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.
Interest in modern band is growing among music educators (Dorfman 2020; Powell 2023). In any such emerging subdiscipline, it can be fruitful to locate exemplars of performance and pedagogy for study. This intrinsic case study (Stake 1995) follows the UMass Lowell Album Ensemble, an elective collegiate ensemble dedicated to the live performance of iconic pop and rock albums in their entirety. Each year the group adopts the name of one artist (e.g., “The Peter Gabriel Ensemble”) and performs two complete albums on stage, one at the end of each semester. The purpose of this study is to understand how students and teacher experience the semester-long process of recreating a classic popular music album and to contextualize its learning and artistic outcomes. I explore how idiomatic scoring techniques, rigor toward rock recording artistry, and informal learning processes contribute to students’ musical experiences and development. Data collection methods include observations of rehearsals and performances, semi-structured interviews with faculty and students, an audience exit poll, and analysis of artifacts such as annotated scores and rehearsal recordings. Reflective narratives from participants further illuminate their lived experiences. Data analysis employs categorical aggregation and direct interpretation, producing thick descriptions of the ensemble’s processes while suggesting broader implications for popular music education and performance.
