Concord, Mass., music teacher Paul Halpainy (CFA’12,’24), normally a trombonist, takes over on drums during a jam session with classmates in CFA’s Rock Band Performance & Pedagogy class on Monday.

Music

For Those About to (Teach) Rock, We Salute You

CFA summer class helps music educators find their groove

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.

A 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. Just another day in CFA’s Summer II course, Rock Band Performance & Pedagogy.

“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. It’s a fun thing.”

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.

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. 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.

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. You can go listen, for a $5 cover charge at the door. (All ages.)

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.

“Most are already teaching music in the schools, and they’re coming to develop their skills as teachers,” says Smith, a punk-loving drummer. “Most are teaching traditional music classes in school—general music, band, orchestra, choir. And they’re really interested to incorporate some more contemporary pedagogical approaches and do more current stuff.”

“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.

“I was in the band in school, but I became a music educator because I played trombone in ska bands,” Halpainy says. “I just really got passionate about loving music because of the relationships, the identity, the friendships—not because I could subdivide eighth notes. I feel like this class focuses on student-centered learning and just the core love of music, rather than a lot of the ideal (musical standards) that get put on students.”

Many of the teachers say they would have leaped at a chance to enroll in the class just for the chance to come to campus and take a course in person, after doing most of their BU classes online amid the isolation of the pandemic. “It was a chance to collaborate with other musicians in real time in person again. That was really appealing to me,” says Pamela Oppenheimer (CFA’22), who is studying for her master’s in music education and teaches middle school choir and first grade general music in Springfield, Pa. 

Ironically enough, Smith has to join three students in Zooming into the class; what he believes to be a false-positive COVID test has forced him into isolation in his native England, where he was visiting.

Rock pedagogy, as Smith and Powell teach it, is less formal and more of a learn-by-doing affair, just like rock itself. In Monday’s daylong class, the teachers learn to play simple riffs on instruments that, in many cases, they’d never played before.

Everyone gets a guitar, and Powell, who plays trombone, guitar, and other instruments, teaches them three simple chords—not by explaining scales or using traditional music notation, but with a simple map of where their fingers should go on the necks of their instruments. Then he launches them into a series of “one-chord songs,” demonstrating the strum patterns along the way.

“‘Low Rider’ in A!” he calls out, cueing up the songs on his laptop so they could play along. “‘Land of a Thousand Dances’ in D! ‘We Will Rock You’ in E!”

“Not that the kids in your classes want to play the Stones or Joe Cocker,” Powell tells the teachers, noting that both the Little Kids Rock software he uses in class and the syllabus itself were put together by guys of a certain rock generation. (He sometimes works with the Little Kids Rock nonprofit.) Powell and Smith broaden the musical approach to include hip-hop styles and contemporary artists like Bruno Mars, Adele, the Chainsmokers, the Weeknd, and Olivia Rodrigo.

For the drums, Powell begins by “body drumming,” tapping out a beat on his chest with one hand, adding a second hand tapping against his leg, and then adding the occasional tap of a foot. 

“I’m not putting you on the spot, we’re all playing together,” he says, in an effort to reduce everyone’s anxiety.

Then he introduces them to a common drum pattern used on songs by everyone from Michael Jackson to AC/DC, and had one student play the kick drum, one the snare, and one the cymbal. Again, less pressure.

“The biggest thing,” Powell says, “is keeping things accessible and letting the kids do it their way in the beginning. If you start correcting them too early, some students will get motivated, and other students will shut down.”

“It really makes you rethink your approach as a music teacher,” says Oppenheimer. “Why am I teaching the importance of a scale as the first approach to this instrument, when a kid’s natural response is to just sit down and explore and play?” 

This approach “invites the students in and makes everybody feel included, which is fantastic,” says Halpainy. “With my students, I always feel like I need to teach them the right habits right away, and form them into what society thinks is the ideal musician, and I don’t know why I fell into the habit of thinking that way.

“That’s really why this class is great,” he says, “because it really reminds you of your love of music and why we do this—and why we want the kids to do it too.”