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 session will explore the challenges and rewards of putting on live student concert events in the local community, based on recent experiences of Bergen Community College (NJ) faculty and students producing events at established venues and festivals as well as creating and producing their own local music festival. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit New Jersey in 2020, students were not only deprived of in-person instruction but also of opportunities to develop as performers and build confidence through live, on campus performances. In hard hit Bergen County, NJ, this prompted Bergen CC faculty and students to put on outdoor concerts in the community - curating, producing and performing at an event as part international Make Music Day as well as working with county officials to put on a concert series featuring both student and community-based songwriters at the county park amphitheater. These events, which build on Bergen CC’s tradition of putting on concerts for its Pop/Rock Ensemble and songwriting students at indoor community venues, shed light on the value of arranging student performances off campus. The presentation will discuss necessary funding, promotion, pre-production and day of event needs for putting on off-campus concert events, as well as possibilities for working these aspects of concert production into classroom instruction.
