Little Kids Rock and modern band in US schools: A punk problematic

A brief history of popular music education in the United States

While a detailed examination of the presence of popular music in US music education is outside the scope of this paper, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of United States-based popular music education in order to contextualize the introduction of modern band programming at the beginning of the 21st century. As detailed by Krikun (2008, 2017) and Powell (2022), the popularity of jazz and swing music in the 1920s and 30s led some music education programmes, in schools as well as in universities and colleges, to incorporate these popular genres to provide students with the skills needed to play in stage and dance bands. After the second world war, university and college schools of music across the US began to incorporate more jazz into their programmes, in part because jazz began to be seen as more acceptable for educational institutions. This change was also reflected in school music programmes.

In 1967, attendees at the Tanglewood Symposium discussed the need for a variety of styles and cultures within school music curricula and declared that the repertoire of music classrooms in the US should include currently popular teenage music (Choate 1968). The Tanglewood declaration was followed in November 1969 with the publication of “Youth Music: A Special Report” by Music Educators Journal, a publication of the Music Educators National Conference (now NAfME) (Housewright et al., 1969). This report featured a collection of articles and testimonials from music educators advocating for the use of popular music in the classroom, including a description of the Youth Music Institute (YMI) which sought to connect teachers and students by “bringing educators into contact with youth music and its creators” (p. 5).

Two decades later, MENC published Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education which called for the expansion of US school music curricula to include multicultural musics as well (Anderson and Campbell, 2011). As a result of this increased focus on multicultural musics in schools, regionally popular ensembles such as Mariachi bands began to appear in high school programmes in states including Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and California. In the past three decades, NAfME has published two special focus issues of its Music Educators Journal focussing on popular music education in the US (Cutietta, 1991; Powell et al., 2019).

Little Kids Rock and modern band

Despite the efforts outlined above to expand access to popular music in US public schools, music education programmes until the turn of the 21st century still largely propagated outdated models of music education that left progressive practices unable to find footing (Campbell et al., 2014; Kratus, 2007; Mantie and Tucker, 2008; Randles and Smith, 2012; Rodriguez, 2004; Williams, 2011; Williams and Randles, 2017). These models were perpetuated and reinforced by higher education’s music teacher education industry, with teachers preparing teachers to teach the way they too had been taught to teach. The non-profit organization LKR was founded in 2002 by Dave Wish, who at that time was a first-grade English as a Second Language teacher in East Palo Alto, California. In 1994, the elementary school where Wish taught did not have a music class for first-grade students, nor was there a full-time music teacher at the school. Owing to the lack of funding for arts education in his workplace, Wish started teaching guitar to his students after school to provide them with some access to music making. Wish’s approach to teaching focused on instant success for students and teaching them to play music that was personally meaningful to them. Wish had no formal preparation in teaching music, and he had had negative experiences with school music ensembles growing up. Wish remembers his music teachers making him feel “unmusical” since he was not interested in participating in the school’s band or choir (Wish 2021), describing his own informal musical education as “haphazard and random”. Wish did not teach staff notation since he did not know how to read it. His approach instead incorporated iconic notation and focused on teaching students the shapes of guitar chords so that they could play music of their choosing. Wish’s guitar teaching was, evidently, necessarily limited in scope. Perhaps the intuition he had developed as a teacher enabled him to use a pedagogical approach that worked with these students; this would be worth exploring at greater length in a future publication where space permits.

As the popularity of Wish’s guitar programme grew to include additional guitar classes and he sought to reach more students, Wish founded LKR. He provided workshops and professional development sessions for teachers across the US, demonstrating how to incorporate guitar instruction and popular music into curricula. The LKR professional development model later grew to include bass, drums, keyboard, vocals and technology: modern band. In response to the efforts of LKR, and a growing understanding of the need for more social and cultural relevance in music classrooms, more teachers have begun to incorporate modern band into their music teaching. As of the 2019–2020 school year, LKR reported having reached over one million students in over 400 school districts throughout the United States ¹ .

Modern band in research

Over the last decade, publications about modern band programmes in the US have burgeoned (Powell, 2021). Recent research indicates that the inclusion of modern band in school music programmes can increase overall participation in school music, especially among non-White students and students who receive school assistance to pay for lunch (Clauhs and Cremata 2020). Since modern band classes often also attract students not already participating in school music ensembles such as band, choir or orchestra, so modern bands are not likely to impact negatively on enrollment in existing music ensembles (Powell 2019).

In his case study of a middle school (Grades 6–8; roughly ages 11–13) modern band programme in downtown Manhattan in New York City, Byo (2018) found that modern band was “meaningful, authentic, and valuable music education that is positioned between the extremes of formal and informal learning, process and product orientation, and teacher- and student-centered pedagogy” (p. 259). Weiss et al. (2017) studied modern band professional development and reported that participating in modern band led to an increase in teachers’ positive perceptions about their music programmes, specifically, their level of excitement about the state of their music programme. Additionally, students participating in modern band have also reported that their participation helped with interpersonal skills such as resolving conflicts with friends, collaborating with their classmates, and working well with other students (Abeles et al., 2021).

LKR and modern band as punk problematic

With the increased presence of modern band in US schools, it is timely to examine how LKR and modern band align with and disrupt other current music education institutions and practices. Scholars have begun this work from a historical perspective (Powell, 2022), in descriptions of pedagogical practice (Byo, 2018; Gramm, 2021; Smith and Gramm, 2022; Powell and Burstein, 2017), in reflections on applications of the ethos (Davis, 2020), through analysis of teacher feedback (Knapp et al., 2022; Randles, 2018), and in writing that critiques some of the claims and practices of LKR and modern band (Cremata, 2021; Rathgeber and Bernard, 2021). Given some of the apparent contradictions and conundrums identified in scholarship and through the authors’ experiences, this authorial team chose punk as a lens for exploring aspects of modern band and LKR.

Punk is of course notoriously difficult to define (Smith et al., 2018a); Bestley et al. (2019: 21) describe “punk as a set of diverse but confluent values and appropriations”. Much of punk’s attractiveness lies in its reluctance and even inability to stay still or consistent, and its purveyors are often adamant that to delimit punk would be to kill it (Rimbaud, 2011; Steinholt, 2021). Yet the durability of the term “punk” and the voluminous literature now using it as a conceptual frame, point to punk’s utility and appeal. So while punk must presumably retain certain features in order still to be punk, it has also to be punk enough not to do only what has previously been done in its name. A somewhat parallel tension – in seeking conservation and conformity while pursuing and initiating dramatic change – is articulated in LKR’s mission statement, wherein the organization declares its goal to “Transform lives by restoring, expanding, and innovating music education in our schools” (Little Kids Rock, 2022). Leaving aside, for the purposes of this paper, the thorny notion of transforming lives (which LKR appears never to have attempted to measure or define (Smith, 2020)), restoration and innovation are arguably one another’s exact opposites – the one concerned with returning things to how they once were, and the other in being different and new. LKR’s performance of this balancing act is something we explore a little, below.

Another attribute that punk and LKR/modern band share is that “Punk is… a critique of hegemony and the advocacy against conformity” (Torrez, 2012: 5). Although LKR and modern band do not offer a critique of Eurocentric hegemony in US school music, per se, they serve as a reaction and practical response to it (Powell, Smith, & D’Amore, 2017). Conversely, much as punk has also always in some ways aligned with, been co-opted by, and perpetuated established institutions and practices (Bestley, 2017; Harniess, 2018), so LKR, through modern band, risks perpetuating a hegemonic form of popular music education (Hess, 2019).

Contradictory and complex though punk proves to be, when seeking to use punk as an analytical framework it is nonetheless necessary to provide some parameters, however contingent or incomplete those may be. To this end, we draw on Seth Kahn-Egan’s (1998) work, based on his work in teaching creative writing, wherein he outlined five broad characteristics of punk (while acknowledging the irony in codifying that which eludes pigeonholing and categorization). Kahn-Egan found that this work helped him explore the punk problematic of embracing and fighting institutions and institutionalization. Below are Kahn-Egan’s five punk premises, each followed by a brief explanation of how it relates to aspects of LKR and modern band.

Tenet 1: A sense of anger and passion that finally drives [one] to say what’s really on his or her mind .

As noted above, Dave Wish founded LKR in 2002 when he was teaching in a low-income elementary school in East Palo Alto on the west coast of the US. In 1994, the school did not have a music class for his first-grade students, nor was there a full-time music teacher at the school. The lack of funding for arts programmes in East Palo Alto in the mid-1990s highlighted funding discrepancies for education in California; the school lacked money to pay a music teacher while sitting in the figurative shadows of immense wealth only a few miles away in Silicon Valley, home to technology companies like Google and Apple. Wish’s anger at the inequities of school funding and lack of opportunity for his students led him to work toward change. Despite lacking any formal preparation in teaching music, Wish was passionate and driven to create an organization that could address these inequalities.

In the summer of 2001, Wish decided to leave teaching to establish a non-profit organization that focused on providing professional development opportunities for teachers to facilitate guitar classes with their students. The founding of LKR coincided with the signing into law of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a problematic federal law that increased focus on student assessment and measuring achievement, having a substantial negative impact overall (Smyth, 2008). The implementation of NCLB ultimately led schools to increase funding for core STEM subjects (i.e. science, technology, engineering, mathematics), often at the expense of music programmes (Motto 2010). Wish was aware of the adverse effects of NCLB and the law’s potentially damaging effect on school music programmes. He noted “budget cuts were decimating music programmes in public schools across the country, sharply limiting children’s access to music education. As an educator, I was inspired by dedicated arts leaders who advocated forcefully for the continued funding of existing music programmes” (Wish 2020). Wish’s passion to change the inequitable system of access to music education drove him to speak out and create a mechanism to enable change.

Wish’s passionate approach to pushing for change to music education in the US has caused some tension among the establishment in that profession, and among music teacher educators in particular. Cremata (2021), for example, presents an account of attending LKR’s Rockfest conference for music teachers in 2014, where he problematizes the rhetoric issuing from Wish and others at LKR in terms of “proselytizing”, “missionaries”, and “evangelism” (pp. 360–361). Cremata (2022) describes subsequent challenges arising from “conversion” to modern band practices among music teachers. Hyperbole and hollow, celebratory rhetoric were also identified as problematic by Rathgeber and Bernard in their (2021) critique of the 2019 iteration of LKR’s Modern Band Summit (professional development conference and successor to Rockfest).

Tenet 2: The Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic, which demands that we do our own work because anybody who would do our work for us is only trying to jerk us around.

The DIY ethic is evident in the approach Dave Wish took to starting LKR; since the establishment appeared not be going about changing very much in US music education (after 50 years of talking about what a good idea it would be), he would do it himself. Wish’s approach embodied the spirit of DIY as he did not have any formal training in music education, nor had he participated in school music during his teenage years or ever before founded and run a non-profit company. Such a spirit of DIY entrepreneurship is at the heart of what it means to be punk (Smith and Gillett, 2015). Wish created his own materials and approach to teaching guitar, with no heed for existing pedagogical approaches to music, such as rhythmic and music staff notation, strict adherence to sequenced instruction, or adherence to a canon of works my great masters commonly found in school settings.

The early years of LKR also embodied the ethos of DIY, although, ‘DIY’ rarely means doing things completely alone – rather, it involves collaborating with the right people on mutually agreeable terms to get things done (Quigley and Smith, 2021; Smith and Gillett, 2015). This disposition of Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) may be a more accurate representation of the collaborative DIY approach Wish used to start LKR, as the DIWO approach unlocks the “potential to share visions, resources and agency, through collaboration and negotiation, across physical and virtual networks— maintaining a critical consciousness” (Catlow and Garrett 2007: 27–8). In the first 3 years of LKR, the DIWO ethos was evident as Wish amassed a group of 40–60 volunteers who worked with LKR to raise awareness among, and donations of funds from, individuals and local businesses to support teacher workshops that provided professional development and gifts of guitars to each school. The initial Board of Directors for LKR comprised local area residents who experienced in grant writing and/or business. With programmatic volunteers and board members, Wish would barter guitar lessons in exchange for their expertise. Wish shared that he used the earliest version of the Web site Craigslist to request assistance with items like web design, creating the LKR logo, and everything else involved with starting a nonprofit organization (Wish 2021).

For the first 3 years he ran LKR, Wish did not take a salary. All of the money raised went to providing guitars for local area schools. Wish’s DIY and DIWO approaches thus also included an ethos of Do It For Others, as the fruits of the collective efforts were not for personal gain, but focused on enriching others. As discussed by Cayari (2020), the word for in DIFO ‘should connote service, which allows people to use their expertise to contribute to a community’ (11).

Tenet 3: A sense of destructiveness that calls for attacking institutions when those institutions are oppressive, or even dislikeable.

Little Kids Rock has not really taken destructive action, per se. For instance, the modern band paradigm propagated by LKR is additive to existing music education offerings, rather than a replacement for wind bands, choirs and orchestras. However, LKR has certainly highlighted the stasis that characterizes much music education across the US, and thus has arguably exhibited a sense of destructiveness towards a system characterized by a monochrome music education in thrall to a Eurocentric, stale-pale-male paradigm. A major contributor to sustaining the status quo, is the largest professional organization of music teachers in the US, NAfME.

Throughout much of its history, NAfME has set the tone for music education in the United States as it publishes five peer reviewed journals and sponsors a national conference each year. Most US states also have respective regional NAfME chapters. In recent years, NAfME has made a concerted effort to promote initiatives focussed on equity, diversity and inclusion in music education. However, a 2019 study by a firm specializing in providing professional development about unconscious bias concluded that foundational barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion persist at NAfME (Cook Ross 2019). As an example of one such barrier, in 2016, NAfME’s then Executive Director, Michael Butera, explained that racial progress had been slow at NAfME because “Blacks and Latinos lacked the piano skills needed to become music teachers” and that he could not diversify NAfME’s all-White board of directors since each member was elected to the board by the NAfME members (Cooper 2016). Little Kids Rock has developed a relationship with NAfME which points to a dichotomy. Little Kids Rock seeks to disrupt the existing system, while needing to fit into current structures to propagate modern band in order to be seen as acceptable in the profession. As an example, the term “modern band” was chosen in part because it sounds like existing wind ensembles common in US schools, i.e. concert band, jazz band and marching band.

In a signal of NAfME’s reciprocal support of, and financial reliance on LKR, LKR now sponsors the All National Honor Modern Band. This is an ensemble to which a handful of young musician applicants from the US are admitted annually by audition; they then perform at a NAfME national conference. The NAfME Web site explains that “The NAfME All-National Honor Ensembles (ANHE) represent the top performing high school musicians in the United States” (National Association for Music Education, 2022); such elitist language, steeped in systematized competitiveness, while endemic to the ethos of NAfME and US music education (Powell, S.R., 2021; Smith and Moir, 2022) seems at odds with the ethos of approximation and inclusion that LKR purportedly perpetuates though modern band (Powell and Burstein, 2017). Further deepening ties between these two organizations, and in the process muting any disruptiveness of LKR, NAfME frequently publishes articles on modern band in its research and practitioner journals (e.g. Burstein and Powell, 2019; Knapp, 2020; Powell, 2021; Vasil et al., 2019). Furthermore, as of January 2022, there is also a dedicated Modern Band Journal, a trade publication from artistpro, LLC (artistpro, 2022), which produces well regarded and widely read trade magazines to thousands of music teachers across the US.

Another example of LKR simultaneously troubling and perpetuating the system is evident in their development of a Modern Band Method Book series in association with Hal Leonard (Hal Leonard 2021). LKR professional development events always begin with extended collective music making. The LKR workshop leaders emphasize how LKR’s version of modern band pedagogy is built on a foundation of “sound before symbol”, “doing before reading”, and other mantras emphasizing a music-first, notation second-if-at-all approach to teaching and learning. By contrast, a how-to book series epitomizes a reverse, symbol-before-sound pedagogical approach. Method books are ubiquitous in early years band and orchestra instruction in the US and provide sequential playing exercises that become gradually more difficult. Despite the potential for popular music pedagogies to bring in aspects such as aural learning, student choice in repertoire, and 21st century learning skills (Vasil et al., 2019), LKR’s Modern Band Method Book will likely lead to more prescriptive, sequential teaching from modern band educators. LKR seems to work between poles of the punk spectrum as it simultaneously disrupts the status-quo while partnering with hegemonic institutions and approaches that perpetuate it.

Tenet 4: A willingness to endure or even pursue pain to make oneself heard or noticed.

LKR has received an abundance share of criticism in the two decades it has been operational (Cremata, 2021; Rathgeber and Bernard, 2021; Smith, 2020). LKR has had to fight to get modern bands into schools, as gatekeepers – such as some music teachers and school district arts supervisors – have pushed back against this means of expanding school music (conversely, other gatekeepers have been quite welcoming of LKR’s innovative initiative, tone and approach). Much of the resistance to incorporating modern band in schools focused on perceived lack of teacher interest, perceived lack of rigour associated with popular music, and skepticism about adopting an approach to music education created by an individual with no formal training in music or music education. The same resistance to LKR could be seen in higher education throughout the first decade of LKR’s functioning, where many professors were skeptical about an organization with “little kids” in the title promoting the incorporation of rock music. Since 2014, however, systemic change appears to have begun taking place, as over 60 colleges and universities have written modern band into their course syllabi as part of their pre-service music teacher preparation courses and summer courses and other electives in modern band and popular music pedagogy proliferate.

LKR has received criticism in publications for a perceived cognitive dissonance around the manner in which it encourages modern band teachers to feel a need for a method in order to teach modern band music ensembles (Rathgeber and Bernard 2021). The development of the Modern Band Method books published by Hal Leonard (noted above) was met with excitement from many LKR-trained teachers looking for a more prescriptive approach to teaching modern band. According to Rathgeber and Bernard (2021), though, this approach to method-based music instruction, in musical styles whose originators have often resisted such formalizing of teaching and learning, can result in music educators embracing resources and ideas without thinking and reflecting on the implications of such actions. Despite challenges and criticisms, LKR has endured to implement the first large-scale popular music professional development initiative in the history of the United States. Moreover, LKR’s founder, Dave Wish, has displayed sufficient resilience to remain (at the time of writing) at the helm of the organization.

Tenet 5: A pursuit of the “pleasure principle”, a revelling in some kind of Nietzchean chasm .

Making music – and especially making music that is relevant, enjoyable and fun – is a vital component of the human condition (Smith, 2017, 2022a), and engaging students with popular musics and allowing them to write their own songs is fun. And while “fun” and student enjoyment are sometimes discounted in the US as rationales for music education (Custodero, 2002; Kratus, 2019, in favour of approaches emphasizing excellence and rigour, music is supposed to be fun – we play music (Morin, 2001; Smith, 2022b). Recent research on modern band teachers and programmes has demonstrated that students and teachers have fun in their modern bands, and students are more engaged when playing music that is relevant to them (Knapp et al., 2022).

Outside of school settings, most musicians make music because it brings them pleasure (Lines 2017), and LKR, through modern band, has provided a means of music making that is fun. We would not wish to suggest that other forms of music making in schools are not fun or any less so, but given what we know about modern band’s appeal to a wider range of students (Clauhs and Cremata, 2020), hopefully by dint of there being more music making in schools, there is also more fun. The “pleasure principle” mentioned by Kahn-Egan is also encountered and emphasized in music and music learning research on embodiment, identity and eudaimonia (Smith et al., 2022a, b; Smith and Silverman, 2020). Nietzche stated, “the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live dangerously!” (1974: 228). In reflecting on the birth and growth of LKR, it seems the journey to introduce and expand modern band has been an exercise in living dangerously. It was a risk for Dave Wish to quit the security of a teaching job and start a non-profit organization. It is an intimidating proposition to seek to disrupt the hegemonic and highly successful structure and industry of school music education by introducing a new paradigm (Williams, 2019). Given the success that LKR has experienced and the growth of the modern band phenomenon in the last 20 years, it is clear that the organization and its acolytes have found fruitfulness and enjoyment (Rathgeber and Bernard, 2021) from living (a little bit) dangerously; as Little Red Riding Hood sings following her encounter with the wolf in Stephen Sondheim’s (1986) Into the Woods, “scary is exciting”.

Conclusions

LKR-derived modern band programmes in school classrooms across the US provide popular punk alternatives to existing norms in music education. The success of LKR and modern band has included providing music teachers and their students with avenues for empowerment, identity realization, agency and self-expression through music making and learning (Knapp et al., in review). Dave Wish’s approach to teaching music and starting LKR clearly exhibit a DIY, DIWO and DIFO ethos. His efforts working from outside the establishment to provide music instruction to his students, and a million more students over the past two decades is laudable. Wish’s passion to express what was on his mind, his persistence to endure obstacles, and drive to disrupt the system align with a punk ethos (Kahn-Egan, 1998).

LKR has also increasingly aligned with the same structures that it seeks (or once sought) to disrupt through partnering with large, nonprofit and for-profit institutions like NAfME and Hal Leonard. Meanwhile, LKR’s total and overt and reliance on philanthropic funding is dually punk – in that the organization needs this funding model to pursue an individualist DIY/DIWO/DIFO alternative to the inherent dysfunction of institutionalized schooling (Illich, 1971) – and also in that this simultaneously runs counter to a majority of socialist and critical pedagogically-aligned thinking in punk practice and scholarship (Giroux, 2019; Smith et al., Dines, & Parkinson, 2017), insofar as it embraces an extreme neoliberal mode of circumventing public funds in order to operate in opposition to the system of tax-payer-funded state education. LKR’s business model relies on and is subject to the whims and caprices of wealthy (and for the most part) white saviour philanthropists (Flaherty, 2016), operating in an accountability vacuum. LKR has published only a handful of “annual reports” since its inception in 2002 (Smith, 2020), a choice that runs counter to expectations of a charitable organization of its size and reach.

The kind of double-edged, full-spectrum punk-ness displayed by LKR is, arguably, exactly what one should expect of LKR as a coming-of-age punk organization – trying to co-exist in a complex world, wrestling with necessary conformity and even more essential push-back (Gordon, 2012; Furness, 2018; Lee and Smith, 2022). While Kahn-Egan (1998) states it is important to stay critical of institutions in general, he advocates for educational spaces where students learn and exercise the passion, commitment and energy that can be nurtured through meaningful education experiences. Kahn-Egan wrote specifically about a writing course, but these authors hope we have demonstrated it is not a leap to apply his punk tenets to understanding LKR and modern band.

Despite their growing ties to hegemonic institutions in music education in the US, LKR’s work to propagate modern band has helped to disrupt the cycle of limited and limiting music education practices. While LKR might operate across the length of punk’s ideological spectrum, Dave Wish and his acolytes continue disrupting the status quo and leveraging an outsider-insider perspective to galvanize momentum towards musicking practices that reconceptualize what school music in the US looks and sounds like. And that is pretty punk.