Pop Music in the classroom

Above: students rehearse for James and The Giant Peach. Grasshopper lip-syncs to Giorgio by Daft Punk.

Pop Music in the performance classroom. It’s effective and inspiring! But is it legal?

As a dance-theatre teacher, I use pop music as a tool for character development and plot-sculpting, and I use my classroom as a music-appreciation platform to introduce students to genres of music and artists they might not otherwise be exposed to. 

For the past twenty-six years, I’ve been customizing my own performance curriculum. The use of contemporary music in my classroom further engages young people into our projects, and when connections are drawn between the curriculum and popular songs, the students’ inspiration and motivation swells to effective heights.

I was eighteen when I first started writing my own curriculum. Hired as a theatre education intern in 2000, I was responsible for teaching a Saturday morning Creative Dramatics class to k-2nd graders. I knew I wanted to produce Jack & The Beanstalk for family and friends at the end of our session, but the script needed to be something very specific: I needed enough parts for each student to have interesting directions to explore, simple and effective design, and really fun music we could sing and dance to. 

I dug around in the scripts library, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. Sadly, the age-appropriate scripts were out-dated, and the music was boring. I couldn’t see myself fully-engaging my class of fifteen little artists with such stuffy material. This was when I realized that I would need to write my own script. I would introduce students to fresh pop songs that fit within the context of the story, and I hoped the students’ families would love the final presentation of the project. I was right! The writing effort paid off, and the next semester’s enrollment tripled. After our presentation of Jack and The Beanstalk, I heard from so many parents who said their children were excited to come to rehearsal each week because “they loved the music and the dancing.” I figured I had stumbled upon a secret formula: pop music in the classroom.

I often reflect on the power of music in storytelling. Music has a way of reaching young people with an electricity and a magnetism that draws them into the content. Music breaks down barriers and meets students where they are. No matter what the day or the week has looked like, a great song can transport them into the exact moment in a story we’re rehearsing. Everything else from the rest of the world falls away. Music helps us get fully present in rehearsals. 

When Stephanie Meyer was writing Twilight, she says she was listening to a lot of Radiohead. I ask my students to think about the relationship between music and writing. Did the songs’ melodic patterns dictate Meyer’s storytelling? Or did she already know where the story was heading, and she sought out music that fit the plot’s vibe? In other words, did Radiohead’s music help her flesh out the details of Bella and Edward’s romance? Or did their relationship lead her to Radiohead? 

In the same vein, when playwright Kimberly Belflower first heard Green Light by Lorde, did she immediately think of The Crucible? When she listened to Lorde sing “those great whites, they have big teeth,” did she ponder about John Proctor, and conclude that he was actually the villain? Or did she know he was the villain, and she searched for a song Shelby could sink her teeth into in the final moments of the play?

Taylor Swift just dropped her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. Naturally, this album with all its Shakespearean references, has me thinking of Hamlet and MacBeth, specifically Ophelia and The Weird Sisters. Taylor loves a drowning damsel in distress, and she also appreciates a prophetic-witch archetype. My imagination follows her into the mist and the lakes.

This puzzle-piecing of characters and stories is my favorite way to experience pop music. When I hear a song, I immediately assign a character or story moment to the song. The first time I heard Ed Sheeran’s song Photograph, I thought of The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. Sheeran sings “we keep this love in a photograph,” and I imagined the four siblings, while navigating a trepidatious journey towards safety, carried with them a comforting photograph of their parents. 

I wander down long corridors of storytelling, holding hands with every artist, album and pop song, until the lyrics have me hung up on plot points in classic stories I’ve known since I was a kid. I weave these idiosyncrasies into my performance curriculum, and the music appreciation lesson plans in my classroom have introduced hundreds of children/teens to artists they might not otherwise be familiar with. Students fall further in love with content when the sounds resonate with them. They leave rehearsal and listen to the songs at home, and this leads them down rabbit holes of discovering more new music.

But is this infringement?

Copyrighted music in educational classrooms is nuanced. Fair use copyright permits educators to use contemporary music in their classrooms, and the unlocked motivation and inspiration has been helping teachers conjure magic since the 1970s. The most important consideration when establishing “fair use” in education is does this use effect the market value of the song? I rely on the safety of knowing with certainty that the use of pop songs in my classroom does not in any way effect the music market. This is primarily because I’m not producing a profitable show for public consumption. Our presentations are in my classroom, and these showings are for students’ family/friends. 

A former student who is now a professional DJ once told me, “I learned about so many artists and genres of music from you.” Another student said, “the way you use pop music and contemporary references in the stories helps each project become so much more relatable, and the experience is unrepeatable.”

Working with pop music in this way is really exciting, and it keeps things alive and fresh for me. If I produced the same show with the same music year after year, I would have burned out twenty years ago. The exploration of contemporary pop-songs for storytelling purposes continues to scratch at my curiosity, and it makes me smile.  And pop music brings twinkles to my students’ eyes.