Nathan Gage and his stu­dents des­cribe and reflect on their crea­tive work as musi­cians, bands and pro­du­cers in their class­room recor­ding spaces.

Here is a des­crip­tion of a secon­da­ry music pro­gram that draws upon popu­lar music in an effort to engage stu­dents with mea­ning­ful music making expe­riences. The program’s empha­sis on musi­cal crea­tion culmi­nates in the annual release of an album-length “mix­tape” of ori­gi­nal songs which the stu­dents have crea­ted. Cur­rent and pre­vious mix­tapes can be found at www.upnextrecordings.com.

James Lyng music stu­dents choose bet­ween two “streams” to best match their musi­cal pre­fe­rence and ambitions :

• the “band” stream, with an empha­sis on ins­tru­men­tal per­for­mance of rock and pop music, col­lec­tive song­wri­ting and recording
• the “stu­dio” stream, in which stu­dents work alone or in small groups on song­wri­ting, recor­ding or beat-making pro­jects, usual­ly, but not exclu­si­ve­ly in the Hip Hop or R&B genres.

This is pre­sen­ted not neces­sa­ri­ly as a model to imi­tate but an illu­mi­na­tion of the pos­si­bi­li­ties of the many forms a student-cen­tred, com­mu­ni­ty based pro­gram can take in a cur­ri­cu­lar context.

Who

Hi, my name is Nathan Gage. I live and teach music in the south-west of Mon­treal, Que­bec. James Lyng is a public high school that caters to a small, diverse student popu­la­tion, most of whom face signi­fi­cant chal­lenges. Many of our stu­dents come from neigh­bou­rhood fami­lies living at or below the pover­ty line. Our school also hosts pro­grams that give addi­tio­nal sup­port to stu­dents with spe­cial needs and beha­viou­ral chal­lenges. Approxi­ma­te­ly 80% of our student popu­la­tion is coded with some kind of beha­viou­ral or aca­de­mic chal­lenge. Here is a research article about our pro­gram.

Here is an intro video about our music pro­gram : The High School With A Hip Hop Program.

When I first sought to create a music pro­gram cen­tred around popu­lar music, I came to the conclu­sion that if I wan­ted to hook my stu­dents, I nee­ded to give them control in deter­mi­ning what sort of music-making acti­vi­ties they were car­rying out, as well as what genres of music they were enga­ging with.

How

The ini­tial infra­struc­ture for the pro­gram was finan­cial­ly sup­por­ted by a McGill Uni­ver­si­ty research pro­ject. A pro­fes­sio­nal-qua­li­ty recor­ding stu­dio was ins­tal­led in the base­ment of our high school, and for the first three years of the pro­gram, the research project’s bud­get paid to hire pro­du­cers / rap­pers with whom I col­la­bo­ra­ted in the edu­ca­tion of my music stu­dents. Since the com­ple­tion of McGill’s invol­ve­ment four years ago, we’ve mana­ged to keep the vision of the music pro­gram alive, through ever-chan­ging sources of fun­ding – various grants avai­lable to us because of our sta­tus as a “have-not” school, as well as pockets of fun­ding from within our school board.

What it sounds and looks like

• James Lyng Stu­dio Creation

This video found below shows stu­dents at work in a typi­cal class of our “stu­dio” stream. Stu­dents wor­king on the stu­dio side work almost exclu­si­ve­ly on music crea­tion pro­jects – either beat-making or wri­ting and recor­ding ori­gi­nal songs. They work indi­vi­dual­ly or in small groups.

• James Lyng Ins­tru­men­tal Creation

This video found below shows a small por­tion of the crea­tive work that goes in our “band” stream. While much of our school year is devo­ted to lear­ning covers of pop and rock songs, each of our band classes will write and record a song annual­ly to be inclu­ded on the mix­tape. Songs are writ­ten col­la­bo­ra­ti­ve­ly by the whole group.

This video focuses on two groups. The first is my grade 7 class. The class had alrea­dy com­po­sed chords and a riff for two sec­tions of the song. One was a chord pro­gres­sion which we col­lec­ti­ve­ly com­po­sed by ana­ly­sing and rear­ran­ging the chords from Bill Withers’ song “Just The Two Of Us”. The class sug­ges­ted and audi­tio­ned a num­ber of com­bi­na­tions of the chords before voting on a final chord pro­gres­sion. A riff for the second sec­tion of the song was brought to the group by one of the class’s gui­tar players. The class had also col­lec­ti­ve­ly writ­ten four lines of lyrics based on their expe­riences in qua­ran­tine. To write these lyrics, they brains­tor­med a num­ber of words and phrases based on the theme and used them to create a series of rhy­ming couplets.

The video starts with some of the stu­dents “MIDI-recor­ding” melo­dies over a “mock up” recor­ding of the two sec­tions that I pre­pa­red. The key­board has been reca­li­bra­ted so that stu­dents can focus on the white keys to create their melo­dies. This is some­thing I do with my youn­gest stu­dents so that their crea­ti­vi­ty isn’t sti­fled by tech­ni­cal consi­de­ra­tions. Once all willing stu­dents have recor­ded, we lis­ten back to the recor­dings and try to iden­ti­fy the best moments so that we can try set­ting our lyrics to the stu­dents’ melodies.

This video shows an inter­es­ting moment when one of my stu­dents latches onto a com­bi­na­tion of lyrics (“I didn’t even know”) and melo­dy and expresses that he thinks the lyrics should be repea­ted. Some of the other stu­dents object, as the repe­ti­tion wouldn’t work with the lyrics that the class had alrea­dy crea­ted. The stu­dents then have to find a reso­lu­tion (col­lec­tive song-wri­ting at its best!).

The second group fea­tu­red in the video is my Grade 9 class. Unlike the Grade 7 class, these stu­dents opted not to write lyrics until after they’d crea­ted some melo­dies. My Grade 9 stu­dents are more expe­rien­ced and com­for­table on their ins­tru­ments. The chord pro­gres­sion was writ­ten by one.

• What does suc­cess­ful music edu­ca­tion mean at James Lyng ?

This is a video of myself and two of my stu­dents reflec­ting on what makes a suc­cess­ful music edu­ca­tion in the context of a pro­gram focu­sed on popu­lar music and on student choice (Trans­crip­tion June 27, 2022):

Nathan Gage : “As a music tea­cher, one thing that we often think about in the music edu­ca­tion world, or as tea­chers in gene­ral, we think about what makes a good edu­ca­tion. Then you start thin­king about a per­son who’s well edu­ca­ted, what qua­li­ties or what have they lear­ned, what makes them well edu­ca­ted, right ? So then, as a music tea­cher, you start to think, what makes a per­son well musi­cal­ly edu­ca­ted, what kinds of things do they have to know ? And I think tra­di­tio­nal­ly, even some people still believe this, but the­re’s a kind of a set of rules set out by a bunch of like old white guys basi­cal­ly, saying, okay, you have to be able to read music, read tra­di­tio­nal nota­tion, you have to be able to play a musi­cal ins­tru­ment real­ly pro­fi­cient­ly, you have to know a bunch of Ita­lian phrases, that kind of thing.

So then, for us, we do a popu­lar music pro­gram and the whole point of the popu­lar music pro­gram is that we take the cues of the stu­dents as to what they want to do musi­cal­ly. The idea is then, for me, when I think about what makes someone well edu­ca­ted musi­cal­ly, maybe there are some things that are maybe abso­lute, but a lot of it comes from what does the student want to do ? Where do they want music to kind of fit in their life after high school ?

So, my first ques­tion for you guys is what do you guys think makes a per­son well edu­ca­ted musi­cal­ly ? What kinds of things do you think could be there ? And then my second part of the ques­tion is, where do you see music fit­ting into your life after high school ? And as a school of Music, are we doing our part to get­ting you where you want to be ? Like, musi­cal­ly, for after high school ? You see what I’m saying ? So what do you think the first part is?”

Student #1 : “For the first part, I think being able to play with others or lear­ning how to play with others is a very impor­tant skill. But I defi­ni­te­ly agree with what you’re saying in that you don’t need to know how to read music in order to be like pro­fi­cient in what you’re doing. But I do think that when we get more advan­ced, I think it defi­ni­te­ly helps at least to know how to do some of these things. Maybe not read music, but like scales, or wha­te­ver, I think that’s impor­tant in what you learn how to do.

Nathan Gage : “And so you’ve been rea­ding tab. You read tab, and I think you lear­ned to do that here. Right ? And so do you think that’s impor­tant ? When we say rea­ding music, it includes that, so say, do you think in the future you want to go on the inter­net and find a song and learn to play it ? »

“I think all those things are defi­ni­te­ly a help, but you never real­ly need to do those things if you don’t want to, because I think, real­ly, what music should be about is just being fun for you. I think imme­dia­te­ly once you have some­thing that you need to do, it’s more of a chore and not some­thing that’s fun. And that’s why if you’re not having fun doing music, you’re not real­ly doing any­thing. It touches on what I was saying before. When you start to get more advan­ced, you think you start to know what you’re doing, then yeah, those things will defi­ni­te­ly help but I don’t think it’s neces­sa­ri­ly requi­red if you just want to have fun playing music.”

Student #2 : “He basi­cal­ly just said eve­ry­thing. Eve­ry­thing that went through my mind, just came out of his mouth.” (laughs).

• On Musi­cal Crea­tion at James Lyng

In this video, our stu­dio ani­ma­tor, Jason New­co­men and I dis­cuss why song-wri­ting and music crea­tion are so impor­tant to James Lyng’s music pro­gram, as well as our hopes for music edu­ca­tion in the broa­der sense.

Nathan Gage : “I’m here with Jason New­co­men, who is our stu­dio ani­ma­tor. He works on the stu­dio side with our stu­dents who want to focus on hip hop and R&B music. I thought it’d be good to have him in on this conver­sa­tion : what drew you towards crea­tive music making in your own tea­ching prac­tice ? Maybe I’ll start.

For me, I would say that it goes hand in hand with this idea of the popu­lar music edu­ca­tion pro­gram, it goes hand in hand with a pro­gram that’s trying to ele­vate student voice. Part of the popu­lar music revo­lu­tion was that the per­for­mer could be the song­wri­ter, the per­for­mer could be the com­po­ser. It sets itself apart from clas­si­cal music where you have the com­po­ser and you have a conduc­tor and below them were the per­for­mers. It just flip­ped around, espe­cial­ly with punk rock music in the 70s, you know, the idea that you didn’t even have to play a gui­tar that well, you could just bring out a gui­tar and if the song had enough pas­sion and the right hook or wha­te­ver, this is could still be a song that was still lis­te­ned to 40 or 50 years later.

In my back­ground as a musi­cian, as a per­for­mer, song­wri­ting and expres­sing myself through music has been so impor­tant to my own musi­cal prac­tice. I wan­ted to pass that on to my students.

On the ins­tru­men­tal side, on the band side, we also do a lot of lear­ning to play our ins­tru­ments through lear­ning covers of rock and pop songs. On the stu­dio side, almost all of what you do is crea­tion. That’s all you do : song­wri­ting, beat making, all that crea­tion stuff.”

Jason New­co­men : “In the last ten years, recor­ding equip­ment and recor­ding soft­ware has been so acces­sible to eve­ry­bo­dy on the Hip Hop side to the point where the big­gest Hip Hop artists in the world are making songs in their base­ment with the same equip­ment that we’re using. It’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the kids on my side to learn a skill that they can conti­nue on their own time, and be pas­sio­nate about on their own time as well. I come from an era where we had to save up to get stu­dio time, you had to pay some­bo­dy who pro­ba­bly would make some­thing dif­ferent with our music. Just to empo­wer the kids by tel­ling them that this is some­thing that they’re able to do on their own with very simple tools, and use it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to exer­cise their free­dom in crea­tion and their free­dom to express themselves.

Nathan Gage : “For me, I would say that’s very impor­tant. If we go back to the clas­si­cal para­digm with the com­po­ser, the conduc­tor, the per­for­mers, and how that is entren­ched so much in tra­di­tio­nal music edu­ca­tion, think what that does to stu­dents. When we focus so much on music of the domi­nant culture, we’re real­ly rein­for­cing that culture. You have to think for my stu­dents, for a student body that is very diverse, what that would do to them. It’s basi­cal­ly put­ting on a pedes­tal one culture and not their own, and how they would feel about that over time. That’s why I think it’s so impor­tant. I hope what we do and I think what we try to do at all times is to flip that para­digm so that it cen­ters the stu­dents at the top of the para­digm, where the stu­dents” voice and the stu­dents” musi­cal pre­fe­rences are what is groun­ding all of their music education.

I do know that music edu­ca­tion has done a lot of work in gene­ral and a lot of tea­chers are wor­king hard to incor­po­rate music from dif­ferent cultures, but I still think that the struc­ture inherent in that clas­si­cal music para­digm is still very, very active in music edu­ca­tion and it’s very dif­fi­cult to get away from that.

For me, that’s why it’s real­ly, real­ly impor­tant to do these crea­tion pro­jects because just natu­ral­ly when the student is doing the crea­tion and maybe wor­king through their own expe­riences or trying to express their own expe­riences through song, it natu­ral­ly cen­ters them so that their own expe­riences are what are validated.”

Bio :

Nathan Gage (he/him) is a music edu­ca­tor living and wor­king in Mon­treal, Que­bec. Having come to the pro­fes­sion later in life, he has a wealth of expe­rience in the music indus­try, as a per­for­mer and as a com­po­ser from which he can draw. He holds a bache­lor’s degree in music com­po­si­tion and has many years of expe­rience as a pro­fes­sio­nal jazz per­for­mer, playing upright and elec­tric bass. He has tou­red exten­si­ve­ly throu­ghout North Ame­ri­ca and Europe with indie rock bands Shapes & Sizes (Asth­ma­tic Kit­ty Records) and Elfin Saddle (Constel­la­tion Records). He foun­ded, mana­ged and owned Pho­no­po­lis, an inde­pendent record store, which the Mon­treal Gazette refer­red to as “an ins­ti­tu­tion in the Mon­treal music scene.” He sold the store at the start of his tea­ching career. Nathan is pas­sio­nate about popu­lar music edu­ca­tion and student-cen­te­red music edu­ca­tion and he strives to conti­nue his own edu­ca­tion as a music teacher.