Expanding the Circle: CCM and Popular Music in Higher Ed

Eight years ago, I started a journey looking into schools to get a doctorate. At first, I started looking into CCM programs – but as most of you reading know, at the doctoral level they don’t exist. Especially for someone like me who doesn’t sing any classical music or musical theatre at a professional level (my background is jazz/songwriter). I finally chose a Music Education PhD with an emphasis in popular music at The University of Miami. I was also very fortunate to be granted a teaching assistantship, largely within the contemporary program (popular musics), where my duties included teaching private contemporary voice lessons, contemporary theory and ear training, songwriter’s ensembles, and songwriting classes.

My intention going in was to figure out how to design a curriculum for a CCM program to help singers gain the skills they would need to succeed in the music industry. Rather quickly however, both through working in the contemporary program and through the research I got involved in, I discovered that in order to really help these kinds of singers, I needed to understand the much larger world of Popular Music Education (PME) and Higher Popular Music Education (HPME). In current academic settings, this is where those singers (singing in popular musics) and their voice teachers would be housed.

Red Fish 3: Laila Biali

Man, what do you say about this woman? She’s amazing. She’s kind. She’s charming and funny and REAL. And her music is so groove infested you just want to get up and dance. I’ve been following Laila for years - and I remember thinking about 10 years ago - man, I wish she’d do original music - and now she is! And it’s GREAT! Don’t get me wrong - she has some truly INSPIRING covers - Yellow, by Coldplay - and I heard a Joni cover of Woodstock that was so original and beautiful it took your breath away. She also performed a Randy Newman song - and woah. Blows your socks off. She was accompanied by Matt Aranoff on bass and Jared Schoenig on drums - two stellar jazz/contemporary musicians that have all the right things to say. They both took several solos during the night - phenomenal. Definitely worth going to hear if she rolls through your town!

Red Fish 2: Mark Guiliana at The Village Vanguard

Saturday night, I went out to hear Mark Guiliana (drums) at The Vanguard in NYC. Late set. Joined by Jason Rigby, saxophone; Shai Maestro, piano; and Chris Morrissey, bass. What an absolutely beautiful sonic evening. They gave few titles for the songs they played - a misfortunate omission, I feel - I always want to know the name of the tune I’m listening to - even if it’s after the fact - or something that inspired it - or even who it was written by - I know it’s a jazz instrumental gig - I just like knowing what I’m listening to - it helps the imagination - especially those new to a person’s music).

Live Music Blog: Red Fish

So, with this blog, I don’t really have any reason except that it seems like an opportunity to write about music, about people I care about, and about this city I love.  As I said, I go out to a lot of music.  Sometimes, I’m the only person in the audience for these shows and sometimes I’m one of a whole bunch of people.  But either way, I love supporting live music, my friends, and venues that provide live music listening opportunities.  Here’s my thoughts on some of the stuff I’ve heard.

Private Instruction the Way of the Dodo?

With the advent of informal and peer-based learning instruction within academic situations - specifically in relation to popular music and popular music education - there is an increasing interest in discontinuing one-on-one instruction within these programs. While this post focuses on the vocal realm, I welcome insight and thoughts from other disciplines, as this continues to plague my consciousness, no matter how many ways I approach the thought process. And believe me.  I’ve tried.  Seven ways to Sunday and back.  But I keep coming back to the same issues, some of which I wonder are ethical issues, which is of course where it gets sticky.  

Portfolio Careers and Success

*First appeared on APME blog: https://apmepopblog.wordpress.com/

About a month I found out that the way I organize my professional life and career has a name.

It’s called a Portfolio Career. A portfolio career is exactly what it sounds like – your career looks like a constantly changing, moving, and growing portfolio. It encompasses all the things you hear about musicians doing – writing, teaching, playing, touring, putting out albums, business meetings, website design, mixing, mastering, recording, bookings…ect. – each opportunity and experience adds to the breadth and depth of the portfolio. Pretty sweet, huh?

From the perspective of many people working traditional ‘jobs’ where they do the same thing, go to the same place and interact with mostly the same people every day, portfolio careers can look really messy and perhaps even stressful. But for the creative (one who creates) it’s exciting, exhilarating, fun, engaging, challenging, and always changing. Just like their art.

Community Music

I recently took a course in Community Music. For some of you reading this, you are familiar with this term, but for many of you, including myself three months ago, I only had a vague idea about what community music was. I thought it was community groups that form in some church basement and play music for fun with their friends. And it is. But it’s also SO much more than that. In his book on Community Music, Lee Higgins (community musician, rock guitarist, scholar, professor, and now president of ISME) explores and explains community musicianship. He defines community music as (1) of a community, (2) communal music making, and (3) an active intervention between a music leader or facilitator and participants.

© 2020 Kat Reinhert. All Rights Reserved.

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