The Cats of Music Education Series: Lucy Green - How Do Popular Musicians Learn?

Lucy Green is a Cat of Music Education. Her work on how popular musicians learn and informal learning made her famous (at least with nerdy music teachers) but her oeuvre runs deep and wide. If you’ve done the Con education course since (at least) Dr. James Humberstone FRSA has been there, you’d know it well.

Green’s seminal music education research moment came when, as a fifteen year old in 1971, she tagged along to her (male) friends rock band rehearsal. She describes herself at that time as a “quite advanced” classically trained pianist. She says that although she had studied music at school and had “a lot of musical knowledge and skills” but as she watched the boys rehearse, she realised something, that she says she probably couldn’t articulate at the time, but later come to realise:

“I didn’t have a clue what they were doing or how they did it”.

She wondered:

“How is that I’ve had all this music education and they haven’t really had any, and how is it that they’re doing something that I wouldn’t know what to do, if I was to get up on the stage and join them? At that time in my life I wouldn’t have known how to join in with what they were doing”.

15 year old Lucy makes a pretty fair point doesn’t she? So, that’s been Lucy’s mission to date, to understand what was going on in that seminal moment and what we (music educators) might do about it. Pretty solid mission isn’t it. We think it’s a great quest to join Lucy on too.

She lists her interests as centering around the sociology of education, “particularly questions of equality, inclusion, how education reproduces wealth and privilege and also reproduces poverty. She says she could see a connection between “all of this and music education”. Yes - Lucy, thanks to you, so can we!

Now to the down side. Because Lucy’s work is so awesome, it’s been widely adopted, adapted and imitated etc to the point that the edu-fad police (yes that’s a thing) have called the approach that came out of her work which has come to be known as “Informal Music Learning”, often shortened to “Informal Learning” or “Musical Futures” an edu-fad.

So, as Gig Based Learners, we try to remember to use our “built-in shock proof crap detectors” when we’re faced with claims like this. We think our position is pretty clear on Green’s work (hint - we’ve added her to our Cats of Music Education series). If you’ve heard about her work via secondary sources, we urge you to go to the source. So here’s an abridged Lucy Green Reading list and another video to get you started.

We hope you’ll join with us as we continue to learn more about Lucy Green’s work and embed it into the Gig Based Learning approach.

Maybe start here:

Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (2008)

then, if you’re not from a popular music background and the Informal Learning book whet your appetite and you’d like to know the back story, go here:

How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (2001/paperback 2002)

or jump straight onto

Music on Deaf Ears: Musical Meaning, Ideology and Education (1988/2nd edition 2008)

How about that subtitle - pretty exciting work right? Or you could even start here if the title grabs you:

Music, Gender, Education (1997)

It’s also easy to find her other work through her Google Scholar Profile

In addition to just knowing stuff about Lucy Green and her work, some of the information in this post comes from this recent video:

LIVE The sociology of music education: a dialogue with Lucy Green https://youtu.be/wYeR3I-Zaac

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