appropriate school rock

After reading selections from Lucy Green's Music, Informal Learning and the School:  A New Classroom Pedagogy (2008), I have been evaluating my own teaching of popular music within the music classroom.  While I don't think club music is the best thing to introduce to a class of adolescents who have a tendency of behavior issues, I have been successful at integrating popular music into music education.  One day, a class I had been teaching as a long-term substitute proved to be highly successful from a behavioral and musical perspective.  One of the students requested singing "A Whole New World" from Alladin.  The children really got into the music.  We were not singing in parts, we were singing by rote or ear at this point, and I could teach "beyond the notes" because it was music with which the students were familiar and which allowed me to concentrate on the other elements of musical performance.  When the regular teacher received word of this, recovering at home from surgery, she was taken aback.  Perhaps it was because the principal couldn't remember the name of the song and referred to it in a conversation with the teacher as "pop music".  That is a dirty word still to this day to some music educators.

I taught for a year at a private school where I was told that placing Disney music on trial at the local music store soiled the name of the school.  Well, excuse me, Snow White!  I guess a dream is not a wish your heart makes after all if you are purchasing Disney music!  With thinking like this after the turn of the century (2000), it is sometimes doubtful if our practice will become much informed by popular music.  However, there is hope.  The undergraduate piano lab which I designed for Wright State University's elementary education program included a unit in which I related the chord progressions of a familiar popular song, "Friends Forever" by Vitamin C to the chord progressions of Canon in D by Pachelbel.  The progressions of the two selections are practically identical.  Not to mention, "To Love You More" by Celine Dion is also similar.  The students also learned how to play melody and to chord in "fake book" fashion with easy songs such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb".  When using popular music in a classroom, a lot of learning can take place if you trace the classical roots in the music.  In addition, incorporating different types of music will help to tear down cultural barriers which students may erect when they think of classical music.  After all, there is not that much difference between a D chord no matter what type of music your students listen to.  Right?  Let me know what you think!

In closing, I would like to ask, as a bit of film buff trivia related to music, if anyone was as struck as I when they viewed the climatic scene of Ocean's Eleven.  The film's music supervisor decided to accent the violence of the casino scene by muting out the sound.  He chose the very peaceful piano piece by Debussy, Clair de Lune instead as a backdrop to the action.