Developing Practices and Approaches to Electronic Popular Music in Education

Abstract

The field of electronic popular music education is a relative newcomer compared to most other educational fields within the arts, and the relationships between educational purposes, between the teacher and the students, and between technology and musical parameters are not as established as they are elsewhere. Through the four articles constituting this thesis, various ways of teaching electronic popular music are explored, all of which emphasize to some degree these relationships. In Article 1, I make broad discussions using continental educational theory—in particular, the work of Biesta—to generate pertinent questions for educators within electronic popular music education. I also introduce and develop an understanding of artistic subjectification as a means of facilitating subjectification (in the Biestaian sense), one that I argue is unique to art education. Article 2 presents a case study of the one-to-one teaching approach of a teacher in electronic music, and points to how one might teach technologies by simply ignoring them and focusing exclusively on the aesthetic parameters of the music, then leaving it up to the student to figure out how to technically achieve their creative endeavors. These two articles together point to how teachers can help students (re)gain agency in their creative practices through both explicitly focusing on how technologies mediate their practices and through ignoring technology altogether. The third article explores the tension between continental educational thinking and student-centered education via the case study of a task for activating student expertise in electronic popular music education, based on that tension. It then frames the findings of this case study within a proposed teaching method, and finally introduces the concept of middle ground teaching. Article 4 provides a case study of a collaborative music making camp involving 16 students, and develops from this case study the model of aesthetic dialogue that points to various aspects that influence the quality and efficiency of the collaboration. These two articles together point to ways of approaching fragmented knowledges and skills and tackling the diverse backgrounds of students.