In this article, I explore how popular music became incorporated into the field of music education in the 21st-century United States.In doing so, I suspend notions of popular music education as simply inclusive or able to produce creative people.Instead, I question how inclusion becomes constructed and defined historically in relation to ideas such as the need for creative people and the possibilities and purposes of popular music education.To pursue such understandings, the analysis focuses primarily on the Tanglewood Symposium as a site of production.I examine the documentary report of the symposium in order to question the intersecting multiple historical trajectories and modes of thought that construct popular music education at Tanglewood.Following this, I consider how these histories have left significant impacts on the epistemologies and practices of contemporary popular music education.In the process, I draw attention to the ways in which notions of desired (and not desired) kinds of people become constructed, how inclusions and interventions become administered in response, and how such ideas become constructed through modes of thought that have little to do with music or popular music practice yet serve to produce popular music education.
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Noah Karvelis (2023) studied this question.
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