Call for Papers
Journal of Music, Technology and Education
Special issue on Technology and Performance in Popular Music Education
Guest editors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Bryan Powell
Performance in popular music education is an increasingly technologised space. As guitars, drums and microphones are gaining greater acceptance in school music curricula around the world through performance-based pedagogical models, such as the Modern Band curriculum of Little Kids Rock, and Musical Futures’ informal learning approach. Turntablism, music production and rapping have a growing presence in programmes from primary school to graduate level. Songwriting courses, rock camps and international collaborative pop projects sprout up globally in physical spaces and on line, while children and young people write, produce and release multi-media popular music artefacts from their bedrooms and basements. Popular music has always relied on, grown through, and pushed innovation in technology. With students embracing change faster than many teachers can imagine relevant pedagogical approaches, new paradigms of performance are emerging: drummers become musical directors at the helm of a plethora of technologies, bassists play synthesizers as much as guitars, and front-people are masters of Ableton, loop pedals and computerized gloves. As performance and production skill sets thus diversify and converge, so other technologies democratize the music-making landscape.
The domains of technologically mediated popular music performance in educational contexts require the attention of critical scholars and actions researchers. This special issue of JMTE invites colleagues to submit papers including, but not be limited to, critical perspectives on the following:
· Epistemologies and intersectionality in technology and popular music performance;
· Music, technology and the liminal popular music performance classroom space;
· Negotiating performance, (social) media and intellectual property in popular music performance;
· Gender and technology in popular music performance;
· Ethics and technologically mediated pro-sumption of popular music.
Please submit full papers of between 5,000 and 7,000 words to:
JMTE-special-issue@gmail.com by 1 May 2015.
