Values of Higher Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the UK

In the 23 years since the first undergraduate popular music degree programme

opened in the United Kingdom, the academic discipline of popular music has burgeoned to

encompass over 160 programmes delivered across the higher education sector, by private

institutions, Royal-chartered conservatoires, post-92 universities and Russell Group

universities. This doctoral research project seeks to understand the values underpinning

and informing educational practice in this growing academic discipline.

It proceeds from an understanding of higher education and popular music as two

highly complex domains in their own right, and from the proposition that values inhering

at their nexus- Higher Popular Music Education- derive from and are borne by multiple

human, institutional and disciplinary sources, and bear the trace of socio-cultural,

economic and historical contexts related to each domain. It takes an inductive approach to

a multiple-case study of four popular music degree programmes at different higher

education institutions across the United Kingdom. Acknowledging from the outset the

impossibility of identifying a conclusive ‘roster’ of itemisable values, this study draws on a

combination of institutional literature, semi-structured interview and field observation data

to explore the interplay of musical, educational and other values within the educational

message systems of pedagogy, curriculum, institution, assessment, lifestyle and market.

Analysis of the data suggested that seemingly unrelated values such as, for

example, those relating to musical aesthetics and social justice, could in fact be

oppositional in practice, resulting in surprising tensions and impacting on such areas as

curricula and student lifestyles. Moreover, values enshrined in policy, or perceived by

interviewees to be dominant within the higher education sector, appeared often to be at

odds with individuals’ personal opinions regarding the value of knowledge and education,

or with what they saw to be the core values of popular music as an art form.

This interdisciplinary study sits across the research fields of music education, the

sociology of higher education and popular music studies, and makes original contributions

to knowledge in each of these fields.