Found Sounds: Music From the Mundane

In: The Music Technology Cookbook: Read-made recipes for the classroom Abstract:This ‘recipe’ encourages learners to develop their critical and analytic listening skills by seeking and recording sounds in their environment as a basis for music composition. The use of unorthodox (i.e. not inherently musical) sounds in a compositional context develops critical listening, creative use of …

A Good Pair of Ears

In: The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy: Before, In, and Beyond Higher Education Bryden Stillie and Zack Moir Abstract: When musicians and music educators consider aural training, many of us have a tendency to imagine students transcribing melodic dictations, identifying chord progressions, intervals, and cadences by ear, and otherwise training to recognise the aural …

Sleepwalkers Beware: Towards a Post-Structuralist Critique of Popular Music in Higher Education

In: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices Zack Moir and John Hails Abstract: This chapter deals with higher popular music education (HPME) and has a particular focus on the teaching and learning of composition. Our interest in this area derives from our practice as musicians and educators, and our deeply-held mutual …

Haphazard pathways: Students’ perceptions of their routes to music study in higher education in the United Kingdom

Zack Moir and Bryden Stillie Link to article Abstract: This article reports on a qualitative study, which explored perceptions of fourteen first-year undergraduate music students in the United Kingdom regarding their secondary school music education as preparation for undertaking degree-level music study. The authors (both lecturers in popular music at a UK university) were motivated …

Popular Music and Critical Consciousness in Higher Education: Cultural Invasion, False Generosity and fear of Freedom

ABSTRACT: Over the last half-century, Paulo Freire’s ideas have influenced progressive educators from a wide range of fields and disciplines, internationally. Although there has been some consideration of his work in relation to the field of music education, few scholars within the relatively new area of popular music education have dealt with or explicitly drawn …