ABSTRACT
Popular music in higher education has always thrived as a sort of cottage industry within the wider higher education music community. Following its emergence in the US in the 1950s, 1 popular music has been almost entirely shunned by the academy in its home country. The picture is quite different in the UK, Scandinavia and Australia, whence the majority of literature on the subject derives (Abramo, 2011); for this reason I will be focusing principally on these countries in this chapter. In the UK a small number of independent institutions and university departments have been teaching popular music for around 30 years – its genesis in the UK was in the mid-1980s. Cloonan observes that ‘the development of PMS [popular music studies in higher education] is inextricably linked to the rise of popular music itself’ (Cloonan, 2005, p. 78) and has been on the increase for decades. However, as Krikun points out:
Although the academic study of popular music as a social, cultural, political, musical, technological, and economic phenomenon has begun to flourish in undergraduate and graduate courses, the teaching of popular music performance and composition is a rarity. (Krikun, 2009, p. 82)
