 2012d, 2012e, 2012f). These latter two
programs are new, and have yet to gather data on
graduate employment; Bachelor of Music alumni are
working in a wide variety of full-time and portfolio
occupations, from beauty therapy, marketing, and
teaching, to working full-time in a well-known poppunk band. Which of these has achieved “success,”
and to what degree? Perhaps, as Partti (2012)
suggests, any student is successful who has been
guided towards increasing agency.
Arguably the most common way to construe
success in music today, in HPMPE and the media, is
in terms of fame or commercial success. Rhetoric
from the Institute and other similar institutions, such
as the Academy of Contemporary Music
Performance in the U.K. (Institute of Contemporary
Music
Performance,
2012b,
Academy
of
Contemporary
Music,
2012),
mentions
“connectivity” to the “the industry” as though the
music industry is a separate entity that exists beyond
the walls of the college—an esoteric arena to which
the colleges can help students gain access. The
Institute lists alumni in its publicity materials, but
only those who are in or affiliated with bands and
artists who have achieved a degree of fame in
performance or music production. Around 300
students graduate annually from the Institute, and
most of these do not go on to become headline news
or, therefore, to make the list of selected alumni that
ignores the vast majority of possibilities for
construing success. Wherefore this endemic
resistance to acknowledging a wider conception of
success?
Construing “Success” at the Institute
Students beginning programs at the Institute
usually want music to play a significant role in their
futures. For the vast majority this means seeking
careers in music. A browse through the promotional
literature of the Institute reveals that, “At the
Institute, we are constantly focused on the needs of
our students … our goal is their success!” (Institute
of Contemporary Music Performance, 2012a, p.33).
Laudable though this sentiment is, defining success
for all current and potential students is no
straightforward task. Success may reasonably be
construed in terms of making a career and a living
from and/or in performing music; the Institute
emphasizes this view throughout its publicity
materials (Institute of Contemporary Music
Performance, 2012b, 2012c). I have written
elsewhere (Smith, 2013b) about the “pedagogy for
employability” (p. 1) that is a pervasive theme at the
Institute, in current literature and at recent
conferences (such as the College Music Society’s
Annual Conferences in the U.S.).
In the music education literature there is
currently a strong focus on the employability of
music college graduates (e.g., Bennett, 2013;
Cartwright, Gillett, & Smith, 2013; Hallam & Gaunt,
2013; Smith, 2013b; Smith & Shafighian, 2013). In
the U.K. this has been especially heightened recently
in the face of the economic recession and the
concomitant huge rise in tuition fees for higher
education; customers (students and their parents)
want more “bang for their buck,” including a job at
the other end. Bennett (2013) tells us that music
educators (particularly in higher education) face “an
ethical and moral imperative” to adopt creative
practices, affording “pedagogies that encourage
students to redefine the term ‘musician’ for
themselves … (enabling) creative learners who
explore individual strengths and talents, and the
intrinsic and extrinsic influences driving their passion
for music” (p. 240).
Curricula at the Institute embody broadly
two pedagogies for employability in respective
undergraduate study programs (Smith, 2013b; Smith
Construing “Success” in Popular Music Studies
Rodriguez (2004) observes that popular
music benefits from “a rich history that is tied to our
social political, cultural, and economic history. What
it lacks, in comparison to, say, Western European
music, is the passage of sufficient time to determine
which practices, structures, persons, and places have
most influenced the genre” (p. 17). Rodriguez’s
denial of a canon in popular music, however, runs
contrary to my experience as an educator and scholar
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Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
working in HPMPE. Students at the Institute are
required to take a course in the history of popular
music, part of “popular music studies” misunderstood
above by Rod Jones (McLaughlin, 2012). Literature
in popular music studies has tended to focus on the
work of famous and commercially successful
musicians, with few exceptions. This is not
unreasonable, as bands or artists that have sold
millions of albums and become recognized
internationally are, by definition, very popular.
Popular music scholars have thus arguably (although
perhaps inadvertently) established a canon of Great
Works and Great Masters in popular music to parallel
those of the Western Classical and (more recently)
Jazz traditions (e.g., Frith, 1996; Gracyck, 1996,
2007; McLaughlin & McLoone, 2012; Moore, 2001,
2012). Those of us in popular music education risk
embedding this view as an orthodoxy which ignores
the 21st-century “reemergence of grassroots
creativity” that continues increasingly to characterize
artists’ and musicians’ modes of production and
distribution of their creative products (Jenkins, 2006,
p. 136). Indeed, Reynolds (2011) argues
compellingly that the obsession with its past threatens
popular music’s very survival as a paradigm; this is
threat is perhaps nowhere in more urgent need of
consideration than at institutions such as the Institute,
whose students, alumni, and faculty can only ever
hope to have careers in the present and the future.
One of the key foci in creation and
distribution of popular music has always been the
“new,” the current, music that has changed
sometimes by revolution, at others by evolution, with
artists and craftspeople striving to be novel and
exciting by assimilating, synthesizing, replacing, and
displacing various gestures—musical, corporeal,
attitudinal, social—of preceding styles or movements
that have spawned today’s plethora of musics in the
“popular” realm. Those creating and producing the
music may wish for high-profile commercial
longevity, but that is not the prevalent model in
popular music, although the media have a habit of
wheeling out and reifying, even deifying, popular
music iconic heritage acts of a former age such as
Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones; the mind
boggles at the thought of what fate might today have
befallen a withering Elvis Presley, had he survived to
the present day. There is not much room on the tiny
pedestal at the top of the media industry “tree” for
musicians and bands. However, in the “creative
revolution” taking place around us and amongst us,
the dialogue and boundaries between “participatory
culture and commercial culture” (Jenkins, 2006, pp.
136-137) are becoming ever more blurred. The tacit
overarching epistemology in popular music studies
needs to change and to acknowledge this or else, as
Hoskyns (2012) warns, “the most authentic scenes
will be those we know nothing about.”
Messages from mainstream media are often
reductive and sometimes wholly misleading, such as
when the New Musical Express in 2002 announced
the “New Rock Revolution” (New Musical
Express/Ignite! 2002). I recall my disbelief at the
allegation that a handful of bands selected for
coverage by a high-profile publication were suddenly
re-discovering and re-inventing a genre that had been
alive and well since its inception. As far as I (along
with the scores of people I frequently encountered on
London’s less-well-publicized rock scene) was
concerned, there was no revolution, just a shift in the
attention of mainstream media to a style that had
been ignored for a season while indie bands, divas
and (in the U.K.) Welsh musicians were the flavor of
the day. Similarly, “the most important acts who are
shaping music today” (Q,2 2011) include hip-hop and
alternative rock artists, with a particularly high level
of attention paid to folk music musicians Laura
Marling and Mumford & Sons. These artists are not
unworthy of attention, but then neither are dozens,
scores or hundreds of comparably “good” acts. I and
many of my peers have been playing folk music for
over twenty years, and will continue to do so after the
cameras have turned elsewhere for the next “new”
style that will likely have long pre-existed and will
long out-last the fickle media hype. Instances such as
these are typical of what Hoskyns (2012) describes as
the mainstream media’s propensity for “deification
and demolition—build ‘em up and knock ‘em down.”
When I teach undergraduate popular music
history I begin by telling the students that I will not
be giving them an accurate or complete history.
Notions of “popular,” “music,” and “history” are so
complex that to attempt to fool students that I could
comprehensively fill them in on all the details would
be arrogant, at best. I am always very nervous to
canonize and to reify the songs, albums, artists,
genres, movements, and events that we discuss,
although I realize that by discussing them I risk
canonizing them all the more, in the minds one class
of undergraduate students at a time. At best, I can
aim to augment students’ existing—usually
substantial—knowledge of music that has gone
before, and, my main task, perhaps to encourage
them to question the histories and messages that they
encounter. I discuss with the class our inevitable
ignorance of the majority of music being made in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Q is a monthly U.K.-based journalistic
publication advertising and discussing current
“popular” music.
32
Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
world or even just in London at present, and, by
extension, the futility of trying to identify a definitive
history of popular music.
I like to try the following exercise with my
classes: I ask how many of the students in the class
are in bands making original popular music, and
every hand in the room goes up. I then ask students to
keep their hands up if their band is “any good.” Most
hands remain up. Finally I ask who is in a band of
which I would have heard. Hands then all go down
(apart from the occasional hand belonging to
someone who sings back-up vocals or plays drums
for a high-profile pop artist on tour). These young
musicians are just beginning to find their niches in
the “long tail” of the music business (Anderson,
2006), where the traditional music industry model of
selling as much as possible of as little as possible
(Cartwright & Smith, in press) is incompatible with a
now-normative, more flexible, portfolio career
model. As Cartwright and Smith (in press) point out,
“Whereas once upon time such an existence would
have been construed as a paying one’s dues en route
to success, for a considerable majority of excellent,
professional musicians in the contemporary sociomusical business environment, this is success. It is
just not widely recognized and valued as such.”
Popular music studies’ prevailing focus on musicians
who have been afforded (and in the very rarest of
cases may themselves have achieved) significant
mainstream and commercial success risks misconstrual by educators, students and the public as
reflective of popular music in the present, when it is
distinctly at odds with the perspectives of musicians
making the vast majority of the world’s popular
music today, that is, the very ways in which popular
music is popular in a 21st-century paradigm.
explores the practices of musicians in Australia, and
Smith (2013a) where I describe the identities and
practices of drummers in and around London. This is
the modus operandi of many a successful musician.
I consider myself to be a successful
musician. I have accomplished things of which I am
proud and for which I have received praise from
respected peers; I have a secure job in HPMPE, and
many “irons in the fire” for current and future
projects. This being said, I am not famous, and my
income derives largely from things other than
performing. Most of the music that I make and that I
would consider truly successful in artistic and
technical terms, pays me very little. Indeed, the music
that I have been paid the most to play has frequently
(although not always) been what I consider to have
been some of the least successful music, musically.
In terms of the aspirations of ISME and NAfME, my
life would probably be judged to be an ongoing story
of success. In the tacit, unwritten terms of the
discussion in the House of Commons, I would
probably be barely recognized as a “musician.” My
performance and recording career to date will
certainly be ignored by the overwhelming majority of
IASPM-ites (as the Association’s popular music
scholars affectionately refer to ourselves).
Successful musicians today occupy unique
niches as multifaceted entrepreneurs, operating in
numerous intra- and inter-disciplinary networks of
contacts with artists, writers, and colleagues from all
over the world—what Gloor (2006) in his book
Swarm Creativity terms “COINs … collaborative
innovation networks” (p. 3). Work patterns like this
are increasingly common and increasingly
encouraged across creative industries and other
domains—including the academia—with members of
COINs collaborating for individual as well as mutual
benefit toward outcomes only achievable with
collaborative, group efforts. Gloor (2006) writes that,
“In a COIN, knowledge workers collaborate and
share in internal transparency. They communicate
directly rather than through hierarchies. And they
innovate and work toward common goals in selforganization instead of being ordered to do so” (p. 4).
While this type of career is not new, the literature
indicates a general shift toward a significantly higher
level of people’s experiences of work happening in
these ways (Gloor, 2006; Partti, 2012; Sennett, 2012;
Netto, 2012; Smith & Shafighian, 2013). It is in
collaborative networks that most musicians in
popular and other musics construct their continued
success, through a process that Cartwright, Gillett
and Smith (in press) identify as “orchestration …
defined in terms of efforts to achieve success by
Conclusions and Implications: Constructing and
Construing Career “Success”
I and my fellow tutors at the Institute play
music that, although in similar styles, and using
virtually all of the same gestures as more
commercially successful artists is, by contrast (if we
take traditional indicators like album sales and fame
as the yardsticks of success), wholly unpopular.
However, the ways that it sounds and is created are
entirely consistent with notions of popular music
(e.g., Frith, 1996; Green, 2002; Hoskyns, 2012). We
all have portfolio careers, pieced together from a
mixture of high-profile performances, low-profile
gigs, teaching, journalism, composition, and all
manner of music-related and non-music-related work.
Similar work patterns are described in detail in the
work of Cottrell (2004), who studies the working
lives of musicians in London, Bennett (2008), who
33
Music Education Research International, Volume 6, 2013
finding and managing creative combinations for
value.”
Many in higher music education are tuning
in to the changing shape of success in music (e.g.,
Hallam & Gaunt 2012). Partti (2012) advocates
integration of networks akin to Gloor’s COINs into
the music education experience at and across every
level, to the mutual benefit of all stakeholders:
(2013), whose biennial conferences bring together
current thinking and practices in and across arts,
management, and organizational behavior, are taking
a keen interest in how musicians construct careers.
Similar critical engagement with the “business of
doing business” as musicians (Cartwright & Smith, in
press) is necessary in HPMPE.
“Success” for most musicians has yet to be
determined; what seems certain is that it will not
follow the patterns of the first 100 years of
commercially available recorded music or the stories
offered up by the mainstream media and many
scholarly studies to describe it. Success will be based
upon involvement in COINs of all shapes and sizes.
Institutions and organizations need to embrace a new,
flexible, dynamic epistemology of popular music that
incorporates real-life scenarios for multiple
musicalities, careers, and notions of success. This
will include recognition that musicians and music
practices in popular idioms beneath the fickle radar
of the mainstream media are, at the very least,
relevant and important, and that recognition and
understanding of them as central to the popular
“canon” will prove vital to successful navigation of
the future in music education. I call upon scholars in
higher education institutions to utilize their influence
to begin to effect empowering social-cultural change:
If asked “Where are the musicians of the future
coming from?” those in the music and music
education professions need to have answers that
reflect a critical and reflexive engagement with the
diverse and changing present. To alter (again)
Glasper’s observation, we in the music education
professions should aspire to a future where we can
say:
Institutions of formal education could and should
(emphasis in original) actively construct various
kinds
of
inter-generational
(and
even
international and inter-institutional) communities
and networks of communities between students,
between teachers, and between students and
teacher(s), cooperating within systems of
exchange based on generalized reciprocity at the
junction of generosity and self-interest. (p. 98)
The challenge for those of us working in music
education is to recognize and incorporate
contemporary understandings of the work patterns of
successful music professionals and, where necessary,
to alter discourses accordingly. As teachers, the
personal narratives that we offer our students about
life as musicians are thus essential, reflecting success
for the majority of musicians in our culture and
supportively guiding students towards realistic
expectations of how they will likely work (Bennett
2013).
Echoing Burnard’s construal of musicians’
multifaceted careers as “boundary-less,” Netto (2012)
finds normative discourse in terms of the “core
industries” of the music business and “related
industries” to be outmoded, seeking a re-construal of
stakeholders’ roles and practices. An emerging trend
in cross-disciplinary research between Management,
Economics, and Music fields reflects and underpins a
need to recognize the centrality of these “other”
industries and domains to our own work in Music
Education and HPMPE. Groups such as the Centre
for the Study of Working Lives (Gillett & Smith
2013) and the Art of Management and Organization
Some people say, “you’re the future of music
education.” We’re not the future—we’re just
now, but, because of our relentless critical
interrogation of our culture, our practices and the
needs of our students, the present actually looks
like the future.
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