Pop Pedagogy

As the ‘newest’ of the singing styles to be taught in music institutions and private studios, the pedagogy for teaching popular singing is still in its early stages relative to other styles of singing, particularly classical singing. However, pop pedagogy has been developing steadily since the year 2000 when the author was part of the team that developed and delivered one of the very first degrees in Popular Music in the UK.  Since then, pop music courses have proliferated worldwide.

We also live in a time when some successful pop stars are celebrating career lengths of over sixty years, having been around since the 1950s when pop music emerged and diversified from jazz, so pop singing has been in existence sufficiently long now that, for teaching purposes, we can observe and analyse what type of approach serves it best, in and of itself.

Whilst contemporary singing certainly shares many areas with other styles of singing, the specifics are distinctive and “non-generic”, thereby requiring a certain level of specialised knowledge, training, experience, and competence to perform it authentically. This course will deliver an overview of the requirements for teaching contemporary singers, presented under three main headings: Technique, Musicianship and Interpretation.

To further fill out the content for each category, the author has reverse engineered what pop singers need to be able to do and know about to be effective in the music industry, so it’s based on observations from her many years of high-level performing, teaching experience and post-graduate studies. These findings have been published in book form and summarised as a curriculum poster.