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 delves into a two-semester Musicianship course sequence, tailored to support Commercial Music students from diverse musical, educational, and cultural backgrounds. This holistic praxial approach combines music theory, keyboard harmony, and aural skills, laying a strong foundation for careers in popular music performance, production, songwriting, and studio writing and scoring. Through hands-on music making, students from varied musical backgrounds develop a versatile toolkit of musical skills, irrespective of their formal training or traditional musical literacy. Students harness their unique strengths and experiences to gain a practical understanding of chord types, functions, and relationships. From their first week of study, students learn to play common chords, progressions, and voicings, quickly enhancing their skills in harmonic analysis and chord realization using jazz symbols, Roman numerals, and Nashville numbers. Working in contemporary and culturally relevant musical styles, students also develop practical keyboard and aural skills and grow their musical literacy through the use of both traditional notation and MIDI roll patterns. This session outlines this inclusive and adaptable pedagogy, shares outcomes from over a decade of implementation, and explores future possibilities with emerging technologies.
