Teaching the Disney Canon

Disney songs pervade the twenty-first-century soundscape to such a degree that we can speak of the formation of a canon. Their popularity means that many of the songs have, at some point, been arranged for pedagogical purposes, and they have been prevalent among school and community choirs. This chapter identifies musical and pedagogical features of Disney choral arrangements and compares them to the original renditions of the songs and professional singing groups’ arrangements. Along with the original performances in the films and elsewhere, professional groups serve as models for the pedagogy-focused groups who sing Disney songs, sometimes problematically in terms of both style and content. Arrangers tread a fine line between reproducing features of the originals and adapting the songs to groups of amateur singers of varied ages and abilities who perform them with pedagogical goals. What music has been arranged and for what types of groups can tell us much about the engagement of amateur singers with the ever-growing Disney song canon and affords insight into how Disney songs are used in music pedagogy more broadly.