Coming of Age: Teaching and Learning Popular Music in Academia

Introduction

Music conservatories provide a valuable function to society and culture—helping musicians develop the knowledge and skills for professional careers in music. In the United States, the formal education of musicians has historically focused primarily on classical music,[1] favoring and appealing to students who have strong backgrounds in instruments and voice and desire to play in professional ensembles or become directors of bands, choirs, and orchestras. Of those who pursue music careers, only a small percentage actually support themselves through professional performance. Despite the intended outcome of a traditional music conservatory degree, most graduates combine music performance with teaching privately or in schools. Thus it is little wonder that bands, choirs, and orchestras have prevailed for so long as the most visible representations of public school music education.

Much of this is now changing. As the world endures the inexorable nature of social, cultural, and technological change, conservatory faculty members are under pressure to adapt to the more extensive and diversified needs for musical understanding in the communities they serve. This pressure has been largely “bottom-up”—beginning from public demand, filtering upward through elementary and secondary public schools—and now challenges American music conservatories to reevaluate what they do and how they do it. The pressure derives from shifting emphases toward personal creativity, technology, world music, popular music and culture, diversity, and inclusiveness. Having advocated for the increased prominence of these elements in music degree programs for many years, I begin with an assumption: further advocacy is not as quite as crucial as assessing the new musical landscape of higher education. What follows is my understanding of the principal forces that have stimulated music conservatories to modify their missions, which I believe include the effects of postmodernism culture on traditional aesthetic philosophy, broadening conceptions of musicality, and the materialization of a popular music vernacular.

Culture of Postmodernism

Is classical music “better” than popular music and thus more worthy of study? Does either possess characteristics that render it more or less susceptible to intensive examination? These questions have been entertained by philosophers, theorists, historians, and educators for generations. The long-standing preference for the Western canon over popular music by traditional instruction carries the belief that classical music is high art and popular music is low art and that schools and educators must concern themselves with only the highest quality examples of the discipline. This preference has become more problematic through emerging scholarship arguing against this distinction. Fisher (2005) provided a helpful summary of this scholarship, claiming that typical distinctions between high/low, good/bad, and art/nonart become more problematic upon careful scrutiny, thus presenting a challenge to the future of aesthetics.[2] Indeed, the notion that classical music permits a higher form of aesthetic experience than popular music has gradually diminished in the second half of the twentieth century due to increasingly conflicting aesthetic perspectives. Shelly (2015) stated, “For the most part, aesthetic theories have divided over questions particular to one or another of these designations: whether artworks are necessarily aesthetic objects; how to square the allegedly perceptual basis of aesthetic judgments with the fact that we give reasons in support of them; how best to capture the elusive contrast between an aesthetic attitude and a practical one; whether to define aesthetic experience according to its phenomenological or representational content; how best to understand the relation between aesthetic value and aesthetic experience.”[3]

What does it mean for an object to be aesthetic or for someone to have an aesthetic attitude or experience? In his book Art as Experience (1934), John Dewey offered an explanation of aesthetic experience through his analysis of expressiveness,[4] claiming that opportunity and practice improved sensitivity to above-ordinary experiences. Prall (1929) explained a similar viewpoint: “It is objects as of specific discriminated character, and in their variety of detail, that most fully satisfy us. And the discriminating of such absolutely specific natures and of such internal character, as distinguished from noticing that an object is of some general kind, conveniently named, or the following out of relations to other objects or to interests and purposes, is the very heart of aesthetic activity. Without such specific discrimination, continuous and more and more refined, aesthetic experience remains mere day-dreams, mere relaxation or truancy, a rest perhaps, but not a refreshment and delight in perception.”[5]

The traditionalist presumption that certain standards, forms, or characteristics of things were intrinsically superior to others, and the application of this presumption to classical music, is now historical. Postmodernist thinking rejects the idea of “beauty” as an objective quality, meaning that aesthetic perception and experience cannot and should not be described, or assumed to exist, in any normative sense. The postmodern perspective allows that no one can say for anyone but oneself what music is, or what it means, or what’s important in or about music. Postmodernist thinking was sufficiently dominant by the end of the twentieth century that leading music education philosophers began writing from decidedly postaesthetic lenses,[6] signaling forthcoming changes in the way music should be taught and learned.

Returning to the question of whether classical music is “better” than popular music, it remains a matter of philosophical perspective, yet the perspective leading to an affirmative answer no longer dominates contemporary society. While it is certainly accurate that classical music is typically the best of the genres and styles it represents, this is obviously not true of popular music. However, as time progresses, it becomes easier to note those artists and performances that rise to the top—in the power of their message, in the extent of their innovation, in the scope of their influence—and doing so characterizes intelligent consumers of musical culture. Creating, performing, and listening to popular music are considered naïve activities only by those who have limited knowledge, interest, or experience in them or who hold a categorical belief that popular music is simply “amateur” music. Classical music is no more worthwhile than popular music for the reasons humans attend to music in the first place. As Gracyk (2004) explained, “The argument in favor of exclusive structural ‘listening’ . . . rests on the principle that an activity requiring specialized or refined knowledge is superior to one that employs only basic knowledge. But this principle is without basis in fact. Specialized knowledge is required to read the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, but it hardly follows that I will gain greater insight into human nature by reading that journal in place of the novels of Charles Dickens and Henry James.”[7]

In his examination of the contrasting worlds of classical and rock music, Baugh (1993) concluded that when someone says the latter suffers from overly simplistic form, it reveals a bias toward the aforementioned specialized knowledge—the belief that good music should be more structurally complex or refined—and also misses the point of rock music.[8] Such dismissive attitudes are subsiding as newer generations of musicians and scholars, having been educated in more inclusive curricula, respond to increasing pressure to temper their attitudes about their specialties in relation to the specialties of others and realize the mutual benefits of doing so. As Bowman (2004) stated, “Taking popular music seriously will make the classics—the greatest musical achievements of the past—all the more momentous. They become far more vital concerns to the extent that they are appropriately seen as part of a continuous, dynamic musical field rather than constituting the whole of it. Rather than museum pieces that demand reverent appreciation, they become part of a broader, living culture—culturally vital, vibrant, and rich in their power to enrich here-and-now experience in the real world.”[9]

These views represent changing sensibilities and suggest an increasingly comprehensive strategy for educating professional musicians in which any particular music tradition provides neither the organizing principles nor the specific subject matter for learning. In pursuit of significant change in the academy, educators are becoming more mindful of musicianship “categories” where some genres are considered “better” or “more advanced” than others and thus more worthy of study—first, because they are arbitrary[10] and second, because they are increasingly irrelevant based on the consumption habits of communities served by higher education. Without the guidelines and conditions of a dominant musical tradition, music conservatories will witness a shift in focus from the institution to the individual, a trend evident in music education at the global level. Georgii-Hemming and Westvall (2012) presented new priorities for Swedish music educators that are comparable to those in other Scandinavian countries: “Music as a phenomenon is not a focus, and music is certainly not seen as an autonomous object. However, the meaning of music is perceived as a unique source for personal and social development. Therefore every student must be respected, learn to cooperate, be given opportunities to find their identity and become a fulfilled human being with self-confidence. They must also be made aware of—and take responsibility for—what he or she [sic] learns, and discover their own abilities and the potential value of aesthetic knowledge.”[11]

These new challenges warrant a reevaluation of musicality because it is a direct way to study the humans these academies exist to educate. What does it mean to call someone musical? In the following section, I address this question in hopes of revealing what musicians of different backgrounds and interests share in terms of personality characteristics, working habits, competencies, and challenges, which minimize the distinctions between them often used to determine who might benefit best from advanced instruction.

Broadening Conceptions of Musicality

The term musicality can describe a characteristic of humans or a quality of sound. I prefer using it to describe humans: it encompasses skills and knowledge of varying styles and traditions and attendant sensitivity to the subjective aspects of musical experiences. This sensitivity is easy to overlook in instruction, but there is evidence that encouraging students to attend to and conceptualize their affective responses leads to more relevant listening to music.[12] Another reason for using musicality in terms of humans rather than sound is the decided reemphasis of philosophical and psychological research from the musical object to the musical person near the beginning of the twenty-first century. Christopher Small introduced the term musicking, which exemplifies this marked shift in the concept of music from products to processes.[13] Meanwhile, music psychology transformed into the social psychology of music as the digital music world evolved. Adrian North and David Hargreaves (2008) wrote:

The relevance of these new directions for the concept of musicality is a basis for understanding all musical behavior, regardless of background or specialization. This is not to endorse musical “universals”—that is, to argue that all musical behavior is normative—rather, it suggests that previously accepted hierarchies of musical competence that separate experts from amateurs don’t help us understand, nor do they represent well, the richness and diversity of human musical activity.

Classical and popular musicians share similar skills and knowledge, personality types, learning styles, and professional challenges. Davies (1999) concluded that music listening invokes the perceptual tendency to seek patterns to distinguish it from noise,[15] a parsing strategy employed regardless of training and experience. Music listening simultaneously involves “looking backward” to recognize and process musical sounds and “looking forward” to formulate expectations.[16] Musicians are adept at reasoning across multiple temporal spaces, even while engaged in generative musical skills—performing, composing, and improvising. Memorization is another mental skill on which musicians rely. As the culmination of a professional music degree, it is standard to expect the senior recital to include extended pieces, or even an entire program, performed from memory, just as rock band members must perform an entire album’s worth of music (or more) from memory during a live concert. It is not possible to function as expected in a bluegrass jam unless one has committed to memory at least dozens—and perhaps even hundreds—of songs that can be sung, accompanied, and improvised to.

Musicians, like all artists, exert extraordinary influence over others through sympathetic induction of desired emotional states. A dependable sign of an accomplished musician is the ability to perform without demonstrating the intended emotion themselves. A famous example of this skill was Elton John’s controlled performance of Candle in the Wind at Princess Diana’s funeral, which reinforces the belief that accomplished musicians understand emotion enough to hold sway over it. Musical ability is associated with pathemia,[17] a personality dimension characterized by pronounced subjective awareness and a potential source of attraction between humans—it enables musicians to influence the feelings of others in socially beneficial ways. Anthony Kemp (1996), interpreting the research of Cattell, described pathemia in this way: “On the surface, pathemia may be associated with a relaxed and even indulgent life of feeling, the individual appearing warm, sentimental, and prone to daydreaming and living through sensitive emotions. At the contrasting pole, cortertia, the individual operates in an alert and realistic fashion; feelings are cool and well under control.”[18]

Musicians, regardless of training, generally approach tasks and situations intuitively and are prone to preferring sensory qualities of musical experiences rather than theoretical knowledge. This is not to imply that musicians do not want or readily benefit from systematic instruction—merely that they often choose to explore possibilities rather than recognize and conform to practicalities, thus suggesting the importance of creative reasoning and self-expression. One exercise I plan for the first day of methods class is to listen to the introduction of the opening song “Playground” from the album Wasp Star: Apple Venus Volume 2 by the rock group XTC.[19] It features two bars of a guitar riff alone, followed by guitar riff and added staggered drum hits for the next four bars, composing an exciting anacrusis that I believe is one of the best album introductions ever. We discuss as a class and then I inform the students that there is a drumming strategy being employed—each iteration is one stroke longer than the previous one, creating a compelling syncopated pattern when laid over the four bars. We listen again with this added analytic information and then discuss again. We listen a third time, and I ask them to try to listen as they did the first time, when their responses noted the raw energy and excitement. It is not possible once you “understand” the strategy.[20] This exercise illustrates the point that musicians have a certain nature in which they are united: differences arise with the amount and type of education they are given or pursue.

When certain areas of formal music instruction prevail, other areas might remain undeveloped. When I completed training in the Orff approach during the 1980s, several of the in-service music teachers dis-enrolled because they were unwilling to complete the substantial creative movement–based segment of the training. These were elementary general music educators who ostensibly help children use their bodies to understand and react to music. I have never met an accomplished music student who didn’t bemoan a lack of improvisation and composition skills, yet most of my upper-level undergraduate methods students have simply never been asked to improvise or compose prior to my class. It is ironic to note that much of what makes popular music attractive is its connection with movement, or dance, and the self-granted creative latitude used by artists and groups to extend their personalities through their music.[21] One might legitimately argue that musically creative activity is the most distinguishing characteristic of the musical personality—a natural expectation for and of accomplished musicians, which becomes more apparent as we consider the diverse ways music makers function beyond the academy.

Music is gratifying to the nervous system, using the same reward pathways as food, drugs, and sexual pleasure.[22] This observation likely accounts for contemporary digital technology development that supports increasingly accessible, sustained, and sophisticated musical behavior. One of the more tangible features of such behavior is mediation, in which participants become vulnerable to social and identity exploration and growth through a process of communication with like-minded individuals.[23] The mediation involves sharing ideas; permitting others to critique, change, and reperform them; critiquing and changing them oneself and then reperforming; and so forth. Since the building blocks for this sharing are already available in the form of preexisting music and other media, the process of creation involves combining and reframing these blocks to produce new meanings—ones that invoke the sensibilities and cultural milieu of the original sources. Electronic dance music (EDM) relies heavily on this hybrid creativity, and it is currently the most popular music genre in the world. Today’s music and nonmusic majors are already exposed to these practices both in their coursework[24] and in the “real world.” In its most recent version, GarageBand now has an EDM music creation interface, and it is accessible to millions of iPhone owners.

The practices of digital musicianship bear out Small’s concept of musicking and North and Hargreaves’ portrayal of the changing social dynamics of music performance and consumption and are consistent with broadening conceptions of musicality based on humans rather than music traditions. Classical music training alone has proven to be more limited—in its purposes, performance protocols, and future employment potential—to the ways popular music thrives across the world. It is an exception of the grandest sense to the ways that humans have utilized music since ancient times.[25] Still, one might wonder whether popular music has a historical legacy and integrity comparable to classical music—whether it can prevail with a historical tradition all its own. Thanks to the growing number of music theorists, musicologists, and music educators oriented toward popular music, that legacy is alive, well, and prospering.

Materialization of a Popular Music Vernacular

History is the central component of a popular music vernacular. I use the term vernacular in the sense that learning about it helps one “speak” its language. For several decades toward the end of the twentieth century, I heard from many popular music enthusiasts that pop music history “begins with Elvis,” yet this belief has waned in favor of a more serious approach to the study of popular music in the United States—namely, the role of American roots music. What used to be called “folk music” by scholars near the start of the twentieth century began as the music of European Americans in the rural South but soon encompassed the songs of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Cajuns, American Indians, and other small ethnic groups. These traditions represented the cultural beliefs and values of ordinary people. Popular styles emerged from this base, evolving into blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. During the 1960s, the folk music revival brought national attention to these original music traditions, and they have collectively become known as examples of American roots music. American roots music reveals how songs function as important cultural forms through which people assert themselves, preserve their own histories in the face of changing social conditions, and even encourage collective action. The history of American popular music is well documented now.[26] It is significantly the history of African American music in the United States. One might take a geographic perspective of this history: it emanated from the South, up the Mississippi River, to the large cities near the river, then eastward and westward, following the Great Migration of African Americans in the twentieth century.

A second component of a popular music vernacular is its signature instruments, including acoustic and electric guitar, bass, drums, piano and electronic keyboard, banjo, fiddle, accordion, mandolin, harmonica, and others. This instrumentation is clearly part of the materiality of popular music. In contemporary music classrooms, these instruments, combined with microphones and laptop computers, carry the name “Modern Band” to distinguish them from previous “band” ensembles and to enhance their integrity as a learning medium. Understanding the idiomatic constraints and advantages of these instruments, and acquiring the highest levels of performance skill, is every bit as challenging and time-intensive as it is for instruments of the symphony orchestra.

A third component of a popular music vernacular is technological development. When radio broadcasts began in the 1920s, it was possible for all Americans to experience the same music, regardless of their location. The widespread distribution of the phonograph allowed users to hear music without making it themselves or seeing it performed live. This technology legacy continues on through cassettes, CDs, and MP3s, leading some to contend that popular music is a recorded medium.[27] With this legacy comes analysis of its constituent parts—principally, studio-recorded tracks, as Kania (2006) argued—which provide effective comparison points with the longer-established classical music tradition.[28]

The interpretive potential of popular music might also be considered part of its vernacular. As socially driven and transforming practice, popular music ventures far beyond the sensory and intellectual pleasures of good performances and recordings—it provides a means for performers and listeners to explore the space between the music and their identities. This is also central to the materiality of popular music. Adventuresome practitioners in some genres (e.g., punk) take this aspect to the extreme, accepting larger risks for achieving greater cultural disruption.[29] Because it is everywhere, and with so many possibilities for self-definition and understanding, popular music is rightfully scrutinized for all the nuances of its consumption. As Valentine (1995) wrote:

Conceptualizing the artifact of music listening as a “space” is useful for capturing the intricacies of individual affective responses interconnected with the varied circumstances of listening experience.[31]

Coda

The ideas presented in the foregoing sections highlight the pervasive philosophical, artistic, psychological, and historical changes faced by music conservatories. Consequently, many schools are indeed changing—some by instituting new degree programs, some through merging, and some through the addition of new popular music courses. Overall, progress toward the acceptance of popular music in higher education is palpable, notably since the publication of Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education in 2004.[32] Yet there is still much progress to make. Specifically, popular music scholarship and performance practice has yet to be integrated equitably with existing curricula. This lack of integration is evident in many areas: major ensembles, applied instruction, theory, musicology, and pedagogy. It is not sufficient to merely add courses to degree programs; subject matter from multiple music traditions will need to be fused in a comprehensive approach to educating professional musicians. In practical terms, this means we will have to “make room” for popular music education to a more significant degree and in a more meaningful way.

The topic of music notation skills continues to be problematic. Would any school of music admit a student who cannot read music? It depends on the school’s mission. If the school’s primary mission were to pursue note-reading excellence on par with the finest players in the world in preparation for a life of professional ensemble performance, the answer would have to be no. If the school’s mission were to help musically talented individuals of diverse backgrounds and skills pursue a career in music, the answer would have to be yes, of course, in accordance with the evaluation of other qualifications unique to the degree program. Just like everyone else, music students learn far less from transmission, or conscious showing and telling, than they do from accretion, or unconscious learning. The educational worth and potential of an institution is thus in the quality of its students, not its faculty. We should be mindful of our collective responsibility to meet the needs for musical understanding in our communities as they constantly change, even if it means leaving some of our expertise behind, because it presents educators with the same challenge facing students—becoming something you have yet to achieve—and demonstrates the value that what you know is not nearly as useful as knowing how to learn.

Notes

1. For purposes of brevity, in this chapter I refer to Western European common practice as “classical” music.

2. J. A. Fisher, “High Art versus Low Art,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd ed., ed. Berys Nigel Gaut and Dominic Lopes (London: Routledge), 527–40. Fisher’s summary provides commentary on whether a single distinction between high and low art can be formulated, whether it represents aesthetic differences, whether it is theoretically coherent, and how it relates to the concept of art.

3. J. Shelley, “The Concept of the Aesthetic,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2015), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/aesthetic-concept/.

4. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1934). See chapter 4, “The Act of Expression,” and chapter 5, “The Expressive Object.”

5. D. W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929), 35.

6. See David Elliott (1995), Estelle Jorgensen (1997), and Bennett Reimer (2003) as examples of transitional, postaesthetic philosophical writing in music education during this time.

7. Theodore Gracyk, “Popular Music: The Very Idea of Listening to It,” in Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston: MENC—the National Association for Music Education, 2004), 60. Gracyk also cites limitations of traditional aestheticians in addressing musical experience in an era dominated by recorded music.

8. Bruce Baugh, “Prolegomena to Any Aesthetics of Rock Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 1 (1993): 25. In this article, Baugh makes the distinction that classical music tends to support perception and appreciation of formal qualities, while “rock music” appeals to bodily rhythmic impulses.

9. Wayne Bowman, “‘Pop’ Goes . . . ? Taking Popular Music Seriously,” in Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education, ed. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez (Reston, VA: MENC—the National Association for Music Education, 2004), 44.

10. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 308. Pinker presents a compelling view of how categories are “arbitrary conventions” of language while noting “deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism in the humanities take this view to an extreme.”

11. Eva Georgii-Hemming and Maria Westvall, “Music Education: A Personal Matter? Examining the Current Discourses of Music Education in Sweden,” in Future Prospects for Music Education: Corroborating Informal Learning Pedagogy, ed. Sidsel Karlsen and Lauri Väkevä (London: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), 100. See also Marja Heimonen, “‘Bildung’ and Music Education: A Finnish Perspective,” Philosophy of Music Education Review 22, no. 2 (2014): 188–208. Heimonen explains how Frede Nielsen and others have interpreted the German concept of Bildung, which emphasizes personal responsibility in one’s education.

12. The development of evaluative responses to visual art is addressed in Michael J. Parsons, How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

13. Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

14. Adrian North and David Hargreaves, The Social and Applied Psychology of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. In the opening chapter, North and Hargreaves invoke Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms from his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to explain how music psychology, focused previously on cognitive questions and experimentation, left many unanswered questions that could only be addressed through a shift to social psychology.

15. Stephen Davies, “Rock versus Classical Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (1999): 193–204.

16. John Booth Davies, The Psychology of Music (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 73–74.

17. Raymond Bernard Cattell, Personality and Mood by Questionnaire: A Handbook of Interpretive Theory, Psychometrics, and Practical Procedures (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973). Cattell derived three factors of pathemia in adults—outgoingness, sensitivity, and imagination.

18. Anthony Kemp, The Musical Temperament: Psychology and Personality of Musicians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 69. Chapter 4, “Sensitivity,” is dedicated to the interpretation of various personality test data, most prominently Cattell’s construct of pathemia. Cattell provided a thoughtful foreword for Kemp’s book.

19. XTC, Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2), released May 23, 2000, Cooking Vinyl/Idea Records.

20. Chuck Sabo claimed, “That fill was completely spontaneous. It just came out of me, after hearing the count-in to the song.” Chuck Sabo, personal communication, March 28, 2017.

21. With respect to guitar chords, there are finite ways to finger a chord; fewer than that are typically used. What brings infinite variety to them is the manner in which the guitarist activates the strings—astute listeners can tell if it is Adrian Belew or Eric Clapton playing.

22. Adiel Mallik, Mona Lisa Chanda, and Daniel J. Levitin, “Anhedonia to Music and Mu-Opioids: Evidence from the Administration of Naltrexone,” Scientific Reports 7:41952 (2017), doi: 10.1038.

23. Lauri Väkevä, “Digital Musicianship in the Late Modern Culture of Mediation: Theorizing a New Praxis for Music,” Signum Temporis: Journal of Pedagogy and Psychology (2013), doi: 10.2478.

24. I recently taught a class entitled “Aesthetics of Rock,” which surveyed musical practice in the contemporary world and focused on how individual students situate themselves in relation to music performance and consumption. Students largely determined the artists and genres we surveyed.

25. Steven Brown, “Biomusicology, and Three Biological Paradoxes about Music,” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 4 (2003): 15–17.

26. For example, see Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

27. Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

28. Andrew Kania, “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 4 (2006): 401–14.

29. Jesse Prinz, “The Aesthetics of Punk Rock,” Philosophy Compass 9, no. 9 (2014): 583–93.

30. Gill Valentine, “Creating Transgressive Space: The Music of kd lang,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20, no. 4 (1995): 474–85.

31. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, “Music Listening Spaces,” in The Musical Experience: Rethinking Music Teaching and Learning, ed. Janet R. Barrett and Peter Webster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 88–102.

32. Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, ed., Bridging the Gap: Popular Music and Music Education (Music Educators National Conference, 2004).

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• Parsons, M. J. How We Understand Art: A Cognitive Developmental Account of Aesthetic Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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