Analysis of Unit Program

The popular music program from St Marys Senior High School provides a lot of depth
towards a musicology based outline. The program starts with the defining of what is popular
music to the various opportunities of popular music through the development and
understanding of popular music throughout the musical eras. The learning activities
allocated to this program allow for listening analysis and reading comprehension on the
musical concepts within selected repertoire, and the influence of technology in popular
music.

There are many positives to this program like the resourceful information around musical
devices in popular music, the glossary of genre descriptions and overall scope of selected
repertoire for popular music across the eras. Although, personally I would argue some
downfalls to this program is the lack of supporting evidence provided through the listening
of selected repertoire. There are no directional instructions within this program, which
assumes the student using the resource book is effective in self-regulation of learning.
The booklet itself is a great tool for gaining the knowledge of popular music. I would argue
though that the booklet is more informative then activity-based. From a teacher
perspective, this book provides multiple opportunities to use the information and create
lessons from the content, but from a student perspective it lacks engaging activities that
compromise of all learning experiences including compositional and performance activities
that involve experimenting with musical concepts and compositional devices to improvise,
create and evolve music through the influence of technology. The current activities in this
program are full of information regarding the impact of technology of music, but provide no
physical relation or component of other learning experiences that will help to obtain this
information within the adolescent mind.

Overall the program adequately represents the outcomes for a musicology unit and engages
with various listening activities with little influence on performative and compositional
tasks. The provision of a variety of sources like the discussion of popular music throughout
this program, is valuable in providing a well-rounded knowledge of popular music. The
importance of interaction and engagement from resources determines whether I would use
the resource in the classroom setting. I assume that resources without evidence supporting
the learning of content, will be detrimental to the understanding and comprehension of
learning about popular music, and may not provide a connection or relation for student
engagement.

The program provides a variety of selected repertoire throughout the period timeline of
popular music. Something I would instate in this program is the option for students to go
further with the selected repertoire. For instance: providing activities underneath each
musical period to allow students to listen, manipulate and experiment with the musical
excerpts. Although the program provides a lot of flexibility and choice for students, it
creates a limitation in the sense that the student can become indecisive and lose self-
regulation to keep up with all the musical examples specific to musical era content.
I would definitely use the information regarding the Pop music Glossary, Musical devices in
pop music, comparison chart between rock and pop, as well as the research tasks that
involve students finding out more about a composer/ artist/ band of their choice and finding
out particular musical traits of these musicians. I also really like the contrastive analysis of
two songs as it’s simple and effective in identifying musical characteristics, changes and
contrasts between the same song.

I would use this program as extra resources to support the instruction of my lessons by
engaging students to look further into the history of popular music. I believe this resource
could be useful in promoting student direction and self-regulation if supported with other
engaging resources like videos, musical excerpts, covers and physical performances of the
selected pieces. The influence of technology is mostly spoken about in this program and
could be more effective if practical experiences involves experimentation with these
technological devices and resources to create relevance to the learning content.

The selected repertoire for this program isn’t clearly defined in the content of this program
and is vague in the sense that selection is broad for students and teachers. There are some
links to famous composers, bands and variety of genres that have relevance to the time
period which is great for a broad knowledge. Although I feel as though the selected
repertoire could incorporate more modernised popular music with the involvement of
electronic instruments or popular songs that are covered in modern time to generate a
restatement of popular music then and now.