Popular Music Genres, Music Producers, and Song Creation in the General Music Classroom

In secondary general music classes, music educators have the opportunity to bridge the gap between the music students’ experiences in school and the music they engage with outside of school. According to Williams, nontraditional music students have musical lives outside of school but choose not to participate in traditional ensembles. In this article, I explore three teaching strategies that can be used to engage students with popular music. These strategies are through studying music genres, studying music producers, and listening to popular songs to distinguish if a song is a remake, cover, sample, remix, or an original song