Percussive, Prosaic, Punkademic Praxis and Popular Music Education

Abstract University schools of music in the United States have important roles to play in addressing the perpetuation of hegemonic Whiteness. Through diversification of programs, courses and faculty and student demographics, music schools can work toward realizing futures that sustain music studies beyond the current prevailing paradigm which largely excludes popular music praxis and pedagogy. In this chapter, Gareth Dylan Smith describes his work as a punkademic professor and performer at Boston university where he gives pop-up, improvised drum kit performances—alone and with collaborators—in the art gallery. These drumming installations respond to exclusive admissions procedures and pedagogic and performance praxis in the school of music by modeling sustainable, relational co-musicking as fundamental to a paradigm shift in higher music education. Smith draws on scholarship in punk pedagogy, liberatory praxis and critical pedagogy to discuss the potential of improvisation as central to an emancipatory paradigm including popular music education.