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.
The last two decades in North America have seen a resurgence of scholarly and practitioner activities advocating for integrating more popular music in music classrooms both through repertoire and pedagogy (Niknafs, 2019). The groundbreaking Tanglewood Symposium held in Massachusetts in 1967 engaged with matters related to “Music in American Society” and intended to raise awareness of the issues related to music activities in American culture and to discover ways in which music educators could be more effective (Choate, 1968). The parties involved in the symposium generated a “Tanglewood Declaration” of eight items that highlighted a greater need for the “music of all periods, styles, forms, and cultures” (Choate, 1968, 139) in the school music curriculum and encouraged music teachers to expand the musical repertory to include a variety of contemporary music across genres and locations; also contributing insights to assisting in the solution of urgent social problems. The purpose of this study was to examine research on the practices and perspectives of integrating more popular music into the learning environment to explore its rich variety of genres, stories, cultures, and creative expressions into the music classroom. Music educators have been called to change their practices—to broaden what and how they teach to create more authentic music-learning environments and to draw more students into school music programs. Experimenting with alternative types of music classes, integrating contemporary popular musics, and incorporating more informal music learning practices are crucial if more students are to be involved in school music programs (Green, 2008).
