ABSTRACT
Historically, American music theory pedagogy has centralized classical music with pitch and form as its main topical areas. Popular music is becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s classrooms, and we as teachers should be providing our students conceptual models, musical skills, and analytical and creative opportunities focused on the contemporary repertoire’s defining characteristics. Rhythm and meter are considered the cornerstone of many popular styles, and this chapter provides a pedagogical overview of drum parts in twenty-first-century pop songs by Black artists. In short, the drums are often mischaracterized as just a timekeeper, establishing a song’s metric grid through a repeating drum pattern while other parts fluctuate more regularly. This chapter’s two-lesson module demonstrates how, in reality, the instrument regularly performs multiple drum patterns and other sounding components throughout the course of a song, which create different expressions of meter, articulate musical form, and fulfill other syntactical and affective functions.
