Devising Drum Kit Repertoire for Higher Instrumental Popular Music Education (HIPME):Towards a Collaborative Learning Model

This composition project aims to devise resources for a learning model within drum kit performance in Higher Popular Music Education (HPME), with instructional compositions embodying a collaborative approach to Higher Instrumental Popular Music Education (HIPME). The project begins from the premise that despite growing investigations into collaborative approaches of delivery within HPME and HIPME, in the author’s experience, consisting of professional popular music performance and HIPME across a range of institutions, instrumental tuition is still dominated by a ‘master apprentice’ approach,often delivered by tutors who do not have an awareness of educational research. As a result, their pedagogic approach is unable to benefit from it.

This practice-led research project explores a number of research questions: 1. How can the composition of new HE repertoire be used to transmit educational theory into HIPME practices? 2. What theories can be used to enrich compositional activity? 3. Does the use of such repertoire benefits one-to-one practices? The project presents scores for drum kit, bass and guitar, although the latter two instruments are not discussed in detail.As well as accompanying audio recordings that exemplify how educational theory can be embedded within HIPME repertoire, this portfolio of new compositions is enriched with pedagogical content drawn from research into relevant educational theories, an examination of existing HIPME repertoire,and an assessment of today’s HIPME environment, carried out through interviews and questionnaires focused on current educators, students and a wider sample group. Original compositions integrate one of five relevant pedagogic approaches, self-learning, peer learning, master apprentice learning, instrument specific learning and multi-instrumental learning. This project concludes that popular music repertoire that overtly integrates educational theories benefits HIPME by encouraging the application by instrumental tutors of a broader range of teaching and learning approaches, propagating a wider understanding of their benefits, and enriching students’ educational experiences. It provides a set of exemplar compositions that will hereby offer a methodology with which to contextualise the general performance literature,and offer a new model of approach to repertoire, suggesting that pieces written to explore specific learning and teaching methods can provide complimentary options to studying performance of commercial popular music works.