Music Educators

Journal
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Toward Convergence: Adapting Music Education to Contemporary Society and Participatory Culture
Evan S. Tobias
Music Educators Journal 2013 99: 29
DOI: 10.1177/0027432113483318
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://mej.sagepub.com/content/99/4/29

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by Evan S. Tobias

Toward Convergence
Adapting Music Education to
Contemporary Society and
Participatory Culture
Abstract: Knowing how students engage with music outside school music programs can help
music educators and their programs evolve. This article offers a look at music teaching and
learning in terms of how people are increasingly interacting with music in participatory ways
that involve digital technologies and media. This participatory culture offers a means for aligning music education more closely with how people engage with music in contemporary society.
The article shows how convergence of older and newer media and such engagement as remixing, creating mash-ups, and interacting with others can provide students with exciting means of
connecting to ways of being musical in contemporary society.
Keywords: contemporary music, convergence culture, curriculum development, high school,
junior high, mash-up, middle school, participatory culture, technology

ow are our programs helping students

engage with music in contemporary
society? Before answering this question,
one might first consider the varied contexts
and ways people engage with music outside
of school music programs. The particular performance practices and ways of being musical typical in K12 music programs represent
an important but somewhat narrow range of
the diverse ways people know and do music.1
Music educators, however, are often perplexed as to how best to evolve with a changing society and address contemporary ways of
being musical beyond the foci of typical K12
programs. Knowing how people learn and do
music in their everyday lives can assist in this
regard.

Participatory Culture2
To identify cultural phenomena surrounding
music and emerging ways of being musical,
we might observe how people engage with
and integrate music in their lives. Table
1 outlines some ways that many people
interact with popular music in contemporary
society. Observing examples of these musical
practices (included as hyperlinks in the digital
supplement to this journal at www.nafme
.org) and by using the suggested search terms
listed in Table 1 combined with the song titles
popular at the time of reading this article,
readers can acquire a sense of how people
engage with music through means that may
not be represented in school music programs.

Evan S. Tobias is an assistant professor of music education at Arizona State University, Tempe. He can be contacted at
evan.tobias@asu.edu.

www.nafme.org

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Are there ways we

can encourage our
students to be more
musical in their
world via what we
do in the classroom?
How might learning
about contemporary
musical cultures
help us evolve as
educators?

Copyright 2013 National Association

for Music Education
DOI: 10.1177/0027432113483318
www.nafme.org

29

TABLE 1
Typical Ways People Engage with Music in Participatory Culture
Practices

Brief Explanations and Some Suggested Search Terms (in Quotes)

Covering

Individuals or groups performing replications or variations of original songs, sometimes in new musical contexts
(cover; name of an instrument, e.g., flute)

Arranging

Reorchestrating an original work for new musical contexts, often making use of computer music applications
(arrangement)

Parodying

Performing live or produced versions, altering lyrics or video to poke fun at the original (parody)

Satirizing

Performing live or produced versions, altering the lyrics or video to comment on society or express ones lived
experience (satire, parody)

Multitracking

Producing versions that layer multiple audio and video parts performed by an individual or groups and visually
displaying the parts being performed (multitrack, a capella)

Remixing

Producing versions that maintain the original works essence while adding musical content to change the context or
genre, typically with technology (remix)

Sample-based
producing

Producing or performing different music by repeating, manipulating, or reordering musical content (samples) of the
original (beat, instrumental)

Creating mash-ups

Combining elements of the original with one or more different songs through juxtapositions, or less traditionally
segueing between them, to create new composites and offer new ways of hearing the originals (mash-up)

Creating tutorials

Creating videos to teach others how to perform or produce the original (tutorial, how to play)

Remediating

Using original music as content for other media, such as videos or choreography (choreography, dance,
machinima, animation, film, or fanfic)

Commenting and
discussing

Sharing comments and feedback related to original works, versions resulting from any of the preceding practices,
or comments of others via social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, blogs, and website comment sections
(comment, discuss)

In considering the processes, skills, and

decisions involved in these practices,
one might find potential in incorporating
this type of musical engagement in
classrooms and ensembles.
While the musical practices listed in
Table 1 are reactions to or interactions
with original works, web-based media
and social aspects of such engagement
often result in people interacting with others creative work. Thus, one might experience remixes or mash-ups of covers and
other iterative versions interconnected
and networked across a range of time,
spaces, and media. This engagement is
representative of a public desire to participate within, rather than simply consume,
30

mediawhat media scholar Henry Jenkins identifies as participatory culture.3

Jenkins and colleagues explain that participatory culture is characterized by
relatively low barriers to artistic
expression and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing
creations with others, some type of
informal mentorship whereby what
is known by the most experienced is
passed along to novices, members who
believe that their contributions matter,
and members who feel some degree of
social connection with one another (at
the least they care what other people
think about what they have created).4

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While this description characterizes

many music programs, the degree to
which classes and ensembles incorporate
these types of participatory culture and
support students engagement in related
forms of musicianship is less clear. Music
educators might thus think in terms of
participatory cultures, some of which
are represented in ensembles and music
classrooms. Reconciling differences
between the musical cultures present
in contemporary society and our K12
music programs necessitates looking
beyond whether people participate
and focusing more closely on how they
engage with music. Expanding the types
of participatory cultures and musical
Music Educators Journal June 2013

practices addressed in music programs

may help music education evolve with
society.
Although not required for participatory culture to occur, technology and
digital media play important roles in how
people network, collaborate, create, and
interact with music. As Jenkins illustrates,
participatory culture is emerging as
the culture absorbs and responds to the
explosion of new media technologies that
make it possible for average consumers to
archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new
ways.5 Several of the musical practices
outlined in Table 1 and the digital supplement reflect this.
Helping students participate in such
musical cultures calls for music educators to contextualize the types of musical
engagement in Table 1 for music classrooms and ensembles in ways that both
engage technology and require minimal
to no use of technology or digital media.
To address participatory culture in our
programs, we might first look at how
musicians and ensembles are adapting
to some of the ways that people interact
with music and media.

Musical Engagement
An increasing number of artists are
addressing public expectations that their
music be interacted with in ways similar
to those outlined earlier in this article.
Bands ranging from Nine Inch Nails to
Radiohead have made stems (groups
of audio sources mixed together to be
dealt with downstream as one unit)
or individual recorded tracks of their
music available online. Members of the
public can download, manipulate, and
use these recordings when generating
additional related material, remix
them, and then upload their creations
to a dedicated site and their own social
networks.6 Websites such as Indabamusic
.com and Soundcloud.com foster
musical collaboration: there are now
opportunities for anyone with Internet
access to interact with and share his or
her music or perspectives with others.
Such sites host legal remix contests, often
using music with Creative Commons
www.nafme.org

licensing, an alternative to copyright that

explicitly states how content might be
modified, recontextualized, and shared.7
Some musicians release their music as
tracks in mobile interactive applications
or as applications themselves in which
one can alter the mix, trigger loops,
and imagine or realize the music in
new ways.8 Similarly, applications allow
people to share their playlists and mix
their music live as DJs in public or private.9
Some use advanced software, such as
Ableton Live, Traktor Scratch, and Serato
Scratch Live, to create, manipulate, remix,
and juxtapose music on the fly, blurring
playing, creating, improvising, and
performing. In the twenty-first century, as
much as people play music, they also play
with and through music.
These types of musical practices are
not exclusive to popular music. Orchestras, such as the Berlin and Brooklyn
Philharmonics, hosted remix contests
of Mahlers Symphony No. 1 and Beethovens Symphony No. 9, respectively.10
Other performers, such as cellist Yo-Yo
Ma, pianist Jason Moran, and vocal group
New York Polyphony, have allowed the
public to remix and add to their respective performances.11 Some composers are
embracing the ethic of remixing. Steve
Reich provided recordings of his music
25 and Drumming for remix contests.12
Under a Creative Commons license,
Tanner Menard released his wind band
composition joes last mix as a score and
digital recordings, inviting people to
remix the original score or recordings.13
Acknowledging a blurring between
the roles of creators, performers, and
audiences, artists such as Imogen Heap
have opened their creative process to the
world, posting updates on their progress
creating, performing, and producing
music.14 Heap asked her fans for feedback, which modified the traditional flow
of music from the creator to the listener
in exciting ways. Composer Eric Whitacre uses social media to offer those who
engage with his music opportunities to
share their perspectives with him and
others, leading to discussions about his
music and related musical experiences.15
Members of the public are also creating
music collaboratively by scoring films

and creating an original opera through

the site wreckamovie.com, or submitting
music and musical ideas for a composition titled Concerto for Composer and
City in collaboration with composer Tod
Machover and the Toronto Symphony.16
Through such efforts, adults, young people, professionals, and those who do not
have a career in music are interacting in
ways where their contributions can be
valued and enjoyed by others beyond
their immediate environment.

Considering Convergence
These examples demonstrate a process
of convergence between older and newer
forms of media and musical engagement.
As Jenkins explains, older forms of media
(television, radio, movies, books) are being
experienced and interpreted through
newer media forms (online websites,
mobile media devices, software), offering
young people innovative ways to engage
with a wide variety of texts, a process he
terms convergence.17 Media convergence,
Jenkins states, refers to a situation in
which multiple media systems coexist
and where media content flows fluidly
across them. Convergence is understood
here as an ongoing process or series of
intersections between different media
systems, not a fixed relationship.18
While watching a television show,
such as The Voice, involves an older
medium, one might simultaneously send
and read Twitter or Facebook comments
about the shows contestants and judges.
Similarly, musical scores or recordings
might be viewed as old media open to the
types of interaction highlighted throughout this article. Figure 1 situates music
through such a convergence in school
music programs. Each arrow represents a
way of opening music to infinite interpretations and realizations by students.

Convergence in Music
Programs
Applying participatory culture and
emerging musical practices in school
music programs calls for expanding
from a model where music is interpreted
by music educators and rehearsed and

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31

FIGURE 1
Possibilities of Student Engagement with Existing Music

performed by students to a more open

process where young people interpret,
analyze, transform, and perform works in
ways that might not have been intended
by the original creator. As Figure 1
demonstrates, such an approach accounts
and allows for a combination of typical
engagements in school music programs
and the types of musical practices
outlined in Table 1, along with emerging
and future forms of engagement.
Music classrooms and ensembles
based on the principles of participatory
and convergence cultures combine the
best of what we do with ways of engaging in contemporary musical and creative practices. Having students reinterpret
composers music through new aesthetic
sensibilities and share the results with
others can occur along with, rather than
in place of, learning and performing
original music created by composers or
themselves. If the Brooklyn and Berlin
Philharmonics can open music such as
Beethovens and Mahlers works to completely new interpretations, so, too, might
music educators. Allowing the old and
new to coexist and converge, whether in
the classroom, on stage, or through webbased media, provides opportunities for
students to engage with issues ranging
from the composers and their own musical decisions to social and cultural contexts of the music rich with potential for
learning and growing as musicians. The
following scenarios highlight potential
application of these ideas.
32

Scenario 1: Integrating contemporary musical practices in classrooms and ensembles. This scenario
mirrors Figure 1 by having students select
music they wish to interact with in any
number of ways highlighted in Table 1.
While some students might choose to
cover, arrange, or remix popular music,
others may wish to create arrangements,
mash-ups, or tutorials related to music
performed by school ensembles. Learning music aurally and creating cover versions has an established history in music
education, with programs such as the
Musical Futures Project providing models
and related resources.19 In this scenario,
students might engage in different projects as individuals or groups. While one
group might cover a song it likes, another
group might create a mash-up of music it
has been rehearsing for a concert.
Music educators would play a key role
in helping students reflect on their musical and creative engagement by asking
their students questions: How do these
two songs relate? Why did you make that
decision? What aspects of the original
are you highlighting or changing? How is
this representative of the particular genre
you chose to use?20 While some educators might provide students opportunities to use technology to create remixes
and mash-ups, others might translate
these practices into settings with minimal or no technology by having students
perform and layer bass or synthesizer
lines and percussion parts vocally or on

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instruments rather than programming

them with music applications. In schools
with access to the Internet, educators
might facilitate students comparing and
contrasting existing cover versions and
arrangements of music with their own.
Students might also record commentary
and analyses comparing their versions
to originals, demonstrating their musical
understanding, interpretive decisions,
and performing, arranging, or aural skills.
Scenario 2: Engaging in public
contests and opportunities. In a second scenario, one might look to music
contests on websites such as Indabamusic.com or Soundcloud.com to serve
as the impetus for music projects. The
majority of contests hosted on such sites
provide stems or recordings of independent instrumental/vocal parts, allowing for
limitless creative musical potential. For
instance, a contest to remix Jason Mrazs
I Wont Give Up includes lead and background vocal tracks as separate stems.21
Provided with these recordings, students
could create, perform, and record additional musical content, interpreting the
song as they wish. Students might, for
instance, listen to a stem through headphones and perform additional content
along with the recording. The opportunities for students to improvise over
chord progressions, generate harmonic
and melodic content within implied keys,
reorchestrate existing instrumental parts,
or build tension and release with their
own rhythmic material while interacting
with stems offer rich potential for musical
expression, thinking, and learning.
Such projects can incorporate technology to whatever degree that one has
access or sees fit. Students final versions
could be uploaded to the contest site,
commented on by the public, and shared
with family, friends, local communities,
and people across the world. Imagine a
departmentwide effort where ensembles and music classes collaborate on a
contest including instruments and voices
performed, recorded, and produced by
students that the local community supports and promotes! Whether students
engage as individuals, groups, or an entire
music department, such projects situate
core aspects of musicianship in musical
Music Educators Journal June 2013

contexts that students may be involved

with throughout their lives. Furthermore,
the public nature of the contest, including listening to and discussing others versions; reading, sharing, and responding
to feedback; and promoting ones music,
places students at the center of participatory culture in and beyond the music
program. Participating in public remix
contests provides students direct experiences with the infinite ways people interpret, envision, and realize music when
working with the same starting points.
Whether developing aural skills required
to determine desired harmonic content
or developing musicality through phrasing and dynamic changes, the skills and
knowledge developed through these projects relate directly to students lifelong
musical engagement.
Scenario 3: Expanding engagement with music literature. A third
scenario might incorporate aspects of
participatory culture that situate media
and art works as starting points for new
story lines, expanded content, or alternative realizations. This might work ideally
with music that includes text, a program,
or narrative. For example, students might
expand and transform musicals, such as
Into the Woods. In expanding the world
of Into the Woods, students might want to
create a Twitter account for Jack tracing
his trip up the beanstalk or to develop
additional or alternative plotlines by
maintaining Facebook pages for each
of the characters. Students might wish
to transform the witchs rap into a Dirty
South
like rap complete with studentproduced beats and turntables. They
might have Cinderellas family wish to go
to the Kings dance club instead of the
festival, resulting in part of the opening
theme being produced and performed in
a dance music genre, such as dubstep.22
Alternatively, students might decide to
create transformative works or parodies
relating the perspectives of the characters
Milky White or the Giantess, or relocate
the musical from the woods to their own
community, drawing on local social, cultural, and musical influences. The imaginative thinking involved in such a project
could lead to student interest in creating
an original musical or multimedia work.
www.nafme.org

In turn, students might open their original works for transformation by peers in
other schools.

Pedagogies of Participatory
Culture
Moving toward convergence and
participatory culture takes more than
simply adding on to what currently exists
in a program or creating separate classes
for these ways of learning and doing
music. Similarly, if modifying a program
to better reflect a convergence of older
and newer ways of being musical, music
educators ought to think carefully about
how they structure such change and what
might be gained or lost.23 For instance,
adopting participatory cultures where
students communicate and collaborate
with other musicians via web-based
media can and ought to coexist with
students face-to-face communication in
physical environments. Convergence,
after all, is characterized by intersections
of different systems rather than the
replacement of one for another.
Along with thinking critically about
what should take place in music programs
and broadening how we think about what
constitutes musicianship, music educators may need to develop understanding
of the nuances, musical thinking, sociocultural contexts, and musical processes
involved in musical practices, such as
those outlined in Table 1. Educators might
then make informed decisions, perhaps
with their students, as to the balance of
older and newer ways of engaging with
music in school music programs and how
they might be enacted. The following
guidelines offer potential first steps for
moving toward convergence.

Engaging as Ethnographers
Educators might first act as ethnographers,
investigating and identifying their
students interests along with how they
and others engage with music outside of
school.24 Becoming aware of how people
interact with music can inform how we
design projects and opportunities for
students in music classes and ensembles.
One might start by conducting surveys

and discussions of students musical

interests and practices. Curiosity and
willingness to experiment will benefit
ones efforts. Consider watching
examples and tutorials of the practices
mentioned throughout this article and
trying to create related content. It is never
too late (or early) to learn the techniques
and cultural aspects of musical practices
such as remixing, creating mash-ups,
or multitracking a capella music and
video clips. Why not start by entering a
current remix contest or collaborative
opportunity? One might then consider
questions such as the following: How
might I integrate this musical practice in
my program? What types of pedagogy
might that entail? Each of the practices
outlined throughout this article involves
a range of musical skills, knowledge,
and decisions. Developing familiarity
and facility with new and emerging
musical practices informs ones pedagogy
and ability to address the nuances of
associated musicianship.

Framing and Facilitating

Convergence
Framing projects as ways of being musical
connected to big ideas can provide
structure to students engagement and
connectedness to musical issues beyond
a project itself. Whereas scenario 1 might
be framed in terms of investigating
how original music can be infinitely
reinterpreted, scenario 2 might be
organized around the idea that musicians
can express ideas or emotions. In scenario
3, students might focus on relationships
between music and narrative.25 Posing
questions to students, such as what
happens to the expressive and sonic
aspects of Rolling in the Deep when
it is reinterpreted as dance music, how
should Jason Mrazs I Wont Give Up
sound, or what would the Giantess from
Into the Woods sing if she could share her
perspective through song, contextualizes
their musical engagement in terms of
larger investigations, aesthetic questions,
and thinking that professional musicians
practice in their everyday lives. Those
unaccustomed to developing projects
might look to established curricular

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33

frameworks, such as comprehensive

musicianship, understanding by design,
and project-based learning, to assist in
this process.26
Following a comprehensive musicianship model, students might analyze
ensemble repertoire they remixed or
used in a mash-up along with associated music, explaining how the idiomatic
aspects of each were preserved, modified,
and transformed in their remix or mashup. Remixes and mash-ups might thus be
seen as legitimate musical practices in
and of themselves and ways of knowing
and learning music.27 When using understanding by design for unit development,
an educator might work with students to
pose big ideas and essential questions
about what it means to be a musician
through creating, recording, and producing versions of Jason Mrazs I Wont Give
Up. Through project-based learning, students might gain a sophisticated understanding of a musicals plot and characters
and how they are expressed through the
music, and create new works extending
beyond the original narrative and music
by identifying and working through
related challenges.

Considering Copyright
and Fair Use
Whether derivatives, new realizations,
remediations, or transformations of
existing works can be performed in
classrooms or in public, recorded,
or shared is complicated, given the
intricacies of copyright law, the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, and fair use.28
The context in which one engages in
the practices addressed throughout this
article is critical in determining ones
rights. Each of the following criteria from
section 107 of the Copyright Act should be
weighed to determine whether students
musical engagement in a project can be
considered fair use:
(1) The purpose and character of the
use, including whether such use is of
a commercial nature or is for nonprofit
educational purposes; (2) the nature of
the copyrighted work; (3) the amount

34

and substantiality of the portion used

in relation to the copyrighted work as
a whole; (4) the effect of the use upon
the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work.29
The forms of musical engagement
articulated throughout this article are
contextualized as ways of learning music
in school music programs for explicitly nonprofit educational purposes that
transform or comment on existing works.
However, clear-cut rules to determine
whether students engagement and interaction with existing music qualify as fair
use do not exist.30 Hobbs argues that educators reliance on industry-sponsored
guidelines and oversimplified resources
have led to confusion, misinformation,
and a narrowing of educators application
of fair use.31 Whereas one might interpret
students remixing purchased musical
recordings in a music class as derivative
work requiring permission of the original
rights holders, others might view this as a
transformative, educational, and analytical process protected under fair use. Similarly, educators, publishers, composers,
students, lawyers, legislators, the public,
and judges may have differing perspectives on what students can or cannot and
should or should not do with compositions in relation to the musical practices
highlighted in Table 1 and Figure 1. Music
educators thus must make ongoing judgments as to how their students interactions with music and media do or do not
qualify as fair use.
It is critical that music educators dialogue with all parties affected by copyright law, fair use, and contemporary
musical practices to develop guidelines
for moving forward. This means involving students in conversations and decisions related to their own and original
creators rights when licensing music or
corresponding with composers and rights
holders about what they wish to do with
original works. While some might wish to
explore such possibilities in their teaching, those looking for approaches that are
less blurred and explicitly legal can incorporate music that is in the public domain,
has Creative Commons licensing, or

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is available through sites legitimately

sanctioning derivative or transformative
works. Thibeault makes such a point,
suggesting that music educators invert
the ratio of copyrighted and Creative
Commons
licensed or public domain
works addressed in music programs with
a focus on students creative rights.32 He
argues that students should have considerable material that has no restrictions,
allowing works that can be remixed,
reused, recorded, even wrecked, and
then shared with the world without having to pursue permission.33 This means
factoring in what students can do with
the music provided to them when determining what to include as part of ones
curriculum.

Reflecting on Convergence
If music education is to evolve and
assist students in participating in the
ways that people engage with music
in contemporary society, we must
address the cultural milieu in which we
are situated. This sometimes requires
change. While some music educators are
excited by this prospect, others may not
understand or value the types of musical
practices outlined in Table 1 or question
musical and participatory cultures that
differ from those typical of school music
programs. As with any pedagogical and
curricular decision, incorporating aspects
of contemporary participatory cultures
and working toward convergence ought
to be done thoughtfully and through a
critical lens.
Returning to how Jenkins articulates
convergence, music educators might
keep in mind how fostering participatory cultures in music programs might
include multiple systems that coexist where content flows fluidly through
ongoing processes or a series of intersections between different systems.34 In
other words, providing opportunities for
students to cover, remix, or create mashups of existing music can take place in
the same setting where they create their
own original music or perform the music
of others on voice or instrument. It is up
to music educators to determine whether

Music Educators Journal June 2013

7. See http://creativecommons.org.

FIGURE 2

8. See https://www.facebook.com/ROMPLR/
info, http://mashbox.beatport.com/, and
https://twitter.com/TouchMix.

Considerations for Convergence and Participatory Cultures in Music

Programs
Starting points:
How are our students, their peers, and the general public engaging
with music outside of school contexts?
To what degree are we preparing students to engage with music in the
broad ways taking place outside of school in a sophisticated manner?
What does it mean to be musically educated in the twenty-first
century?
Continuing the conversation:
What types of musicianship and music literacies are most beneficial
for students?
What is the music educators role when students engage with participatory culture?
How might we balance a creators intent and music with students
creative interpretations and remediations?
Moving toward convergence:
What aspects of our programs are we willing to change in order to
more closely reflect participatory culture in our classrooms and
ensembles?
How might ensembles and music classrooms be modified or restructured to allow for new and emerging contemporary musical practices?

9. See http://blog.musicsoftarts.com/djmixer-pro/, http://amidio.com/dj/, and

http://www.algoriddim.com.
10. See http://remix-contest.berliner-philhar
moniker.de/education/remix-contest and
http://bphil.org/bphilwp/remix/.
11. See http://www.indabamusic.com/
opportunities/yo-yomacontest, http://
www.indabamusic.com/opportunities/
remix-jason-moran, and http://www
.indabamusic.com/opportunities/
victimae-paschali-laudes-remixopportunity.
12. See http://www.indabamusic.com/
opportunities/steve-reich-remix-contest
and http://www.corkoperahouse.ie/events/
reich-drumming-remix-competition.
13. See http://www.loosefilter.com/jlm/.
14. See http://deepdivemarketing
.com/2009/07/20/the-new-musicbusiness-model-imogen-heap/.
15. See http://ericwhitacre.com/.

or how this occurs in school music settings. Figure 2 outlines several questions
to inform the type of music teaching and
learning outlined in this article and catalyze dialogue around related aesthetic,
curricular, philosophical, and pedagogical issues that may need to reconciled.
Whether addressing just one of the questions or several, engaging in such discourse can help put music education in
conversation with the broader social and
cultural milieu of contemporary society.
Discussing the potential for transformation in music education, Jorgensen
encourages music educators to break out
of the little boxes of restrictive thought
and practice and reach across the real
and imagined borders of narrow and rigid
concepts, classifications, theories, and
paradigms to embrace a broad and inclusive view of diverse music educational
perspectives and practices.35 Moving
toward convergence and embracing participatory culture embodies this ethic and
offers a way for music educators to align
more closely with musical engagement in

www.nafme.org

current times while looking ahead to a

future connected to musical life beyond
school.

16. See http://toronto.media.mit.edu/.

17, Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Media Collide (New
York: New York University Press, 2006).

NOTES

18. Ibid., 282.

1. John Kratus, Music Education at the

Tipping Point, Music Educators Journal
94, no. 2 (2007): 4248.

19. See http://www.musicalfutures.org.uk/ for

resources on integrating popular music
and aural learning in school music programs based on research and practice in
schools in the United Kingdom.

2. To provide examples of musical practices discussed throughout the text, the

supplemental content provides links to
examples that are designed to coincide
with how one reads the article.
3. Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and
Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture
(New York: New York University Press,
2006), 50.
4. Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma,
Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice
J. Robison, Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education
for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2009), 56.
5. Ibid., 8.
6. See http://remix.nin.com/ and http://
www.radioheadremix.com/.

20. For additional information on questioning techniques to help students learn,

see Randall E. Allsup and Marsha Baxter,
Talking about Music: Better Questions?
Better Discussions! Music Educators
Journal 91, no. 2 (2004): 2933; and Kirk
Kassner, Would Better Questions Enhance
Music Learning? Music Educators Journal
84, no. 4 (1998): 2936.
21. See http://www.indabamusic.com/
opportunities/jason-mraz-i-wont-give-upremix-contest.
22. Dubstep is a style of electronic dance
music characterized by a prominent bass
line and, recently, incorporates an oscillated wobbling sound along with samples
and stuttering effects. For information

Downloaded from mej.sagepub.com at ARIZONA STATE UNIV on October 13, 2014

35

on creating and producing dance music,

see Rick Snoman, Dance Music Manual
(Oxford, UK: Focal Press, 2009).

Musicianship through Performance

(Chicago, IL: GIA Publications, 2003);
and Laura Sindberg, Just Good Teaching:
Comprehensive Musicianship through
Performance (CMP) in Theory and
Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Education, 2012). For information on understanding by design as an
approach, see http://www.authenticedu
cation.org. For information on projectbased learning, see http://www.edutopia
.org/project-based-learning.

23. Many musical practices that may be

new to music education, such as creating mash-ups or remixing, are not new
to society. In this case, newer musical
practices can refer to both those that
are newer in society or to K12 music
education.
24. For perspective on the role of teacher as
ethnographer, see Leif Gustavson, Youth
Learning on Their Own Terms: Creative
Practices and Classroom Teaching (New
York: Routledge, 2007).

27. For a discussion on mash-ups as an analytical process and form of musicianship,

see Wayne Marshall, Mashup Poetics
as Pedagogical Practice, in Pop-Culture
Pedagogy in the Music Classroom,
ed. Nicole Biamonte (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2011), 30715.

25. For additional information on the notion

of big ideas and how they can inform
project design, see Grant Wiggins
and Jay McTighe, Understanding by
Design (Alexandria, VA: Association
for Supervision and Curriculum
Development, 2008).

28. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi,

Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put
Balance Back in Copyright (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011);
Renee Hobbs, Copyright Clarity: How Fair
Use Supports Digital Learning (Thousand
Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2010); Kembrew
McLeod and Peter DiCola, Creative

26. For information on comprehensive

musicianship, see Patricia OToole,
Shaping Sound Musicians: An Innovative
Approach to Teaching Comprehensive

License: The Law and Culture of Digital

Sampling (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011). For additional resources,
see http://fairuse.stanford.edu and http://
www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fair-use.
29. Copyright Act, Section 107 (1976)
http://www.copyright.gov/.
30. This section does not address the
monetization of students derivative or
transformative work, such as covers or
arrangements, or educators arrangements for students to perform, all of
which require licenses and, potentially,
clearing rights.
31. Hobbs, Copyright.
32. Matthew D. Thibeault, Assessing Your
Curriculum with the Creative Rights
Pyramid, Music Educators Journal 98,
no. 1 (2011): 3132.
33. Ibid., 31.
34. Jenkins, Convergence, 282.
35. Estelle R. Jorgensen, Transforming
Music Education (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 119.

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