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

This article was first published in BU Today on August 5, 2021. By Joel Brown
EXCERPT
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.
Event Details
BU CFA Summer Rock and Pop Show Band: culminating showcase gig for the Boston University Summer Term Pop and Rock Pedagogy Course, featuring special guests Rebekah Lamb and Black Light Bastards (BLB). Date/Time: August 7, 2021, from 3 to 7 pm ET at Midway Cafe. For more information, visit the CFA Events page.