Full Description
There is growing recognition that improvisation is a vital artistic and ontological practice that can promote developments in many areas of musicianship and beyond. Although improvisation is taught and assessed in education institutions throughout the world, pedagogical research on improvisation is disparate, emerging mainly from case-specific accounts of particular musical traditions, for instance, jazz and free improvisation. Furthermore, in certain musical contexts, improvisation is often viewed primarily as a means to an end or as a method to construct musical artifacts.
In contrast, this volume considers improvisation within the field of popular music education not as a "means to an end" but as the opportunity for liberatory praxis. Editors Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir view improvisation and improvisatory thinking within education as means to enhance, challenge, rethink, or disrupt normative pedagogic approaches within popular music education. Improvisation offers liberatory potential through resisting, undermining, and refocusing many of the forces in music education and cultures of music learning that can have dehumanizing effects on learners, teachers, scholars, and practitioners alike.
The editors have curated a unique collection of essays wherein improvisation as liberatory praxis works as an exploratory framework. Together these chapters--written by leading scholars, practitioners, and musicians from around the world--explore ways to consider improvisation and improvisatory thinking within education as means to enhance, challenge, rethink, or disrupt normative pedagogic approaches within and around popular music education.
Contents
Introduction: Improvisation and Pedagogical Freedom in Popular Music Education
Gareth Dylan Smith and Zack Moir Chapter 1. Improvisation and Higher Popular Music Education: Onto-Epistemic heterogeneity, liberation, and counter hegemonic praxis
Zack Moir Chapter 2. Playing with Failure: Improvisation as Resistance to Institutional, Ideological, and Industrial Norms in Higher Popular Music Education
Robert S. McLaughlin Chapter 3. Freedom's more than "just another word for nothing left to lose": New musical virtuosities, healthy musical identities, and teaching improvisation
Raymond MacDonald Chapter 4. Improvisation as Liberatory Praxis
Frank Abrahams Chapter 5. An Unexpected Journey: The Art of Teaching as Improvisation in High School Choir
Austina Lee Chapter 6. Percussive, Prosaic, Punkademic Praxis and Popular Music Education
Gareth Dylan Smith Chapter 7. Improvised Teaching: Popular Music, Methodolatry, and Consciousness
David Knapp Chapter 8. Reflecting on Carnivalesque Improvisation as Anti-Racist Public Pedagogy: The Case of The Rumba Madre
David Diéguez Chapter 9. The Ethics of Improvisation Through the World Music Pedagogy Approach
William J. Coppola and Patricia Shehan Campbell Chapter 10. Create and Connect: Improvisation as a Collaborative Learning Experience
Heloisa Feichas and Sean Gregory Chapter 11. "The Happiness is Better When It's Shared": Reflecting on and Contextualizing the York College Community Jam Session
Tom Zlabinger Chapter 12. "You were only waiting for this moment to arise": Dialoguing on the possibilities of improvisation pedagogy for a liberatory music education
Rolf Martin Snustad and David Lines Chapter 13. Improvisation is Not a Toy: Liberating from Liberation Itself
Ed Sarath Index
