![]() “I just really got passionate about loving music because of the relationships, the identity, the friendships-not because I could subdivide eighth notes. “I was in the band in school, but I became a music educator because I played trombone in ska bands,” Halpainy says. “This class was important to me because my love of music came from playing in rock bands,” says Paul Halpainy (CFA’12,’24), a music teacher in the Concord, Mass., public schools, who is studying for his doctorate in music education online. And they’re really interested to incorporate some more contemporary pedagogical approaches and do more current stuff.” “Most are teaching traditional music classes in school-general music, band, orchestra, choir. “Most are already teaching music in the schools, and they’re coming to develop their skills as teachers,” says Smith, a punk-loving drummer. The rationale for the course is simple: Music teachers from kindergarten through high school are more familiar with typical school-band repertoire and instruments, while their students may be more enthusiastic about learning music that they actually listen to. You can go listen, for a $5 cover charge at the door. On Saturday, they’ll be taking the stage at the Midway Cafe in Jamaica Plain from 3:30 to 7 pm, where they’ll play a mix of covers and original songs they’ve written for class. “We’re just getting in a groove and playing music and having people experiment with some stuff,” explains Powell (right), “because you can be expressive and it’s low-pressure. Job one for Powell and Smith today is to get the teachers to loosen up, to learn by doing, to forget about scales and grades and proper technique, and find a groove. ![]() The 13 students in the class are music teachers from all over, most of them enrolled in CFA online master’s or doctoral programs in music education. Taking the pressure off is key for Powell, an assistant professor of music education at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and Gareth Dylan Smith, a CFA assistant professor of music education, who teach the course together and are also founding coeditors of the Journal of Popular Music Education. “We’re just getting in a groove and playing music and having people experiment with some stuff,” explains Bryan Powell (CFA’11), “because you can be expressive and it’s low-pressure. Just another day in CFA’s Summer II course, Rock Band Performance & Pedagogy. On a Monday afternoon, the joyful noise echoing from a classroom into a first floor lobby of the College of Fine Arts comes from a piano, two electric keyboards, a drum set, a couple of basses, and a handful of electric and acoustic guitars, all played with abandon by people who had, in some cases, never played them before that day.Ī driving if erratic rock beat, a few tentative solos, a bit of spoken word that we won’t call rap…and finally the jam ends in laughter and applause.
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