Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
This literature review study, part of the author’s current PhD research, will explore current thinking on the feasibility and advisability of cross-training singing teachers between different genres. Recent research data has highlighted a growing need for pedagogical training in Popular Music singing. Reasons posited for this include the increase in PM courses at HMEIs across the West, declining interest in and careers within the once-dominant sphere of Western classical music, and student demand for better career-oriented preparation within the PM industry. Conversely, most singing teachers currently working in Western schools and colleges are likely to have been classically trained due to long-standing cultural hegemonies and the lack of a PM-specific voice pedagogy framework. This leaves a considerable gap between the demand for PM genre-specific voice training and the supply of appropriately trained teachers. Generic ‘functional’ voice training pedagogy and cross-training for classical singers and singing teachers have been suggested as suitable approaches to fill this gap. However, wider debates currently taking place concerning cultural context and authenticity in singing voice pedagogy render this solution potentially problematic: If cultural context and immersion are an essential part of PM voice education, how do we reconcile this with cross-training teachers who have been immersed in an entirely different culture?
