Hybrid Authenticities of Popular Music Education

Programmes in popular music studies and popular music performance are increasingly prevalent in higher education, especially at undergraduate level. Historically, however, popular music has been identifiable as a set of performance, commercial and creative practice whose currency has resided in championing values that sit in opposition to institutionalised culture and to notions o vocational training for employment in the professions, both of which are represented by the conservatoire and university. The presenters discuss some different and potentially oppositional dimensions of authenticity in popular music (including as commercialised artefact, in performance and in education) suggested by Adorno (1941), Green (2002), Lilliestam (1996), Soderman (2013), O'Hara and others, proposing that authenticity is a contested and unstable value concept in popular music. The authors argue that various dimensions of authenticity in popular music are problematised when popular music is brought into higher educaton, where the aesthetic and cultural values of staff and students may contradict those enshrined in curricula and pedagogy designed in response to state-prescribed impratives such as employability (e.g. QAA, 2008). Through a combination of interviews with staff and students, policy and curricula analysis and a review of current literature in the field of popular musc education, the authors propose steps towards attaining a multi-vocal (Kreber, 2007) and inclusive understanding of authenticity in the burgeoning field of popular music education.