The NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum

This year, for the first time, I’m co-teaching the NYU Steinhardt Music Education Popular Music Practicum with Dr Kimberly McCord. Kimberly is doing the first half of the semester, and I’m doing the second half. She’s covering live performance and improvisation in the rock and “modern band” idioms, and I’m doing songwriting and remixing in the hip-hop and dance music idioms. This is an opportunity to put some my long-standing theories into practice, so I am excited.

Here’s a summary of what we’re doing.

Kimberly is centering her half of the course on Lucy Green’s classic, How Popular Musicians Learn. The class kicks off with a crucial question: What is groove? For listening examples, Kimberly is using various recordings of “Hound Dog,” “Mannish Boy,” and “Black Magic Woman.” Then she’s having the class play “Billy Boy” using Orff instruments in different grooves: Traditional Orff, pop, heavy rock, swing (like Red Garland), bossa, and Afro-Cuban. This is an approach to teaching the teachers that aligns perfectly with my own philosophy, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Kimberly puts it into action.

For the following few weeks, the students will learn (and learn to teach) guitar, bass, keyboard, ukulele, and bucket drums. They will practice learning and arranging by ear, and playing improvised solos. Finally, they will form bands, work out arrangements of covers, and perform them. If, like me, you come from a rock, blues, gospel, country, funk or jazz background, this process is a familiar one. However, it is very far from the usual way that director-led notation-based ensembles work. So it’s great that NYU is having music ed majors experience it.

My half of the course begins with the concept of “an art class for music,” the basis of my forthcoming book with Will Kuhn. I’ll be introducing the remix as a scaffold to more open-ended creativity. This doesn’t just mean literally remixing audio; it’s a metonym for transforming existing music generally.

After this philosophical start, we’ll be doing some songwriting exercises: writing new lyrics for an existing tune, writing new music for an existing set of lyrics, writing a rap verse using an existing flow. We’ll read about how Talking Heads and Brian Eno wrote “Once in a Lifetime” and how your pop sausage is made. We’ll be blessed with a freestyle rap workshop with Toni Blackman. We will also discuss the thorny issue of the white rap cover. Finally, we will talk about designing creative projects creative projects for different age groups and levels of musical ability.

This is going to be a voyage of discovery for everyone involved. I’ll be documenting our progress here on the blog. Stay tuned.